XHURCH NATIVITY

Photo: Eva Schifter

I posted some photos of the Xhurch's Christmas Nativity at Flickr.

(You may also view it as a slideshow with musical accompaniment here.)

The Xhurch's Christmas Nativity took place Thursday, December 23rd, between the hours of 5 and 8pm at the Xhurch. (The Xhurch, for those who don't know, is a small repurposed church in Portland, OR that has been remade into a home studio/gallery/event space. It is also home to GOD, LLC.)

The Xhurch's Christmas Nativity was a purely nostalgic nativity—a "non-theist's" nativity. It was an opportunity for a small contingent of irreligious types to create the conditions for a warm holiday scene, complete with mood lighting, low-volume Christmas music, homemade hot chocolate, homemade hot apple cider, and pews to sit and sip and reflect on the nativity.

A statement was issued to accompany the nativity which can be read here.

Special thanks to everyone involved in making the nativity a success, and to a delightful audience.

Holy See, seen and re-seen...

Xhurch Nativity

Duh! It was in the cards all along—the xhurch was to host a quality nativity this holiday season! And so, myself and a select group of godless cohorts have been busy constructing animals and costumes and mangers for the affair, which will take place on Thursday, December 23^rd, between the hours of 5 and 7pm.

The Xhurch's Christmas Nativity also marks my first concerted venture into the visual arts realm in years. Please come and enjoy the tranquil scene, have a cup of hot chocolate, and give yourself over to nostalgia's warm embrace. Or be made breathless by the terrestrial embodiment of your literal reading.

Read the Nativity Statement

R2D2 Christmas Tree

A friend posted this on Facebook. Needless to say, I thought it was worth sharing. I suppose then I should have "liked" it...

It did get me thinking though—anyone have any interesting Christmas tree photos they'd like to submit? Any C-Tree-POs? Even plain-old Christmas trees can be interesting. Don't feel like you have to floor me. You couldn't possibly. Trust me I've seen EVERYTHING.

Submit to: submit@xhurch.net

Bill Moyers on the origins of the religious 'impulse,' according to Joseph Campbell

I borrowed a great book from a friend: The Power of Myth. In it, decorated journalist, Bill Moyers, supplies the manuscripts from his interviews with Joseph Campbell in the years just before Campbell's death in 1987. The stuff of these interviews became the popular PBS documentary series, Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth.

Campbell had a way of stringing stories together that was basically mesmerizing. He had a sort of benevolent, paternal authority about him—a grandfatherly command over conversation. In a way, he seems to embody a bygone masculinity. This passage isn't meant to illustrate any of that, but it does provide an interesting account of what is sometimes called the "religious instinct."

Bill Moyers recalls Joseph Campbell's view:

He imagined that this grand and cacophonous chorus began when our primal ancestors told stories to themselves about the animals that they killed for food and about the supernatural world to which the animals seemed to go when they died. "Out there somewhere," beyond the visible plain of existence, was the "animal master," who held over human beings the power of life and death: if he failed to send the beasts back to be sacrificed again, the hunters and their kin would starve. Thus early societies learned that "the essence of life is that it lives by killing and eating; that's the great mystery that the myths have to deal with." The hunt became a ritual of sacrifice, and the hunters in turn performed acts of atonement to the departed spirits of the animals, hoping to coax them into returning to be sacrificed again. The beasts were seen as envoys from that other world, and Campbell surmised "a magical, wonderful accord" growing between the hunter and the hunted, as if they were locked in a "mystical, timeless" cycle of death, burial, and resurrection. Their art—the paintings on cave walls—and oral literature gave form to the impulse we now call religion.

'Benevolent domination:' Rorty on dealing with fundamentalist students

This is straight from the Wiki-page on Rorty which I was exploring last night...

With respect to confronting religious fundamentalism in a university setting, Rorty says:

“It seems to me that the regulative idea that we heirs of the Enlightenment, we Socratists, most frequently use to criticize the conduct of various conversational partners is that of ‘needing education in order to outgrow their primitive fear, hatreds, and superstitions’ ... It is a concept which I, like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own ... The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire ‘American liberal establishment’ is engaged in a conspiracy. The parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students ... When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank... You have to be educated in order to be ... a participant in our conversation ... So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours ... I don’t see anything herrschaftsfrei [domination free] about my handling of my fundamentalist students. Rather, I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents ... I am just as provincial and contextualist as the Nazi teachers who made their students read Der Stürmer; the only difference is that I serve a better cause.”

– ‘Universality and Truth,’ in Robert B. Brandom (ed.), Rorty and his Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 21-2.

Prophetic indeed...

What Maxwell fails to acknowledge are the ambitions of his own enterprise. The faithful yearn to see their doctrines gain ultimate acceptance, ever striving toward theocracy. Ridicule and marginalization are societies tools for regulating irrational, and/or unpopular beliefs.