Posts
Here is Tyson's dinner prayer booklet, free for you to download. Go ahead, look it over! Despite entirely cynical preconceptions, I couldn't help but feel relaxed and warmed this sentimental little booklet.
On the other hand, here's an interesting video from inside one of Tyson's chicken processing facilities.
I am not so bothered by the visual, visceral sensation of a conscious chicken's head popping off in the rubber gloves of a weary factory employee. After all, eating meat has always involved the toleration of a certain amount of violence. It's the image of that moving belt loaded with hundreds of dead chickens, a few live ones freaking out--a mass-processing system that treats millions of living beings in every way as inanimate "food units" for their entire (short) lives.
What disturbs me even more though is how you and I deal with the disconnect between our personal comfort level and the reality of industrial meat production. I think that most of us have seen something like this at some point but we have to push the image to the back our minds, to the very edge of our consciousness, in order to contentedly eat a chicken breast. Maybe we westerners have been doing this in many areas of life ever since we had to start questioning the giddy utopianism of endlesss technological progress sometime in the middle of the 20th century, ever since we became vaguely and obscurely afraid that our lives might be negatively transformed by the elaborate systems and environments we've engineered for ourselves.
If we chose to look under the hood, we would most likely be disgusted by feces-littered pens crowded with obese chickens with clipped beaks. We might have to consider the unpleasant possibility that our international system of food production and transportation would find ways of perpetuating itself even after it ceased to be the most efficient, cheap or healthy solution. But why should I consider such complicated questions when I can easily opt for the comforting vision printed on the packaging of my chicken breasts? "Look, this food was raised on an idyllic village farm where happy, healthy animals wander around on the sun-warmed earth under the gaze of a watchful, benevolent farmer."
Corny marketing is not convincing, it's just an extremely convenient anesthetic for the chafing of our various ideals against the world as it is.
Flickr
My collection of photos on Flickr. Nothing new just yet, but check out the photo-mapping feature.
Hsi-an Monument
"Twenty-seven sacred books [the number in the New Testament] have been left, which disseminate intelligence by unfolding the original transforming principles. By the rule for admission, it is the custom to apply the water of baptism, to wash away all superficial show and to cleanse and purify the neophytes. As a seal, they hold the cross, whose influence is reflected in every direction, uniting all without distinction. As they strike the wood, the fame of their benevolence is diffused abroad; worshiping toward the east, they hasten on the way to life and glory; they preserve the beard to symbolize their outward actions, they shave the crown to indicate the absence of inward affections; they do not keep slaves, but put noble and mean all on an equality; they do not amass wealth, but cast all their property into the common stock; they fast, in order to perfect themselves by self-inspection; they submit to restraints, in order to strengthen themselves by silent watchfulness; seven times a day they have worship and praise for the benefit of the living and the dead; once in seven days they sacrifice, to cleanse the heart and return to purity."
The above is an excerpt from the Hsi-an Monument, set up in 781 AD to document the several-hundred-year history of Nestorian Christian missionaries in the East, where their influence had been praised and accepted by Emperor Dezong of the Tang dynasty. Follow this link for the full translation of the monument's text.
It's always fascinating to hear about ancient movements which speak powerfully to the current "missional" trend in Christianity. For unknown reasons, Nestorian Christian presence in China had pretty much disappeared by the 1800s. Did 1950s evangelical missionaries to China know of that region's long history of interaction with Christianity or did they imagine that they were the first witnesses of Christ in Asia?
Despite widespread war between all sorts of peoples and civilizations, it strikes me that there are a lot of surprising examples of religious tolerance in the 1000s. You've got Buddhists welcoming Christians in China, St. Francis studying prayer with Muslims, and the Ottoman Empire, an entire ethnicity-spanning Muslim civilization that was explicitly and legally tolerant of Christians and Jews.
Elsewhere in the Hsi-an Monument's explication of Christianity, there are a lot of inherantly cross-cultural themes. The cross, in addition to being described as the location which defines "the four cardinal points" (N, S, E, W), becomes "a seal... whose influence is reflected in every direction, uniting all without distinction."
The above is an excerpt from the Hsi-an Monument, set up in 781 AD to document the several-hundred-year history of Nestorian Christian missionaries in the East, where their influence had been praised and accepted by Emperor Dezong of the Tang dynasty. Follow this link for the full translation of the monument's text.
It's always fascinating to hear about ancient movements which speak powerfully to the current "missional" trend in Christianity. For unknown reasons, Nestorian Christian presence in China had pretty much disappeared by the 1800s. Did 1950s evangelical missionaries to China know of that region's long history of interaction with Christianity or did they imagine that they were the first witnesses of Christ in Asia?
Despite widespread war between all sorts of peoples and civilizations, it strikes me that there are a lot of surprising examples of religious tolerance in the 1000s. You've got Buddhists welcoming Christians in China, St. Francis studying prayer with Muslims, and the Ottoman Empire, an entire ethnicity-spanning Muslim civilization that was explicitly and legally tolerant of Christians and Jews.
Elsewhere in the Hsi-an Monument's explication of Christianity, there are a lot of inherantly cross-cultural themes. The cross, in addition to being described as the location which defines "the four cardinal points" (N, S, E, W), becomes "a seal... whose influence is reflected in every direction, uniting all without distinction."
Father Aelred
Father Aelred, Benedictine monk and founder of the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, says:
"The monastery is not a refuge, not a solution for dealing with problems of adjustment. Monasticism is a head-on collision with reality, and the more silent, the more solitude, the more head-on it is."
Withdrawal from the world gets all kinds of flack from people. Say what you will, the raw idealistic commitment of classical monasticism inspires respect from me. It attempts to hollow out a space within the dense, destructive weight of a fallen world, pulling at and stretching out an ever-thinning membrane that enforces the boundary between a sin-enslaved existence and one defined by absolute freedom to obey. Forced to admit the inevitably human anchoring in the present fallen world, fanatical monks struggle to live in sync with another, incoming world.
What does a contemplative monk do? Pray. Meditate. In a practical sense, nothing. It is by definition impossible for the entire body of believers to abide in this state and what a malformed body it would be if everyone tried to or wanted to.
Speculatively, we could say that contemplative monasticism is the nervous system of the body of Christ: A network of cells, flowing upwards and inwards, towards that central point of contact with the Brain, convulsing with electric impulses which are the first physical traces of another level of consciousness.
"The monastery is not a refuge, not a solution for dealing with problems of adjustment. Monasticism is a head-on collision with reality, and the more silent, the more solitude, the more head-on it is."
Withdrawal from the world gets all kinds of flack from people. Say what you will, the raw idealistic commitment of classical monasticism inspires respect from me. It attempts to hollow out a space within the dense, destructive weight of a fallen world, pulling at and stretching out an ever-thinning membrane that enforces the boundary between a sin-enslaved existence and one defined by absolute freedom to obey. Forced to admit the inevitably human anchoring in the present fallen world, fanatical monks struggle to live in sync with another, incoming world.
What does a contemplative monk do? Pray. Meditate. In a practical sense, nothing. It is by definition impossible for the entire body of believers to abide in this state and what a malformed body it would be if everyone tried to or wanted to.
Speculatively, we could say that contemplative monasticism is the nervous system of the body of Christ: A network of cells, flowing upwards and inwards, towards that central point of contact with the Brain, convulsing with electric impulses which are the first physical traces of another level of consciousness.
Declaration of Peace
During the past week I was fortunate to land a job shooting and editing some short (2-4 minute) documentary videos for the Declaration of Peace, a coalition of various organizations who planned a week of events to vocally oppose the US military campaign in Iraq. Here are four of the videos I made from the week; (please pardon the grainy/dull results of compressing the videos into a size that would be small enough to upload onto YouTube's servers):
Philadelphia, September 25th:
Press Conference at the White House (Kelly Dougherty), September 21st:
The Capitol, September 26th:
Interfaith Rally at the Capitol, September 26th:
If you're interested, you can find more videos on the YouTube channel we created. Oh and here's some press coverage from the Washington Post.
Philadelphia, September 25th:
Press Conference at the White House (Kelly Dougherty), September 21st:
The Capitol, September 26th:
Interfaith Rally at the Capitol, September 26th:
If you're interested, you can find more videos on the YouTube channel we created. Oh and here's some press coverage from the Washington Post.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)