I say the word is “this.” You did “this.” Redemption with respect to “this.” The “this” is body/bodies. There is no Guernica without bodies to destroy, nor any redemption.
]]>That line was supposed to describe Picasso’s inner conflict. During the occupation a German official asked of a print of Guernica on the wall, ‘Did you do this?’ Picasso responded, ‘No, you did.’
I apply this to the body. What does redemption mean with respect to this?
]]>Fascinating that Process theology is being picked up in Asia. I guess the world is filled with surprises. Is AT a Christian, or is this Process stuff being somehow removed from the Christian context, a la Agamben/Baidou on Paul?
What the mountains brought from you is beautiful, though I can’t say I want to sympathize with this disembodiedness:
you the body, the indefatigable and odious mound of flesh that holds me to this present moment
Matthew 26:41 makes me wonder whether the bodily optimism one often hears in incarnational theology isn’t biblically inaccurate. I tend to prefer to incarnational to the biblical.
]]>The inter-cultural dialogue coming out of Kyoto since the war period past century has been primarily via Tillich and the process theologians, whom seem generally to have been more interested in each other. AT pioneered ‘hayathology’ which seeks to escape some of the limitations of such, sharing something with Buber/Rosezweig’s translation of the bible and idea of ‘I Am’ as active force rather than simply being in a Greek ontological sense. I’m not sure how robust it is as my Japanese is not good enough to touch the original (yet).
I agree about personhood and would add the requirement that self-definition involves re-appropriating one’s own body (https://joeldietz.com/post/39999218/how-do-we-remember-a-sequence-of-images). This is the post I meant to link you to before, but only makes sense silhouetted by Picasso’s Guernica.
]]>Of course the paradox is of great interest in Christianity… A conversation with a friend last night about Tolstoy’s ideal pacifist Jesus reminded me how much all of this relates to the ongoing discussions about messianism in Continental philosophy these days—Agamben, Baidou, and Zizek. And of course, in there efforts to think through political utopianism, all travel by way of Pauling Christianity (for Agamben, Pauling messianic Judaism).
What I point to at the end is the sense in which utopias and their messiahs collapse in the face of simple personhood, or what I have described elsewhere as the aspiration to coherent personhood.
Christianity, it can be said, insists on overturning that logic, that sense. Three can inhabit one, and perfection can lie in a person—it’s no contradiction, it’s a mystery.
So you’ve got to have the desire that wants to take that leap…
]]>Ariga Tetsuro writes on this but it remains mostly untranslated into English.
]]>I hadn’t heard of William Sims Bainbridge I am sorry to admit. However I did come across what I now believe to be nanoconvergence, which I do completely NOT understand. Look at this picture long enough and you see a teapot floating in thin air and in 3 dimensions [1]. I really do want to know how that works and I will therefore check out Bainbridge’s work.
Glad I found your site!
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