Posted by Ian in Adorno, Ancient Rome, Christian Thought, Community, Comparative Religion, Critical Theory, Education, Heathenry, History, Islamic Thought, Modern Polytheism, Religion and Faith, Social Change.
I’m going to spend a little time talking about this post by Hrafnkell. I find the post profoundly frustrating. He touches on real issues, but inflates them all out of proportion. The claim that he is correcting monotheistic distortion doesn’t hold water, unless he takes as corrective the introduction of a rival ‘polytheistic’ distortion.
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Posted by Ian in Africa, African Diaspora, BaKongo, Comparative Religion, Critical Theory, Eleggua, Latin America, Santeria, Shango, philosophy of art.
The other day I came across this spectacular work of art by Gabriel Martinez entitled Guerrero (pictured to the right; it is 10 feet tall at the head). I find it an effecting piece and wanted to take a post to talk about it.
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Posted by Ian in Ache, Community, Comparative Religion, Education, Ethics, Religion and Faith, Social Change.
I want to pick up from where I left off with the last discussion of idolatry and explore some of the intellectual implications of the discussion. What habits of thought contribute to idolatry and what habits can we cultivate to help avoid it?
I want to suggest that there is a ‘rational’ foundation for idolatry, namely that there is such a thing as the sanctification of an object. An object can be touched by a spiritual entity and retain a ‘fingerprint’ of that contact, can possess a holiness and spiritual presence thereby.
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Posted by Ian in Ache, Community, Comparative Religion, Ethics, Religion and Faith, Social Change.
As I think about the terms at work around the concept of worship, I start to bump into a related concept, idolatry. Idolatry tends to appear more often in the theological discussions of Abrahamic monotheism, where it is applied negatively, to describe forms of worship that are spiritually unhealthy.
Because it is used bluntly to deride and marginalize non-Abrahamic religions, the term doesn’t get too much attention outside of those circles. I want to reconsider the term and its implications, suggest how it might have application outside of its usual frame of reference.
I want to keep the negative implications of idolatry in mind because it is useful to have an idea of how to worship wrongly as guides toward how to worship properly.
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Posted by Ian in Africa, Anthropology, BaKongo, Christian Thought, Community, Comparative Religion, Ethics, History, Nigeria, Religion and Faith, Social Change.
Okay, so this is just a little more that I have managed to track down through a little bit more research. First, I want to share some off-line research into African witchcraft beliefs so that it becomes clearer the debt these Christian models owe to pre-Christian African beliefs. Then I’m back to some news-ier linkage and commentary.
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Posted by Ian in Africa, African Diaspora, Anthropology, BaKongo, Community, Comparative Religion, Ethics, Religion and Faith, Social Change, Vodou.
I want to start this piece with a quote from Sallie Ann Glassman:
We don’t worship the lwa, because they are not gods. But we offer them respect and honor and we serve them. Getting in touch with them gets you in touch with the world around you.
In English, this is almost nonsense. To respect, to honor, and serve are intimately bound up with the term ‘worship.’ If you look at a Vodou ceremony, you would be hard-pressed to think it was anything but a worship ceremony.
The phrase does start to make sense if you change the register a bit and look at the backdrop of African diaspora culture that informs Vodou. The BaKongo traditions that partially inform Haitian Vodou makes a similar distinction.
I suspect it can be traced to the early interactions between participants in the African diaspora religions and state-supported Christianity. Worshiping the lwa (or orisha or etc.) was defended against claims of idolatry and polytheism by some well-intentioned obfuscation around the phrases used to describe religious work. (more…)
Posted by Ian in Africa, Anthropology, Community, Comparative Religion, Ethics, Nigeria, Religion and Faith, Social Change.
I continue to do what I can to get a better sense of what might be going on with the Nigerian witch hunts (so far, here and here). As I do so, I become increasingly aware of how complicated the situation gets. The more I understand, the more I want to understand.
Now, I’m aware that this sounds very abstract to plenty of people. They hear a story about children being accused of being witches, of children being tortured, and they want to swing into action, to condemn those in the wrong, sign petitions, donate money, send out educators to dispel the superstitions of these people.
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Posted by Ian in Africa, Christian Thought, Community, Comparative Religion, Ethics, Healing traditions, Nigeria, Religion and Faith.
So, I keep coming back to this stuff about Nigerian witchcraft and trying to make some sense of how to position it in relationship to broader trends. I started with Helen Ukpabio’s site, linked from the Wild Hunt. I went from there and found a little more background on this.
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Posted by Ian in Africa, African Diaspora, Christian Thought, Community, Comparative Religion, Dahomey, History, Judaic Thought, Modern Polytheism, Religion and Faith, Yoruba.
So, I have mentioned a few times now that I would like to start thinking through how I use terms in general and on this blog in particular. In part because I am trying to maintain connections with a great number of traditions at once, it gets easy to use very gestural language. I would like to find a way around that, toward more concrete terminology.
I do that because I want to cultivate a certain ecumenical framework, one that does not reduce what I am saying to any of the traditions that I am drawing upon and that doesn’t obscure the connections to those traditions. It’s a building exercise, acknowledging intellectual debts without denying difference. These terminological posts are a lot like showing your work in math class, sketching the trajectory as much as the answer.
One thing I’m tempted to do is just start listing out terms that sketch out the different sorts of things that are, talking about their inter-relationship. It’s easy enough to list out terms like: the dead, the ancestors, land wights, gods, angels, etc. But that feels like I’m still circling the issue instead of approaching it more directly.
At issue for me is not just the identification of the different things that are, but the concern with how to comport myself toward each of these. It is a question of worship as much as of ontology.
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Posted by Ian in Africa, Anthropology, Christian Thought, Community, Comparative Religion, Healing traditions, Nigeria, Religion and Faith, Social Change.
I have a handful of posts in various stages of completion, but then this Wild Hunt post comes up in regards to Nigerian witch hunts. I’m going to put the other posts on hold for a moment and just talk a little about this one. I don’t have anything strong to say, just some thoughts about how the picture is more complicated than it appears.
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