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Potlucks and protocols – KRUX and the bureaucratic world
In my second year of undergraduate study at university the computer science lecturer forgot about one of the lectures. He was lost in some algorithm that caught his fancy the night before and made him forget to go to bed at all. He arrived at the lecture hall twenty...
A broken beauty
A tall woman with greying hair, gentle eyes and a comfortable dress, I approached Annelie Venter at the walkabout to her exhibition at the Bellville Arts Association gallery. Annelie’s exhibition “Pause” contains almost 100 small works in oil and acrylic. After years of painting mostly nature scenes, this solo is the first more clearly autobiographical.
Silence, space and time, a reflection on the Cederberg
Stephen Watson was a South African academic, poet and writer who passed away in 2011. His prose and poetry were primarily inspired by the city of Cape Town, but it was in the Cederberg that he found what he calls la querencia, a Spanish word referring “to a place on...
Living water in the desert of the real
Apple recently unveiled its Vision Pro, a revolutionary spatial computer that seamlessly blends digital content with the physical world. The device creates an infinite canvas for apps that scales beyond the boundaries of a traditional display and introduces a fully three-dimensional user interface controlled by the user’s eyes, hands, and voice. This is a significant move towards an increasingly digital life in the metaverse, a limitless online reality.
Where Words Cannot Reach
The image of a young Albie Sachs pacing up and down a solitary cell, whistling to some stranger, has stuck with me for years since the first time I’d discovered his story in a BBC podcast. As a daily prison ritual (1963), Sachs and a (then) unknown detainee whistled...
Does AI dream of electric salvation?
In the ever-evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, the dawn of large language models (LLMs) has ushered in a paradigm shift that continues to blur the lines between human and machine communication. As these digital titans rise to prominence, their unparalleled...
Reflections on a cowhide – an exhibition by Franli Meintjes
A few months ago Franli invited me for a tea-and-art-kuier at her home studio in Bloubergstrand. Franli has inhabited many parts of South Africa, being a native of the Free State, she's lived in KZN, Gauteng, and now the Cape. She’s no longer tied to the agricultural...
How Should We Then Fight?
Amazon Prime’s “The Boys” presents viewers with a philosophy of power that echoes the work of Michel Foucault. Faced with a growing sense that power is wielded against us by corrupt overlords, where do Christians look for a response?
In Praise of Albums
Ydi Coetsee Carstens reflects on the meaning and value of albums. In a world of endless feeds and infinite scrolling, albums provide a wholesome limitation for artist and listener. Albums remind us that endings are normal, that melancholy and sadness, endings and new beginnings, cycles of productivity and periods of rest constitute the pattern of human life.
Serious Business – or, It Works, even when you Don’t Believe In It (Part 5 of 5)
This is the fifth and last post in a series Resilience as Practice for Kingdom Dwellers. Click here to view all posts in the series. Isaiah 12:6 Shout aloud and sing for joy, people of Zion, for great is the Holy One of Israel who is among you. ...
Tears – or, What are your Brutal Facts? Where lies your Deepest Faith? (Part 4 of 5)
This is the fourth post in a series Resilience as Practice for Kingdom Dwellers. Click here to view all posts in the series. 2 Corinthians 4:8,9 We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing; persecuted, but not...
Withstanding – or, We All Have a Frontline (Part 3 of 5)
Withstanding or We All Have a Frontline This is the third post in a series Resilience as Practice for Kingdom Dwellers. Click here to view all posts in the series. 1 Peter 5:9 Be sober of spirit, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a...
Quick Learning – or, No Plan Survives Contact (Part 2 of 5)
Quick Learning or No Plan Survives Contact This is the second post in the series Resilience as Practice for Kingdom Dwellers. Click here to view all posts in the series.Ecclesiastes 11:4 Farmers who wait for perfect weather never plant. If they watch every...
Resilience as Practice for Kingdom Dwellers (Part 1 of 5)
RESILIENCE as Practice for Kingdom Dwellers In honour of Theo2 Timothy 4:7 I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Never was any material made as resilient as the human spirit – Bern Williams What humankind actually needs is...
Live not by Lies (Nor by Fear)
It is not surprising to find oneself drawn to “the Revelation from Jesus Christ … to his servant John” (Rev 1:1) at a time such as this. To be sure, the Revelation is a strange book with bizarre creatures and indecipherable episodes re-imagined and re-purposed from an ancient vault of Biblical apocalyptic imagery. And, as GK Chesterton so aptly put it; “Though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creatures so wild as one of his own commentators.” Yet instinctively we sense, if the reader would “heed” (1:3) the words in this book, navigational directives will emerge by which to surmount tumultuous times. Herein lies the allure of the apocalyptic.
Politics, friendship, and the art of conversation
Politics, friendship, and the art of conversationHealthy politics depend on our ability to have ongoing conversation. How we define friendship largely determines with whom we’re willing to have ongoing conversation. Our assumptions about human existence shape our...
A call for an Apologetic of Beauty
At the height of the scientific apologetic debates of the 2000s it felt like both sides were driving in opposite directions in identical cars, each convinced they were driving towards the truth. Perhaps they were, but they were also driving away from something. And I think what they were driving away from, was beauty.
Book review – God in the Gallery
Siedell believes that “art works are not merely objects but products of institutional intention and belief, made under certain conditions and intended to be viewed in specific contexts.” If we as artists are to imagine a better synergy artistic practice and religious practice, we need to do the hard work of understanding these beliefs and intentions.
Art, Faith and Money – conversations between makers and the market
Since the 1980s when The Gift (Lewis Hyde) was first published, more and more alternatives to the traditional market-system have presented themselves – patronage, crowd-funding and community-funded work in non-profit organisations. Or perhaps these subtle gift exchanges have always been part of certain aspects of our lives. Most of the important things in our lives (like parents, mentors, friendship, insight), cannot be monetised (‘I am x amount of Rands worth per hour’). Nonetheless, the bottom-line question for many of the artists in our community remains the same – how do I pay the bills.
Advent reflection: Son of David
On this third Sunday of Advent, in keeping with the Advent theme of longing and waiting, or promise and fulfilment to use the Biblical categories, our main text for reflection is 2 Samuel 7:1-17, the account of David’s desire to build God a “house.” Our New Testament counterpart is a slightly unusual choice, Romans 1:1-7, as it gives peculiar expression to the ultimate fulfilment of God’s response to David through the prophet Nathan, that he instead would be the one to build David a “dynasty.”
The world well staged? Creation and culture revisited
Culture is thus both human achievement and divine gift. It is, to stay with our metaphor, the performance of our ultimate beliefs and values—the inevitable staging of our religion. If this is so, it is the task of theology pre-eminently to interpret and articulate the meaning of the cultures we inhabit; and to suggest the way of (biblical) wisdom throughout the stages of life.
On being creative
Artists are not fatally cast upon their inner brilliance (or lack thereof), but called to the diligent use of their peculiar insights into the givenness of what God has created; a world budding with potentiality in anticipation of his image-bearers to explore and celebrate.
Sekoto and I
Sekoto was self-taught, he didn’t go to school like people today. And an interesting thing about him; he was born in 1913, in the same year that the Land Act was passed in South Africa. It’s fascinating to see how he interacted with that time, growing up in that era in South Africa.
Culture Care
Inspired by organizations like CIVA, artway.eu, Morphe Arts and The Rabbit Room, South African artists have realised the need for a place where artists can think deeply and come together and dialogue about faith.
Shadow and light – Archetypes and the Gospels
If we combine the 4 Jungian archetypes with the personifications of the tetramorph, can we make a case for Christ as the perfect fulfilment of all that Freud, Jung, Campbell, Moore, and Gilette are looking for? In a society of disordered archetypes, and psychoses of imbalance, can we psycho-analyse Christ in a Jungian framework and find the perfect man? I contend that we can. And that the answer to all our psychoses can be found by spending time in the gospels.
Fiddlers and Afflictions – joy and suffering in the work of Marc Chagall
Seeking for ‘mentors in hope’ in the troubling times in South Africa and abroad made me reflect on some of the ways Chagall seems to brave despair.
Secularization’s Crisis: What Africa has to offer the world
The notion of the secularisation of (Western) society is a fascinating subject in its own right, with both supporters and detractors of its central thesis; that our society is no longer concerned with religion the way it used to be. Secular, from saeculum (generation, or age) in its Christian Latin usage denotes ‘the world’, as opposed to sacred, from sacer (holy), that which is consecrated to God. Back in 1966 Bryan Wilson called it “the process in which religious thinking, practice and institutions lose social significance”, and Anthony Giddens, more recently as “the process where religion loses its influence over the various spheres of social life”. Or, as Max Weber more imaginatively called it, “the disenchantment of the world”.
Inconclusively Offensive?
The dinner spectacle John describes for us in his gospel, even though remote, still manages to offend us (though not as much as the original guests), but, we’re not quite sure how—or, why, we are offended. We can determine this however, that the story gives us a picture of extravagant devotion.
Unleavened
Hoping to offer a Christian perspective on the growing discourse within African Contemporary art, the ‘Unleavened’ exhibition was imagined as a place of restoration but also of provocation. The theme Leaven provided a metaphor “through which to view the work of young artists as they explore the presence and impact of culture, gender, politics and religion in their lives today”.
An Allegory of Grief
I have a friend who become the victim of sudden loss. One day she was walking along quite happily, when out of the blue a spear of grief was hurled.
Are we all bunkering billionaires?
Douglas Rushkoff’s TED Talk, How to be “Team Human” recounts how he was probed by tech billionaires who wondered whether New Zealand was the right location to build their doomsday bunkers. What bothered Rushkoff about what these tech billionaires were planning?
Voicing Creation’s Praise
Begbie’s fundamental statement in this book is “that human creativity is supremely about sharing through the Spirit in the creative purpose of the Father as he draws all things to himself through his Son”.
Of Past and Future Wrought
Elbie Visser’s oil series titled Fragmented heroes speak about ruins and decay, but not in the dialect of the sublime and Romantic that is so typically associated with it. The series of 5 paintings were exhibited at a group exhibition titled Soma as part of a 40 Stones exhibition at the National Arts Festival in Makhanda.
An Allegory of Beauty
Imagine a great person, stronger than lions, wise as Mountains, more gentle than the light of dawn, whose words are clear as a stream and whose touch imparts life. Someone whose very presence fills you with awe, gladness, laughter and light.
Artists in Community
Gathering faith-based artists into a community for discourse, dialogue and practice in the arts is a liberating and life-giving venture
Potlucks and protocols – KRUX and the bureaucratic world
In my second year of undergraduate study at university the computer science...
A broken beauty
A tall woman with greying hair, gentle eyes and a comfortable dress, I approached Annelie Venter at the walkabout to her exhibition at the Bellville Arts Association gallery. Annelie’s exhibition “Pause” contains almost 100 small works in oil and acrylic. After years of painting mostly nature scenes, this solo is the first more clearly autobiographical.
Silence, space and time, a reflection on the Cederberg
Stephen Watson was a South African academic, poet and writer who passed away...
Living water in the desert of the real
Apple recently unveiled its Vision Pro, a revolutionary spatial computer that seamlessly blends digital content with the physical world. The device creates an infinite canvas for apps that scales beyond the boundaries of a traditional display and introduces a fully three-dimensional user interface controlled by the user’s eyes, hands, and voice. This is a significant move towards an increasingly digital life in the metaverse, a limitless online reality.