I did a guest article yesterday over on Transpositions blog. It was about Art and Embodiment and Digital Culture. The conversation has been going on ever since with some fascinating comments (38 so far!). I am particularly intrigued by Sam, a Mennonite contributor who just doesn't get my aversion to words and who sees words as central to our understanding of God - much more than images. I've experienced the same here in Durham too.
This picture of shells on the beach at Lindisfarne cannot be put into words but says so much to me of everything that I love about God and his creation.
Well, I thought I would put a link to the article so that you could enjoy the conversation but I also wanted to give a litany of thanks to those who go beyond words:
I'm so glad that everything isn't limited to words. I am so glad that words do not mediate my experience of the divine or of his creation. I am so pleased that God has written himself and his imagery into everything I see. I simply do not agree that we need to be bound by words as the conveyors of all meaning. Thank God for the mystics and for apophatic theology. Thank God for the cloud of unknowing. Thank God that he is beyond words. Thank God for sign language, indeed for signs of any kinds like rainbows and hearts and fish and the cross which convey more than words could ever say. Thank God for artists of every hue who put into their creations that which words could not possibly convey. I'm with the post-structuralists who see in our fealty to words simply logocentricism as a cipher for the power of the rational over the experiential. But then I would...
http://pmphillips.posterous.com/art-simply-goes-beyond-words-a-response-to-so
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