Bishop Moore
From a First Things website:
On Bringing One's Life to a Point
Once we come to see that our self is at stake in such moments, we will get quite a different slant on the truth we think we understand. It cannot be simply my personal view, my personal cause. For that alone I would scarcely risk or endure isolation. Few "opinions" of mine are likely to mean as much to me as my good name among colleagues. So if it is my cause that is at stake, that good name is likely to trump other considerations. No, the truth we think we understand must have about it an impersonality; it cannot simply be one's own private view or opinion. The truth I think I understand and for which I must stand up is, in reality, a truth that I stand under and to which I look up....
That the truth we understand must be a truth we stand under is brought out nicely in C. S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength when Mark Studdock gradually learns what an "Idea" is. While Frost attempts to give Mark a "training in objectivity" that will destroy in him any natural moral sense, and while Mark tries desperately to find a way out of the moral void into which he is being drawn, he discovers what it means to under-stand.
"He had never before known what an Idea meant: he had always thought till now that they were things inside one's own head. But now, when his head was continually attacked and often completely filled with the clinging corruption of the training, this Idea towered up above him-something which obviously existed quite independently of himself and had hard rock surfaces which would not give, surfaces he could cling to."This too, I fear, is seldom communicated in the classroom, where opinion reigns supreme. But it has important implications for the way we understand argument. During the course of the uproar at Oberlin I discovered to my surprise that the cause I defended had become genuinely an impersonal one-not my own. It was not the sort of thing over which one could become personally irritated or annoyed. Indeed, I have on occasion over the years been far more annoyed by minor criticisms of my writings than by the direct and personal attack I now experienced. For it was impossible to regard the position I defended as my own; indeed, I cannot imagine subjecting myself to such criticism for the sake of anything so minor as an "opinion" of mine. In such moments one needs a truth with hard surfaces to cling to and stand under, and this experience has renewed my fear that the teaching of ethics alone seldom offers such truth. If trying to stand under the truth means the practice of an ars moriendi, we begin to see what the moral life really requires.
-- "On Bringing One's Life to a Point," by Gilbert Meilaender, First Things, November 1994, pp. 31-35
From my web journal, log24.net, May 9, 2003:
ART WARS
The Rhetoric of Power:
A meditation for Mental
Health Month
From "Secondary Structures," by Tom Moody, Sculpture Magazine, June 2000:
"By the early ’90s, the perception of Minimalism as a 'pure' art untouched by history lay in tatters. The coup de grâce against the movement came not from an artwork, however, but from a text. Shortly after the removal of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc from New York City’s Federal Plaza, Harvard art historian Anna Chave published 'Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power' (Arts Magazine, January 1990), a rousing attack on the boys’ club that stops just short of a full-blown ad hominem rant. Analyzing artworks (Walter de Maria’s aluminum swastika, Morris’s 'carceral images,' Flavin’s phallic 'hot rods'), critical vocabulary (Morris’s use of 'intimacy' as a negative, Judd’s incantatory use of the word 'powerful'), even titles (Frank Stella’s National Socialist-tinged Arbeit Macht Frei and Reichstag), Chave highlights the disturbing undercurrents of hypermasculinity and social control beneath Minimalism’s bland exterior. Seeing it through the eyes of the ordinary viewer, she concludes that 'what [most] disturbs [the public at large] about Minimalist art may be what disturbs them about their own lives and times, as the face it projects is society’s blankest, steeliest face; the impersonal face of technology, industry and commerce; the unyielding face of the father: a face that is usually far more attractively masked.' ”
From Maureen Dowd's New York Times column of June 9, 2002:
"The shape of the government is not as important as the policy of the government. If he makes the policy aggressive and pre-emptive, the president can conduct the war on terror from the National Gallery of Art."
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From the New York Times, The National Gallery of Art in Washington has just acquired Tony Smith's first steel sculpture: "Die," created in 1962 and fabricated in 1968. "It's a seminal icon of postwar American art," said Earl A. Powell III, director of the National Gallery. |
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Die (Tony Smith) |
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Bishop Moore |
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From a New York Times
obituary, Bishop Dies Paul Moore Jr., the retired Episcopal bishop of New York who for more than a decade was the most formidable liberal Christian voice in the city, died yesterday at home in Greenwich Village. He was 83.... Bishop Moore argued for his agenda in the most Christian of terms, refusing to cede Biblical language to the Christian right. Although he retired as bishop in 1989, he continued to speak out, taking to the pulpit of his former church as recently as March 24, even as illness overtook him, to protest the war in Iraq. "It appears we have two types of religion here," the bishop said, aiming his sharpest barbs at President Bush. "One is a solitary Texas politician who says, `I talk to Jesus, and I am right.' The other involves millions of people of all faiths who disagree." He added: "I think it is terrifying. I believe it will lead to a terrible crack in the whole culture as we have come to know it.".... [In reference to another question] Bishop Moore later acknowledged that his rhetoric was strong, but added, "In this city you have to speak strongly to be heard." Paul Moore's early life does not immediately suggest an affinity for the kinds of social issues that he would later champion.... His grandfather was one of the founders of Bankers Trust. His father was a good friend of Senator Prescott Bush, whose son, George H. W. Bush, and grandson, George W. Bush, would become United States presidents. |
Related reading:
Question:
Which of the two theories of truth in reading (2) above is exemplified by Moore's March 24 remarks?