benghini

[benghini]

"This entails an obvious consequence: that criticism is no longer going to be practiced in the search for formal structures with universal value, but rather as a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying. ...And this critique will be genealogical in the sense that it will not deduce from the form of what we are what it is impossible for us to do and to know; but it will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think."

—Michel Foucault, "What is Enlightenment?"

[benghini]

Bess Atwell | Sylvester

[benghini]

"But that does not mean that one has to be 'for' or 'against' the Enlightenment. It even means precisely that one has to refuse everything that might present itself in the form of a simplistic and authoritarian alternative: you either accept the Enlightenment and remain within the tradition of its rationalism (this is considered a positive term by some and used by others on the contrary, as a reproach); or else you criticize the Enlightenment and then try to escape from its principles of rationality (which may be seen once again as good or bad)."

—Michel Foucault, "What is Enlightenment?"

[benghini]

"I wonder whether we may not envisage modernity rather as an attitude than as a period of history. And by 'attitude,' I mean a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task. A bit, no doubt, like what the Greeks called a ethos."

—Michel Foucault, "What is Enlightenment?"

[benghini]

"Enlightenment is thus not merely the process by which individuals would see their own personal freedom of thought guaranteed. There is an Enlightenment when the universal, the free, and the public uses of reason are superimposed on one another."

—Michel Foucault, "What is Enlightenment?"

[benghini]

Rocky Reef on the Seashore (1825) by Caspar David Friedrich

[benghini]

"Law is not opposed to Grace; there is only Law hollowed of its implicit pretensions to Grace, hollowed instead of hallowed."

—Vincent Lloyd, The Problem with Grace

[benghini]

"Tradition thus requires faith. To set aside the security that practice (to which norms are accountable) provides is not easy to stomach. It is a risk. Sometimes it works, often it fails. The visionary politician persuades, the visionary writer changes her audience; other aspiring visionaries are laughed off the platform, other writers remain unpublished or ignored. Excellence (at judgment, at rhetoric) is no guarantee of success. This is what always happens when the hegemony of the visible is refused: there are no guarantees."

—Vincent Lloyd, The Problem with Grace

[benghini]

"For the sacred text to consume the world, and so to thrust us into the tradition where we always already reside, is to weave an elegantly patterned cloth and then to pretend that the pattern was there all along, even when the threads were sitting, virginal, on spools."

—Vincent Lloyd, The Problem with Grace

[benghini]

"Like God who is incomprehensible because unlimited, humans might have a nature that imitates God only by not having a clearly delimited nature."

—Kathryn Tanner, "Creation and Salvation in the Image of an Incomprehensible God"

[benghini]

Gilbert Decock (Belgian, 1928-2007), Alcyone, 1999. Oil on canvas, 70 x 70 cm.

[benghini]

“Definitions of women’s boundaries and ritualistic reinforcement through liturgies accompany the political and economic structures of women’s oppression. Lo indecente (the indecent act) is to cross these boundaries, the political and religious boundaries of oppression that have developed for women. To fall into indecency is to fall outside the tenuous definition of men respecting women’s lives, so it is also a dangerous affair, especially for poor women.”

—Marcella Althaus-Reid, From Feminist Theology to Indecent Theology

[benghini]

“To begin from the bodies of poor women is to recognize in Christology a sexed discourse, a discourse already made from the body of a young man like Jesus and of his experiences of pain and pleasure, of love and dissatisfaction and also of his ignorance of the feminine beyond the cultural constructions of gender of his time and society… But it is also the body of a sexed messiah who interpreted the world from a phallocentric perspective, who did not experience the objectified lives of the women of his era. Beyond a few metaphors of Jesus concerning the Motherhood of God, Jesus as God incarnate never gave birth, suckled a child, nor suffered the pains of menstruation.”

—Marcella Althaus-Reid, From Feminist Theology to Indecent Theology

[benghini]

“The struggle here has been and still is even more fierce, because the discourse of gender threatens the core of patriarchally constructed religious representations and their production of sacred meaning. We must be proud to be called betrayers, if our unfaithfulness to patriarchal ideology opens up the possibility of discovering God anew.”

—Marcella Althaus-Reid, From Feminist Theology to Indecent Theology

[benghini]

Yukio Mishima | St. Sebastian

[benghini]

“Converting our minds to the earth cannot happen without converting our minds to each other, since the distorted and ecologically dysfunctional relationships appear necessary, yet they actually support the profits of the few against the many. There can be no ecological ethic simply as a new relation of 'man?' and 'nature.' Any ecological ethic must always take into account the structures of social domination and exploitation that mediate domination of nature and prevent concern for the welfare of the whole community in favor of the immediate advantage of the dominant class, race, and sex. An ecological ethic must always be an ethic of eco-justice that recognizes the interconnection of social domination and domination of nature.”

—Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk

[benghini]

"All we are left with is the freedom to choose which method we will try out when brought face to face with that void in the progressive tense, in the interval while we await the 'absolute.' Either way, we must make our preparations. That these preparations should be referred to as 'spiritual development' is due to the desire that lurks to a greater or lesser extend in all human beings to fashion themselves, however unsuccessfully, in the image of the 'absolute' to come."

—Yukio Mishima, Sun and Steel