benghini

[benghini]

"Such collective identification depends for its efficacy on the temporality of enunciation, the contingent 'time' in which cultural 'faults' and 'virtues' are translated and rearranged to accommodate emergent, hybrid subjects and values. This is why the self-critical community resists the regulative and rebarbative function of an orthodox Tradition that polices jesters and banishes poets." —Homi Bhabha, On Cultural Choice

[benghini]

"The subject can no longer be imagined as a form of person hood that is prior to the cultural performance, standing apart from the social process, constituted as "consciousness" outside the material and signifying practices of texts, languages, institutions, political regulations, communal registrations, and psychic representations. The subject is not simply what you start with, as an origin, nor where you end, as a closure. The subject is a strategy of authorization and differentiation that produces an anteriority before the beginning, and a futurity beyond the end, where the present is the time of decision and choice, at once deliberate and disjunctive, at once survival and sovereignty."

—Homi Bhabha, On Cultural Choice

[benghini]

"All our theological efforts, like all other human efforts, will be fallible and limited; they will not gain us a new certitude, promise of moral rightness, or guarantee of positive outcomes. They will, without a doubt, be criticized and left behind by some future generation."

—Sheila Greeve Daveney, Pragmatic Historicism

[benghini]

Nicola Samori | Primo Martire | 2010

[benghini]

"Once in the west I lay down dying to see something other than the dying stars so singularly clear, so unassailably there, they made me reach for something other. I said I will not bow down again to the numinous ruins. I said I will not violate my silence with prayer. I said Lord, Lord in the speechless way of things that bear years, and hard weather, and witness."

—Christian Wiman, Witness

[benghini]

“You don’t exactly penetrate another culture, as the masculinist image would have it. You put yourself in its way and it bodies forth and enmeshes you.”

— Clifford Geertz

[benghini]

"Those who like to believe in the miracle of 'pure' thought must bring themselves to accept that the love of truth or virtue, like any other kind of disposition, necessarily owes something to the conditions in which it was formed, in other words a social position and trajectory."

—Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations

[benghini]

"I think it is important above all to reflect not only on the limits of thought and of the powers of thought, but also on the conditions in which it is exercised, which lead so many thinkers to overstep the limits of a social experience that is necessarily partial and local, both geographically and socially, and restricted to a small region, always the same, of the social universe, as is shown by the limited scope of the references invoked, often restricted to one discipline and one national tradition."

—Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations

[benghini]

"If it kills, it is bad theology. Whatever else can be said about a theology, if it has systemically harmful and potentially even fatal consequences, then there must be something wrong with it."

—Hanna Reichel, After Method

[benghini]

Judith Bergerson（American）

Sunset Tapestry   acrylic/colored pencil on 15″x 30″ stretched canvas   via   more

[benghini]

"The shape of the life of any person expresses and generates, implicitly or explicitly, distinct belief about God, self, world, and the shape of their relationship—and these beliefs in turn have real effects on our being in the world, for better or worse; they matter not only existentially and spiritually but also materially, ethically, politically, culturally, and ecologically."

—Hanna Reichel, After Method

[benghini]

“So the gospel transmitted means in many imaginations the way in which different peoples have culturally adopted and adapted Christian faith, ideas, doctrine, and lagnuage. And thanks to a supersessionist mistake and a colonialist sensibility, few Christians would discern the tragic history and the ongoing tragedy inside that statement about transmission. Unfortunately, the universal (bound up in docetism) and the contextual (bound up in adoptionism) are currently the dominant options for the contemporary theological imagination.”

—Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination

[benghini]

Joseph Schiano di Lombo | Var. 2: Clarinet, Synthesizer (Live at Maison de la Radio et de la Musique, Paris) | 2023

#Youtube

[benghini]

"Those who have endured the labors and dangers of the sea and then amass material riches, even when they have gained much desire to gain more. They consider what they have at present as nothing and reach out for what they have not got. We, who have nothing that we desire, wish to acquire everything through the fear of God."

—Amma Syncletica, The Sayings of the Desert Mother

[benghini]

"It is dangerous for anyone to teach who has not first been trained in the 'practical' life. For if someone who owns a ruined house receives guests there, harm is done because of the dilapidation of the dwelling. It is the same in the case of someone who has not first built an interior dwelling; loss is caused to those who come. By words one may convert to those who come. By words one may convert them to salvation, but by evil behavior, one injures them."

—Amma Syncletica, The Sayings of the Desert Mothers

[benghini]

"The same Amma said that a teacher ought to be a stranger to the desire for domination, vainglory, and pride. A teacher should not be fooled by flattery, nor be blinded by gifts, conquered by the stomach, not dominated by anger. A teacher should be patient, gentle and humble as far as possible; successfully tested and without partisanship, full of concern, and a lover of souls."

—Amma Theodora, Sayings of the Desert Mothers

[benghini]

"I have done this many times, dragged the burden of my body, estranged from me, along roads of my own and foreign countries where caravans of featureless faces, colorless lips, figures with blurred contours, are thrown on the screen of the retina, a hail of stones on a shuttered window."

—Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Elegy