Tag: Religion
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Goludev the bell lover
I have never been able to really understand the meaning of the word ‘praying’, or maybe I should say ‘the act of praying’. One prays to god – at least according to my catholic upbringing – but since I can’t imagine anything when hearing or reading the word ‘god’, praying to god doesn’t make sense…
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Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari
Popular belief or the folklore of faith is, in general, what religion means to the common man. It is its most widespread manifestation, not only in Catholicism, but in other religions as well. There’s a lot of suffering in the world and people are often subjected to great stress, either self imposed, or by their…
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Treasure-house Venice
One of the nice things of the Italian pavilion at the 2011 Biennale in Venice was the continuity one experienced when stepping out of the exhibition venue into the different nooks and corners of this always enchanting city. Both inside and outside one felt surrounded by the same mixture of folkloric frivolity and renaissance seriousness.…
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The art is not our thing
Art critic and politician Vittorio Sgarbi was chosen as curator of the Italian pavilion at the 54th Biennale in Venice (2011). Since he is known not to like modern art and even less its organizational “mafia”, his nomination was rather controversial. He decided not to select the works for the exhibition himself but to ask…
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Where I stand
After my comments in the previous posts on the Fall of man and Redemption of man, you may like to know where I stand. Well, I’m standing here under this tree and look up and think it’s beautiful. Through our observations of nature, and our thoughts and studies, we have come to a certain understanding…
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Redemption of man
or the cross in the mountains If God is in the detail (“Der liebe Gott steckt im Detail”, Aby Warburg), then he is more present in the fly on the cross than in the man who’s nailed to it. I, at least, have always marvelled at the fly that is taking a rest on the…
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Fall of man
Adam and Eve, thrown out of paradise by an angry god. What had they done wrong? They had committed the first, original sin. They had eaten the fruits from ‘the tree of knowledge of good and evil’ which god had explicitly forbidden. As a consequence the first man and woman lost their innocence and they…
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Silent witnesses
When I walked between the old Khmer monuments of a thousand years ago, the guardian deities with their introverted faces on the gopuras looking out over the land in the four directions, I couldn’t help seeing them as silent witnesses of the horror that had swept the country of Cambodia only a few decades ago.…
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The lonely slipper
or Shiva and Parvati in a courtyard “Shiva is man and Parvati is woman; they are the causes of creation. All men have Shiva as their soul, and all women are Parvati. Shiva has the form of the male sign, the lingam, and the goddess has the form of the female sign, the yoni. The…
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Fun-fair Ganesha
Popular places of Hindu worship, with their newly created temples and statues of the gods, are more often than not in bad taste. At Hardwar for example, where this picture was taken, there is a long row of new temples that seem to compete for first prize in cheap and kitschy design. How come? These…
καιρός remembered 