On Sunday Kate and I went with the friend with whom we are staying to The Brewery an artist colony downtown LA in what I guess at some point was an old brewery but which looks like its most recent iteration was a manufacturing complex. In Fact according the information part of the complex was an old brewery, and part was also part of an Edison plant, and it seems other things as well. Apparently, in some capacity artist have been living and working in the old Brewery since the early 80’s. However, it does look still very industrial, and the portion of the colony that we had time and energy to look at (there are over 300 artist loft/studios according to the web site.) looks like old machine shops. The Brewery has an “open house” twice a year, in the fall and the spring.
What we [...]

Original post by lekamphausen@netzero.net (Larry Kamphausen)

My wife and I came out to LA for a Friends Wedding this past Saturday, and are staying on for a few days. The wedding was very beautiful ceremony. Roman Catholic wedding and the priest an elderly man who has been priest at the church for a very long time officiated. The priest weaved a quite beautiful and quirky commentary and explanation into the liturgy. A practice he explained he took up because he knows that Weddings include people often who rarely if ever go to church and of people of a variety of religious backgrounds. One friend commented that there seemed to also be a strong proclamation of the Gospel. I pointed out that yes that was there, but because the liturgy of matrimony and the Eucharist are when fully understood are themselves proclamations of the Gospel, so if one is going to [...]

Original post by lekamphausen@netzero.net (Larry Kamphausen)

Lenore Kandel, Beat poet, belly dancer, eroticist, and all-around bad-ass woman, passed away October 18th.
HARD CORE LOVE
by Lenore Kandel
To Whom It Does Concern
Do you believe me when I say / you’re beautiful
I stand here and look at you out of the vision of my eyes
and into the vision of your eyes and I see you and you’re an
animal
and I see you and you’re divine and I see you and you’re a
divine animal
and you’re beautiful
the divine is not separate from the beast; it is the total crea-
ture that
transcends itself
the messiah that has been invoked is already here
you are that messiah waiting to be born again into awareness
you are beautiful; we are all beautiful
you are divine; we are all divine
divinity becomes [...]

Original post by beatnikgoth

I confess I have become interested in Hegel and Kant again. I confess that I passed over Hegel with having read very little of his works. Spent more time with Kant but Kant and Hegel are the great Modernist systems, those Grand Narratives that claim to encompass the whole. Prime examples of totalitarian thought. This reading though ultimately fails to understand Hegel and Kant and we who come after.
Post-modernists seem to have stopped reading Hegel and Kant, we simply remember the supposed grand systems that bear their names. I am finding that much in both of their works still is operative in our culture in our questions, in our interpretations of the world. But we have forgotten the details and only remember ironically the generalized narratives and summary’s of their philosophies.
I want to read them again, read them after- After [...]

Original post by lekamphausen@netzero.net (Larry Kamphausen)

Been meaning for awhile to read Phyllis Tickle’s book The Great Emergence: How Christianty Is Changing and Why. Although I have been meaning too read the book I have also put it off: I feared my historiographical training (that instilled a respect and healthy skepticism of periodization in the discipline of history: bothnecesary but problematic for understanding much historical processes. Dividing up history into periods hides as least as much as it reveals. we’ll get back to this in a moment.) But also I have am sceptical about all this talk about “emergence” specifically that this particular period of time is particularly significant in terms of emergence. Now to be clear this scepticism is from perhaps the opposite side of what one would expect. I am not denying that things have changed, nor am I of the opinion that some static immovable notion of Christianity and [...]

Original post by lekamphausen@netzero.net (Larry Kamphausen)

One of the intents of the Symposium on the Theological Interpretation of Scripture is for scholarship to be put to bear on concerns of the church, of pastors and laity. I overheard a student of the seminary heatedly complain that the first presentation on whether and the nature of Paul’s conversion had nothing he could take back with him into his pastoral ministry. I found the complaint odd. First because was he really saying that no one in his context looked to Paul’s conversion as a model for their understanding of their conversion or the conversion of others? This could be, though McKnight made clear that in part his investigation came out of his own ecclesial background where conversion was modeled on Paul and his own conversion was articulated in ways he was lead to believe were Pauline. Could this student not take the way [...]

Original post by lekamphausen@netzero.net (Larry Kamphausen)

Bubbles. Like…wow.

Done at my most casual but astonished request by the amazing Juan Ochoa.

Original post by beatnikgoth