Power Sit
Photo by Momma Bear
Posts
How to Eat Like a Bird
This is going to be the hard part .... Particularly since the same thing applies to shopping. Or reading novels. Anything that one might do compulsively, in order to avoid feeling those uncomfortable feelings . AWK!!!
Where's Mom?
(click to enlarge) (For all those not in the know, the Medieval Academy of America is meeting this weekend in New Haven. Happily, the dogs don't seem too worried about how far away it is.)
Fourth Sunday of Advent
(click to enlarge) Really, I'm working on it. In my head. You know, brainstorming. FYI, the novel is Terry Pratchett's Thud (2005). Highly recommended, particularly for its understanding of prayer. And fencing .
Canticle of the Creatures
(click to enlarge) Happy St. Francis Day! Statue: Francis of Assisi (d. October 3, 1226), Laudes Creaturarum , better known as the " Canticle of the Sun ." Prairie dog: Donovan, "Brother Sun, Sister Moon," from Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972).
Back-to-School
(click to enlarge) P.S. In case it's not clear, they're talking about me. Maybe. You never know. Maybe I just want them to be talking about me.
A Day at the Faire
(click to enlarge) There's a real question here. The more I do centering prayer , the better I am coming to appreciate how nothing really matters except God. Or, perhaps more accurately, how everything that matters, matters only in respect to God. It is all too easy to spend our time on earth dreaming about ways in which our lives could be different, all the while missing how amazing it is to be alive at all. Which is not to say that we should not exercise our imaginations in the effort to live well, only that everything we need is already here, right in the palm of our hands, if only we could learn to pay attention.
Self-Portrait
I know some of you who don't know me personally have been wondering what I look like. Here's a pic taken on my last quest... Now it's your turn: SP-Studio . Hat tip to Andi for the great site! [Update: There, now I'm right-handed.]
Bear's Theory of Comics*
This is still very much a work in progress , but this is what I have so far. 1. Comics are neither novels with pictures nor pictures with captions, but something wholly other, a hybrid of text and image with which it is possible to tell stories that can be seen as well as "heard." Theorists have found them so difficult to describe because they (the theorists) are habituated to think in terms only of text (literary critics) or image (art historians). In this respect, comics are analogues of God, more particularly, of the Second Person of the Trinity, who, while by nature divine (the Word), became incarnate, taking on not only flesh, but also (as per the Nicene Creed ) our nature as human beings. 2. Comics are preoccupied with superheroes and superheroines and their battles against evil because there is something in the form itself (word+image) that presupposes this kind of story. Just as God became incarnate so as to save humanity from its sins, so comic book heroes figh...
Incarnation of the Word
It seems obvious in retrospect, although at the time it seemed an odd thing to say. Of course the conjunction of image and text in that puzzling art form we call "comics" is somehow akin to God; that's the whole point! Okay, maybe not consciously for most comic artists and perhaps for even fewer readers, but from a Christian perspective, what could be more true? "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). It was staring me right in the face: comics are so powerful because they realize as can no other art form this theological truth: the Word became visible, something--or someone--whom we could see, even with our bodily eyes, that he might live among us and save us from our sins. Not convinced? Think about what it is that makes comics distinctive. Comics are pictures with text, but not just with titles or labels. Rather, in comics (and here I am drawing on David Carrier as well as Scott McCloud ), the text typically appears in the form ...
Guilty Pleasures
I was up way too late last night reading an outstanding comic book series that I just found a few days ago. In fact, tired as I am, I'd be reading it now online if the site weren't having trouble loading. It's probably crowded with hits from everybody else on lunch breaks, hooked, like me, on what happens next. Oh, how I wish I could put into words the experience of being drawn into a story that is presented in both pictures and words! Scott McCloud has tried, of course, but it's interesting how even he is not able to say what it is that is actually so captivating about this particular mode of art despite the great service he has done in articulating its formal properties and how they work. Perhaps other critics have, but unless they have done it in comic form, like McCloud, I doubt it. Isn't it strange how art works? Aha, you will say, but art historians talk about this sort of thing all the time. Actually, they don't really, at least not in my field. ...
