vessels of belief

the lives of ostensibly non-religious people and finds that, even if they don’t identify with a religious tradition, there can still be a strong spiritual undercurrent to their lives. Her book takes readers through a number of spiritual subcultures

I think that traditional conceptions of secularization in America have looked at the religiously unaffiliated as an indicator that America is getting less religious. That is actually not the case. About 72 percent of the religiously unaffiliated say they believe in some sort of higher power.

The painterly, alchemical ritual involved in the production echoes her experiences imbedded with the Kwoma people of Papua New Guinea. The artist has been inducted into the Kiava clan where artmaking is connected to the ritual washing of objects to attract the energy of spirits and ancestors.

that materials do things you don’t expect them to do. Ideas can be clean and precise; if an idea doesn’t get manifested in real form, you can keep imagining it as a perfect and pristine thing. But if you execute an idea in material form, usually the idea changes and gets rumbled up. It interests me when an idea is disrupted by what happens with... See more

Life, as we all know, is conflict, and man, being part of life, is himself an expression of conflict. If he recognizes the fact and accepts it, he is apt, despite the conflict, to know peace and to enjoy it. But to arrive at this end, which is only a beginning (for we haven’t begun to live yet!), a man has got to learn the doctrine of acceptance,... See more

People still want God, but doctrine is no longer a main, if latent, draw — it’s the love and openness inside of all of us that God, or the universe (Rae uses both terms), is. It helps that this specific spiritual outlook is also compatible with pop-consciousness’ belief that our minds control our destinies

I think the relationship between Nietzscheanism, decadent-dandyism, and fascism is profoundly under-theorized. D'Annunzio started out as a Decadent, after all — his first novel, The Child of Pleasure, is basically dandyism-by-numbers. I think the intellectual move goes something like this: to be a dandy is to be a “miniature god,” to use Barbey... See more

Gods are conveniently anthropomorphic mental representations of the tribe.

Light of course is incorporeal; you can’t hold it, you can only record its effect. And yet there’s such materiality to these pieces.