SRAWUNG SENI CANDI – SHARING TEMPLE ART

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CANDI SUKUH, MOUNT LAWU

Karanganyar, Central Java



Friday, 31 December 2010 and Saturday, 1 January 2011

Candi are one of the traces of the history of civilizations and cultures. In the time of the societies where a candi was built, the temple had a context of life. In this era, a…

From The Huffington Post

Take one comedian, mix in a beauty queen, throw in some bigots and an exploding crow and you’ll open an unorthodox window into the past year for Muslims in America.

It’s been a tough year, so let’s start with the crow.

One of the stupendously stupid protagonists of the British film Four Lions wires a crow to explode by remote…

I sadly can not say that I am always proud to be United Methodist but last week I was. The head of the Tea Party Nation Judson Phillips made the statement that the United Methodist Church is nothing more than the religious arm of the socialist movement. All of this because as he passed by the Methodist Building here in Washington, DC he saw a sign that read that read “I have a dream”. The sign is in support of the passage of the…

In Mircea Eliade's The Myth of the Eternal Return, he discusses the sacredness of New Year festivals for “primitive” societies. New Year festivals served to remove all taboos from the previous year's crops as well as set the fates for the coming year. The festivals occurred during the…

In my last post, An Atheist at Theology School, I noted the possible connections between atheism and liberal theology.  This post is more about what is now called "Civil Religion," and the challenges atheists face during times when this brand of religion appears more often.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the first to examine "civil religion" in general, while Robert…

This past Christmas was a special day for me. Not only did I celebrate the feast of the Incarnation of Christ, but it was my thirtieth birthday. That’s right—I share a birthday with Jesus. There are both positive and negative aspects to being born on Christmas. I imagine there are ups and downs to celebrating your birth any other day. One particular challenge of celebrating Christmas, the New Year, and another year of my life all within a week of each other is that I tend to be overly…

One of the most interesting descriptions of the style and order of the Qur'an describes it as…

This article was originally published on the Huffington Post.

Derek Webb isn't your prototypical evangelical Christian -- but he hopes that someday, he might be.

A long-time darling of the contemporary Christian music scene, Webb has flirted with controversy a number of times since launching his solo career, most notably with his 2009 album Stockholm…

The contemporary Estonian composer, Arvo Pärt, has developed a compositional system that—reduced to its sparest minimum—consists of the dynamic interplay of two musical lines in a field of silence.

The melody, which proceeds mainly in steps up and down the scale, might be compared to a child tentatively walking.  The second line underpins each note of the melody with a note from a harmonizing triad (the fundamental…

In Rabbinic Judaism, Torah is considered as much a process as a sacred text. By studying, analyzing, and debating the significance of its contents, rabbis and their disciples are said to make Torah.

If respectful debate and engagement enliven our own sacred texts, we must similarly work to make interfaith learning in seminary rather than view it as a passive undertaking. By its very nature, it seems meant to be made, not simply learned cold and dry in a course on comparative…

What is our model of interreligious dialogue?  What scriptural models could we choose from?

Well, on the one hand we might choose the model of Moses and the Pharaoh.  This might be called a kind of fanatical and violent exclusivism.  In the encounter of Yahweh and the gods of Egypt, the side that wins is the side that can out-catastrophize the other.  And it really is one catastrophe after another, one tragedy after another, isn’t it.  In the interreligious encounter between Moses and…

This past week the United Methodist Church got some good press... the Tea Party Nation's Judson Phillips demanded its closure.

The Huffington Post reports that Phillips demanded the closure of the United Methodist Church after he toured the United Methodist Building in Washington, DC. There he saw a sign in support of the…

From State of Formation

I thought I would burst! I stared with wide eyes as her hands came toward my mouth with a piece of bread the size of my fist, soaked in a honey-peanut butter mixture. As I opened my mouth to beg – “please, I can’t eat another bi-ghrrr…” – her small hand found its target and I did burst…with laughter.

Looking back I’m surprised that peanut butter didn’t come out of my nose. Watching her veiled head, and those of her…

I thought I would burst! I stared with wide eyes as her hands came toward my mouth with a piece of bread the size of my fist, soaked in a honey-peanut butter mixture. As I opened my mouth to beg – “please, I can’t eat another bi-ghrrr…” – her small hand found its target and I did burst…with laughter.

Looking back I’m surprised that peanut butter didn’t come out of my nose. Watching her veiled head, and those of her co-conspirators, shaking with laughter, I wiped the sticky…