Mural of Christ must move, church says | Philadelphia Inquirer | 2011-07-17
Luminous and translucent, commanding earth and sky, the risen Christ is too vast to be contained within the borders of artist Lothar Speer's mural.
Jesus' face disappears above the 13-by-28-foot canvas. His ascending torso hovers over a landscape peopled with saints, prostitutes, flower children, Hasidic Jews, a bishop, and thugs. In the distance, Center City burns, inexplicably.
When he finished his headless Jesus in 1995, Speer believed his "ethereal vision" would reside "for a long, long time" in Bustleton's Calvary Evangelical Lutheran Church. Painted on canvas glued to drywall, secured to the vestibule's rear wall with hundreds of screws, The Healing of Bartimaeus But two weeks ago, the 48-year-old Speer learned that - like the Jesus in his painting - there is not room in the little brick church on Northeast Avenue for his cathedral-scaled tableau. After Calvary Lutheran dissolved in the fall due to dwindling membership, a Ukrainian Baptist congregation bought the church. For months, Speer called from his home in Chicago, trying to learn if the new occupants wished to keep the mural, he said, but got vague replies. Early this month, the leadership of First Ukrainian Evangelical Baptist Church informed him that it wanted the painting gone. " 'Please pick up now,' " Speer said he had been told. "I went pale. I said, 'Please. This is not like scraping off wallpaper.' They said they understood. They gave me until Aug. 1." So eager is he to save the mural, he said, that he will donate it to any church or public building in the Philadelphia area and arrange to mount it free. Still, the task promises to be a challenge. Based loosely on Jesus' miraculous healing of the blind Bartimaeus, the 300-square-foot image has a curved top and is notched by three doors. During 1994 and 1995, Speer and church volunteers labored on a scaffold five or six days a week. Then a master's degree student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Speer was paid $15,000 for Bartimaeus , whose controversial Jesus was the subject of an Inquirer article on Feb. 15, 1995. "Very sinister," an elderly Lutheran parishioner called the image back then. The Rev. Dmitri Login, pastor of the 58-year-old Ukrainian congregation, said last week that neither theology nor aesthetics figured in the church's decision to remove the mural. Rather, he said, the church must take down the rear wall to add pews.
Risen Christ Image - News
By David O'Reilly Luminous and translucent, commanding earth and sky, the risen Christ is too vast to be contained within the borders of artist Lothar Speer's mural. Jesus' face disappears above the 13-by-28-foot canvas. His ascending torso hovers over
Paul says that over five hundred people saw the risen Christ at one time. My friend, if you get five hundred witnesses into any law court, you will win your case! Also the apostles were witnesses to the risen Christ. They were there to testify to it.
Stringer's works are synonymous with high-profile public sites throughout the country, including The Risen Christ in Christchurch's Cathedral Square, his Grand Head in Wellington, and Mountain Fountain in the forecourt of Auckland's Cathedral of the
The Christian's courage comes from understanding that what life really means is now known only in light of the risen Christ (see eg, 2 Corinthians 4:10ff). In Christ, God's faithfulness is shown to be a faithfulness in death and beyond death.
We prefer the image of Christ as victor over death, love stronger than death, the kind of victory that we sense at the Paschal service Easter midnight in the Orthodox Church, when there is a constant refrain, "Christ is risen from the dead,
St Strumpet? | What's in Kelvin's Head
Image – do not touch me yet, a recollection of her seeing the risen Christ but being forbidden to embrace him.
Mary M is someone whom people are prepared to squabble over a bit these days.
The traditional interpretation is that she was a “fallen” woman. A tart, a strumpet, even a whore, who was redeemed and restored to a holy and righteous way of living by her encounters with Jesus.
There was more than a hint of that in the collect that I looked up for this morning’s mass: liveth and reigneth one God, now and for ever.
I have to admit that I baulked at the first couple of lines and made up my own. For in recent times, feminists and others have wanted to challenge the image of Mary as a tart – after all there is little in the Biblical evidence to suggest that Mary Magdalene was any kind of loose woman at all. The red hair and red frock have been added later. Does not her depiction as a sleeze, they might ask, have more to do with the church’s inability to deal with women as powerful intelligent human beings in their own right than Mary herself. Is not The Strumpet an invented figure to hide the face that we are unable to deal with Mary as businesswoman, apostle and saint of power and integrity?
Indeed, a womanist liberation theologian might say, yes, woman of power and more than that. She is a signifier of liberation – she shows us that the encounter with Christ could lead to a woman being redeemed from the slavery of their culture which kept women down, kept women out of religious discourse and kept women quiet.
To which a feminist Jewish New Testament critic might say: Hey! Whose religion are you referring to? I don’t think that the Jewish culture of the day has much to learn from Christians about attitudes to women. There’s a faintly anti-semitic tone to all this talk of the slavery of women in a Jewish culture. Judaism of its time wasn’t that bad to women you know. Mary M is evidence that women could be empowered in that culture. Have you forgotten that Mary Magdalene was Jewish, as was Jesus?
And then along comes a queer theorist who will say: No! The point about Mary Magdalene is not her Jewishness nor her being a woman but that she was a boundary transgressor. Let us embrace the queerness of the Magdalene – let us remember her as someone who has been celebrated throughout the Christian tradition whist simultaneously being proclaimed as being outside the normative expressions of human sexuality through the ages. Let us celebrate Mary’s difference and oddness and ability to queer the accepted norm. Mary Mag is one of us and it is to such as the Magdalene that God always comes first.
Risen Christ Image - Bookshelf
Image of the Risen Christ
A risen Christ in Eastertime, essays on the Gospel narratives of the Resurrection
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