An endless living world If there is a heaven, and I am allowed entrance, I will ask for no more than an endless living world to walk through and explore. Michael R. Canfield, Field Notes on Science and Nature learningnaturereligionwalking
To find God in the seminary If he were to tire of the Andalusian fields, he could sell his sheep and go to sea. By the time he had had enough of the sea, he would already have known other cities, other women, and other chances to be happy. I couldn't have found God in the seminary, he thought, as he looked at the sunrise. Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist religion
As a kind of gateway Historically, Japan's shrines have been built in order to worship the gods who live in the sacred mountains or seas; They don't reside in the shrine itself, but in the space beyond it. This belief that the spirits and deities exist beyond the confines of the shrine, and that the shrine itself acts not as a centre, but as a kind of gateway, is very different to the grand, imposing churches and cathedrals of Christianity. The majority of shrines are not found in the mountains or in the middle of the fields, therefore, but at the borders of mountain villages – which is to say, at what is seen as the edge of the mountains. The tori gate, marking the entrance to a shrine, indicates that there are gods on the other side of it. Kengo Kuma, My Life as an Architect in Tokyo An edge is an interfacePaths, edges, districts, nodes, landmarks religionedges
The neon god they made And the people bowed and prayed To the neon god they made Paul Simon & Art Garfunkel, The Sound Of Silence religionenergy
Everybody worships Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. David Foster Wallace, This is Water City messages religion
Dwelling in ritual Even a dwelling is a device that generates a distinct pattern of daily activities and their relationships. Some buildings are explicitly built for ritual, but the repetition of any activity, either mundane or religious, tends to ritualize them, and by facilitating this, an architectural structure can turn gradually – sometimes even unnoticeably – into an instrument of ritual. Robert McCarter & Juhani Pallasmaa, Understanding Architecture White cloth ritualpatternsreligion
Who walks beside you? Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land religionwalking
Immer wieder My attitude toward Alexander’s teachings prior to experiencing the places and spaces realized in his practice was akin to what Alan Watts said about certain teachings in The Bible: Sometimes, as St. Paul pointed out, commandments are not given in the expectation that they will be obeyed, but in the expectation that they will reveal something to those who hear them. Today, my answer is unequivocal. My interpretive lens: literal. Time and again, across cultures and continents and islands and oceans, in five different places now I’ve examined the evidence, and am persuaded. Nicht nur einmal: immer wieder. Dan Klyn, Einmal Ist Keinmal blog.usejournal.com religionteaching
The Mind of the Maker A Book by Dorothy Sayers en.wikipedia.org Looking at man, [the author of Genesis] sees in him something essentially divine, but when we turn back to see what he says about the original upon which the “image” of God was modelled, we find only the single assertion, “God created”. The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire and the ability to make things. Only in terms of other thingsI mix it with two in my thoughtTowards a synthesis of experienceAnd these three are one"The right phrase"+28 More religion
Narcissus and Goldmund A Novel by Herman Hesse www.goodreads.com DualityFear of deathPain and joySuddenly the letter has a tailAll that is beautiful and lovely My own beauty reflected religionlovelife
the speed of God An Article by Alan Jacobs blog.ayjay.org [Andy Crouch] quotes the Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama saying that “the speed of God” is three miles an hour because that was the speed at which Jesus moved through his world. So maybe, and I think this is one of the chief burdens of Andy’s book, what makes the most sense for us is to try whenever possible to move at the speed of God – and in that way refuse the offer of superpowers. Of course, this dovetails with a lot of things people have been writing lately about slowness, but what I like about Andy’s book is that it specifies why we can find ourselves responding so warmly to the possibility of slowness. What happens when we seek superpowers, and especially super-speed, is the sacrifice of what I want to call our proper powers – the powers through the exercise of which we (heart-soul-mind-strength) flourish in love. The brain is wider than the sky religionloveeuphonyslowness
The Architecture of Happiness A Book by Alain de Botton www.alaindebotton.com A few millimeters apartTragic colorsClassical absurdityIdeas of a good lifeThe people we love+13 More architecturehappinesslife
A few millimeters apart Aesthetes force us to consider whether happiness may not sometimes turn on the presence or absence of a fingerprint, whether in certain situations beauty and ugliness may not lie only a few millimeters apart, whether a single mark might not wreck a wall or an errant brush stroke undo a landscape painting. details
Tragic colors Life may have to show itself to us in some of its authentically tragic colors before we can begin to grow properly visually responsive to its subtler offerings. melancholy
Classical absurdity Corbusier observed that the requirements of flight of necessity rid airplanes of all superfluous decoration and so unwittingly transformed them into successful pieces of architecture. To place a Classical statue atop a house was as absurd as to add one to a plane, he noted, but at least by crashing in response to this addition, the plane had the advantage of rendering its absurdity starkly manifest. Shorten the wingsTowards a New ArchitectureForm follows function function
Ideas of a good life In essence, what works of design and architecture talk to us about is the kind of life that would most appropriately unfold within and around them. They tell us of certain moods that they seek to encourage and sustain in their inhabitants. While keeping us warm and helping us in mechanical ways, they simultaneously hold out an invitation for us to be specific sorts of people. They speak of visions of happiness. To describe a building as beautiful therefore suggests more than a mere aesthetic fondness; it implies an attraction to the particular way of life this structure is promoting through its roof, door handles, window frames, staircase, and furnishings. A feeling of beauty is a sign that we have come upon a material articulation of certain of our ideas of a good life. architecturebeauty
The people we love The objects we describe as beautiful are versions of the people we love. loveobjects
The search for happiness If the search for happiness is the underlying quest of our lives, it seems only natural that it should simultaneously be the essential theme to which beauty alludes. happiness
An equivalence In both early Christianity and Islam, theologians made a claim about architecture likely to sound so peculiar to modern ears as to be worth of sustained examination: they proposed that beautiful buildings had the power to improve us morally and spiritually. They believed that, rather than corrupting us, rather than being an idle indulgence for the decadent, exquisite surroundings could edge us towards perfection. A beautiful building could reinforce our resolve to be good. Behind this distinctive claim lay another astonishing belief: that of an equivalence between the visual and ethical realms. ethicsaestheticsgoodness
Inwardly to resemble What we want, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty. We can conclude from this that we are drawn to call something beautiful whenever we detect that it contains in a concentrated form those qualities which we personally, or our societies more generally, are deficient. beauty
The gathering darkness of a Sunday evening Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored. work
What we don't like A grasp of the psychological mechanism behind taste may not change our sense of what we find beautiful, but it can prevent us from reacting to what we don’t like with simple disbelief. Our understanding of the psychology of taste can in turn help us to escape from the two great dogmas of aesthetics: the view that there is only one acceptable visual style or (even more implausibly) that all styles are equally valid. taste
Over-imagination An architect intent on being different may in the end prove as troubling as an over-imaginative pilot or doctor. However important originality may be in some fields, restraint and adherence to procedure emerge as the more significant virtues in a great many others. We rarely wish to be surprised by novelty as we round street corners. We require consistency in our buildings, for we are ourselves frequently close to disorientation and frenzy. The signature designnovelty
The extremes of order and complexity Such works emphasize the truth of the ancient maxim that beauty lies between the extremes of order and complexity. It follows that the balance we approve of in architecture, and which we anoint with the word ‘beautiful’, alludes to a state that, on a psychological level, we can describe as mental health or happiness. Like buildings, we, too, contain opposites which can be more or less successfully handled. beauty
Beauty and strength Yet the bridge testifies to how closely a certain kind of beauty is bound up with our admiration for strength, for man-made objects which can withstand the life-destroying forces of heat, cold, gravity or wind. We respond with emotion to creations which transport us across distances we could never walk, which shelter us during storms we could not weather, which pick up signals we could never hear with our own ears and which hang daintily off cliffs from which we would fall instantly to our deaths. beauty
With grace and economy Both bridges accomplish daring feats, but Maillart’s possesses the added virtue of making its achievement look effortless - and because we sense it isn’t, we wonder at it and admire it all the more. The bridge is endowed with a subcategory of beauty we can refer to as elegance, a quality present whenever a work of architecture succeeds in carrying out an act of resistance - holding, spanning, sheltering - with grace and economy as well as strength; when it has the modesty not to draw attention to the difficulties it has surmounted. beauty
The dignity of age Wood and stone, and now concrete and wood, age slowly and with dignity. They do not shatter hysterically like glass, or tear like paper, but discolor with a melancholy, noble air. Things that shine and glitter time
Apportioning value Contrary to the Romantic belief that we each settle naturally on a fitting idea of beauty, it seems that our visual and emotional faculties in fact need constant external guidance to help them decide what they should take note of and appreciate. ‘Culture’ is the word we have assigned to the force that assists us in identifying which of our many sensations we should focus on and apportion value to. aesthetics
There was no fog in London It is books, poems and paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge. Oscar Wilde referred to this phenomenon when he quipped that there was no fog in London before Whistler started painting the Thames. Likewise, there must have been little beauty in old stones before Japanese priests and poets began writing about them.
To the worms and the trees We owe it to the fields that our houses will not be the inferiors of the virgin land they have replaced. We owe it to the worms and the trees that the buildings we cover them with will stand as promises of the highest and most intelligent kinds of happiness. architecture