Jonathan VanAntwerpen's Blog, page 2

The Peace of Wild Things

Walkway in the woods | Photo: Jonathan VanAntwerpen

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in th...

Lost

California Redwoods, July 3, 2014 | Photo: Jonathan VanAntwerpen

“Somebody once said to me that in relation to religion that I come across like I’m totally lost. And I took it as a deep compliment. I was delighted, because I have no interest in being found. ‘I once was lost, but now I’m found’ is a phrase that echoes throughout so much hymnody in the Christianities of the world. And I sometimes have deep suspicion of the idea of being found, because I am interested, perhaps artistically, in the i...

Searching for sounds

Jonathan VanAntwerpen and Johno Wells | Photo: Lisa Whiteman.

Johno Wells is a life-long musician, composer and sound designer from Southern California. His music “is focused on themes of textures and transitions and searching for sounds that have never been heard before.”

Johno created and hosts Modular World, a global modular synthesizer event with performers from all over the world, and he created and hosts Dotwave, a podcast dedicated to featuring genre-defying musicians and creators.

Born in t...

Sweet Darkness

Pentwater, Michigan | Photo: Jonathan VanAntwerpen

Sweet Darkness

by David Whyte

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone,
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your home
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to whic...

Is America Possible?

Fetzer Institute | Photo: Jonathan VanAntwerpen

“Somehow, in a time like our own, when the capacity for imagining appears to be endangered, both by the technology of television and the Internet and by the poverty of public dreams, it seems especially crucial to introduce our students to the meaning of such a question as ‘Is America Possible?’ And it is absolutely necessary that they discover the significance of the biblical text: ‘Where there is no vision the people perish.’ Indeed, it is precise...

Stealing Buddha’s Dinner

Stealing Buddha’s Dinner | Bich Minh Nguyen | Photo: Jonathan VanAntwerpen

“Maybe because I was surrounded by so much Christianity, I often regarded Buddha as a stand-in for God. I prayed to him many times for things I wanted: Top 40 albums, new shoes, chocolate cake. I prayed for miracles, too: twenty-twenty vision, a pretty face, big bank accounts for my parents. Whenever God was cited — in the Pledge of Allegiance or on coins — in my mind I substituted the word Buddha.”

from Bich Minh Nguyen’s ...

A particular history of the brain

Neuromatic | John Lardas Modern | Photo: Jonathan VanAntwerpen

“In the MRI, flat on my back, questions arose. How to write a particular history of the brain that would capture the reverberating intimacies and the cognitive claustrophobia — all that was going into the relation of power that I was experiencing? How to convey, let alone explain, the blinkered feeling that I might not be human? How to tell stories — and stories within stories — about the people, practices, propositions, and beliefs t...

Critique of Pure Reason

Critique of Pure Reason | Conrad Bakker | Photo: Jonathan VanAntwerpen

Conrad Bakker is an artist. Their work was featured in numerous exhibitions at key galleries and museums, including the Analix Forever and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Conrad Bakker has been featured in articles for the Art Lies, the ARTFORUM and the Bloomberg. The most recent article is Slow Connection: TSA GVL presents REDIRECT in Asheville written by Kate Averett for the BURNAWAY in February 2020.

More here. And her...

Thick description

Thick And Other Essays | Tressie McMillan Cottom

“By interrogating my social location with a careful eye on thick description that moves between empirics and narrative, I have — over the course of hundreds of essays and more than a decade of public writing for an audience who recognized me as a voice of some kind — tried to explore what our selves say about our society. Along the way, I have shared parts of myself, my history, and my identity to make social theory concrete. The things we touch an...

The soul of religion

Kathryn Lofton’s Consuming Religion | Photo: Jonathan VanAntwerpen

“The idea of the study of religion was founded in a simple description of the religious not as something out there but as something in here, among us. When Durkheim said, ‘the idea of society is the soul of religion,’ he was speaking merely to the Aborigines that comprised his primary physical evidence. He was also asking us implicitly to name ours: to name our society by naming the soul that we thought guided it. We can divide th...