What can I say. I want to communicate what a great time I had at Poets, Prophets and Preachers and how grateful I am to Rob Bell for not only inviting me to speak but standing side by side with me on the stage in an act of solidarity. In the battle for what Christianity will look like in our current epoch Rob Bell is an important figure and one who I hope we heed. For, as I hinted at in one of my talks, some of the alternatives are frightening in their impotent violence.

Anyway, there were a couple of practical things that I wish I had mentioned at the conference but totally forgot about. The first concerns the album I mentioned called ‘Hymns to Swear By’. Lots of people have been asking me about it. I am hoping that Pádraig Twomey (the singer/songwriter) will have it recorded by October and that we will be launching it during my pub tour. However ikon has produced a CD called ‘Dubh‘ (Irish for ‘Black’) on which Padraig has a couple of songs. Here is a taste of Pádraig on the CD (it is not by me, despite what it says on soundcloud),

The second thing i wanted to remind people of is that I am running a parable competition as part of the launch of my new book, ‘The Orthodox Heretic‘. There is still a few weeks for you to write something before the deadline so please do get writing. More information here.

Not long to go before I will be speaking with Rob Bell and Shane Hipps at the Poets, Prophets and Preachers conference. This promises to be an explosive time. I am confident that this conference will be an important contribution to the ongoing conversation concerning how Christianity will look in the 21st century.

If you can get here I would really recommend you make a last minute booking and join us.

Here is an outline of what will be happening,

Sunday July 5

4pm Registration check-in begins – DeVos Performance Hall lobby

7 pm

Rob Bell – The Original Guerilla Theatre

throwing ourselves into this ancient, sacred art form with the absurd, naive, antiquated belief that the world needs inspiring, provocative, comforting, dangerous, healing, great sermons now more than ever

Monday July 6

9 am

Rob Bell – The Story We’re Telling

sin, salvation, business, art, justice and the importance of beginning in the beginning

11 am

Peter Rollins – Returning to the New: An Introduction to Transformance Art

what do flash mobs, performance artists, and pirates have to do with Christianity? exploring how the church can act as an aroma of the coming kingdom

noon

break for lunch

2 pm

Shane Hipps – How Technology Shapes the Sermon

the art of preaching evolves with every new technological innovation in a culture. do you know what is being done and undone by our technologies?

5 pm

break for dinner

7 pm

Rob Bell – The Fig Tree and the Failure of Language

moment, movement, mystery, and the science of homiletical architecture (alternate title: why some sermons work and others don’t)

Tuesday July 7

9 am

Rob Bell – Fumbling Around with Your Radar

tools, questions, approaches, and everyday 5 minute disciplines that have helped me understand where sermons come from

11 am

Peter Rollins – For Those With Ears to Hear: Parables and the Lost Art of Provocation

an exploration of that theological dis-course that holds the power to send us hurtling off course and onto a new one

noon

break for lunch

2 pm

Shane Hipps – You Are the Medium

an exploration of the human being as God’s ultimate medium for his message. if the medium is the message, and you as a person are the medium, then what does that say about the message?

4 – 5 pm

Rob Bell – The One Thing I’ve Never Heard Someone Talk About That Has Changed Everything for Me

Its going to be fun!

I am keen to lead some reading groups dedicated to introducing and exploring the work of key theorists who are contributing important insights into Christianity. These courses would involve reading both secondary and primary material. I would introduce the evening and guide the discussion to ensure that we get the most out of what we are reading. Each course would come with the tag ‘beginner’, ‘intermediary’ and ‘advanced’.

While the advanced classes will be very difficult for people not familiar with theology this does not mean they would be of no use. Often we learn most by placing ourselves in an educational context that is currently beyond us. When I started studying theology and philosophy I was twenty-two and had no proper educational background. But I attended all the philosophy conferences and theology symposiums I could. For a couple of years I understood virtually none of what I heard. But eventually, like one of those Magic Eye pictures, it all began to become clear.

To kick things off I am wanting to run an advance reading group in Belfast over the summer exploring the work of dialectic materialist theologian Slavoj Žižek. Žižek blends a provocative mix of Lacan, Hegel and Marx in his theological project and comes to some fascinating insights. This will be a five week course in which we shall read two secondary sources and two primary sources.

If you would be interested in attending this reading group please email me here.

In the future I am keen to run courses on (to name but a few),

John Caputo
Terry Eagleton
John Milbank
Dietrich Bonheoffer

People have been asking if I am thinking of doing an audio version of The Orthodox Heretic. The answer is that, while I would like to, I have to wait to see how well the book does first.

However I am working on an exciting DIY project at the moment with the musician Dubh provisonally entitled The Cimmeria Chronicles: An Anthology of Half-Forgotten Fables. This album will offer twelve parables (some new ones I have written that are not in my books and some that I have collected over the years) with ambient dub overlayed. Each track will be ideal for personal or collective relfection.I am tempted to use the subtitle Bedtime Stories for the Soul, as the restful tone of the work will be ideal to listen to late at night as you prepare to sleep.

There will be more information on this little underground project in the coming weeks. However, for now I thought I would gather together the readings I did on this blog in the run-up to the release of The Orthodox Heretic, so that they could all be accessed from the one place.

Dialogue from the opening credits:

Number six “Where am I?”
Number two “In the Village.”
Number six “What do you want?”
Number two “Information.”
Number six “Whose side are you on?”
Number two “That would be telling…. We want information. Information! INFORMATION!”
Number six “You won’t get it.”
Number two “By hook or by crook, we will.”
Number six “Who are you?”
Number two “The new Number Two.”
Number six “Who is Number One?”
Number two “You are Number Six.”

The 1960’s seminal TV series The Prisoner is one of my all time favorites. A surrealist, Orwellian allegory that was co-created by the brilliant Patrick McGoohan (who is also the star). The premise, as many will know, concerns a British secret agent (Patrick McGoohan ) who has handed in his resignation under mysterious circumstances and is about to leave the country. However, before he can do so, he is drugged and brought to a bizarre prison where his captors set about finding out why he resigned.

The episodes revolve around the escalating conflict between the British agent (who is given the name ‘Number six’ as all inhabitants, guards and prisoners alike, are assigned a number) and his captors. Number six constantly attempts to escape, undermine those in power and find out who ultimately runs the prison (he has no idea whether it is run by his own Government or by some foreign power). In contrast his captors devise ever more elaborate schemes to break Number six and extract the information they desire. The result is a tense psychological drama that explores the nature of power and resistance in contemporary society.

The prison itself offers us an insightful allegory of contemporary Western Society. On the surface there is freedom and contentment, all ones needs are provided for and those in control seem benign. Yet the calm and free nature of the village has a deeply uncanny texture. There is constant indoctrination, escape seems impossible and social experiments are taking place all the time to keep people docile and obedient. More than this, it is never clear who are the prisoners and who are the guards, or even whether the guards themselves are prisoners. Indeed one of the few authority figures we do see (Number two), changes constantly and seems just as trapped in the village as everyone else.

Throughout the series Number six is constantly striving to find out who runs the Village, who the power behind Number two really is. In short, he is attempting to unmask the elusive Number one.

*Spoiler*

And this is where the show really gets interesting. The answer to who runs the Village goes far beyond the usual tired idea of ‘them’. Whoever they happen to be (Russians, Vietnamese, Islamic terrorists, big business, Government etc. etc.). What the series suggests is that the oppressive power behind the Village is Number six himself. He is responsible for this oppressive regime, he enables it to function, he has built this prison in which he languishes. What is amazing is the way that this information is hidden in plain sight. Every episode tells us that Number six is the one who is really running the Village, and yet no-one ever sees it (indeed, even now, almost forty years later, this does not seem to be addressed in web sites dedicated to the series). In the last line of the dialogue quoted above we hear the words, “You are number six”, in response to the question, “who is number one”. Here it is as if Number two is changing the subject, refusing to answer the question. However, is number two not really answering the question, saying, “YOU ARE, number 6”?

In The Prisoner we are thus brought face to face with the idea that it is we who create the Big Other that controls us. That while we experience this Big Other as separate from us, existing independently of us, and baring over us, it is nonetheless our own creation. We are oppressed by a foreign power that is our own. We are both number six and number one, oppressor and the one being oppressed. We are a divided subject who creates a fiction that imprisons us and demands our loyalty

Is it not the case that a sacrifice is only ever complete when we sacrifice the sacrifice itself? In other words, the real challenge involved with giving someone/something up does not so much lie in the renunciation of what we love, but in giving up the pleasure we receive from the renunciation itself. When we give up the object-cause of our desire we can be overcome with the onset of melancholia, mental anguish or a profound sense of ennui. We hold onto this manifest pain because it acts as a form of perverse pleasure (perverse pleasure being the implicit pleasure we receive from explicitly renouncing pleasure). The net result is that we wallow in the loss of meaning that floods our world. In this way we remain (negatively) wedded to that which we give up. Bound to what we desire in its absence as much as, if not more than, when we were bound to its presence.

In contrast, when one is able to make the initial renunciation and then renounce the perverse pleasure one receives from it, then one has simultaneously fulfilled and transcended sacrifice. At this point the individual experiences a type of freedom.

To take a concrete example I once met a very talented doctor in the US who had walked away from a well paid, comfortable job to work among the poor and oppressed in the area of public health care. While we talked he mentioned that, on reflection, the decision to give up his highly respected job to work among the poor had not really been a sacrifice at all. Why? For the simple reason that he got so much fulfillment from the work he was doing.

However, it soon became obvious that this claim was a retroactive one (i.e. it only became true after the sacrifice itself had been carried though to completion). For at the time of the decision the doctor experienced the move as profoundly difficult. However, he not only gave up his job, but also gave up any jouissance that he received from the loss. In so doing he was able to enter into his new vocation in a full and rewarding way. Only in making the absolute sacrifice, the sacrifice of sacrifice itself, did he come to a place where he could fully embrace his new work and gain abundant life from it. Or, to take an alternative example, in a broken relationship it is only when we are able to give up the pain involved in the break that we are able to move on.

The sacrificial act as a twofold phenomenon (a sacrifice that goes on to sacrifice itself) is profoundly difficult for us to achieve. When it comes to what we love we find it so very hard to let go of that which we have given up.

On 28th August ikon will be offering a transformance art event at Greenbelt music festival entitled ‘Pyro-theology’.

The gathering itself is inspired by Buenaventura Durutti’s provocative phrase,

‘The only church that illuminates is a burning church’

Hope you can join us

Just to let you know that The Christian Century this month features an interview with myself about ikon and my work. The interview was done in a fantastic little coffee shop in the heart of Chicago by the lovely Amy Frykholm. The interview itself lasted about an hour, so what you get in the magazine is a stripped down version. It is great to be featured on the front page. Next year… TIME!

Click here if you would like to have a better look at the photos they used

Dreaming can often offer us a wonderful escape from our daily life. Indeed it is well known that we can be so enamored with our dream-state that our mind can integrate external distractions in order to prolong it. Taking sounds and feelings that would otherwise wake us and finding a way of embedding them into the dream itself. In this way, we are able to fight off the inevitable moment when we have to enter reality and face the myriad of issues that present themselves to us.

However, this morning I was reminded of another experience. One that is more interesting and unnerving. This morning I had a dream that so disturbed me I woke myself up. This dream did not help me escape my mundane reality, but rather was of such an intensity that I needed to escape the dream itself by entering back into reality.

Why? Simply because the dream itself was more real than my daily reality, the dream brought me face to face with the Real of my life, and I did not want to cope with it, I could not bare to stand in its presence. Hence I had to escape the Real of the dream into the fiction of my everyday life.

Lacan provides an insightful example of this escape into reality when he describes a dream recorded by Freud. The dream takes place when a man falls asleep while keeping guard over his sons coffin in an adjacent room. In the dream this man is confronted by his son, who proclaims, in an anguished voice, ‘Father, can’t you see that I am burning?’ At this point the man wakes up and notices the smell of smoke. He discovers that a candle has fallen over in the room next door and set the coffin alight.

The dream itself was no doubt set in a type of hell because the smell of smoke was integrated into the dream. The question we must ask is why he awoke. The standard explanation, of course, is that the smell of the smoke could not be fully integrated into the dream-State and so woke the man up to the reality of what was taking place. However Lacan posits another possibility, namely that the dream itself was so horrific that the Father sought to escape it. Commenting on this Zizek writes,

So it was not the intrusion of the signal from external reality that awakened the unfortunate father, but the unbearably traumatic character of what he encountered in the dream – insofar as ‘dreaming’ means fantasizing in order to avoid confronting the Real, the father literally awakened so that he could go on dreaming. The scenario was the following one: when his sleep was disturbed by the smoke, the father quickly constructed a dream which incorporated the disturbing element (smoke-fire) in order to prolong his sleep; however, what he confronted in the dream was a trauma (of his responsibility for the son’s death) much stronger than reality, so he awakened into reality in order to avoid the Real.

Hence ‘reality’, however dissatisfied with it we are, can act as a screen which protects us from a direct encounter with the horrific Real. In short, reality is structured as a fantasy.

Sadly, there are some who find it difficult to sleep because, in their dreams, they encounter this Real all too often. Here obsessive late night partying, drinking, drug taking and socialising are not to be thought of as attempts to make mundane reality more interesting and exciting (a common misunderstanding). Rather they can often be futile attempts to ward off the real that awaits them in their dreams (an idea that may well explain the unnerving power of Freddy Kruger).

Does this line of thought not help us understand the depth and insight of Freud’s claim,

What we repress by day will haunt us by night