Book: "Warhol/Icon: The Creation of Image"

Warhol/Icon was a major exhibition co-created by Haunch of Venison and Potnia Thiron Gallery in Athens, which explored Andy Warhol's obsession with fame through his work as a painter of ‘icons’. The emphasis in the exhibition was on the relationship between Warhol’s own Byzantine religious beliefs, Slavic background and devotion to his mystical mother, and his apparently unfettered celebration of an American celebrity culture.

The Gospel According to Superheroes (Stan Lee)

I recently read a book titled The Gospel According to Superheroes: Religion and Pop Culture by B. J. Oropeza that I found interesting enough to recommend. To find out more about the book, I have reproduced the Foreword below by Stan Lee:

Know something? There's no way to predict how mythology will get started. What has come to be known as the Marvel Mythology started quite by accident. Since you're a captive audience, I'd like to tell you about it.

Let me take you back to the early 1960's when I wrote the original scripts for what came to be known as the Marvel Universe of Superheroes. I must admit that attempting to create a mythology was the furthest thing from my mind at that time. I was just trying to write appealing stories about interesting characters with interesting powers. As you'd expect, all the heroes I created fought evil foes for the good of humankind. Each of them represented my feeling of what a superhero should be - a person who uses his power to protect good people from bad.

The Postmodern Sacred

Emily McAvan’s interesting thesis, summarized in an issue of the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, has now been expanded in her recently published thesis The Postmodern Sacred: Popular Culture Spirituality in the Science Fiction, Fantasy and Urban Fantasy Genres. Below is an abstract of McAvan's earlier thesis along with a link, together with a description of her book:

By Emily McAvan

Division of Arts

Murdoch University

Journal of Religion and Popular Culture

Vol. 22(1)-Spring 2010

Abstract

I argue that the return of the religious in contemporary culture has been in two forms: the rise of so-called fundamentalisms in the established faiths—Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, even Buddhist—and the rise of a New Age style spirituality that draws from aspects of those faiths even as it produces something distinctively different. I argue that this shift both produces postmodern media culture and is itself always already mediated through the realm of the fictional. Secular and profane are always entangled within one another, a constant and pervasive media presence that modulates the way that contemporary subjects experience themselves and their relationship to the spiritual. I use popular culture as an entry point, an entry point that can presume neither belief nor unbelief in its audiences, showing that it is “unreal” texts such as Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Matrix, The Passion of the Christ and Left Behind that we find religious symbols and ideas refracted through a postmodernist sensibility, with little regard for the demands of “real world” epistemology. I argue that it is in this interplay between traditional religions and New Age-ised spirituality in popular culture that the sacred truly finds itself in postmodernity.

Read the entire study here.

Book Review: "Our Necessary Shadow: The Nature and Meaning of Psychiatry"

Unable to give a satisfactory materialist explanations to free will, consciousness and the immaterial mind, psychiatry has been on a downward spiral in recent years as a science, though it once enjoyed high status among the sciences. Below is a link to a review from the Washington Post of Our Necessary Shadow: The Nature and Meaning of Psychiatry, by Oxford social psychiatrist Tom Burns, which tries to unpack the problems, while defending psychiatry as a legitimate medical specialty:

Book review: ‘Our Necessary Shadow,’ on the nature of psychiatry, by Tom Burns

National Healthcare and the Church-State Relationship in Byzantium

By John Sanidopoulos

July 25, 2009

"Dr. Miller is a learned and enterprising historian with a fascinating theme. He shows beyond a doubt that the Western hospital tradition goes back to the early Byzantine Empire in the fourth century." -- Medical History

Fr. John Romanides writes the following about the relationship between Church and State in the Roman Empire following the conversion to Christianity of Emperor Constantine the Great: