books for project

The offering of the gentiles David J Downs. esp pp120-160

Les Murray- Post Mortem

I was upstaged in Nottingham
after reading poetry there
by what lay in the porter's room above:
ginger human skeletons. Eight of them.

Disturbed by extensions to the arts centre
and reassembled from the dozer's shove
some might have been my ancestors, Nottingham
being where my mothers family fled from

in the English civil war.
These were older than that migration,
crusty little roundheads of sleep,
stick-bundles half burned to clay by water.

Their personhoods had gone, into the body
of that promise preached to them. What had stayed
in their bones were their diseases, the marks
of labour in a rope-furrowed shoulder blade,

their ages when they died, and what they'd eaten:
bread, bacon, beer, cheese, apples, greens,
no tomato atoms in them, no potatoeines,
no coffee yet, or tea, or aspirin

but alcoholic curds horn-spooned at a fair
and opium physic, and pease porridge.
The thought that in some cells their
programmes might persist, my far parentage,

attracted me no more than re-building
faces for them with wire and moulding.
Unsatisfied to go as a detective
to the past, I want the past to live

with the body we have in the promise,
that book which opens when the story ends.
Being even a sound modern physique
is like owning an apartment in Venice

Jazz is running your fingers over an uneven pailing fence,
rough grain chafes the skin,
still, you wont pull your hand
from that syncopated border

"What kind of literature and what kind of life is the same question," Tom Stoppard The Coast of Utopia

Warnings

"In it's use of signs that move through time and space and which imitate the world beyond performance, seen and unseen, the theatre may well bear a likeness to that sensory mode of divine self-revelation attested in the classic texts of Christian faith. But, at least for the Christian, the theatre will not move beyond likeness to rival, claiming to emulate the Incarnation by summoning spirit or universal will to inhabit it's material signs" Max Harris. Theatre and Incarnation

Artaud on Theatre

The spectator must approach as they might a surgeon
"knowing, of course, that he will not die, but that it is a serious thing and he will not come out of it unscathed...He must be totally convinced that we are capable of making him scream" Antonin Artaud

Could we say the same of a sermon?

Shults and Zizoulas on the future

"The truth of history lies in the future, and this is to be understood in an ontological sense: history is true, despite change and decay, not just because it is a movement towards and end, but mainly because it is a movement from the end, since it is the end that gives it meaning." This is revealed not through analysis of cause and effect, but through the manifestation of the openness of the Father to the Son in the Spirit, which is the basis of the Christian claim that ontology must be understood in terms of communion. For human creatures, this means that being is oriented toward a future in which they share in this communion. This shapes Zizioulas's anthropology and ecclesiology. "The truth and the ontology of the person belong to the future, are images of the future." The church "has it's roots in the future and it's branches in the present."
John Zizioulas in LeRon Shults- Reforming the Doctrine of God (194)

What does this mean for the personhood of people outside the church?