Thursday, January 18, 2007

New Ooze Article and Discussion Thread

The discussion on my first article on Burning Man and what this subculture "says" back to the emerging church continues at The Ooze, making it a hot topic. As of this post there were 90 replies and 573 views. Although in my opinion the vast majority of comments have missed the point, at least the dialogue is continuing.

The Ooze just published my second Burning Man article titled "Apocalyptic Man Ablaze." I started a discussion thread on this which can be found here. In the thread I raise the following questions from the article for reader's to consider and comment on:

1. With the post-modern preference for the embodiment of wisdom, how might Christians embody wisdom as they follow Jesus as the incarnation of divine wisdom?

2. What do you think of the Christological idea of Jesus as holy fool? Is this sacrilegious, a rediscovery of a lost biblical idea, a valid tool for sharing Jesus?

3. Harvey Cox talked about the need for festivity and fantasy in the church? Have we lost this and how might we recapture it in the present?

4. Cox calls for a metainstitution to proclaim festivity and fantasy in the world which has lost both. Can the church be this metainstitution? What forms of church might be necessary to accomplish this?

I encourage you to reflect on this and join the discussion on The Ooze. I look forward to your comments.

3 comments:

Steve Hayes said...

What is the "Burning Man" subculture?

I've never heard of it, well, nt quite true. I see it is the most popular tribe on tribe.net, but as I didn't know what it was about, i didn't join. I thought it was a pop group.

Can you give a brief description, for the ignorany?

John W. Morehead said...

Thanks for stopping by and sharing a comment and question, Steve.

With reference to the Burning Man subculture, I refer to the growing thousands of people in the U.S. and abroad who participate in the annual festival in Nevada and who also maintain connection and some sense of community through local regional gatherings and the Internet, and who identify as part of this heterotopian movement. In this sense they might be construed as a subculture, aking to other subculture and countercultural movements such as ConFest in Australia, Glastonbury in the U.K. and various Neo-Pagan festival subcultures in the West. They might be paralleled by previous subcultures that were utopian and countercultural, such as the Jesus People Movement and the Rainbow Tribe that arose in the 1960s and 1970s, and which might find similar expression in contemporary utopian movements.

I hope this helps.

Steve Hayes said...

Thanks very much. My curiosity was piqued when you mentioned it and I had been seeing it as the most popular tribe on tribe.net.

I asked in the New Religious Movements discussion forum (list originally started by Irving Hexham), and got some answers there -- I suppose I hadn't heard of it because it is so local, like Oppikoppie, which is the local annual version of Woodstock.