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Camille Paglia Religion and the Arts in America Publish Date

Apr one, 2007

Back to God with Camille Paglia

Back to God with Camille Paglia

camille

The route to a renaissance of the American fine arts lies through faith… When a club becomes all-consumed in the provincial minutiae of partisan politics, as has happened in the US over the by 20 years, all perspective is lost. Great fine art can be fabricated out of love for organized religion, besides as rebellion against it. But a totally secularized lodge with contempt for religion sinks into materialism and self-absorption and gradually goes slack, without leaving an artistic legacy.

Camille Paglia, "Faith and the Arts in America", A lecture at Colorado College, February 2007, available on CSPAN

This is for nother, who wrote on the site a twelvemonth ago that he'd exist happy to hear Camille and Chris "discuss a grilled cheese sandwich."

Yes, conversations with Camille Paglia tend to go everywhere… and we'll surely get to the Edwardses, the Clintons, the Giulianis and the ascent of a compelling new presidential persona in the brownskinned JFK, Barack Obama. I wonder why she writes in her Salon cavalcade, resumed after five years: "I wish Nancy Pelosi were running;" and what prompted her to tell Mitt Romney (running against Ted Kennedy in 1994) "You're going to exist president."

Because she'due south always had a brilliant ear for media trends, I promise nosotros'll get to the surging power of YouTube as an case of the now all-dominant (blogosphere-challenging) visual culture. I hope she'll have a shot at explaining the voluminous hostility of the Salon comment thread on her comeback pieces… Just we'll begin with Professor Paglia's observation of the collision betwixt the nearly-theocracy of the Bush years and hard-sell neo-atheism from the likes of Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. What has get of the relaxed and tolerant fascination with each of the globe religions every bit, in Paglia'southward line, "a complex symbol arrangement, a metaphysical lens through which we tin see the vastness and sublimity of the universe."

Paglia calls herself an "atheist," but it ever seemed to me the wrong discussion for a woman who grew upwardly, as I did, with the gaudy statuary, stained-glass piety and Counter-Reformation confidence of the Cosmic church in the

American 1950s — and who celebrated Italian-Catholic paganism in her breakthrough book, Sexual Personae.

Paglia is a scholar and culture buff who cannot imagine homo life without the religious ambition — or American life without the vital pulse of our religious history. Without the King James Bible, equally she writes, there is no Hawthorne or Melville. Without the burn down and brimstone of Jonathan Edwards in the 18th Century, there is no Blitz Limbaugh today. Without the "epitome mania" of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, there is no "YouTube" culture stamping out the final inhibitions of Calvinism on our laptop screens. Without the hymns of the "great awakening" in America in that location is no Elvis and no James Dark-brown. From Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic" to the swan song of the Titanic, "Nearer My God to Thee," Paglia insists that the genius of "American hymnody should be required study." And farther: African-American gospel music — "passionate and histrionic" — should be recognized as "America's grand opera."

So how, she asks, did nosotros come up to the sullen and simple-minded breach of conservative Christians blaming Godless leftists for sex and violence in the popular media; and smug liberals in high dudgeon about the Fundamentalist hostility to abortion and gay union?

I hope this chat will have in how much has changed since yesterday — 1991, in fact — when Camille Paglia flare-up onto our scene. She'due south changed, also — partnered up and adopted a child who's now in master school. E'er and always she remains, as I wrote on the site ii years agone, My Kinda Talker. What else must we talk most, please?

Extra Credit Reading
Camille Paglia, Cults and Cosmic Consciousness: Religious Vision in the American 1960s, Arion, Wintertime 2003: "Organized religion has always been central to American identity: affiliation with or flight from family unit religion remains a primary term of our self-description."

Camille Paglia, The Salon Interview: Camille Paglia, Salon, February 7, 2003: "Anyone who thinks symbolically had to be shocked past the explosion of the Columbia shuttle, disintegrating in the air and strewing its parts and man remains over Texas — the president's home country! And then many times in antiquity, the emperors of Persia or other proud empires went to the oracles to ask for communication nigh going to war. If in that location was e'er a sign for a president and his assistants to rethink what they're doing, this was it. I mean, no sooner had Bush-league announced that the war was "weeks, not months" abroad and gone off for a peaceful weekend at Camp David than this catastrophe occurred in the skies over Texas."

Thomas Hibbs, Praising Paglia, National Review, August 12, 2003: "[Paglia] wants religious texts to be taught equally culture rather than as morality, a bifurcation utterly foreign to religious texts. Paglia'south dilemma hither is instructive. She faces the obstacles of the mod, self-conscious pagan, someone who cannot believe in the pagan gods in the way an unreflective aboriginal Roman once did, simply is still attracted to its mythic structure and its rich symbolism."

galoot, in a annotate to Open Source, Apr 2, 2007: "As a painter I am puzzled past the quotation from Paglia. She calls herself an atheist, but looks to religion to rejuvenate the arts? I'chiliad starting to think that just equally you lot can't exist a little scrap pregnant, you can't be a little bit in favor of religion. Reason v. Unreason, that's where the battle lines are existence drawn – in politics, in art, everywhere."

pryoung, in a annotate to Open Source, April 2, 2007: "Camille Paglia: 'But a totally secularized lodge with contempt for religion sinks into materialism and self-absorption and gradually goes slack, without leaving an artistic legacy.' Well, what most a deeply (oft fanatically) religious society that sinks into materialism and self-absorption?"

South. Casey, Camille Paglia on C-Bridge: On the Arts and Religion, The Laughing Os, March fifteen, 2007: "In a startling and delightful transformation, she suddenly becomes a hyper-intellectual improvisational stand up-up comedian, with all of her natural Martin Scorsese-on-speed song mannerisms in full effect."

Judith, Art and Politics, Part 2, Our World and Welcome to It, March 7, 2007: "Granted, someone can have deeply-held political beliefs and the talent to display them artistically, just anything – art or politics – means picayune if it doesn't have something deeper than humanism or materialism as the issue."

Camille Paglia discussion grouping, The Camille Paglia Community: "This is a community defended to the study, appreciation, and discussion of camille paglia'southward works, career, influences, and characteristic subject matters."


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Source: https://radioopensource.org/back-to-god-with-camille-paglia/