Category: Reflections

Religion, Bible, and Theology Scholars Collude with Israeli Apartheid

Reflections
Religion Scholars Collude with Israeli Apartheid
Don Michael Hudson, PhD

“To me, this is one of the biggest ethical questions of our time.”

It’s time religion-biblical-theological organizations, churches, schools, seminaries, and so-called “anti-colonial” scholars in these fields reckon with the Palestinians and their outright devastation. It remains strange to me that religion-biblical-theological scholars carry the flag bravely into the fray in the name of justice–until the issue of the Palestinians. Hear those crickets? Yeah, I don’t even hear the crickets. What’s wrong–Bibi got your tongue?

It is no longer a debate, and everyone who remains in silence participates in the ethnic cleansing and genocide of an entire people and culture in 2021. Have you ever said to yourself, “My God, I wish I had been alive during the Holocaust! I would have done something?” No, you wouldn’t because you’re turning a blind eye now. Tenure? Never even been to Palestine? West Bank? Gaza? Went on some cutesy “Israel” trip orchestrated by masters of propaganda? Afraid of outright racists calling you a racist? Seriously? Afraid of being called “anti-semitic” because Israeli semites are colonizing Palestinian semites?

@SBL @AAR/SBL Southeast @AAR @ASOR

Portico Detail for the Museum MMK für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, DE (Mar 2021)

Reflections
Portico Detail for the Museum MMK für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, DE (Mar 2021)
Don Michael Hudson, PhD
 
Mono Q2
 
I really love this entrance, and even though it is a B and W Mono, the portico itself is B and W Mono. How does one capture this? I chose to keep the “industrial” on the left and the “celestial” on the right. But notice that these are “stairs”–upside down stairs? Is there such a thing as upside down stairs? And could we even tread them? We need them badly, longingly, but we can only observe them–their simplicity, elegance, symmetry, their almost invisible, ignored presence. Such a view–my view of this portico for the last few years–has made me think of Jacob and his ladder, Mohammad and his fleet-footed horse and his flight into the darkness, Duchamp and his complex and multi-dimensional nude, and even Zeppelin’s decadent Stairway to Heaven. Yeah.
 
Maybe that’s one of our human problems we need to remedy but can’t. We must use our stairs within the bounds of gravity–except, except, in art, in our imaginations, in our creative eyes, in our minds, in our yearning to go beyond ourselves to right the world. Have you noticed that there are few places in this life with no bounds, places where we can soar without limits? This is Design. Art. Lascivious, ridiculous, laughable creativity. Upside down stairs? “Insanity,” some say.

“Gentlemen of the Road”

Photos, Reflections
“Gentlemen of the Road”
Hauptwache, Frankfurt, DE (2021)
Don Michael Hudson, PhD

 

“Gentlemen of the Road”
 
Hauptwache, Frankfurt, DE (2021)
Mono Q2
 
“As a general rule of biology, migratory species are less ‘aggressive’ than sedentary ones.
 
There is one obvious reason why this should be so. The migration itself, like the pilgrimage, is the hard journey: a ‘leveller’ on which the ‘fit’ survive and stragglers fall by the wayside.
 
The journey thus pre-empts the need for hierarchies and shows of dominance. The ‘dictators’ of the animal kingdom are those who live in an ambience of plenty. The anarchists, as always, are the ‘gentlemen of the road’.”
― Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines