Liberation: Challenges to Modern Orthodox Theology from the Contextual Theologies

When it comes to the articulation of theology, context is at the same time an inevitability, a responsibility, and a liability. It is inevitable that every expression of theology is brought forth in a particular language, at a particular time and place. It is a responsibility in that the framing of theology must be responsive to evolving cultural, linguistic, and even socioeconomic realities: it must address its prophetic word to people where they are. But context can also be a liability when a theological expression remains bound to an ancient or otherwise distant formula without perceiving the need to “translate” it from its original setting. Context can also be a liability when it overtakes theology, where theology becomes so beholden to its linguistic, cultural, and sociological setting that it loses its prophetic character altogether. Such, then, is the challenge facing anyone who dares articulate theology: to express genuine, timeless, true theology in a way that is conditioned by context, receivable within context, but not diluted by context

Orthodoxy, Music, Politics and Art in Russia and Eastern Europe: By Ivan Moody and Ivana Medić (eds.)

Orthodoxy, Music, Politics and Art in Russia and Eastern Europe  Ivan Moody and Ivana Medić (eds.) University of London, Goldsmiths Centre for Russian Music Institute of Musicology SASA, Belgrade 2020, 263 p. ISBN 978-86-80639-57-4 https://dais.sanu.ac.rs/handle/123456789/1039

A College Collage: Concert and Recordings

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College

Arvo Pärt: Sounding the Sacred [TOC]

Scholarly writing on the music of Arvo Pärt is situated primarily in the fields of musicology (analyzing Pärt’s signature “tintinnabuli” method), cultural and media studies (Pärt’s audience is uncannily broad within and beyond the contemporary classical world) and, more recently, in terms of theology/spirituality (Pärt is primarily a composer of sacred music). For the most part, this work is centered around the representational dimensions of Pärt’s music (including the trope of silence), writing and listening past the fact that its storied effects and affects are carried first and foremost as vibrations through air, impressing themselves on the human body. In response, this ambitiously interdisciplinary volume asks: What of sound and materiality as embodiments of the sacred, as historically specific artifacts, and as elements of creation deeply linked to the human sensorium in Pärt studies? In taking up these questions, Arvo Pärt: Sounding the Sacred “de-Platonizes” Pärt studies by demystifying the notion of a single “Pärt sound.” It offers innovative, critical analyses of the historical contexts of Pärt’s experimentation, medievalism, and diverse creative work; it re-sounds the acoustic, theological, and representational grounds of silence in Pärt’s music; it listens with critical openness to the intersections of theology, sacred texts, and spirituality in Pärt’s music; and it positions sensing, performing bodies at the center of musical experience. Building on the conventional score-, biography-, and media-based approaches, this volume reframes Pärt studies around the materiality of sound, its sacredness, and its embodied resonances within secular spaces