Twitter-witter!

( Beware the ramblings! )

(no subject)

Yesterday I was at the Scott-Holland lectures, which this year were given by Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum on 'the constraints and opportunities of a visual tradition' - or rather, what the making of images does to Christianity, and what the images we make, inherit and modify say, particularly to people outside the church. The Scott-Holland for whom the lectures was named was Henry Scott-Holland,† sometime Dean of St Paul's, high-churchman and one of the founders of the Christian Socialist Union - he was one of the second wave of churchmen of the Oxford Movement, whose strongly incarnational understanding of God as intimately involved in the world and concerned for the poor led them to the East End, and to a passionate interest in social justice (even to the insistence that it is as important to pay a fair price for goods as it is to pray and receive the sacraments). This, incidentally, is why so many Anglo-Catholic churches are in poor places - or what were poor places at the turn of last century - and also why I get irritated when people assume that all 'Spikes' are only interested in ceremonial and the cricket pages of the Daily Telegraph.

( Yes, but is it art? )

In conclusion: I seem to have turned into a Neil MacGregor fangirl (though I get the impression that he wouldn't know what to do with one), and I really wish I had seen the exhibition Seeing Salvation in 2000; I wonder if you can still get the catalogue?