A Quote by James Norton

We live in secular world now, but most of our art and culture is rooted in religion. — © James Norton
We live in secular world now, but most of our art and culture is rooted in religion.
Warhol and other Pop artists had brought the art religion of art for art's sake to an end. If art was only business, then rock expressed that transcendental, religious yearning for communal, nonmarket esthetic feeling that official art denied. For a time during the seventies, rock culture became the religion of the avant-garde art world.
How do you live with evil? Art is traditionally - certainly with my secular background - the answer, but art is very self-referential, whereas religion claims to go beyond the bounds of human existence.
We need to build resilience together, rooted in religion, rooted in schools, rooted in our health care institutions.
Secular humanists should recognize those forms of religion as allies in the struggle for human advancement. They should also learn from them, as they try to build a fully secular world in which people can have the opportunity to live rich and fulfilling lives.
For democrats, it's as crucial to defend secular culture as to preserve secular law. And in fact the two projects are inseparable: When religion defines morality, the wall between church and state comes to be seen as immoral.
Instead of loving a God, we love each other. Instead of the religion of the sky-the religion of this world-the religion of the family-the love of husband for wife, of wife for husband-the love of all for children. So that now the real religion is: Let us live for each other; let us live for this world without regard for the past and without fear for the future. Let us use our faculties and our powers for the benefit of ourselves and others, knowing that if there be another world, the same philosophy that gives us joy here will make us happy there.
Part of my life's thesis is that we live in a culture that has bought into the patently silly idea that there is a divide between the secular world and the faith world.
We all have one other world we live in: our public world. Some people call it our public persona. This is the world where someone who doesn't know you privately, personally, or professionally hears your name and has some opinion about you one way or another. So the question becomes: where is integrity rooted? Some people think it's rooted in their public life. They spend all of their time trying to spin their public image. It's not rooted there, however. It's simply revealed there. People who lack integrity will have it revealed publicly.
I don't think the world is particularly responsive to - our world, the culture we are in, to art right now.
We need to employ a secular approach to ethics, secular in the Indian sense of respecting all religious traditions and even the views of non-believers in an unbiased way. Secular ethics rooted in scientific findings, common experience and common sense can easily be introduced into the secular education system. If we can do that there is a real prospect of making this 21st century an era of peace and compassion.
Art is not like other culture because its success is not made by its audience. The public fill concert halls and cinemas every day, we read novels by the millions, and buy records by the billions. 'We the people' affect the making and quality of most of our culture, but not our art.
I think I'm fascinated by the power of religion in our culture. Like a lot of secular, liberal people, I ignored it for a long time. Lately, of course, just from a political perspective, it's impossible to ignore.
The art world is now a slave of mass culture. We have a sound-bite culture and so we have sound-bite art. You look at it, you get it - it's as immediate and as superficial as that.
I was lucky enough to have had great success early on in life; to have had all the things the material world can offer. And yet, I realized that what I had actually neglected was the more spiritual side of myself, which has always been there. But it's easy for us in our culture to become consumed in a sense by materialism. Now materialism is fine. We live in a material world. I'm not saying that beautiful things don't enhance our lives. But, in our culture, we're never happy.
The Salafists are trying to abort the revolution and make it religious, though the revolution started secular. There was not a single Islamic slogan. It was secular men and women, and in fact, they were unified. Now they want to divide the revolution, and religion is a very strong weapon.
We live in a world where art is always looked upon as the perfect medium. We live in a society where we can alter our body parts, we can act in the most perfect or right way. A lot of that is dangerous because, especially in the world of art, the chief enemy of creativity is being safe. If you're safe, you can't fall and hurt yourself. The older you are, the further down the crash is going to be. But if it works out, the higher the high.
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