#robert benson

ALL SAINTS

Here’s one quotation to walk with today:

"All of the places of our lives are sanctuaries; some of them just happen to have steeples. And all of the people in our lives are saints; it is just that some of them have day jobs and most will never have feast days named for them." 
— Robert Benson in Between the Dreaming and the Coming True: The Road Home to God

Robert Benson’s series Sex Dolls.

"I wanted to show the unusualness of the place. The people who work there are truly talented artists and have a passion for what they do.”

Join us Friday night, July 8th from 7:30-9:00pm as we spend an evening with Author Robert Benson considering the promblematic separation of the sacred and secular.  This will be a fascinating evening.  Don’t miss it.  Held at the Regas Building Gathering Place Cafe, Downtown (318 North Gay Street, Knoxville, TN 37917)

Bishop Robert Barron writes, “[Theologian]...Paul Tillich observed that the surest sign of the perdurance of original sin is the fact that the house of worship exists alongside of the bank and the theater and the statehouse as a separate entity representing a separate realm of being.  In a properly configured world, the entire ‘secular’ realm would be ‘sacred,’ since all things would be seen as grounded in the holiness of God’s reality. But [in humanity’s perspective] there is a sharp distinction between the holy and the profane, between super-nature and nature, since God has been sequestered as a dangerous rival.  The awkward tumble out of dreaming innocence into egotism has indeed resulted in a loss of holiness or ‘wholeness’ of vision.  We now live in a universe marked by profanizations and secularization, conditioned by a ‘divided’ consiousness.” (And Now I See: A Theology of Transformation, pgs 45-46)

Robert Benson argues that separating the secular and sacred, the distinguishing of holy and profane spaces are, as Bishop Barron and Paul Tillich allude to (above), false and destructive.  This is a result of thinking and acting not rooted in the way it’s supoosed to be, so to speak.  In ‘a properly configure world’ all things are sacred, whole, rooted in God’s “as it should be.” Benson believes though, that the folks most responsible for creating this problematic mindset are those who are, in fact, most religious, most faithful.  And that a corrective is needed.  What do you think?  

Camp, White Plains, 2 August 1778

Sir,

By an act of the legislature of the State of New-York, the commissioners for detecting and defeating conspiracies, &c., were directed to tender an oath of allegiance, in the said act prescribed, to certain persons, inhabitants of this state, who have affected to observe, during the present war, a dangerous and equivocal neutrality; and on their refusal to take the same, that the said commissioners should cause them to be conveyed within the enemy's lines. In consequence whereof, sundry persons, to whom the said oath hath been tendered, and who have refused to take the same, were by the commissioners directed to rendezvous at Fishkill, on Monday next, in order to embark on board a sloop to be provided at that place for the purpose.

In order that this business might be conducted with as little danger as possible to the operations of the present campaign, his excellency Governor Clinton requested his excellency the commander-in-chief to appoint an officer of the army for the purpose; and you being assigned to this business, his excellency Governor Clinton hath directed me, in his name, to request you to repair to Fishkill on Monday next, &c.

If by any accident you should not find the commissioners at Fishkill, his excellency will be much obliged to you if you would ride up to Poughkeepsie, where the board are sitting.

I am, with great respect, yours, &c.,

Robert Bendon, Secretary.