Last month I commented on the Ellis G shadow art, and now the mystery is solved:
If you've been hitting the strip along Brooklyn's Smith Street lately, you may have noticed the chalk sidewalk drawings outlining the shadows of utility poles-all signed ELLIS G. It turns out they have an only-in-New York back story. About a month ago, artist Ellis Gallagher, 31, was mugged in the foyer of his Cobble Hill home. "I saw this shadow on the front door," he recalls. "It was this guy with a two-foot-long machete saying, 'Gimme your money!'"
Tracing shadows has become a therapy against the anxiety he feels.
While watching former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore explain his views on the role of Christianity in America, past and present, I was struck with the difficulty secularists, or even those in a post-critical stage of their faith, have in articulating values relative to fundamentalists such as Moore. Whereas he argues that some of our founding documents reflect the notion that God gave us our rights to liberty and not the government, then the government can't take them away. The secularist has a more difficult but important argument to make.
To provide a simple example of the challenge, consider the first of the Five Contemplations -- a Buddhist grace: "this food is a gift of the universe, the earth, and the sky" Even in this non-deistic expression of gratitude, human cognition and language requires someone or something to be the giver of that gift. Some might posit an anthropomorphic God, others might anthropomorphize the universe. Neither strikes me as right. I do not subscribe to the notion of an angry father in the sky, nor a benevolent Earth mother, but appreciate the miracle of life nonetheless.
Understanding how the human mind works explains, in part, the presence of "God talk" in founding documents. The authors were attempting to articulate a notion of human values with the cultural resources available to them at the time. The founding of America was a point of transition, a time arising from the Enlightenment when we were beginning to articulate a new conceptualization of human rights, values, and civil society. To speak of rights as inalienable and God-given was a step forward from earlier notions. However, the language for its expression and its implementation were not yet mature. Jefferson famously wrote, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." To a modern reader, the supposition that there are unalienable rights is just as self-evident, if not more so, than the existence of a creator. (In fact, Jefferson's claim is problematic since advocates for slavery had long held that the practice was condoned in the Bible.) Consequently, attempts to represent the founding of America as a purely secular or Christian enterprise are inappropriate. The founding was an attempt to articulate and secure notions of liberty in the context of a predominately Judeo-Christian people who had settled on land belonging to others and often worked by slaves, but who were moving towards a free and pluralistic society.
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