Adam, with his group from Waco, TX VOID Collective, actually did an event at the first Subverting the Norm conference. It was a huge success and really helped many people see embodied what had been simply talked about during the conference. We wanted to do that again, feeling that showing & doing is just as necessary as talking & theorizing about it.

This event was focused on a couple different themes or questions. Adam and I agreed that the question of ‘how to be human’ should be central. Adam also wanted to incorporate this idea of one’s searching for the secret. I have been very interested in the liturgical form and its use for subversive & radical transformance art type events.

So the event is much more than the documents below show. The liturgy was just the framework from which so much more opened up. I don’t want to try to explain the event too much, but needless to say something happened. People didn’t tweet or photograph during the time—we were all captured in the moment, caught up truly in an Event.

And let it be noted that one can have an event based on Radical Theology and it not just be depressing death & decay, but that one can draw people together and truly touch & inspire each other without pulling any punches.

Feel free to use or steal anything from this liturgy. If you have any questions, please comment below or find me on Twitter.

• the liturgy booklet
• Dehumanizing readings (read during the Confession section)

“To make a declaration of love is to move on from the event- encounter to embark on a construction of truth. The chance nature of the encounter morphs into the assumption of a beginning. And often what starts there lasts so long, is so charged with novelty and experience of the world that in retrospect it doesn’t seem at all random and contingent, as it appeared initially, but almost a necessity. That is how chance is curbed: the absolute contingency of the encounter with someone I didn’t know finally takes on the appearance of destiny. The declaration of love marks the transition from chance to destiny, and that’s why it is so perilous and so burdened with a kind of horrifying stage fright.”
Alain Badiou from In Praise of Love

“My own philosophical view is attempting to say that love cannot be reduced to any of these approximations and is a quest for truth. What kind of truth? you will ask. I mean truth in relation to something quite precise: what kind of world does one see when one experiences it from the point of view of two and not one? What is the world like when it is experienced, developed and lived from the point of view of difference and not identity? That is what I believe love to be.
…
Love is always the possibility of being present at the birth of the world. The birth of a child, if born from within love, is yet another example of this possibility.”
Alain Badiou from In Praise of Love

“Selfishness, not any rival, is love’s enemy. One could say: my love’s main enemy, the one I must defeat, is not the other, it is myself, the “myself” that prefers identity to difference, that prefers to impose its world against the world re-constructed through the filter of difference.”
Alain Badiou from In Praise of Love

“Every attempt to read revelation as a teaching on the nature and attributes of God falls into the same error of representational thought—the sin of objectifying metaphysics— against which we are called to recover the hearing of Being.” Gianni Vattimo After Christianty

“…the end of metaphysics (the belief in an order of being as stable, necessary, and objectively knowable foundation) is accompanied in contemporary thought and social practice by the death of the moral God, namely the God of philosophers. The end of metaphysics, however, is also and above all the rebirth of the sacred in its many forms. For Heidegger, the end of metaphysics means moving from a conception of Being as structure to one of Being as event characterized by a tendency toward weakening.”
Gianni Vattimo After Christianity p.23

My interest here is not in the quality or the point of Mr. Kopit’s play, which I did not see (because I do not willingly subject myself to offense). I am interested in the article about him and his play merely as an example of the conventionality of the artistic intention to offend -and of the complacency of the public willingness not to be offended but passively to accept offense. Here we see the famous playwright coming from the center of culture to a provincial city, declaring his intention to “offend almost everyone,” and here we see the local drama critic deferentially explaining the moral purpose of this intention. But the playwright makes three rather curious assumptions: (i) that the Louisville theater audience may be supposed (without proof) to be complacent and corrupt; (2) that they therefore deserve to be offended; and (3) that being offended will make them less complacent and less corrupt.

That Louisville theatergoers are more complacent and corrupt than theatergoers elsewhere (or than Mr. Kopit) is not an issue, for there is no evidence. That they deserve to be offended is not an issue for the same reason. That anyone’s complacency and corruption can be corrected by being offended in a theater is merely a contradiction in terms, for people who are corrupted by complacency are by definition not likely to take offense. People who do take offense will be either fundamentally decent or aggressively corrupt. People who are fundamentally decent do not deserve to be offended and cannot be instructed by offense. People who are aggressively corrupt would perhaps see the offense but would not accept it. Mr. Kopit’s preferred audience is thereforeone that will applaud his audacity and pay no attention at all to his avowed didactic purpose – and this perhaps explains his love for “vile people.”

In reading this, my thoughts go to how this would relate to the work of Peter Rollins’ transformance art project with Ikon. He is very explicit in his desire to offend no one by offending everyone and also has a desire to create a provocation which existentially disrupts the attendees. There was something to this thought of Rollins that initially grasped me. It’s like taking an artist like Marcel Duchamp or Andres Serrano and giving them control of the church service. But over time now the more I think and wrestle with it, the more I’m leery of the provocation (while I still very much like & desire the direction which a group like Ikon is exploring).

I wonder if Wendell Berry might be right about in his assessment of who will come or would be interested in a performance of offense, let alone have the ‘ears to hear’. I understand Rollins’ desire to provoke, to draw one out of the everydayness and help to break spell of certain fetishes & big Others. I just wonder if there are other ways.

I’m currently working on a Radical Theology liturgy with Adam Moore for the Subverting the Norm 2 event. In our talks we are trying to explore and find a way of being radical which is almost completely boring and normal. Something that doesn’t have to be provocative or extravagant to be radical. Adam and I have both done provocative transformance art previously and both have faded back from it. I think we (or at least I) would like to find something that fits more into the everyday world.

So we have chosen to use a liturgical form as the base from which to build. By its nature provocative needs to new & unexpected, but what can done with the expected memorized liturgy to transform us, to beckon, to call, to invite us into being more human.

“…the end of metaphysics (the belief in an order of being as stable, necessary, and objectively knowable foundation) is accompanied in contemporary thought and social practice by the death of the moral God, namely the God of philosophers. The end of metaphysics, however, is also and above all the rebirth of the sacred in its many forms. For Heidegger, the end of metaphysics means moving from a conception of Being as structure to one of Being as event characterized by a tendency toward weakening.”
Gianni Vattimo After Christianity p.23

“If you are genuinely creating value for businesses, you are no longer in the “trade defined small units of time for defined small units of money” business model. This is what most employees do. This is how you have spent most of your life working. You have left that life behind.”

Patrick McKenzie from this interview.

“The nonbeliever is not interested in an otherworldly salvation, as are believers in other religions; rather he consider it an evasion of the only question he wishes to deal with: the value of earthly existence.”

Gustavo Gutierrez’s A Theology of Liberation