The third season of Netflix hit series Dark will be dropped online coming Saturday, June 27th. Those who watched the first two seasons know that this is an important date within the realm of the series’ narrative – and those who watched these seasons might also be interested in the following.
Lees verder Time Travelers from (the) Dark: the entanglement of the scientific and the occult in a Netflix series [paper]
De Amerikaanse cineast Terrence Malick geeft zijn oeuvre nieuw gewicht met het monumentale A Hidden Life. Het ethische dilemma in het hart van de vertelling overspant eeuwen.
Lees verder Recensie: A Hidden Life [Terrence Malick, 2019]
I wrote an extensive paper on pop star Billie Eilish and her song all the good girls go to hell. If you are interested, you can read it right here. I wrote it in the context of my research master in Religious Studies at Utrecht University and my interest in music, popular culture & the transformations of western culture, identity politics, symbolism and transgression.
Lees verder Billie Eilish’ all the good girls go to hell, Lucifer and the embodiment of individualism [Paper]
Voor indebioscoop schreef ik een essay over de plaats die religie inneemt in Andrej Tarkovski’s visie op de filmkunst. Het oeuvre van de Russische cineast is nu te bewonderen in EYE Amsterdam, waar ook een tentoonstelling over datzelfde oeuvre loopt. Over de tentoonstelling werd onlangs dit stuk gepubliceerd.
Klik hier voor het essay.
”De kunst die uit het scheppen van de kunstenaar voortkomt kan alleen geaccepteerd worden als de toeschouwer het beeld en zijn waarheid gelooft, en de kunstenaar daarin onvoorwaardelijk vertrouwt. Tarkovski legt zo een belangrijke verantwoordelijkheid bij de toeschouwer: als hij de waarheid niet zoekt, blijft ook het schone voor hem verborgen.”
This is a paper from a few months ago. Writing on the (academic) study of ”Gnosticism” was challenging, especially because I barely knew anything about the field when I started my research. The final effort still contains some flaws that I’m well aware of – specialists will certainly be able to spot them, which is also one of the reasons I ultimately didn’t succeed in publishing the paper. It’s interesting to reread and to see how quickly views can change and evolve – my thought experiments on the subject matter were different from how they are now. Still wanted to publish it though, it might be an interesting trip for those of you who are interested.
Lees verder Genesis 2-3, Canonical Interpretation and the Challenge of ”Gnosticism” [Paper]
Kind van de Duivel
A moral response to an ‘offensive’ song
‘’Ik ben een kind van de duivel, mama jij hoeft niet te huilen.
Feesten alsof elke dag hier mijn laatste is
hoop dat je deze draait op mijn begrafenis.’’
When the Dutch rapper Jebroer released his single Kind van de Duivel in 2017, generous airplay of Dutch and Belgian radio stations coincided with considerably high chart positions in the Dutch single top 100 and the Top 40.[1] The lyrics and the clip, however, aroused quite some controversy among confined groups of Christian people, who responded to the song’s glorifying references to death and the devil.[2] Performances by Jebroer in Hardinxveld-Giessendam and Ouddorp were cancelled after protests of local residents.[3]
In the course of March and April 2019, I wrote seven essays on topics ranging from a supposedly blasphemous song to the relationship between subjectivity and anthropological fieldwork. Today I publish the first essay, on Robin Hardy’s 1973 cult classic The Wicker Man.
Lees verder In Pastures Green He Leadeth Me: The Reconfiguration of Space and Authority in The Wicker Man (1973)
I recently wrote an academic book review for one of my research master courses. I took a publication of the Canadian Religious Studies scholar Douglas E. Cowan, entitled America’s Dark Theologian: the Religious Imagination of Stephen King.
Lees verder Academic Book Review: Stephen King, America’s Dark Theologian [Douglas E. Cowan]
In the autumn of 2018, I attented the yearly conference of the NGG (Nederlands Genootschap voor Godsdienstwetenschap). The overarching theme was ‘Interpreting Rituals’. Keynote lectures and paper sessions shed a light on a broad variety of topics, challenging me and the other research master students on the spot to search for challenging perspectives. The paper that I am sharing serves as a reflection on the conference and one of its pivotal themes. I wrote it in the aftermath of the event, but the case study that I used will be the starting point for another paper on David Bowie and performativity, which I will hopefully produce this spring.
Lees verder Essay: Performing Death (NGG Conference Religious Studies, 2018)
The [English] paper that I submitted below is the result of my efforts for a master course on conversion. My intention has been to combine theoretical reflections on conversion [‘can you also convert to secularity?’] with a textual & formal analysis of a specific film (Kreuzweg, or Stations of the Cross, Dietrich Brüggemann, 2014). I argue that this film perpetuates a rigid binary between ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’ and I question the ideological implications underneath.
Lees verder Paper: Religious Sacrifice and the rejection of secular conversion in Kreuzweg