This is your mission:

Use a painting or photo or some kind of static, linkable visual art to comment on some aspect of religion. The work itself doesn’t need to be religious (but it can be). For example, you might use:

• Bouguereau’s The Sheperdess to point out institutional religion’s propensity to emphasize the ideal (or the idyllic) over reality,
• Van Gogh’s Starry Night to express a sense of religious awe for the numinous;
• Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa to evoke the horror of hell (or the hell on earth that religious groups create for many), or even the hope religion provides from the terrors of this existence,
• Osbert’s Vision symbolizes, for me, some of the mystical aspects of religion.

If you’re interested in participating, email me a link this to the image you want to use (send it to my “fierymind” gmail account) with a sentence or two describing what you are trying to say with the image. I think this could be a lot of fun–I don’t want us to interpret what the artists are trying to express so much as to commandeer the images to tell our own stories. I used conventional paintings, but feel free to use other imagery (from ads, photojournalism, album covers, flickr, etc.)

I’d like to assemble what you all send into a post with everyone’s images and blurbs. Let’s see what we can gather together this weekend, and I’ll try to post it early next week.