excerpts from the last 2 pages
"It seems to me that a lot of us non-evangelical, non-fundamentalist followers of Jesus find ourselves where Marc Chagall found himself vis-a-vis his faith in God and the public perception of what that faith means. Chagall is proof that not all people who identify with Christianity and Judaism (or religion in general) are of the Hagee, LaHaye, Rushdoony, and Jenkins ilk.
Chagall was an ambassador for a Judaism of peace and redemption, not a pusher of the eternal war of ethnic-religion-based Christian and/or Jewish Zionism, let alone a purveyor of fear of the "other"say, Europeans, Arabs, or gays. Chagall extends an olive branch to humanity and envisions an inclusive Judaism, not the clenched fist of race-based Zionist otherness and exclusion that the far-right hardliners in the modern State of Israel have become.
Chagall painted faith subjects infused with the Jewish and Christian symbolism that had been part of his formative years in prerevolutionary Russia. Chagall was one of the twentieth century's great painters., but he paid a price for being out of step with the critics of his day, most of whom were preoccupied with "brave" mid-twentieth century angst and nihilism. Chagall refused to remove biblical themes from his visual vocabulary long after all such "sentiment" (indeed, any figurative representation at all) was supposed to have been rejected by thinking artists. Chagall -- much like Pierre Bonnard, Georges Rouault, and several other outcasts from the inner circle of early to mid-twentieth-century critical acclaim -- has since transcended his critics."
"I happen to empathize with Chagall. As a person of faith -- both chosen and inherited -- where do I fit as a writer? Where did Chagall "fit"? Where do love and mystery and mercy fit in the literalist-minded armed camp of atheist against believer, when the whole debate is tinged with a deadly fear of the other?
How can one be a Christian when those such as Rushdoony, Jenkins, and LaHaye describe themselves as such? How can one be an atheist when a T-shirt vendor such as Dawkins has foisted himself on thoughtful and humane non-believers? Chagall shows the way for all of us, whatever we believe. His life and art demonstrate that it is possible to buck the trend of cynicism and to believe in each other more than in the rightness of our particular ideas."
btw-Max Blumenthall's book "The Family", chronicles the adventures of many of tehse fringe personalities that this author mentions.
