William Stafford

#2

The Brooklyn Immersionists were a community of artists, musicians and writers that moved beyond the distancing aesthetics of postmodernism and immersed themselves and their audiences in the world where they lived. First emerging in the late 1980s and coming to fruition in the 1990s, the experimental scene in Williamsburg, Brooklyn catalyzed the largest New York renaissance to take root outside Manhattan. Rejecting the cloistering of the arts into disciplinary siloes, and stressing local vitality over the curatorial priorities of Manhattan, the Immersionists created fully dimensional experiences in the streets, rooftops and abandoned warehouses. Unlike the artificial immersion of digital media, and installation art that is walled off in a museum or gallery, the Brooklyn Immersionists cultivated rich webs of connection across disciplines and with their entire neighborhood. The dynamic, post-postmodern culture played a critical role in revitalizing Williamsburg’s deteriorating industrial waterfront and spread a wave of environmental enchantment to Bushwick, DUMBO, and throughout Brooklyn.

#3

Modern Biblical criticism (as opposed to pre-Modern criticism) is the use of critical analysis to understand and explain the Bible without appealing to the supernatural. During the eighteenth century, when it began as historical-biblical criticism, it was based on two distinguishing characteristics: (1) the scientific concern to avoid dogma and bias by applying a neutral, non-sectarian, reason-based judgment to the study of the Bible, and (2) the belief that the reconstruction of the historical events behind the texts, as well as the history of how the texts themselves developed, would lead to a correct understanding of the Bible. This sets it apart from earlier, pre-critical methods; from the anti-critical methods of those who oppose criticism-based study; from the post-critical orientation of later scholarship; and from the multiple distinct schools of criticism into which it evolved in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The emergence of biblical criticism is most often attributed by scholars to the German Enlightenment (c. 1650 – c. 1800), but some trace its roots back further, to the Reformation. Its principal scholarly influences were rationalist and Protestant in orientation; German pietism played a role in its development, as did British deism.