If you’re a fan of the Hitchikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, you might remember the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, who features in it, a creature described as so mind-bogglingly stupid that it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you. So all you need to do to protect yourself from it, despite it being very ravenous, is to wrap a towel round your head. You can’t see it, so it can’t see you. Problem solved.
The Bugblatter Beast doesn’t exist outside the world of fiction – I hope - but its way of thinking certainly does.
One Sunday after services, a young rector commented to President Franklin Roosevelt that the mystery writer and theologian Dorothy Sayers had been greatly influenced by Kierkegaard. Roosevelt responded, “Who is Kierkegaard?” The Episcopal priest replied that it was Kierkegaard who had put “a fresh emphasis on the doctrine of original sin and its implications….” In her memoir, Frances Perkins records that several weeks later the President asked him if he had every read Kierkegaard. Roosevelt continued, “Kierkegaard explains the Nazis to me as nothing else ever had.”
Visual artist Piper Mavis used twine in a sanctuary to celebrate the history of one congregation in London, England. In 2012 Heath Street Baptist Church commissioned five artists to conceive and execute works for an exhibit called The Long Cloud of Witnesses.
