I sent a cassette tape of Adrian Rogers on Evolution to John Hospers in May of 1994 which was the 10th anniversary of Francis Schaeffer’s passing and I promptly received a typed two page response from Dr. John Hospers. Dr. Hospers had both read my letter and all the inserts plus listened to the whole sermon and had some very angry responses. If you would like to hear the sermon from Adrian Rogers and read the transcript then refer to my earlier post at this link.  Over the last few weeks I have posted  portions of Dr. Hospers’ letter and portions of the cassette tape that he listened to back in 1994, but today I want to post a review that Hospers did of Sam Harris’ book THE END OF FAITH and then below give my reaction to it.  I also read that book and found it very engaging although I differed with many of the assertions made by Harris.

A CRITIQUE OF FAITH by John Hospers

l. Religious faith

I devote the opening section of this essay to a brief summary of Sam Harris’ (2004) book The End of Faith, with some deletions and a few additions of my own.

When I say to you, a trusted friend, “I have faith in you,” I am relying on past experience of your character and disposition to make a statement about my present attitude toward you. Many professions of faith, however, are not of this kind: they express a present attitude which has little or no basis in fact.

When we read, for example, that water has been turned into wine, or that a person already dead has come back to life, we have no such basis in our past experience; indeed, what is alleged is something contrary to our experience of how the world works; it is “pure faith´ in the absence of any evidence to sustain the belief. Many of the ancient Greeks believed that there were numerous gods—Zeus on Mt. Olympus ruling the earth, Poseidon ruling the seas, Pluto ruling the underworld, and do on. There were many forms of polytheism, as well as various forms of monotheism such as belief in the Old Testament god Yahweh. There is no empirical evidence that would enable us to determine which of them, if any, is true; belief in them is entirely a matter of faith. We have only the words in a supposedly sacred text. (We have independent evidence for the existence of Jesus, but not of Noah or Moses or Abraham.)

Not only have we no way to verify any of these beliefs, but there is an added problem: many of them contradict one another, so these beliefs cannot all be true. Zeus cannot be king of the gods if Zoroaster also is; nor can there be one and only one god if there are also numerous gods. If a belief is true, another belief that contradicts it cannot also be true. It is Aristotle’s Law of Non-contradiction that holds true, regardless of the field of discourse in which we are engaged.

Even within the same religious text, there are alleged truths that contradict one another. The god of the Old Testament is seen and heard: he talks with Adam and Eve in the cool of the evening. But God, we are also told, is eternal and invisible. The infant Jesus was taken into Egypt, but (according to another Gospel) was not taken into Egypt. God is the author of all things, and thus also of evil, but he is, we are also told, not the author of evil; Satan is.

How can people believe these mutually contradictory statements? (1) Sometimes, I think, the belief rests on some ambiguity: it is true if you take it in one sense but not if you take it in another: Jesus was a man who was born in Bethlehem of Judea and died like the rest of us, but also he was God who existed “from all eternity” and “before the foundation of the world”. This certainly seems like a contradiction, but some theologians have attempted to work out ways in which it is not. (2) Most believers, however, fail to notice these discrepancies because they don’t really bother to read the passages in question.

They mouth the lines as part of a religious liturgy, but the repetition of the words has been almost automatic: they do not think them through or try to connect them with other passages with which they are at odds.

Nor do they try to relate them to their everyday experience, as they do when talking about themselves or what goes on in their familiar world. They believe, at least they do not doubt, that (perhaps in their own lifetime) Jesus will return to earth “on the clouds of heaven” to bring “the legions of the saved” into eternal paradise with him. Yet if they were actually to see a robed figure appearing to them out of the sky and swooping earthward, they would probably be as surprised as anyone else They do not doubt, either, that the resurrection of Jesus was genuine: they do not cite, as their preachers do, numerous religious authorities who proclaim to them that Jesus’ resurrection is just as certainly true as the existence of the church they are now in; they don’t think about these religious authorities, they just believe on faith that after death they will live again.

What is it that prompts people to entertain such beliefs and continue to hold them throughout a lifetime even in the face of contrary experience? Some say is hope, grounded in the promises of Scripture; others, that it is hope entertained in desperation; for others, it is to believe something you know darned well isn’t so. For most part, believes Harris, it is the psychological difficulty or inability to face reality, the fact that “this is it” and death ends our mortal existence. People find life unbearable without belief in a hereafter, particularly when life has not dealt kindly with them and they have nothing to live for in the here and now. The parents’ six-year-old daughter has just died of a fatal disease and they desperately want to see her again; what buoys them up is the faith that they will one day be with her again.

At this point I could wish that the author had been more explicit about what the content of their belief is supposed to be: the parents believe they will see their daughter again, be with her, and love her. But for how long will it be? Presumably forever? If the parents will not see her until they reach heaven in sixty years, will she still be the same small daughter at that time? That is how the grieving parents imagine it: they do not imagine her as a grown woman and certainly not as an old woman some years later (and certainly not as one who in the course of time dies). It’s ‘their little girl, now’—years later they might not feel so strongly about it any more. Also, would she still look the same as she did here—surely not as she did when ravaged by the disease? Would she still have those fits of coughing or sneezing as she used to, or that little limp, and the inability to digest certain foods? Or would she have no defects whatever, not even the peculiarities of personality which irritated some people and endeared her to others? Surely the parents would imagine her as having the characteristics they liked or approved of (not quite the same thing!). And would she coexist in heaven alongside a younger sister who had not yet been born when this one died? And what would their relations be with each other? Would warmth, familiarity, a bit of strangeness, and perhaps common faith be in such a relationship?

One could speculate forever about how such things should be imagined, or exactly what there would be to imagine. (Harris does not venture so far.) In any case, the grieving parents don’t try to imagine the future situation (happiness with their daughter in heaven) in any specific detail. It is enough that they see her again (For how long; forever? Might they not tire of it eventually)?

Never mind such details as to how such things are possible, or apparent obstacles like the Law of Non-contradiction, which they have never heard of anyway. Their primary wish is to be happy again, which they find impossible without her. It would seem that in such a situation one doesn’t adjust one’s feelings to the facts (don’t we all think we should?) but one adjusts the facts to one’s feelings—a recipe for psychological disaster from a Randian perspective.

2. Faith and morality

The above is a summary and critique of a world-view based on faith, which Harris presents in The End of Faith. The author, however, also delves somewhat summarily into moral philosophy, or at any rate into moral pronouncements. What apparently unites these pronouncements is the view, shared by most people at least in the West, that pain and suffering are evil and should be avoided unless such pain and suffering lead to greater happiness or fulfillment. He repeatedly condemns the Crusades and the Inquisition as the wanton infliction of suffering. Also condemned are a large number of Biblical commands and prohibitions: “What, after all, is the punishment for taking the Lord’s name in vain? It happens to be death (Leviticus 24:l6). What is the punishment for working on the Sabbath? Also death (Exodus 3l:l5). What is the punishment for cursing one’s father and mother? Death again (Exodus 2l:l7). What is the punishment for adultery? You’re catching on (Leviticus 20:l0).” (page 115)

Moreover, the details of such punishment are often spelled out, though modern believers have only a limited visualization of them. “If your brother, the son of your father or of your mother, or the souse whom you embrace, or your most intimate friend, tries to secretly seduce you, saying, ‘Let us go and serve other gods,’ unknown to you or your ancestors before you, gods of the peoples surrounding you, whether near you or far away, anywhere throughout the world, you must not consent, you must not listen to him; you must show him no pity, you must not spare him or conceal his guilt. No, you must kill him, your hand must strike the first blow in putting him to death and the hands of the rest of the people following. You must stone him to death, since he has tried to divert you from Yahweh your God (Deuteronomy l3:7-ll)” (page l8)

Most people today, however, do not read such passages, or even know that they exist. They are somewhat embarrassed if they have to come across them, but if they are committed to believing that the entire Bible is the Word of God, they dare not openly reject such passages—since they are apparently “stuck with them,” they simply ignore them or “pay them no heed.” But they cannot reject them outright if their eternal salvation depends on acceptance of the entire Bible.

The author does condemn torture and killing in all its forms (including capital punishment), including the Nazi, Soviet, and Chinese communist regimes. But the main target of his condemnation is none of these, but current Islamo-fascism as manifested especially in Saudi Arabia and Iran. Fundamentalist Muslims differ from their Soviet predecessors in at least one important respect: the Soviets were deterred by the fear of nuclear annihilation. Today’s Islamo-fascists not deterrable by threats of death: by killing unbelievers they are promised a blissful hereafter for themselves.

Pacifism, says Harris, is an unwillingness to die, combined with a willingness to let others die at the pleasure of the world’s thugs. Islamofascists exhibit, by contrast, a willingness to die, combined with a commitment to making every unbeliever die. Such is the ultimate result of accepting religious views based solely on faith.

Harris reserves the term “moderate Christians” for believers in Christianity who don’t take their faith very seriously. “Moderate Muslims”, however many of them there are, don’t take theirs seriously either. The fate of the world in the twenty-first century, he concludes, may hinge on how many moderate Muslims there will be in the coming years.

I must say that I find that conclusion extremely plausible.

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Here is a portion of Hospers’ June 2, 1994 letter to me: 

Most of the writers you quote are quoted out of context, so as to capture just the sentences you agree with. I hereby quote a passage from Bertrand Russell’s HUMAN SOCIETY IN ETHICS AND POLITICS, which I think is not out of context: 

If you think that your belief is based upon reason, you will support it by argument, rather then by persecution, and will abandon it if the argument goes against you. But if your belief is based on faith, you will realize that argument is useless, and will therefore resort to force either in the form of persecution or by stunting and distorting the minds of the young in what is called “education”. This last is particularly dastardly, since it takes advantage of the defenselessness of immature minds. Unfortunately it is practiced in greater or less degree in the schools of every civilized country.

My response to John Hospers and Sam Harris:

I personally like that quote from Bertrand Russell and see a lot of merit in it. Let me see if I can give a good argument based on evidence and not on faith alone.

In the above paper John Hospers makes this assertion:

When we read, for example, that water has been turned into wine, or that a person already dead has come back to life, we have no such basis in our past experience; indeed, what is alleged is something contrary to our experience of how the world works; it is “pure faith´ in the absence of any evidence to sustain the belief. Many of the ancient Greeks believed that there were numerous gods—Zeus on Mt. Olympus ruling the earth, Poseidon ruling the seas, Pluto ruling the underworld, and do on. There were many forms of polytheism, as well as various forms of monotheism such as belief in the Old Testament god Yahweh. There is no empirical evidence that would enable us to determine which of them, if any, is true; belief in them is entirely a matter of faith. We have only the words in a supposedly sacred text. (We have independent evidence for the existence of Jesus, but not of Noah or Moses or Abraham.)

Not only have we no way to verify any of these beliefs, but there is an added problem: many of them contradict one another, so these beliefs cannot all be true.

Many secularists have claimed that Christians do not even have the right to have a place at the table. However, the vast majority of great scientists of the last 500 years did hold the view that we live in an open system and they did not hold the view of the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system. Recently I read the article ANSWERING THE NEW ATHEISTS, by  KerbyAnderson,  Sunday, January 30 th, 2011, and that article notes:

Francis Schaeffer also has discussed the nature of proper Christian faith with this story below:

Suppose we are climbing in the Alps and are very high on the bare rock, and suddenly the fog rolls in. The guide turns to us and says that the ice is forming and that there is no hope; before morning we will all freeze to death here on the shoulder of the mountain. Simply to keep warm the guide keeps us moving in the dense fog further out on the shoulder until none of us have any idea where we are. After an hour or so, someone says to the guide, “Suppose I dropped and hit a ledge ten feet down in the fog. What would happen then?” The guide would say that you might make it until the morning and thus live. So, with absolutely no knowledge or any reason to support his action, one of the group hangs and drops into the fog. This would be one kind of faith, a leap of faith.

Suppose, however, after we have worked out on the shoulder in the midst of the fog and the growing ice on the rock, we had stopped and we heard a voice which said, “You cannot see me, but I know exactly where you are from your voices.  I am on another ridge. I have lived in these mountains, man and boy, for over sixty years and I know every foot of them. I assure you that ten feet below you there is a ledge. If you hang and drop, you can make it through the night and I will get you in the morning.

I would not hang and drop at once, but would ask questions to try to ascertain if the man knew what he was talking about and it he was not my enemy. In the Alps, for example, I would ask him his name. If the name he gave me was the name of a family from that part of the mountains, it would count a great deal to me. In the Swiss Alps there are certain family names that indicate mountain families of that area. In my desperate situation, even though time would be running out, I would ask him what to me would be the adequate and sufficient questions, and when I became convinced by his answers, then I would hang and drop.

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Now I will turn to the message given by Adrian Rogers followed by some evidence from archaeology.

How can I know the Bible is the Word of God? by Adrian Rogers

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How Can I Know the Bible is the Word of God?
By Dr. Adrian Rogers

Overview

The historical, scientific, and prophetic accuracy of Scripture, along with its life-changing qualities, offer evidence that the Bible is the revealed Word of God.

Introduction

Scripture Passage: Revelation 22:18-19

It is absolutely imperative that you are certain of God’s Word. You will never get much of anything else settled until you are sure of the Bible. Your salvation depends on it, since the Bible says you are born again by “the Word of God” (1 Peter 1:23). Your sanctification depends upon it, because Jesus said, “Sanctify them through thy truth. Thy Word is truth” (John 17:17). Your usefulness depends on it, for the Scriptures say, “These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God that you might know that you have eternal life” (1 John 5:13). If you want to be sure of your faith; if you want to be an exclamation pointrather than a question mark, then you need to be certain that the Bible is the Word of God.

Discussion

“For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: and if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book” (Rev. 22:18-19).

God makes it very clear that we are to believe and revere our Bibles, but there is in our world a war over the Word; a battle over the Bible. There are those who despise it; they are against all that we Christians stand for. There are those who deny it; they simply refuse to believe the Bible is the Word of God. There are those who distort it; they twist the words of the Bible to their own destruction. There are those who dissect it, treating Scripture more like a math text than a love story. There are those who disregard it, claiming it unimportant and irrelevant. They want to focus on the here-and-now, so they spend their energies making this world abetter place from which to go to hell. There are those who claim to believe it, giving lip service to the Bible as God’s Word, but they do not know it, nor do they live by it. There is dust on their Bibles and drought in their hearts. Finally, there are those who believe it. They know the Bible is the inspired, inerrant, infallible, authentic Word of God, and they trust it for the daily guidance of their lives. We can have a firm assurance that the Bible is the Word of God. There is an abundance of evidence to support the fact.

Scientific Evidence

Skeptics seem to think that the Bible is full of scientific errors. However, before an individual can make that assertion, they had better make sure they know both science and Scripture. You see, I have heard unbelievers state that the Bible is not a book of science, but a book of religion, which is basically true. It is not written to teach us about science, but to teach us about God. But the God of salvation and the God of creation are the same. Science doesn’t take God by surprise. A close look at Scripture reveals that it is scientifically accurate.

Every now and then science may disagree with the Bible, but usually science just needs time to catch up. For example, in 1861 a French scientific academy printed a brochure offering 51 incontrovertible facts that proved the Bible in error. Today there is not a single reputable scientist who would support those supposed “facts,” because modern science has disproved them all!

The ancients believed the earth was held up by Atlas, or resting on pillars, or even seated on the backs of elephants. But today we know the earth is suspended in space, a fact the Word of God records in Job 26:7: “He . . . hangeth the earth upon nothing.” God revealed the facts of cosmology long before man had any idea of the truth.

For centuries man believed the earth was flat, but now we know the earth is a globe. The prophet Isaiah, writing 750 years before the birth of Christ, revealed that “God sitteth upon the circle of the earth” (Isaiah 40:22). The word translated here as “circle” was more commonly translated “sphere.” In other words, Isaiah explained that the earth was a globe centuries before science discovered it.

When Ptolemy charted the heavens, he counted 1026 stars in the sky. But with the invention of the telescope man discovered millions and millions of stars, something that Jeremiah 33:22 revealed nearly three thousand years ago: “The host of heaven cannot be numbered.” How did these men of God know the truth of science long before the rest of the world discovered it? They were moved by the Holy Spirit to write the truth. God’s Word is not filled with errors. It is filled with facts, even scientific facts.

When the black plague was killing one quarter of Europe’s population in the fourteenth century, it was the church, not science, that helped overcome the dread disease. The leaders in the church noticed the instructions given by the Lord to Moses in Leviticus 13:46: “All the days wherein the plague shall be in him he shall be defiled; he is unclean: he shall dwell alone; without the camp shall his habitation be.” These early believers did not know microbiology or understand what germs were, but they could understand a clear teaching to quarantine someone who was sick. So they followed the Biblical dictum, quarantined those sick with the plague, and stopped it from spreading. The Bible had its science correct even before man discovered the truth! Don’t accept the charge that the Bible is filled with scientific errors. Modern science seems determined to explain God away, and refuses to acknowledge any evidence of the supernatural. But the science of Scripture is one reason to accept the Bible as God’s Word.

Historical Evidence

The Bible is not primarily a history book, but it records history, and all the things we believe as Christians are historical fact. Historians have criticized the Bible as being filled with errors, but in our lifetime we have seen the history of the Scriptures proven right time after time. For example, linguists rejected the fact that Moses authored the Pentateuch, claiming that people didn’t know how to write during Moses’ day. But then the Tel Elarmona tablets were discovered in northern Egypt, containing business transactions of people in Palestine centuries before Moses was born. It turns out the Bible was correct–the people of Moses’ day did have a written language.

For years historians claimed Daniel’s story of King Belshazzar was a fake, that there was no record of that Babylonian king. They claimed the last Babylonian king was named Nabinitus, and that Belshazzar never existed. Then one day an archeologist uncovered a clay tablet describing the rule of Belshazzar, who was co-regent with his father, King Nabinitus. The Bible had been right all along.

Historians and archaeologists have dug into the history of both the Old and New Testaments, and each time the historical accuracy of Scripture has been upheld. That is one of the reasons we can trust the Bible.

Wonderful Unity

Another reason to trust the Scripture as the Word of God is that it offers a unique unity. Here is one unified book, yet it is really 66 books put together. Those books were written by at least forty different authors over a period of sixteen hundred years. They were written in thirteen countries, on three continents, by people of all different backgrounds. Some were shepherds, others were kings; some were soldiers, others were scholars; some were learned historians, others were unschooled fishermen. They wrote on different subjects, at different times, in at least three different languages. Yet on all subjects they came together to create one unified book that reveals the story of God and His people. From Genesis to Revelation, it reads as one book. What incredible unity! I’ve been studying this book for forty years, and the more I study the more unified I find it. There are no hidden flaws, only hidden beauties. The Bible has but one theme: salvation. It has one hero: Jesus. It has one villain: Satan. It has one purpose: to glorify God. How could this incredible book be written apart from divine intervention? There was clearly a Master Architect who designed this book, giving it a wonderful unity. That’s why I believe it.

Fulfilled Prophecy

Another reason we can believe the Bible is because of the fulfilled prophecies contained in it. It is the only book of its kind with so many accurate prophecies. For example, there are over 300 Old Testament prophecies dealing with Jesus Christ that are fulfilled in the New Testament. Statisticians tell us that to suggest they are merely fulfilled by chance is an impossibility. A skeptic might say that Jesus, as a student of the Old Testament, simply arranged to fulfill these prophecies. But how could He arrange to be born in Bethlehem, fulfilling the prophecy of Micah? How could He arrange to be born of a virgin? How could He arrange for the prophet Isaiah to write all kinds of intricate details of the Lord centuries before He was born? And could He have arranged for the psalmist to describe His death by crucifixion long before that style of punishment was first used? Could He have arranged for the Roman government to crucify Him upon a cross, or for Judas to betray Him for exactly thirty pieces of silver, as the Old Testament prophesied? Finally, could He have arranged His own resurrection from the dead three days after His burial?

Well, in a sense the Lord Jesus did arrange all of that. As God, He revealed it to the Old Testament authors, who wrote the prophecies that Jesus fulfilled. And so convinced were those who saw Jesus, that they were willing to lay down their lives for the truth. No one lays down their life for a lie. The early Christians knew that Jesus was who He claimed to be. There is no way to explain fulfilled prophecy apart from divine inspiration.

The Ever-Living Quality of Scripture

Another reason we can trust the Bible is that it is always alive. No book has endured as much opposition. Men have laughed at it, scorned it, burned it, and made laws against it. At times it has been illegal to even own a Bible. Men have preached its funeral. But the corpse has outlived its pallbearers. The Bible has survived. Despite all the attempts to bury the Bible, it has continued to endure. No other book can make that claim. The ancient religious manuscripts of the pagans have disappeared, but the Bible continues. The wisdom of great men is often forgotten by succeeding generations, but the wisdom of God remains intact and available. The Word of the Lord endureth forever. That unique quality makes me believe that this is a special book–God’s book–and He intends for man to have it.

The Life-Changing Quality of Scripture

The Bible is not like any other book. It is alive and powerful. It describes itself as a sword and as dynamite. It has power to change lives and power to save sinners. No other book, no other power can take men’s guilt away except the Bible. It sanctifies those who believe. It brings truth and maturity to the saints. You will never grow spiritually strong until you begin to feed on the milk of the Word. It offers sufficiency to the sufferer. Many times I have seen people hurting or in torment, and they have found comfort in the Bible which they could find nowhere else. It brings satisfaction to the scholar. You can study it for a lifetime and still not fathom its depths. It is a book so deep you can swim forever and never touch bottom, yet so peaceful that even a child can take a drink without fear of drowning. You can never move on in your faith until you come to see the Bible for what it is: God’s precious gift to us, given so that we may know Him and find eternal life in Him. You can be certain that the Bible is the Word of God.

About Dr. Adrian Rogers

Dr. Adrian Rogers was the Pastor Emeritus of Bellevue Baptist Church and one of America’s most respected Bible preachers. Under his pastoral leadership, Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis, Tennessee, grew from 9,000 members in 1972 to more than 29,000. A staunch defender of Biblical inerrancy, Pastor Rogers was called upon to serve three times as President of the 14-million member Southern Baptist Convention. Adrian Rogers has written numerous books: Mastering Your Emotions; God’s Way to Health, Wealth and Wisdom; The Power of His Presence; and Ten Secrets for a Successful Family; Kingdom Authority, Believe in Miracles but Trust in Jesus; Standing for Light and Truth; God’s Wisdom is Better Than Gold; plus many others.

Dr. Rogers was also the pastor/teacher of Love Worth Finding, a ministry which extends the message of Dr. Rogers far beyond the congregation, proving to be a blessing to listeners around the nation every day. This radio and television ministry takes Dr. Rogers’ message in four languages to more than 14,000 television outlets and 1,100 radio outlets in the United States and in 150 other countries including all of Europe, Latin America, China, Australia, Africa, India, and beyond. Tapes and other resources from Dr. Rogers are available through Love Worth Finding Ministries, P.O. Box 38300, Memphis, TN 38183-0300, 1-800-274-LOVE (5683).

Dr. Rogers went to be with Jesus on November 15, 2005.

– See more at: http://www.fbcmd.org/message.php?messageID=3033&#sthash.KrRcF92Y.dpuf

Is the Bible historically accurate? Here are some of the posts I have done in the past on the subject: 1. The Babylonian Chronicle, of Nebuchadnezzars Siege of Jerusalem, 2. Hezekiah’s Siloam Tunnel Inscription. 3. Taylor Prism (Sennacherib Hexagonal Prism), 4. Biblical Cities Attested Archaeologically. 5. The Discovery of the Hittites, 6.Shishak Smiting His Captives, 7. Moabite Stone, 8. Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III, 9A Verification of places in Gospel of John and Book of Acts., 9B Discovery of Ebla Tablets. 10. Cyrus Cylinder, 11. Puru “The lot of Yahali” 9th Century B.C.E., 12. The Uzziah Tablet Inscription, 13. The Pilate Inscription, 14. Caiaphas Ossuary, 14 B Pontius Pilate Part 2, 14c. Three greatest American Archaeologists moved to accept Bible’s accuracy through archaeology., 

 The Bible and Archaeology – Is the Bible from God? (Kyle Butt)

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During the 1990′s I actually made it a practice to write famous atheists and scientists that were mentioned by Adrian Rogers and Francis Schaeffer and challenge them with the evidence for the Bible’s historicity and the claims of the gospel. Usually I would send them a cassette tape of Adrian Rogers’ messages “6 reasons I know the Bible is True,” “The Final Judgement,” “Who is Jesus?” and the message by Bill Elliff, “How to get a pure heart.”  I would also send them printed material from the works of Francis Schaeffer and a personal apologetic letter from me addressing some of the issues in their work. My second cassette tape that I sent to both Antony Flew and George Wald was Adrian Rogers’ sermon on evolution and here below you can watch that very sermon on You Tube.   Carl Sagan also took time to correspond with me about a year before he died. 

(Francis Schaeffer pictured below)

Adrian Rogers pictured below

I have posted on Adrian Rogers’ messages on Evolution before but here is a complete message on it.

Evolution: Fact of Fiction? By Adrian Rogers

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Great article

“I believe in art that is connected to real human feeling, that extends itself beyond the limits of the art world to embrace all people who are striving for alternatives in an increasingly dehumanized world. I am trying to make art that relates to the deepest and most mythic concerns of human kind and I believe that, at this moment of history, feminism is humanism.”

JUDY CHICAGO SYNOPSIS

Judy Chicago was one of the pioneers of Feminist art in the 1970s, a movement that endeavored to reflect women’s lives, call attention to women’s roles as artists, and alter the conditions under which contemporary art was produced and received. In the process, Feminist art questioned the authority of the male-dominated Western canon and posed one of the most significant challenges to modernism, which was at the time wholly preoccupied with conditions of formalism as opposed to personal narrative and political activity. Seeking to redress women’s traditional underrepresentation in the visual arts, Chicago focused on female subject matter, most famously in her work The Dinner Party (1979), which celebrates the achievements of women throughout history, scandalizing audiences with her frank use of vaginal imagery. In her work, Chicago employed the “feminine” arts long relegated to the lowest rungs of the artistic hierarchy, such as needlework and embroidery. Chicago articulated her feminist vision not only as an artist, but also as an educator and organizer, most notably, in co-founding of the Feminist Art Program at Cal State Fresno as well as the installation and performance space, Womanhouse.

JUDY CHICAGO KEY IDEAS

Inspired by the women’s movement and rebelling against the male-dominated art scene of the 1960s, which lionized the Minimalist work of artists like Donald Judd, Chicago embraced explicitly female content. Creating works that recognized the achievements of major female historical figures or celebrated women’s unique experiences, Chicago produced a rich body of work that sought to add women to the historic record and, more generally, to enhance their representation in the visual arts.

Just as she elevated explicitly female subject matter, Chicago embraced artistic media whose creators were exclusively or mainly women and (perhaps not coincidentally) dismissed by the high art world as merely “craft.” Art forms such as needlework, ceramic decoration, and glass art are central to Chicago’s work, often included alongside traditional high art media, such as painting. Works such as The Dinner Party helped validate the importance of crafts-based art forms and break down the boundaries separating them from their “high” art counterparts.

Along with fellow artist Miriam Schapiro, Chicago co-founded several pioneering ventures that sought to change the structure of women’s artistic training, as well as broaden their access to, and visibility in, contemporary art. The women-only Feminist Art program, established at California Institute of Arts, centered on women’s identity, experiences, and collaborative, discussion-based practices such as consciousness-raising. Womanhouse, co-founded by Chicago and Schapiro as an outgrowth of the Feminist Art program, was an installation and performance space dedicated to female creative expression.

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MOST IMPORTANT ART

Domes (1968) Composed of three dome-like forms and using transparent material with spray-on plastic, this piece is rendered in the Minimalist style of Chicago’s early work. Its use of repeated shapes and glossy, “industrial” media suggest the work of artists such as Donald Judd, though there is significant contrast to the hard, geometric forms of Judd and his contemporaries in the deployment of softer, rounded forms that suggest a kind of ambiguous femininity. Critic Susan Jenkins suggests that the work prefigures the “purely feminist idiom” that was to come: the three domes make up what came to be Chicago’s signature stylistic motif, the triangle, closely associated with vaginal imagery in Chicago’s oeuvre. Sprayed acrylic lacquer inside clear acrylic – EDG, Exhibits Development Group

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JUDY CHICAGO BIOGRAPHY

Childhood

Judy Chicago was born Judy Cohen in 1939 in Chicago, Illinois, in the last year of the Great Depression. She grew up in a liberal environment; unusual for the time, her intellectual Jewish parents both worked to support their children and openly articulated their left-wing politics. Chicago began drawing at the age of three and attending classes at the Institute of Chicago starting in 1947. In 1948, her father, Arthur Cohen, left his union job in the midst of the McCarthy blacklist and the controversy surrounding the family’s “Communist” leanings. Two years later, he died from a massive stomach ulcer.

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JUDY CHICAGO LEGACY

Judy Chicago’s work is significant for furthering the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and for the recognition and reinstatement of women’s roles throughout history, as well as for her dedication to the deconstruction of traditional hierarchies of fine art and craft, her zeal for the rediscovery of forgotten or undervalued technique, and for her vision of collaborative art-making. Her commitment to female subject matter provided a critical example followed by several generations of contemporary artists, such as video and performance artist Martha Rosler, while Chicago’s embrace of “female” art forms such as needlework and embroidery influenced many practitioners of textile art, including the contemporary textile artists Orly Kogan and Gillian Strong. Chicago’s legacy is also felt in her role as teacher, writer, and moving force behind such ventures as Womanhouse and Through the Flower, dedicated to using art to prevent the erasure of women’s achievements. Chicago has written eight major books documenting her and other female artists’ work, including Women and Art: Contested Territory.

Original content written by Sarah Jenkins

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Judy Chicago. [Internet]. 2015. TheArtStory.org website. Available from:
http://www.theartstory.org/artist-chicago-judy.htm [Accesed 04 May 2015]

JUDY CHICAGO QUOTES

“Women’s history and women’s art needs to become part of our cultural and intellectual heritage.”

“I could no longer pretend in my art that being a woman had no meaning.”

“There has to be more room for us as artists. We have to be able to be seen in our fullness in terms of our own artistic agency, and we’re a long way from that.”

“Because we are denied knowledge of our history, we are deprived of standing upon each other’s shoulders and building upon each other’s hard earned accomplishments. Instead we are condemned to repeat what others have done before us and thus we continually reinvent the wheel. The goal of The Dinner Party is to break this cycle.”

INFLUENCES

ARTISTS

Louise Nevelson

Lee Bontecou

Frida Kahlo

Miriam Schapiro

FRIENDS

Anais Nin

Lucy Lippard

Allan Kaprow

MOVEMENTS

Minimalism

Performance Art

Arts and Crafts Movement

Judy Chicago

Years Worked: 1964 – present

ARTISTS

Suzanne Lacy

Martha Rosler

Edward Lucie-Smith

FRIENDS

Lucy Lippard

Arlene Raven

Sheila de Bretteville

MOVEMENTS

Minimalism

Feminist Art

Performance Art

Postmodern Art

Judy Chicago

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Judy Chicago
Chicago at work in her china-painting studio, 1974.
Born	Judith Sylvia Cohen[1] July 20, 1939 (age 77) Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Known for	Installation Painting Sculpture
Notable work	The Dinner Party The Birth Project Powerplay The Holocaust Project
Movement	Contemporary Feminist art
Awards	Tamarind Fellowship, 1972
Patron(s)	Holly Harp Elizabeth A. Sackler[2]

Judy Chicago (born Judith Sylvia Cohen, July 20, 1939) is an American feminist artist, art educator,^[3] and writer known for her large collaborative art installation pieces which examine the role of women in history and culture. Born in Chicago, Illinois, as Judith Cohen, she changed her name after the deaths of both her father and her first husband, choosing to disconnect from the idea of male dominated naming conventions. By the 1970s, Chicago had coined the term “feminist art” and had founded the first feminist art program in the United States. Chicago’s work incorporates stereotypical women’s artistic skills, such as needlework, counterbalanced with stereotypical male skills such as welding and pyrotechnics. Chicago’s most well known work is The Dinner Party, which resides in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum.

Contents

 [hide] 

• 1Early personal life
• 2Education and early career
  • 2.1From Cohen to Gerowitz to Chicago: Name change
• 3Artistic career
  • 3.1The feminist art movement and the 1970s
  • 3.2Womanhouse
  • 3.3The Dinner Party
  • 3.4The Birth Project and Powerplay
  • 3.5A new kind of collaboration and The Holocaust Project
  • 3.6Current work and life
• 4Style and work
• 5Through the Flower
• 6Teaching career
• 7Books by Chicago
• 8Notes
• 9References
• 10Further reading
• 11External links

Early personal life[edit]

Judy Chicago was born Judith Sylvia Cohen^[1] in 1939, to Arthur and May Cohen, in Chicago, Illinois. Her father came from a twenty-three generation lineage of rabbis, including the Vilna Gaon. Unlike his family predecessors, Arthur became a labor organizer and a Marxist.^[4] He worked nights at a post office and took care of Chicago during the day, while May, who was a former dancer, worked as a medical secretary.^[1][4] Arthur’s active participation in the American Communist Party, liberal views towards women and support of worker’s rights strongly influenced Chicago’s ways of thinking and belief.^[5] During McCarthyism era in the 1950s, Arthur was investigated, which made it difficult for him to find work and caused the family much turmoil.^[4] In 1945, while Chicago was alone at home with her infant brother, Ben, an FBI agent visited their house. The agent began to ask the six-year-old Chicago questions about her father and his friends, but the agent was interrupted upon the return of May to the house.^[5] Arthur’s health declined, and he died in 1953 from peritonitis. May would not discuss his death with her children and did not allow them to attend the funeral. Chicago did not come to terms with his death until she was an adult; in the early 1960s she was hospitalized for almost a month with a bleeding ulcer attributed to unresolved grief.^[4]

May loved the arts, and instilled her passion for them in her children, as evident in Chicago’s future as an artist, and brother Ben’s eventual career as a potter. At age of three, Chicago began to draw and was sent to the Art Institute of Chicago to attend classes.^[4][6]By the age of 5, Chicago knew that she “never wanted to do anything but make art”^[6] and started attending classes at the Art Institute of Chicago.^[7] She applied but was denied admission to the Art Institute,^[5] and instead attended UCLA on a scholarship.^[4]

Education and early career[edit]

While at UCLA she became politically active, designing posters for the UCLA chapter NAACP and eventually became its corresponding secretary.^[5] In June 1959, she met and became romantically linked with Jerry Gerowitz. She left school and moved in with him, for the first time having her own studio space. The couple hitch hiked to New York in 1959, just as Chicago’s mother and brother moved to Los Angeles to be closer to her.^[8] The couple lived in Greenwich Village for a time, before returning in 1960 from Los Angeles to Chicago so she could finish her degree. Chicago married Gerowitz in 1961.^[9] She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1962 and was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Gerowitz died in a car crash in 1963, devastating Chicago and causing her to suffer from an identity crisis until later that decade. She received her Master of Fine Arts from UCLA in 1964.^[4]

While in grad school, Chicago’s created a series that was abstract, yet easily recognized as male and female sexual organs. These early works were called Bigamy, and represented the death of her husband. One depicted an abstract penis which was “stopped in flight” before it could unite with a vaginal form. Her professors, who were mainly men, were dismayed over these works.^[9] Despite the use of sexual organs in her work, Chicago refrained from using gender politics or identity as themes.

In 1965, Chicago displayed work in her first solo show, at the Rolf Nelson Gallery in Los Angeles; Chicago was one of only four female artists to take part in the show.^[10] In 1968, Chicago was asked why she did not participate in the “California Women in the Arts” exhibition at the Lytton Center, to which she answered “I won’t show in any group defined as Woman, Jewish, or California. Someday when we all grow up there will be no labels.” Chicago began working in ice sculpture, which represented “a metaphor for the preciousness of life,” another reference towards her husband’s death.^[11]

Study for Pasadena Lifesavers, prismacolor, 1968.

In 1969, the Pasadena Art Museum exhibited a series of Chicago’s spherical acrylic plastic dome sculptures and drawings in an “experimental” gallery. Art in America noted that Chicago’s work was at the forefront of the conceptual art movement, and the Los Angeles Times described the work as showing no signs of “theoretical New York type art.”^[11] Chicago would describe her early artwork as minimalist and as her trying to be “one of the boys”.^[12] Chicago would also experiment with performance art, using fireworks and pyrotechnics to create “atmospheres”, which involved flashes of colored smoke being manipulated outdoors. Through this work she attempted to “feminize” and “soften” the landscape.^[13]

During this time, Chicago also began exploring her own sexuality in her work. She created the Pasadena Lifesavers, which was a series of abstract paintings that placed acrylic paint on Plexiglas. The works blended colors to create an illusion that the shapes “turn, dissolve, open, close, vibrate, gesture, wiggle,” representing her own discovery that “I was multi-orgasmic.” Chicago credited Pasadena Lifesavers, as being the major turning point in her work in relation to women’s sexuality and representation.^[13]

From Cohen to Gerowitz to Chicago: Name change[edit]

As Chicago made a name for herself as an artist, and came to know herself as a woman, she no longer felt connected to her last name, Cohen. This was due to the late grief of the death of her father and the lost connection to her name through marriage, Judith Gerowitz, after her husband’s death. She decided she wanted to change her last name to something independent of being connected to a man by marriage or heritage.^[4] During this time, she married sculptor Lloyd Hamrol, in 1965. (They divorced in 1979.)^[14] Gallery owner Rolf Nelson nicknamed her “Judy Chicago”^[4] because of her strong personality and thick Chicago accent. She decided this would be her new name, and sought to change it legally. Chicago was described as being “appalled” by the fact that she had to have her new husband’s signature on the paperwork to change her name legally.^[14] To celebrate the name change, she posed for the exhibition invitation dressed like a boxer, wearing a sweatshirt with her new last name on it.^[13] She also posted a banner across the gallery at her 1970 solo show at California State University at Fullerton, that read: “Judy Gerowitz hereby divests herself of all names imposed upon her through male social dominance and chooses her own name, Judy Chicago.”^[14] An advertisement with the same statement was also placed in Artforum‘s October 1970 issue.^[15]

Artistic career[edit]

The feminist art movement and the 1970s[edit]

In 1970, Chicago decided to teach full-time at Fresno State College, hoping to teach women the skills needed to express the female perspective in their work.^[16] At Fresno, she planned a class that would consist only of women, and she decided to teach off campus to escape “the presence and hence, the expectations of men.”^[17] She taught the first women’s art class in the fall of 1970 at Fresno State College. It became the Feminist Art Program, a full 15-unit program, in the Spring of 1971. This was the first feminist art program in the United States. Fifteen students studied under Chicago at Fresno State College: Dori Atlantis, Susan Boud, Gail Escola, Vanalyne Green, Suzanne Lacy, Cay Lang, Karen LeCocq, Jan Lester, Chris Rush, Judy Schaefer, Henrietta Sparkman, Faith Wilding, Shawnee Wollenman, Nancy Youdelman, and Cheryl Zurilgen. Together, as the Feminist Art Program, these women rented and refurbished an off-campus studio at 1275 Maple Avenue in downtown Fresno. Here they collaborated on art, held reading groups, and discussion groups about their life experiences which then influenced their art. Later, Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro reestablished the Feminist Art Program at California Institute of the Arts. After Chicago left for Cal Arts, the class at Fresno State College was continued by Rita Yokoi from 1971 to 1973, and then by Joyce Aiken in 1973, until her retirement in 1992.^{[nb 1]}

Chicago is considered one of the “first-generation feminist artists,” a group that also includes Mary Beth Edelson, Carolee Schneeman, and Rachel Rosenthal. They were part of the Feminist art movement in Europe and the United States in the early 1970s to develop feminist writing and art.^[19]

Chicago became a teacher at the California Institute for the Arts, and was a leader for their Feminist Art Program. In 1972, the program created Womanhouse, alongside Miriam Schapiro, which was the first art exhibition space to display a female point of view in art.^[14] With Arlene Raven and Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Chicago co-founded the Los Angeles Woman’s Building in 1973.^[20] This housed the Feminist Studio Workshop, described by the founders as “an experimental program in female education in the arts. Our purpose is to develop a new concept of art, a new kind of artist and a new art community built from the lives, feelings, and needs of women.” ^[12][21] During this period, Chicago began creating spray-painted canvas, primarily abstract, with geometric forms on them. These works evolved, using the same medium, to become more centered around the meaning of the “feminine”. Chicago was strongly influenced by Gerda Lerner, whose writings convinced her that women who continued to be unaware and ignorant of women’s history would continue to struggle independently and collectively.^[14]

Womanhouse[edit]

Main article: Womanhouse

Womanhouse was a project that involved Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. It began in the fall of 1971. They wanted to start the year with a large scale collaborative project that involved woman artists who spent much of their time talking about their problems as women. They used those problems as fuel and dealt with them while working on the project. Judy thought that female students often approach artmaking with an unwillingness to push their limits due to their lack of familiarity with tools and processes, and an inability to see themselves as working people. “The aim of the Feminist Art Program is to help women restructure their personalities to be more consistent with their desires to be artists and to help them build their artmaking out of their experiences as women.”^[22]

In 1975, Chicago’s first book, Through the Flower, was published; it “chronicled her struggles to find her own identity as a woman artist.”^[10]

The Dinner Party[edit]

The Dinner Party as installed at the Brooklyn Museum.

Main article: The Dinner Party

Chicago decided to take Lerner’s lesson to heart and took action to teach women about their history. This action would become Chicago’s masterpiece, The Dinner Party, now in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum.^[23] It took her five years and cost about $250,000 to complete.^[7] First, Chicago conceived the project in her Santa Monica studio: a large triangle, which measures 48-feet by 43-feet by 36-feet, consisting of 39 place settings.^[14] Each place setting commemorates a historical or mythical female figure, such as artists, goddesses, activists and martyrs. The project came into fruition with the assistance of over 400 people, mainly women, who volunteered to assist in needlework, creating sculptures and other aspects of the process.^[24]

The Birth Project and Powerplay[edit]

From 1980 until 1985, Chicago created The Birth Project. The piece used images of childbirth to celebrate woman’s role as mother. The installation reinterpreted the Genesis creation narrative, which focused on the idea that a male god created a male human, Adam, without the involvement of a woman.^[24] Chicago described the piece as revealing a “primordial female self hidden among the recesses of my soul…the birthing woman is part of the dawn of creation.”^[6] 150 needleworkers from the United States, Canada and New Zealand assisted in the project, working on 100 panels, by quilting, macrame, embroidery and other techniques. The size of the piece means it is rarely displayed in its entirety. The majority of the pieces from The Birth Project are held in the collection of the Albuquerque Museum.^[24]

It is interesting to note that Chicago was not personally interested in motherhood. While she admired the women who chose this path, she did not find it right for herself. As recently as 2012, she has said “There was no way on this earth I could have had children and the career I’ve had.”^[7]

After The Birth Project, Chicago returned to independent studio work. She created Powerplay, a series of drawings, weavings, paintings, cast paper and bronze reliefs. Through the series, Chicago replaced the male gaze with a feminist one, exploring the construct of masculinity and how power has affected men.^[25]

A new kind of collaboration and The Holocaust Project[edit]

In the mid-1980s Chicago’s interests “shifted beyond ‘issues of female identity’ to an exploration of masculine power and powerlessness in the context of the Holocaust.”^[26] Chicago’s The Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light (1985–93)^[26] is a collaboration with her husband, photographer Donald Woodman, whom she married on New Year’s Eve 1985. Although Chicago’s previous husbands were both Jewish, it wasn’t until she met Woodman that she began to explore her own Jewish heritage. Chicago met poet Harvey Mudd, who had written an epic poem about the Holocaust. Chicago was interested in illustrating the poem, but decided to create her own work instead, using her own art, visual and written. Chicago worked alongside her husband to complete the piece, which took eight years to finish.^[24] The piece, which documents victims of the Holocaust, was created during a time of personal loss in Chicago’s life: the death of her brother Ben, from Lou Gehrig’s disease, and the death of her mother from cancer.^[27]

To seek inspiration for the project, Chicago and Woodman watched the documentary Shoah, which comprises interviews with Holocaust survivors at Nazi concentration camps and other relevant Holocaust sites.^[27] They also explored photo archives and written pieces about the Holocaust.^[28] They spent several months touring concentration camps and visited Israel.^[26] Chicago brought other issues into the work, such as environmentalism, Native American genocide,^[6] and the Vietnam War. With these subjects Chicago sought to relate contemporary issues to the moral dilemma behind the Holocaust.^[27] This aspect of the work caused controversy within the Jewish community, due to the comparison of the Holocaust to these other historical and contemporary concerns.^[6] The Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light consists of sixteen large scale works made of a variety of mediums including: tapestry, stained glass, metal work, wood work, photography, painting, and the sewing of Audrey Cowan. The exhibit ends with a piece that displays a Jewish couple at Sabbath. The piece comprises 3000 square feet, providing a full exhibition experience for the viewer.^[27] The Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light was exhibited for the first time in October 1993 at the Spertus Museum in Chicago.^[27] Most of the work from the piece is held at the Holocaust Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.^[2]

Over the next six years, Chicago created works that explored the experiences of concentration camp victims.^[26] Galit Mana of Jewish Renaissance magazine notes, “This shift in focus led Chicago to work on other projects with an emphasis on Jewish tradition”, including Voices from the Song of Songs (1997), where Chicago “introduces feminism and female sexuality into her representation of strong biblical female characters.”^[26]

Current work and life[edit]

In 1985, Chicago was remarried, to photographer Donald Woodman. To celebrate the couple’s 25th wedding anniversary, Chicago created a “Renewal Ketubah” in 2010.^[10]

Chicago’s archives are held at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College, and her collection of women’s history and culture books are held in the collection of the University of New Mexico. In 1999, Chicago received the UCLA Alumni Professional Achievement Award, and has been awarded honorary degrees from Lehigh University, Smith College, Duke University^[29] and Russell Sage College.^[2] In 2004, Chicago received a Visionary Woman Award from Moore College of Art & Design.^[30] Chicago was named a National Women’s History Project honoree for Women’s History Month in 2008.^[31] Chicago donated her collection of feminist art educational materials to Penn State University in 2011.^[32] She lives in New Mexico.^[33] In the fall of 2011, Chicago returned to Los Angeles for the opening of the “Concurrents” exhibition at the Getty Museum. For the exhibition, she returned to the Pomona College football field, where in the late 1960s she had held a firework-based installation, and performed the piece again.^[34]

Chicago had two solo exhibitions in the United Kingdom in 2012, one in London and another in Liverpool.^[26] The Liverpool exhibition included the launch of Chicago’s book about Virginia Woolf. Once a peripheral part of her artistic expression, Chicago now considers writing to be well integrated into her career.^[26]

Chicago strives to push herself, exploring new directions for her art; she even attended car-body school to learn to air-brush and has recently begun to work in glass.^[7] Taking such risks is easier to do when one lives by Chicago’s philosophy: “I’m not career driven. Damien Hirst’s dots sold, so he made thousands of dots. I would, like, never do that! It wouldn’t even occur to me.”^[7] Chicago’s subject matter, however, has broadened from the focus of The Dinner Party. In the words of the artist: “I guess you could say that my eyes were lifted from my vagina.”^[7]

Style and work[edit]

Chicago trained herself in “macho arts,” taking classes in auto body work, boat building, and pyrotechnics. Through auto body work she learned spray painting techniques and the skill to fuse color and surface to any type of media, which would become a signature of her later work. The skills learned through boat building would be used in her sculpture work, and pyrotechnics would be used to create fireworks for performance pieces. These skills allowed Chicago to bring fiberglass and metal into her sculpture, and eventually she would become an apprentice under Mim Silinsky to learn the art of porcelain painting, which would be used to create works in The Dinner Party. Chicago also added the skill of stained glass to her artistic tool belt, which she used for The Holocaust Project.^[14]Photography became more present in Chicago’s work as her relationship with photographer Donald Woodman developed.^[28] Since 2003, Chicago has been working with glass.^[33]

Collaboration is a major aspect of Chicago’s installation works. The Dinner Party, The Birth Project and The Holocaust Project were all completed as a collaborative process with Chicago and hundreds of volunteer participants. Volunteer artisans skills vary, often connected to “stereotypical” women’s arts such as textile arts.^[14][27] Chicago makes a point to acknowledge her assistants as collaborators, a task at which other artists have notably failed.^[7][35]

Through the Flower[edit]

In 1978, Chicago founded Through the Flower, a non-profit feminist art organization. The organization seeks to educate the public about the importance of art and how it can be used as a tool to emphasize women’s achievements. Through the Flower also serves as the maintainer of Chicago’s works, having handled the storage of The Dinner Party, before it found a permanent home at the Brooklyn Museum. The organization also maintained The Dinner Party Curriculum, which serves as a “living curriculum” for education about feminist art ideas and pedagogy. The online aspect of the curriculum was donated to Penn State University in 2011.^[33]

Teaching career[edit]

Chicago developed an art education methodology in which “female-centered content,” such as menstruation and giving birth, is encouraged by the teacher as “personal is political” content for art.^[36] Chicago advocates the teacher as facilitator by actively listening to students in order to guide content searches and the translation of content into art. She refers to her teaching methodology as “participatory art pedagogy.”^[37]

The art created in the Feminist Art Program and Womanhouse introduced perspectives and content about women’s lives that had been taboo topics in society, including the art world.^[38][39] In 1970 Chicago developed the Feminist Art Program at California State University, Fresno, and has implemented other teaching projects that conclude with an art exhibition by students such as Womanhouse with Miriam Schapiro at CalArts, and SINsation in 1999 at Indiana University, From Theory to Practice: A Journey of Discovery at Duke University in 2000, At Home: A Kentucky Project with Judy Chicago and Donald Woodman at Western Kentucky University in 2002, Envisioning the Future at California Polytechnic State University and Pomona Arts Colony in 2004, and Evoke/Invoke/Provoke at Vanderbilt University in 2005.^[40] Several students involved in Judy Chicago’s teaching projects established successful careers as artists, including Suzanne Lacy, Faith Wilding, and Nancy Youdelman.

Books by Chicago[edit]

• The Dinner Party: A Symbol of our Heritage. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday (1979). ISBN 0-385-14567-5.
• with Susan Hill. Embroidering Our Heritage: The Dinner Party Needlework. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday (1980). ISBN 0-385-14569-1.
• The Birth Project. New York: Doubleday (1985). ISBN 0-385-18710-6.
• Beyond the Flower: The Autobiography of a Feminist Artist. New York: Penguin (1997). ISBN 0-14-023297-4.
• Kitty City: A Feline Book of Hours. New York: Harper Design (2005). ISBN 0-06-059581-7.
• Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist. Lincoln: Authors Choice Press (2006). ISBN 0-595-38046-8.
• with Frances Borzello. Frida Kahlo: Face to Face. New York: Prestel USA (2010). ISBN 3-7913-4360-2.
• Institutional Time: A Critique of Studio Art Education. New York: The Monacelli Press (2014). ISBN 9781580933667.

Notes[edit]

1. Jump up^ Aiken opened the all-women’s co-op Gallery 25 with her students, developed the Fresno Art Museum’s Council of 100 and the Distinguished Women Artist Series, which helped develop programming and exhibitions about women at the museum.^[18]

1. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c} Levin in Bloch and Umansky, 305
2. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c} Felder and Rosen, 284.
3. Jump up^ Chicago, Judy. (2014). Institutional Time. The Monacelli Press.
4. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e f g h i} Felder and Rosen, 279.
5. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d} Levin in Bloch and Umansky, 306
6. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e} Wydler and Lippard, 5.
7. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e f g} Cooke, Rachel (3 November 2012). “The art of Judy Chicago”. The Guardian. Retrieved 15 February 2014.
8. Jump up^ Levin in Bloch and Umansky, 308
9. ^ Jump up to:^{a b} Levin in Bloch and Umansky, 311
10. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c} Chicago, Judy. “Illustrated Career History”.
11. ^ Jump up to:^{a b} Levin in Bloch and Umansky, 314
12. ^ Jump up to:^{a b} Lewis and Lewis, 455.
13. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c} Levin in Bloch and Umansky, 315
14. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e f g h} Felder and Rosen, 280.
15. Jump up^ Levin, Becoming Judy Chicago; A Biography of the Artist, p. 139
16. Jump up^ Levin in Bloch and Umansky, 317
17. Jump up^ Levin in Bloch and Umansky, 318
18. Jump up^ Dr. Laura Meyer; Nancy Youdelman. “A Studio of Their Own: The Legacy of the Fresno Feminist Art Experiment”. A Studio of their Own. Retrieved 8 January 2011.
19. Jump up^ Thomas Patin and Jennifer McLerran (1997). Artwords: A Glossary of Contemporary Art Theory. Westport, CT: Greenwood. p. 55. Retrieved 8 January 2014. via Questia (subscription required)
20. Jump up^ “Woman’s Building records, 1970-1992”. Archives of American Art. Smithsonian Institution. Retrieved 15 Aug 2011.
21. Jump up^ Moravec, Michelle (2013). “Looking For Lyotard, Beyond the Genre of Feminist Manifesto” (PDF). Trespassing. 1 (2). Retrieved 30 May 2014.
22. Jump up^ Schapiro, Miriam; Chicago, Judy. “Womanhouse catalog essay” (PDF). Womanhouse. Retrieved 7 March 2015.
23. Jump up^ “The Dinner Party”. Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Brooklyn Museum. Retrieved 15 January 2011.
24. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d} Felder and Rosen, 281.
25. Jump up^ “Judy Chicago”. Jewish Virtual Library. 2012. Retrieved 15 Jan 2011.
26. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e f g} Galit Mana (October 2012). “Judy Chicago in the UK”. Jewish Renaissance. 12 (1): 42–43.
27. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e f} Felder and Rosen, 282.
28. ^ Jump up to:^{a b} Wylder and Lippard, 6
29. Jump up^ Debra Wacks (2012). “Judy Chicago”. Jewish Women’s Archives. Retrieved 15 January 2011.
30. Jump up^ “Visionary Woman Awards”. Support Moore. Moore College of Art & Design. Retrieved 8 April 2012.
31. Jump up^ “Judy Chicago”. 2008 Honorees. National Women’s History Month Project. 2008. Retrieved 15 Jan 2011.
32. Jump up^ “The Judy Chicago Art Education Collection | Penn State”. judychicago.arted.psu.edu. Retrieved 2015-09-12.
33. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c} “Penn State Receives Judy Chicago Feminist Art Education Collections”. Local News. Gant Daily. 2011. Retrieved 15 January 2011.
34. Jump up^ Jori Finkel (2011). “Q&A Judy Chicago”. Censorship. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 15 January 2011.
35. Jump up^ Gerhard, Jane (2013). The Dinner Party: Judy Chicago and the power of popular feminism. 1970-2007. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press. pp. 2, 228. ISBN 0-8203-3675-0.
36. Jump up^ Chicago, Judy, (n.d.). Art Practice/Art Pedagogy, Judy Chicago Art Education Collection, Penn State, Box 11, Folder 6, page 1 at http://judychicago.arted.psu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Art-Practice-Art-PedagogyTranscript-and-Slide-Presentation-Boxx-11-6.pdf.
37. Jump up^ Keifer-Boyd, K. (2007). From content to form: Judy Chicago’s pedagogy with reflections by Judy Chicago. Studies in Art Education: A Journal of Issues and Research in Art Education, 48(2), 133-153.
38. Jump up^ Fields, Jill (Ed.). (2012). Entering the picture: Judy Chicago, The Fresno Feminist Art Program, and the collective visions of women artists. New York: Routledge.
39. Jump up^ Gerhard, Jane F. (2013). The Dinner Party: Judy Chicago and the power of popular feminism. 1970-2007. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
40. Jump up^ Chicago, Judy. (2014) Institutional Time: A Critique of Studio Art Education. New York, NY: Monacelli Press.

References[edit]

• Bloch, Avital (editor) and Lauri Umansky (editor). Impossible to Hold: Women and Culture in the 1960s. New York: NYU Press (2005). ISBN 0-8147-9910-8.
• Felder, Deborah G. and Diana Rosen. Fifty Jewish Women Who Changed the World. Yucca Valley: Citadel (2005). ISBN 0-8065-2656-4.
• Lewis, Richard L. and Susan Ingalls Lewis. The Power of Art. Florence: Wadsworth (2008). ISBN 0-534-64103-2.
• Wylder, Thompson Viki D. and Lucy R. Lippard. Judy Chicago: Trials and Tributes. Tallahassee: Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts (1999). ISBN 1-889282-05-7.

Further reading[edit]

• Dickson, Rachel (ed.), with contributions by Judy Battalion, Frances Borzello, Diane Gelon, Alexandra Kokoli, Andrew Perchuk. Judy Chicago. Lund Humpries, Ben Uri (2012). ISBN 978-1-84822-120-8.
• Levin, Gail. Becoming Judy Chicago: A Biography of the Artist. New York: Crown (2007). ISBN 1-4000-5412-5.
• Lippard, Lucy, Elizabeth A. Sackler, Edward Lucie-Smith and Viki D. Thompson Wylder. Judy Chicago. ISBN 0-8230-2587-X.
• Lucie-Smith, Edward. Judy Chicago, An American Vision. New York: Watson-Guptill (2000). ISBN 0-8230-2585-3.
• Right Out of History: Judy Chicago. DVD. Phoenix Learning Group (2008).

External links[edit]

• Official website
• Judy Chicago on Through the Flower
• Judy Chicago Art Education Collection at Pennsylvania State
• Papers, 1947–2004 (inclusive), 1957–2004 (bulk). Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
• International Honor Quilt Collection, University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky.

[hide] v t e Feminist art movement in the United States
Feminist art Feminist art movement Women artists
Precursors	American Association of University Women (1881) National Association of Women Artists (1889) New York School of Applied Design for Women (1892)
Venues or organizations	A.I.R. Gallery Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art (Brooklyn Museum of Art) Hera Gallery Lesbian Art Project National Museum of Women in the Arts New York Feminist Art Institute Soho20 Chelsea tArt Artist Collective Woman’s Building Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota
Exhibitions or installations	Womanhouse (1972) Three Weeks in May (1977) WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007)
Films or documentaries	!Women Art Revolution
Publications	Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics (1977–1992) The Feminist Art Journal (1972–1977)
Groups	subRosa Guerrilla Girls The Waitresses Women’s Caucus for Art Where We At (WWA)
Lists	List of feminist artists List of women art historians
Feminist movements and ideologies

Authority control	WorldCat Identities VIAF: 97732316 LCCN: n78079492 ISNI: 0000 0001 2283 3028 GND: 118675834 SUDOC: 071333452 BNF: cb15570530g (data) ULAN: 500045890 NDL: 00435897 RKD: 103968

Categories:

• 1939 births
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• 21st-century American artists
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• American installation artists
• American women installation artists
• American women painters
• American women sculptors
• Artists from Chicago
• Artists from New Mexico
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I sent a cassette tape of Adrian Rogers on Evolution to John Hospers in May of 1994 which was the 10th anniversary of Francis Schaeffer’s passing and I promptly received a typed two page response from Dr. John Hospers. Dr. Hospers had both read my letter and all the inserts plus listened to the whole sermon and had some very angry responses. If you would like to hear the sermon from Adrian Rogers and read the transcript then refer to my earlier post at this link.  Over the last few weeks I have posted  portions of Dr. Hospers’ letter and portions of the cassette tape that he listened to back in 1994, but today I want  to look at some other comments made on that cassette tape that John Hospers listened to and I will also post a few comments that Dr. Hospers made in that 2 page letter.

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John Hospers: From 1776 to 1984

Here is another quote from Dr. John Hospers’ June 2, 1994 letter that commented on Adrian Rogers message on Evolution:

I find it [GRADUAL EVOLUTION] much more compatible with the way reality works in other areas to believe that it came gradually over millions of years. (No, the dinosaurs did not “on the 6th day” — but long before man. The evidence of the rocks is pretty convincing on this, unless you want to say that God planted false evidence in the rocks in order to try man’s faith (as some said 10 years ago). (And the sun had to be there before the third day, since without the sun’s light there would be no day and night on the earth!)

During the 1990′s I actually made it a practice to write famous atheists and scientists that were mentioned by Adrian Rogers and Francis Schaeffer and challenge them with the evidence for the Bible’s historicity and the claims of the gospel. Usually I would send them a cassette tape of Adrian Rogers’ messages “6 reasons I know the Bible is True,” “The Final Judgement,” “Who is Jesus?” and the message by Bill Elliff, “How to get a pure heart.”  I would also send them printed material from the works of Francis Schaeffer and a personal apologetic letter from me addressing some of the issues in their work. My second cassette tape that I sent to both Antony Flew and George Wald was Adrian Rogers’ sermon on evolution and here below you can watch that very sermon on You Tube.   Carl Sagan also took time to correspond with me about a year before he died. 

(Francis Schaeffer pictured below)

Adrian Rogers pictured below

I have posted on Adrian Rogers’ messages on Evolution before but here is a complete message on it.

Evolution: Fact of Fiction? By Adrian Rogers

_______________________________________

(This next paragraph is my comment and not Adrian Rogers) This might interest you that good friend in Little Rock Craig Carney had an uncle named  Warren Carney and Warren was born in 1917 and he was the last living witness of the Scopes Monkey trial but he died in June of 2015. His father took him to the trial every day since they lived in Dayton and it was the biggest happening in the town’s history. Also I attended the funeral of Dr. Robert G. Lee (1886-1978) at Bellevue Baptist in Memphis and he is the minister who presided over William Jennings Bryan’s funeral in 1925.

(William Jennings Bryan)

(Dr. Robert G. Lee )

_______________________________

b. The Fixity of the Species
The second bridge the evolutionist cannot cross is the steadfastness, the fixity, of the species—that is, “the basic categories of life.”

Now, what does the Bible say about the species? Well, Genesis 1, verses 11–12: “And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit”—now, listen to this phrase—“after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good” (Genesis 1:11–12). You continue this passage. Ten times God uses this phrase, “after his kind”—“after his kind,” “after his kind”—because like produces like.

Now, the evolutionist must believe that reproduction does not always come kind after kind. There has to be a mutation—or a transmutation, rather—between species—that you can become a protozoa; and then you can become an un-segmented worm; and then you may become a fish; and then you may become a reptile, and move from one species to another. Now, all of us know there is such a thing as mutation. If you have roses, you can get various varieties of roses. If you have dogs—canines—you can have everything from a poodle to a Great Dane, but they’re still canines; they’re still dogs. The scientists have bombarded fruit flies with gamma rays or some kind of rays to cause mutations, and they get all kinds of strange fruit flies. But, they never get June bugs; they’re still fruit flies. You see, there are variations and adaptations that God has built, but you never have one species turning to another species. You never have a cat turn into a dog that turns to a cow that turns to a horse. You just don’t have that.

Now, men have tried to do that. I heard, one time, about a marine biologist who tried to take one of these beautiful shell creatures called an abalone and cross it with a crocodile. What he got was a crock of baloney. And, anytime anybody tries this, that’s exactly what they come up with.
Now, you say, “Pastor Rogers, why are you so certain about the fixity of the species, the steadfastness of the species?” Number one: because the Bible teaches it, and that’s enough for me. But, let’s move beyond that. We’re not talking about theological reasons now; we’re talking about logical reasons. Friend, if this is true, you would expect to find transitional forms in the fossils. There are billions of fossils; there are trillions of fossils— multiplied fossils. In not one instance—are you listening?—in not one instance do we find a transitional form. None—there are none.

Now, there are some people who will attempt to show you a proof of these, but I can tell you that eminent scientists have proven that these are not true. You would think that if man has evolved for millions and billions of years, and that life has evolved from one-celled life, some amoeba, to what we have today, that, in the fossils in the earth, we would find these transitional forms. But, they’re not there. The people talking about finding the missing link… Friend, the whole chain is missing—the whole chain is missing. Now, you ask them to prove it—that that is not true; and, they cannot come up with evidence. Well, you say, “But Pastor, they seem to have the proof. What about these ape-men? What about these people who lived in caves—these cave dwellers?” We have cave dwellers today. People have lived in caves through the years. “But, what about these things that we see in the museum? What about these creatures in this Time-Life advertisement?” Those are the products of imagination, and artistry, and plaster of Paris.

Adrian Rogers pastor of Bellevue Baptist in Memphis visiting with Ronald Reagan in White House pictured above.

Below Bellevue Baptist pictured in 1975:

Some years ago—in 1925, I believe it was—in Tennessee—Dayton, Tennessee— we had something called The Monkey Trial. Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan were in a court case. A teacher had taught evolution in school, and there were people who sued that evolution should not be taught in school. Now it is reversed— you’re sued if you don’t teach evolution in school. But, there was a great debate, and Clarence Darrow, who was a very brilliant lawyer, was presenting evidence for evolution. Part of the evidence that Clarence Darrow presented was Nebraska Man, and he had all of these pictures.

Now, what had happened is there was a man named Harold Cook. And, Harold Cook had found a piece of evidence, and out of that piece of evidence the artist had created this half-man, half-ape—this Nebraska Man. Well, what was it that Clarence Darrow used as evidence that Harold Cook had discovered? It was a tooth. I didn’t say, “teeth”; I said, “tooth.” He had a tooth; and, with that tooth, he had devised a race—male and female.

I was interested in reading, in my research for this message, where a creationist went to the University of Nebraska, where they have the campus museum. And, since he’s named Nebraska Man, they have the replica of Nebraska Man there, in the museum. So, this creationist went in there and said, “I want to see Nebraska Man.” So, they took him in there, and in a case were the skull and the skeleton of Nebraska Man. And, the creationist said, “Are these the actual bones of Nebraska Man?” “Oh,” he said, “no, they’re not the actual bones.” “Well,” the man said, “where could I see the actual bones?” “Oh,” he said, “well, we don’t have the bones. These are plaster of Paris casts of Nebraska Man.” “Well, you must have had the bones to make the cast.” The man in charge seemed embarrassed. “We don’t have any bones. All we have is a tooth.” That’s Nebraska Man. And, what they had done was to take a tooth, take some imagination, take an artist, take plaster of Paris, take some paste and some hair, and glue it on him—make a male, make a female, make a civilization called Nebraska Man out of one—one—tooth.

When I was in school, I studied about the Java ape-man. If you go back as far as I do, you studied about the Java ape-man. Where’d he come from? Well, in 1891, Sir Eugene Dubois found, in Java, the top of a skull, the fragment of a left thighbone, and three molar teeth. He announced the missing link had been found—750,000 years old. These bones that he found—these sparse bones—were not found together, and they were found scattered, over the space of one year. Twenty-four eminent scientists got together to investigate these bones; they were from Europe. There was no agreement. Ten said that they were the bones of an ape; seven said that they were the bones of a man; seven said that it was the missing link. Later, Dubois himself had to confess that it was the remains of an ape. But, in the museum, he is called Pithecanthropus Erectus— “the ape-man who stands up.” But, he’s just an ape.

What about the Piltdown man? I, in college, was introduced to the Piltdown man. Where’d we get his name? Well, Charles Dawson, in Piltdown, England, found in a gravel pit a piece of a jaw, two molar teeth, and a piece of a skull. For 50 years, this was known as “the Piltdown man,” but it was later shown to be a hoax. And, The Reader’s Digest, in 1958, said this—and I quote: “The great Piltdown hoax was an ape only 50 years old. Its teeth had been filed down and artificially colored.” Well, we laugh at that, and we say anybody could have a joke pulled on him. Yes, but friend, the scientists took this and put it in the museum for 50 years. Do you see how anxious man is to make a monkey of himself? I mean, it was a hoax.

__________________________________________________________________________

The painting, entitled “A Discussion on the Piltdown Skull,” is based on a meeting at the Royal College of Surgeons on the afternoon of August 11, 1913, during which the participants presented their views on the anatomy of Piltdown man. One or more of these men may have been involved in committing the fraud, while others were the unwitting victims. The anthropologist Arthur Keith (wearing the white laboratory coat) is seated at the table examining the Piltdown skull. Seated to Keith’s left are the osteologist William Pycraft and the zoologist Ray Lankester. The dentist Arthur Underwood stands in front, to Keith’s right. Standing in the back (from Keith’s far left) are the geologist Arthur Smith Woodward, the amateur paleontologist Charles Dawson, the anatomist Grafton Elliot Smith, and Frank Barlow, an assistant to Woodward. Other notables in the Piltdown affair, such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Lewis Abbot and Martin Hinton, were not present at the discussion. On the back wall, a portrait of Charles Darwin presides over the meeting. (Photograph courtesy of the Geological Society of London.)

______________________________________________

And, Dr. Austin H. Clark, noted biologist of the Smithsonian Institute,  said this—listen to this, this is Smithsonian: “There is no evidence which would show man developing step-by-step from lower forms of life. There is nothing to show that man was in any way connected with monkeys. He appeared suddenly and in substantially the same form as he is today. There are no such things as missing links. So far as concerns the major groups of animals, the creationists appear to have the best argument. There is not the slightest evidence that any one of the major groups arose from any other.” Folks, again—not that I’m embarrassed at being a Baptist preacher—but that’s not a Baptist preacher speaking; that’s a biologist at the Smithsonian.

There’s a man today who’s going about speaking on college campuses. His name is Dr. Philip E. Johnson. He’s a Harvard gradate and also a graduate of the University of Chicago. He’s an attorney—and no mean attorney. He has served as a law clerk for the Chief Justice of the United State Supreme Court. I want you… And, by the way, Mr. Johnson, whose books are in our library and in our bookstore, I believe, is a true believer and does not believe in evolution. He’s brilliant. And, he tells the following story of a lecture given by Colin Patterson at the American Museum of Natural History in 1981. Let me tell you who Patterson is. Patterson is a senior paleontologist—that means, just simply, “someone who studies ancient events, and creatures, and so forth”—he is a senior paleontologist at the British Natural History Museum. And, I’ve been to that museum. As you walk in, the first thing you see is the head of Darwin there—the bust of Darwin. He is—Colin Patterson is—the senior paleontologist at the British Natural History Museum, and he is the author of that museum’s general text on evolution. So, this guy’s no “6” or “7.” When it comes to science, he’s a “9” or “10.”

(Phillip Johnson)

(Colin Patterson)

Now, Philip Johnson, who is this lawyer from Harvard, quotes Colin Patterson, and he says this happened: He says—Patterson is lecturing now, and Philip Johnson is talking about it; and, here’s what Philip Johnson says: “First, Patterson asked his audience of experts a question which reflected his own doubts about much of what has been thought to be secured knowledge about evolution.” Now, here’s this man; he’s asking his colleagues this question: “Can you tell me anything you know about evolution—any one thing—that is true?” A good question: “Can you tell me…”—now listen; it’s kind of funny—“Can you tell me anything—any one thing—you know is true?” Now, here are these learned men sitting out there. And, let me tell you what happened: He said, “I tried that question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural History, and the only answer I got was silence. I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology Seminar in the University of Chicago”—morphology means, “to change from one form to another”—I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology Seminar in the University of Chicago, a very prestigious body of evolutionists, and all I got there was silence for a long time. Eventually, one person said, ‘I do know one thing: It ought not to be taught in high school.’”
Now, get the setting: Here is a man, a brilliant scientist from the British Museum, who has written a book on the thing. And, he gets these high muckety-mucks out there—these intellectual top waters—and he said, “

Can you tell me one thing that you know to be true—that you know to be true?” Silence. Only thing one of them said: “I know that it ought not to be taught in high school.”

You see, folks, there are some bridges that they cannot cross. One bridge is the origin of life. George Wald said, “That’s impossible, but I believe it—spontaneous generation—because I don’t want to believe in God.” The other is the fixity of the species. We don’t have any evolutionary fossilized remains, missing links.

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Ron Gorchov at CHEIM & READ

Featured artist is Ron Gorchov

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Related posts:

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I sent a cassette tape of Adrian Rogers on Evolution to John Hospers in May of 1994 which was the 10th anniversary of Francis Schaeffer’s passing and I promptly received a typed two page response from Dr. John Hospers. Dr. Hospers had both read my letter and all the inserts plus listened to the whole sermon and had some very angry responses. If you would like to hear the sermon from Adrian Rogers and read the transcript then refer to my earlier post at this link.  Over the last few weeks I have posted  portions of Dr. Hospers’ letter and portions of the cassette tape that he listened to back in 1994, but today I want  to look at some other comments made on that cassette tape that John Hospers listened to and I will also post a few comments that Dr. Hospers made in that 2 page letter.

John Hospers on His Friendship with Ayn Rand

Jane O’Grady

Wednesday 13 July 2011 14.24 EDTFirst published on Wednesday 13 July 2011 14.24 EDT

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Anyone over the age of 40 who has ever studied philosophy is likely to have on their shelves at least one edition of the mandatory student primer, An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis, first published in the mid-1950s. Its author, John Hospers, who has died aged 93, was emeritus professor in philosophy at the University of Southern California.

“I want to be remembered as a philosophical instructor who could clarify questions, and present good ideas clearly,” he wrote. He will also be remembered as one of the founders of the individualistic, anti-government Libertarian party in the US, which had links to the laissez-faire economists Friedrich Hayek and Alan Greenspan. He wrote one of the party’s key texts, Libertarianism: A Political Philosophy for Tomorrow, and, in 1972, was the first Libertarian party nominee for president. Many contempories considered him to be the first openly gay candidate for President but since his death his family have strenuously denied that he was gay. His campaign photograph had the heading “Break free from Big Brother”. Hospers and his vice-presidential nominee, Theodora Nathan, each won an electoral college vote from a renegade Republican elector. Hospers soon abandoned full-time politics for a return to academia.

A

He was born in Pella, a small town near Des Moines, Iowa. Pella had been founded by Dutch religious refugees in the 18th century, and Dutch was Hospers’s first language, tulip gardens his aesthetic, self-reliance and Calvinism his religious codes. It was David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion that later helped him struggle free of the Dutch Reformed Church and engendered his interest in philosophy.

His first boyhood love was astronomy. He would go to the nearby college observatory to view, and to show college students, the rings of Saturn and various double stars. When at college himself, aged 17, he was often delegated to replace the dean in giving astronomy classes to college seniors. After graduating with an MA in English literature from the University of Iowa in 1941, Hospers was offered a scholarship in philosophy at Columbia University, where he studied for a year under the British analytic philosopher GE Moore, who was a visiting professor. He got his PhD in 1944. His first book, Meaning and Truth in the Arts, published in 1946 while he was teaching at Columbia, was based on his dissertation.

He wrote extensively on ethics and aesthetics, and taught philosophy at Brooklyn College in New York, the University of North Carolina and the University of Minnesota. His libertarianism was inspired by Ayn Rand, the self-declared philosopher and cult hero of the free market, with whom he was, for a limited time, close friends.

Hospers encountered Rand in 1960 when she came to lecture at Brooklyn College. They met for lunch and were still avidly talking five hours later. That evening he “plunged into” her novel Atlas Shrugged, which was “heady wine” to him. He became infatuated with Rand and her scorn for altruism and state welfare. They would meet every two or three weeks and hold, till 4am or even 6am, talks that Hospers described as “among the most intellectually exhilarating of my life”.

He was said to be the only person, bar one, who was able to debate amicably with the histrionic Rand. However, differences in opinion over determinism (she, unlike him, was a stern believer in unconditioned free will), the possible necessity of military conscription (which he, unlike her, advocated), and logic (which was not her forte), caused strains in their friendship, which she abruptly terminated in 1962 after he had publicly questioned her views on aesthetics. He never saw her again. Hospers continued to be influenced by Rand and to brood, often tearfully, over their relationship.

His students and friends described him as a warm and delightful conversationalist and a wonderful listener. He antagonised many Libertarians by opposing one of their tenets – the open borders policy – in a 1998 article excoriating unrestrained Mexican immigration, and by defending the Iraq war in his revised edition of Libertarianism in 2007. By then, he had left the party and been instrumental in setting up the Republican Liberty Caucus.

• John Hospers, philosopher, born 9 June 1918; died 12 June 2011

• This article was amended on 16 August 2011. The original stated without qualification that he was the first openly gay candidate for President but the article now reflects the familiy’s strenuous denial that he was gay.

Here is a quote from June 2, 1994 letter from John Hospers:

“Apparently the idea that human beings came on the scene thru GRADUAL DEVELOPMENT, rather than POPPING SUDDENLY INTO EXISTENCE as you seem to think, is unnerving to you.”

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During the 1990′s I actually made it a practice to write famous atheists and scientists that were mentioned by Adrian Rogers and Francis Schaeffer and challenge them with the evidence for the Bible’s historicity and the claims of the gospel. Usually I would send them a cassette tape of Adrian Rogers’ messages “6 reasons I know the Bible is True,” “The Final Judgement,” “Who is Jesus?” and the message by Bill Elliff, “How to get a pure heart.”  I would also send them printed material from the works of Francis Schaeffer and a personal apologetic letter from me addressing some of the issues in their work. My second cassette tape that I sent to both Antony Flew and George Wald was Adrian Rogers’ sermon on evolution and here below you can watch that very sermon on You Tube.   Carl Sagan also took time to correspond with me about a year before he died. 

(Francis Schaeffer pictured below)

Adrian Rogers pictured below

I have posted on Adrian Rogers’ messages on Evolution before but here is a complete message on it.

Evolution: Fact of Fiction? By Adrian Rogers

_

Don’t get the idea that it’s just evangelical Christians—fundamentalists—who refuse evolution. Many of the greatest scientists who’ve ever lived in the past were creationists. Let me name some of them. This is the “Hall of Fame” in science: Michael Faraday, Lord Kelvin, Joseph Lister, Louis Pasteur, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Sir William Ramsey, Lord Francis Bacon, Samuel Morris. And, we could name others. All of these men were great scientists, and all of them were creationists.

1. Four Bridges that the Evolutionist Cannot Cross

Now, I said I rejected evolution. The first reason is for logical reasons. There are four bridges that the evolutionist cannot cross; and, I want to mention these, and this is all under the heading of logical reasons.

a. The Origin of Life
The first bridge the evolutionists cannot logically cross is the origin of life—the origin of life. Now, whence came life? Well, if you’re a Bible believer, you know what the Bible says, in Genesis 1, verse 24: “And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so” (Genesis 1:24). What does the evolutionist say? Well, he’s reduced to guesses. From whence came life?

One theory is—and you won’t believe this, but it’s been advanced by men who are supposed to be men of science—that some germ of life from some distant place in space hijacked a meteor, or was carried by a meteor, to Earth; and, that’s how life originated on Earth. All that does is just move the question back: How did life originate somewhere out yonder in space?

Others talk about something called spontaneous generation. That is—the way they love to explain it sounds so scientific—a fortuitous concourse of atoms. Well, that means, “kind of a flash of lightning through gas vapors, or green scum, or something.” Here’s this original soup; and now, ipso facto, it somehow just comes together—bing, there’s life.

(George Wald  is pictured above and I had the opportunity to correspond with him)

Let me tell you something: Dr. George Wald–Professor Emeritus of Biology at Harvard University—he won the Nobel Prize in Biology in 1971—writing in Scientific American on the origin of life, has said this—and I want you to listen carefully: “There are only two possibilities as to how life arose: One is spontaneous generation arising to evolution. The other is a supernatural creative act of God. There is no third possibility.” And, we would all say amen. Either God did it, or it just happened accidentally. All right. But now, let’s go on. So far, he’s doing good. He said there’s no third possibility. “Spontaneous generation, that life arose from nonliving matter, was scientifically disproved 120 years ago”—that was 120 years from when he made this statement—“by Louis Pasteur and others. That leaves us with only one possible conclusion: that life arose as a supernatural creative act of God.” So far, so good. But now, tune your ears, and don’t miss this. I want you to hear what this Nobel Prize winning scientist, Professor Emeritus of Biology at Harvard, said. Now remember, he said there are only two possibilities: Either there’s a creative act of God, or it is spontaneous generation that arises or moves to evolution. He said—and I’m continuing to quote: “I will not accept that…”—what that is he referring to? That it is a supernatural creative act of God—“I will not accept that philosophically, because I do not want to believe in God. Therefore, I choose to believe what I know is scientifically impossible: spontaneous generation arising to evolution.” Two theories: God did it; it just happened. “To say it just happened is impossible, but I believe it, because I don’t want to believe in God”—written in Scientific American.

Let me tell you, another evolutionist, Sir Arthur Keith, confessed this: “The only alternative to some form of evolution is special creation, which is unthinkable.” “That’s the only alternative,” he says, “that God did it.” He said, “Man, that’s just unthinkable.”

Scientist D. M. S. Watson displayed his prejudice when he wrote, “Evolution is a theory universally accepted—not because it can be proved by logically coherent evidence to be true, but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible.” “We accept it,” he says, “not because it can be proven, but to believe in God—oh no. So, we have to believe it.”

Now, what I want you to see is, therefore, that evolution is not truly science; it is philosophy. It is a bias against God. It is the next best guess of those who will not accept divine creation—the origin of life. For 2,000 years, man believed in spontaneous generation of life, because they did not know what Louis Pasteur discovered. And so, men would see some slimy water; and, after a while, there’d be wiggle tails in that water. They say, “Ah, life comes from that.” They would see some putrefaction on the ground; and, after a while, they would see maggots working in that putrefaction. “Ah, life comes out of putrefaction.” Or, they would see some rags—cheese rags, or whatever— and, after a while, mice would appear; and so, they said, “Look, that’s where life comes from. It comes spontaneously.”

But then, more than a century ago, Pasteur said that was impossible, and he proved spontaneous generation of life impossible. And, I want to tell you a basic axiom of biology: that life only arises from life. That is a basic axiom of biology. No biologist today would dare say that you can get life from anything other than life. They would say, scientifically, it is impossible to get life from nonliving matter. This law in science is called the law of biogenesis. It is a basic law of science. And, the evolutionist, without any proof—none, nada, none—would say it happened: “We know it’s impossible, but it had to happen, because we don’t believe in God.” No evolutionist—none—can show the origin of life. But, in order to prove evolution, friend, he’s got to start with the origin of life. He cannot cross that bridge.

(Louis Pasteur)

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Irving Petlin is featured artist today 

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Irving Petlin at Kent 2010.mov

Uploaded on Feb 2, 2010

ARTIST PROFILE

Pastel Master Irving Petlin

By Gwyn McAllister

Irving Petlin

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Irving Petlin
Irving Petlin at Kent Fine Art, New York, 2015
Born	December 17, 1934 Chicago, IL, United States
Nationality	American
Education	Art Institute of Chicago 1953-1956.Yale University, MFA, 1960
Known for	Painting, Pastel
Movement	Chicago Imagist

Irving Petlin (born December 17, 1934 in Chicago, Illinois) is an American artist and painter renowned for his mastery of the pastel medium and collaborations with other artists (including Mark di Suvero and Leon Golub) and for his work in the “series form”^[1] in which he uses the raw material of pastel, oil paint and unprimed linen, and finds inspiration in the work of writers and poets including Primo Levi, Bruno Schulz, Paul Celan, Michael Palmer and Edmond Jabès.^[2]

Petlin attended the Art Institute of Chicago from 1953-1956 where he received his BFA during the height of the Chicago Imagist movement. At a critical juncture Petlin attended Yale to study under Josef Albers, subsequently earning his MFA in 1960.^[2] In 1964, his work was shown at the Hanover Gallery in London and Galerie du Dragon in Paris, where he influenced the Nouvelle figuration (fr) movement. That same year, Petlin was invited to teach at UCLA as a visiting artist, along with artists Richard Diebenkorn and Llyn Foulkes.

While in California, he was a principal organizer of the “Artist’s Protest movement against the war in Vietnam.” In open meetings held at the Dwan Gallery, of which John Weber is the director, he founded the Artists’ Protest Committee. In 1966, Petlin planned the Peace Tower with help of Mark di Suvero, as well as Philip Lieder, Craig Kauffman, Larry Bell, Walter Hopps, Rolf Nelson, Judy Chicago, Lloyd Hamrol, Hardy Hanson, Eric Orr, Tanya Nuefeld, and others. “The Artists’ Call” for the tower is published in four languages, and works arrive from all over the world to be attached to it. The finished tower, was dedicated by Susan Sontag and untimately attacked overnight. The following year, in 1965, Petlin had his first major one-man exhibition held at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels. Shortly thereafter, he returned to New York with his family and moved into an apartment on West 11th Street. At this time, his growing commitment to the American milieu resulted in the completion of the painting The Burning of Los Angeles. During this period, Petlin is a founder and a participant in Artists and Writers Against the War in Vietnam, the Art Workers Coalition, the Art Strike, the Moratorium, the Venice Biennale.

Since the 1960s, when he became one of the founding members of “Artists and Writers Against the War in Vietnam,” Petlin has been a leader in artists’ political activism. He created the iconic anti-Vietnam War poster And babies in 1969. Petlin has continued his militant interventions after the 1960s through such activities as his participation in the “Artists’ Call Against the U.S. Intervention in Central America”.^[3] Petlin has taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, the Cooper Union in New York, as well as the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. He currently resides in Paris, New York and Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.

Selected exhibitions[edit]

2014 “The Still Open Case of Irving Petlin”. Kent Fine Art, New York[4] 2014 “Paris Show”: Galerie Jacques Leegenhoek[5] 2012 Irving Petlin: Storms: After Redon. Kent Fine Art, New York 2010 Irving Petlin: Major Paintings, 1979-2009. Kent Gallery, New York 2007 Orpheus, Pastels. Galerie Ditesheim, FIAC, Paris 2006 Este Mundo. Kent Gallery, New York 2002 Irving Petlin. Galerie Krugier-Ditesheim Art Contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland 2001 Out of the Shadows. School of the Museum of Fine Art, Boston 1998 A Tribute to Meyer Schapiro. Jan Krugier Gallery, New York 1997 Le Monde D’Edmond Jabes, Pastels. Krugier-Ditesheim Art Contemporain, Geneva 1996 Paris is White. Kent Gallery, New York 1995 Irving Petlin: 1955-1995, Disegni nacosti. Studio d’ Arte Recalcati, Turin, Italy 1993 Swiat Brunona Shulza. Galerie Kordegarda, Varsovie, Poland 1992 Memories Drawn from Bruno Schulz and Others. Kent Gallery, New York 1990 Israel in Egypt. Kent Fine Art, New York 1990 The Periodic Table. Gallery 400, University of Chicago, IL 1990 Chagall to Kitaj: Jewish Experience in 20th Century Art. Barbican Art Gallery London, England 1989 A Different War: Vietnam in Art. Whatcom Museum, Bellingham, WA. Curated by Lucy Lippard. 1988 Pastels 1961-1987. Kent Fine Art, New York, NY

1987 Weisswald. Kent Fine Art, New York 1982 Irving Petlin: Recent Paintings and Pastels. Marlborough Fine Art, London, UK 1982 The Venice Biennale, Italian Pavilion, Venice, Italy 1981 Drawings from the Studio, 1972-1981. University of California at Santa Cruz 1980 Irving Petlin, Pastels. Galerie Nina Dausset, Paris 1978 Rubbings (Large Paintings, Small Pastels). Neuberger Museum-SUNY, Purchase, NY & Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago, Il 1977 Galleria Bergamini, Milan, Italy 1974 Documenta, Torino, Italy 1973 Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Art, Whitney Museum New York, NY 1972 Galleria Bergamini, Milan, Italy 1968 Irving Petlin: Opere recent. Galleria Il Fante Di Spade, Rome, Italy 1967 Odyssia Gallery, New York 1966 Rolf Nelson Gallery, Los Angeles 1965 Petlin Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Belgium 1964 American Show, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL 1963 Petlin: Peintures 1962-1963. Galerie du Dragon, Paris, France 1961 Paris Biennal, American Section. Paris, France 1960 Petlin, Galerie du Dragon, Paris, France 1958 Dilexi Gallery, San Francisco, CA 1956 Cliffdweller Gallery, Chicago, IL 1954 Exhibition Momentum. Chicago, IL 1953-56 Art Institute, Chicago, IL

References[edit]

1. Jump up^ Palmer, Michael. Active Boundaries: Selected Essays and Talks. New York: New Directions Publishing, 2008. p. 164
2. ^ Jump up to:^{a b} “Irving Petlin: A retrospective”. Absolutearts.com. 2010-01-29. Retrieved 2014-06-02.
3. Jump up^ International School of Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture in Umbria, Italy Archived November 12, 2009, at the Wayback Machine.
4. Jump up^ http://www.kentfineart.net
5. Jump up^ http://www.pierrejoris.com/blog/?p=13753

External links[edit]

Petlin sites and artist pages

• Irving Petlin Artist Page
• Irving Petlin: A Retrospective Artist Page at Jan Krugier Gallery website
• Irving Petlin on artnet

Others on Petlin, including reviews & perspectives

• [1]
• “Irving Petlin: The Committed Brushstroke by Peter Selz.
• Irving Petlin, Este Mundo by Carrie Moyer at The Brooklyn Rail
• from Nomadics Blog: 3 Irving Petlin Shows in New York poet Pierre Joris provides links and commentary on his blog to the 3 major Petlin shows that occurred in New York City in early 2010
• Press: Three essays on Petlin link provides access to free PDF online versions of seminal Petlin retrospectives by Edward Fry (from the Wiesswald exhibition catalogue), Paul Cummings (“The Precincts of Light”), and Michael Palmer (“A Bonfire in the Starry Night”)
• The Unbearable Yet Obligatory, And other shows of modern and contemporary works
• Studio Matters, Arts & Commentary: Irving Petlin’s paintings; Bernardo Siciliano’s girlie pix; a Leonardo da Vinci for Times Square by Maureen Mullarkey

Petlin in his own words

• Kent Gallery Exhibition Catalogue of Major Paintings, 1979-2009 Click here for free PDF online publication of 90 pages that documented in full those works included in the Kent Gallery exhibition from 2010, including Petlin’s own commentaries and complete biographical information on the artist
• 1000 words: Peace Tower; Irving Petlin, Mark di Suvero, and Rirkrit Tiravanija revisit The Artists’ Tower of Protest, 1966 includes extensive transcript of Petlin in his own words
• Irving Petlin at Kent 2010 on YouTube Petlin discusses some of his work as he walks around the Kent Gallery in 2010
• In Conversation: Irving Petlin with John Yau renowned poet/art critic & Art Editor for The Brooklyn Rail John Yau interviews Petlin in 2006

Authority control WorldCat Identities VIAF: 50032917 ISNI: 0000 0000 7821 670X SUDOC: 082623031 BNF: cb119360169 (data) ULAN: 500020129 RKD: 62996

Categories:

• 1934 births
• Living people
• American artists
• 20th-century American painters
• 21st-century American painters
• Artists from Chicago, Illinois
• Yale University alumni
• People from Paris
• People from Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts
• School of the Art Institute of Chicago alumni
• University of Haifa faculty
• Dartmouth College faculty
• Artists from New York City

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