Where faith is a healer: Intro: "A recent Reader's Digest survey found that 31% of people thought Easter was sponsored by Cadbury's, while 48% had no idea what the religious festival was about. The 16-24 age group had the lowest level of knowledge. The survey is more evidence of how Britain has been comprehensively de-Christianised in the past 50 years. What's interesting is how peculiar this phenomenon is in a global context and how blind we are to our peculiarity. As we have become increasingly wedded to our faithlessness, the world beyond western Europe has experienced an astonishing increase in religiosity. We have painfully and slowly been forced to acknowledge this in the US and in the Muslim world - and it completely bewilders the faithless. Secular Europe is losing an ability to speak a language - that of faith. It pretends that faith is simply a personal hobby. When the pretence doesn't work, it peers, fearfully, at a world all around it that has become profoundly foreign. Nowhere is that more true than Africa. It is another part of the globe that urgently needs to be mapped in terms of its rapidly intensifying religiosity if we are to begin to understand what is happening there. Some argue that the intensification of religious identity and consciousness - evident from the Pakistani madrasas to the Baptist churches of the American south - finds its apogee in Africa. Christianity and Islam are expanding dramatically as they gather new converts, while African traditional religions are experiencing a renaissance." Link
monochrom is an art-technology-philosophy group having its seat in Vienna and Zeta Draconis. monochrom is an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, context hacking and political activism. Our mission is conducted everywhere, but first and foremost in culture-archeological digs into the seats (and pockets) of ideology and entertainment. monochrom has existed in this (and almost every other) form since 1993. [more]
