You or someone you know left organized religion? 

​Artist Alan Nakagawa invites submissions of 3-sentence stories of this 'turn' in life -- see:  

​https://prospectart.org/participate.html

"Prospect Art is pleased to present "Point of Turn," a participatory project by Alan Nakagawa.

Alan Nakagawa is an interdisciplinary artist with archiving tendencies, primarily working with sound, often incorporating various media and working with existing communities. Nakagawa is the recipient of two Art Matters grants, the City of Los Angeles Artist Fellowship, the California Community Foundation Mid-Career Artist Fellowship, and a Monbusho Scholar.

"Point of Turn" is a community-based project about the final moment or experience that led to an individual's decision to leave organized religion. Organized religion's role in our lives can be deep and complex. As the current Pasadena Buddhist Temple artist-in-resident, Nakagawa has learned about the dynamics between faith and religion as a cultural center in individuals' lives, dogma versus community.

The project initiates with the data collection of short sound bites that name the moment that led individuals to break with religion. Not the complex history that led to it or the subsequent journey, but the story, the straw that broke the camel's back. Ideally, he would like to collect dozens of narrated moments and compose them into a sound piece.

The project will launch with a free and open forum through a public zoom meeting. In the zoom meeting  Alan,  will be in conversation with Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter and will introduce the project and invite audiences to share their point of turn. Bennett-Carpenter is the author of Death in Documentaries: The Memento Mori Experience (Brill, 2018) and Explaining Jesus: An Interdisciplinary Exploration of a Phenomenon (Lexington / Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).

The event will be Friday, March 3rd at 5pm PST.

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83171171003?pwd=dXFRWDIrNCtmdnpQV2NYSlJvK3E1Zz09

Meeting ID: 831 7117 1003

Passcode: 972331"

https://prospectart.org/alan-nakagawa.html

Some work ends up being ‘an experience of encounter with an ethical challenge of creating one’s life for one’s self within its defined existential limits and engaging the work one has inherited.'

-DD, p. 25 

Some 'makers' in creative practice 'are strong personalities, and to experience them through their work is to come away differently, to have one's "form of life" altered.'

-DD, p. 24

"What’s the first thing that comes to mind for you when you hear the word “global”? Beyond the global as system or sphere, I have in mind the ways it may work as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, or dialectic.  This short essay reflects briefly on some initial associations that may arise in the context of exploring global studies."

https://gsc.gust.edu.kw/2021-carpenter

PDF at:  https://gsc.gust.edu.kw/sites/default/files/files/GSC%20Newsletter%202%20-%202021.pdf

'Any item, whether word, image, artifact, or what-have-you, that makes a difference to somebody as it runs into other items (words, images, etc.) means we have a sign.  The chains and networks of all these signs that form as they bump into each other are semiotic systems.

It is also possible to conceptualize the system of signs as not only synchronic and diachronic but also as a "fluid" "surface" that may ebb and flow, jump, appear and disappear, and absorb "closed systems" defined by linear patterning and non-relative schemas.  One may conceive of an infinite "play" of signs, with [any particular] prominent sign [one may choose] within that "play" or semiotic "game" space.'

-XJ, pp. 110, 117, adapted

'It is said that thinking and reading and writing and talking about living is no substitute for living, except that thinking and reading and writing and talking are already life.

These marks on this page/screen are not "not natural".  Both these pecks on the page/screen and the pecks on the bird's nest (outside my window) are natural, where "natural" is a totalizing term for all that is, positively speaking, and which comes to us humans and individuals as most obvious in the most powerful "other" that humans deal with, which are the physical elements, external and internal.'

-Memento Vivere project rough notes, 12 Oct 2020, adapted