Supplemental material

In What Would Jesus Deconstruct the philosopher John Caputo, wrote about my work with the ikon community in Belfast. In that chapter he talked about ikon in relation to the theme of epoché. I’ve included that section below, as well as a link to where you can buy the full book (which I recommend). I’ve also enclosed a link to where you can buy Knight and Squire.

reflection

My friend Jay Bakker was the one who put me onto the comic book. He was doing a talk, and mentioned this magical pub called 'Time in a Bottle' and it struck me as a great metaphor for what we were doing in ikon at the time (the community I facilitated in Belfast for many years). 

It was the philosopher John Caputo, who really brought out how we were creating that type of space, when he wrote about ikon in his book What Would Jesus Deconstruct, so I've included that section of the book as part of the supplemental material.

These spaces are like deserts in the oasis of our lives. Quiet places nestled in the midst of our everyday life, where we can experience some kind of deeper kinship with others.

Hopefully we all have these kinds of spaces somewhere in our lives, whether it's at our monthly poker game, weekly coffee morning, online discussion group etc. They can be places where we can can be free to drop our defenses, engage with others and experience briefly a type of connection with others that crosses boundaries.

Perhaps a question to ask yourself today involves reflecting on whether you have that type of space in your life and/or how you might cultivate one.

Time in a Bottle

Knight and Squire is a six-issue, limited series comic book by Paul Cornell, Jimmy Broxton and Yanick Paquette, that offers a light-hearted parody of Batman and Robin.

The following excerpt is from the beginning of the first issue (published in October 2010). The first comic in the series takes place in an old London pub called Time in a Bottle. The fascinating thing about the pub is that a truce spell was cast over it, meaning that no-one can fight in it. Every Thursday night various heroes and villains go to the pub to have a drink and unwind.

It’s a place of radical suspension where there is “neither hero nor villain”. A place where two opposing sides can sit down, have a drink and discuss life. As a result we find that the two opposing camps aren’t really as different as we might initially assume.

I've included this excerpt close to the beginning because it offers a light hearted reflection on the philosophical notion of epoché. A term that means ‘suspension’ and that can be used to describe a space in which we suspend our usual assumptions in order to explore deeper truth. It is a term that has been used by people like John Caputo to describe a type of community in which we are able to encounter people beyond their various cultural, religious and political identities.

As such it can help paint a picture of the type of space that can be opened up in Atheism for Lent. We can perhaps think of it as analogous to this pub, offering a Truce Spell that enables the seemingly different camps of theist and atheist come together, learn from each other and find commonality.