John R. S. Davies

This chapter explores the concept of kitsch in religious liturgy, drawing on Szostak and Sułkowski’s (2020) framework to identify and critique kitsch elements in contemporary liturgical language. While kitsch is well-documented in visual liturgical arts, there is still room to develop a neutral framework for identifying and analysing kitsch in liturgical texts. This work builds on Catherine Madsen’s (2001) critique of superficial liturgical productions and examines how Bryan Spinks and David Jasper address the transformation of worship and liturgical language. A case study analysing two versions of an Anglican Ash Wednesday liturgy experiments with the practical application of Szostak’s criteria for distinguishing true aesthetic productions from kitsch. The study concludes with questions for evaluating new liturgical texts to help evaluate the maintenance of theological depth and to resist the pull towards kitsch.

Beliefs about hypothetical situations need to be 'quarantined' from factual representations, so that our inference processes do not make false conclusions about the real world. Nichols argued for the existence of a place where these special beliefs are kept: the pretence box. We show that this theory has a number of drawbacks, including its inability to account for simultaneously keeping track of multiple imagined worlds. We offer an explanation that remedies these problems: beliefs of content imagination each belong to some number of microtheories; systems of ideas tagged as being true or false only in certain contexts.

Captured through the lenses of some of the leading names in photography, Cities on the Edge provides a fascinating insight into six of the world’s most ‘edgy’ cities. Published to coincide with ambitious international ‘Cities on the Edge’ cultural programme, Davies and his hand picked team of photographers provide an incredible visual journey through six cities sharing common cultural, historical, social and economic ties. They are all ports, cities with great histories, cities which have battled with their capital cities over many centuries, cities famous for their creativity, humour, distinctiveness, love of football. They are also cities which are sometimes considered by their countrymen to be difficult and unruly. Beautiful, unnerving and often stark but always striking, Cities on the Edge is a visually stunning tale of six beautifully and contradictory cities placing their complicated histories in context with their place in the ‘New Europe’.