{"id":41366,"date":"2017-08-11T06:15:50","date_gmt":"2017-08-11T10:15:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/?p=41366"},"modified":"2017-08-11T14:27:52","modified_gmt":"2017-08-11T18:27:52","slug":"the-elephant-in-the-room-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2017\/08\/the-elephant-in-the-room-2.html","title":{"rendered":"The Elephant in the Room"},"content":{"rendered":"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-\/\/W3C\/\/DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional\/\/EN\" \"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/REC-html40\/loose.dtd\">\n<html><head><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><\/head><body><div><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ZxDYHiLC1QY\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>As the first movement of his choral and orchestral work titled <em><a href=\"http:\/\/amzn.to\/2eQmowR\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">Creation\/Creator,<\/a><\/em>\u00a0Christopher Theofanidis used for the libretto a poem by the famous Sufi mystic Rumi (translated by <a href=\"https:\/\/regworldlit.files.wordpress.com\/2013\/10\/elephant-in-the-dark-text-of-poem.pdf\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">Coleman Barks<\/a>):<\/div>\n<blockquote><p><strong>Elephant in the Dark<\/strong><\/p>\n<div>Some Hindus have an elephant to show.<\/div>\n<div>No one here has ever seen an elephant.<\/div>\n<div>They bring it at night to a dark room.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>One by one, we go in the dark and come out<\/div>\n<div>saying how we experience the animal.<\/div>\n<div>One of us happens to touch the trunk.<\/div>\n<div>A water-pipe kind of creature.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Another, the ear. A very strong, always moving<\/div>\n<div>back and forth, fan-animal. Another, the leg.<\/div>\n<div>I find it still, like a column on a temple.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Another touches the curved back.<\/div>\n<div>A leathery throne. Another the cleverest,<\/div>\n<div>feels the tusk. A rounded sword made of porcelain.<\/div>\n<div>He is proud of his description.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Each of us touches one place<\/div>\n<div>and understands the whole that way.<\/div>\n<div>The palm and the fingers feeling in the dark<\/div>\n<div>are how the senses explore the reality of the elephant.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>If each of us held a candle there,<\/div>\n<div>and if we went in together, we could see it.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div><a href=\"http:\/\/rumidays.blogspot.com\/2010\/11\/elephant-in-dark.html\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">This poem<\/a> offers a wonderfully different and fresh perspective on the classic parable of the elephant and the blind men. I have long felt that the view articulated in it is an important clue to how to find a third way, one that leads out from the apparent impasse between Enlightenment modernism\u2019s overconfident claims to knowledge and extreme postmodernism\u2019s insistence that we cannot know for certain.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>I can\u2019t recall who put it this way, but someone has said that \u201cJust because we all have biases, that doesn\u2019t mean that all we have\u00a0are biases.\u201d What we see together despite our biases, through our different lenses, and from our different vantage points, has a greater chance of being correct than anything one individual or even one group may perceive or conclude.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Some call it \u201ccritical realism.\u201d But it seems to me to me that it deserves a more inspiring name than either that or \u201ccollective elephant perceptionism.\u201d<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Theofanidis\u2019 piece <em><a href=\"http:\/\/amzn.to\/2eQmowR\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">Creation\/Creator<\/a><\/em> incorporates a wide array of texts about creation, ranging from the Rig Veda to St. Augustine to Sefer Yetzirah to a retelling of Genesis by poet James Weldon Johnson.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>For something almost entirely unrelated, see <a href=\"http:\/\/www.internetmonk.com\/archive\/75426\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">the analogy\u00a0between moral reasoning and elephant-steering in the recent post by Chaplain Mike<\/a>.<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Christopher-Theofanidis-Creation-Kelley-OConnor\/dp\/B013ROL1R6\/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&amp;linkCode=li3&amp;tag=jamefmcgrshom-20&amp;linkId=e926dab8ca394111f4643d23a78cae49\" target=\"_blank\" class=\" decorated-link\" rel=\"nofollow\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/\/ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/widgets\/q?_encoding=UTF8&amp;ASIN=B013ROL1R6&amp;Format=_SL250_&amp;ID=AsinImage&amp;MarketPlace=US&amp;ServiceVersion=20070822&amp;WS=1&amp;tag=jamefmcgrshom-20\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\"><\/a><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;\" src=\"https:\/\/ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/e\/ir?t=jamefmcgrshom-20&amp;l=li3&amp;o=1&amp;a=B013ROL1R6\" alt=\"\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" border=\"0\"><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As the first movement of his choral and orchestral work titled Creation\/Creator,\u00a0Christopher Theofanidis used for the libretto a poem by the famous Sufi mystic Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks): Elephant in the Dark Some Hindus have an elephant to show. No one here has ever seen an elephant. They bring it at night to a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":136,"featured_media":41367,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[144,149],"tags":[14842,2438,3007,4624,7838,7841,9274,10628,12025,12027],"class_list":["post-41366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hinduism","category-islam-religion","tag-blind","tag-dark","tag-elephant","tag-hindu","tag-mystic","tag-mysticism","tag-poem","tag-rumi","tag-sufi","tag-sufism"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The Elephant in the Room<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"As the first movement of his choral and orchestral work titled Creation\/Creator,\u00a0Christopher Theofanidis used for the libretto a poem by the famous Sufi\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2017\/08\/the-elephant-in-the-room-2.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Elephant in the Room\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"As the first movement of his choral and orchestral work titled Creation\/Creator,\u00a0Christopher Theofanidis used for the libretto a poem by the famous Sufi\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2017\/08\/the-elephant-in-the-room-2.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Religion Prof: The Blog of James F. 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