The Cynic And The Fool – Book Signing And Talk By Tad Delay

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When?  Thursday, November 9, 6:30-8:30 Where? BookBar, 4280 Tennyson Street, Denver, CO 80212, 303-284-0194 BookBar “is a bookshop for wine lovers. A wine bar for book shoppers. And a fabulous cafe, too”. Sponsored by Cri Hub.  Admission free and open to the public.  Map. The questioning of religion is the beginning of a flood, one that cannot be contained and will soon drown every theological, political, economic, and cultural orthodoxy that pledged its allegiance to a sinking cause. We are in just such an era of revolt, and those with eyes to see are learning to interrogate motives. When we are told of an idea that cannot possibly be true, the most immediate question is this: does the speaker so very foolishly believe their own words, or is the person a cynic who knows perfectly well how they manipulate the truth? As individual personalities transform into a collective drive, the aftermath is a brutal […]

Divinatory Poetics – Public Talk And Book Signing by Selah Saterstrom

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When?  Thursday, October 12, 6:30-8:30 Where? BookBar, 4280 Tennyson Street, Denver, CO 80212, 303-284-0194 BookBar “is a bookshop for wine lovers. A wine bar for book shoppers. And a fabulous cafe, too”. Sponsored by Cri Hub.  Admission free and open to the public.  Map. Selah Saterstrom’s creative work draws heavily from her life growing up in the Spiritual Church Movement in Natchez, Mississippi. As a university student, she studied Biblical hermeneutics and was influenced by writers such as Stephen Moore (Derrida & Foucault at the Foot of the Cross, God’s Gym).  Her work addresses the tensions and consonances between postmodern hermeneutics and the spiritualist tradition in which she was raised.  While divinatory tactics, such as tarot card reading, keep a fashionable place in New Age culture, Saterstrom’s work with divination comes from a lineage of root workers in the South and runs much deeper than a fad.   Saterstrom’s novels – The Pink Institution; The Meat and Spirit Plan; and Slab […]

A Half Century Of Postmodernism – Public Talk And Book Signing By Carl Raschke On His Latest Work

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When?  Thursday, September 21, 6:30-8:30 Where? BookBar, 4280 Tennyson Street, Denver, CO 80212, 303-284-0194 BookBar “is a bookshop for wine lovers. A wine bar for book shoppers. And a fabulous cafe, too”. Sponsored by Cri Hub.  Admission free and open to the public.  Map. The term “postmodernism” has functioned as a term of both celebration and rebuke for much of contemporary history since the Vietnam era.   It has especially defined the spiritual heritage of the West during that period, serving as a badge of identity for religious seekers of three generations as well as the perennial whipping boy for conservatives and fundamentalists. What has postmodernism wrought, and is it finally over?  Come hear University of Denver Professor Carl Raschke, internationally recognized as the “inventor” of religious postmodernism, answer these questions while reflecting on the changes and upheaval in our culture during the past half -century.  Title: “Bye, Bye Xanadu: Postmodernism as our 50-Year Spiritual Odyssey From the Hippies To […]

Critical Conversations – Taking The Spiritual Temperature Of Our Time

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Starting in September 2017 CRI launches a series of  talks entitled Critical Conversations by and with Denver-based writers and public intellectuals on topics connected to their new books, which have been just recently published. Critical Conversations is a partnership with BookBar, 4280 Tennyson St, Denver, CO 80212 and will be held once a month on Thursday evenings in September, October, and November. The first “conversations” will focus on the theme “Taking the Spiritual Temperature Of Our Time”, an exploration of the ways in which contemporary arts and culture as well as politics are both infused with and shaped by the deeper longings of the heart, including inklings of an immaterial realm. All sessions are from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. .  The fall schedule for Critical Conversations is as follows: Thursday, September 21. Carl Raschke.   Author of Force of God, GloboChrist, Fire And Roses, and More. Professor of Religious Studies, University of Denver.  Talk: “Bye, Bye Xanadu: Postmodernism […]

CRI Hosts Discussion On The Transformative Power Of The Arts In Vienna

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THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF THE ARTS. Joy Sawyer from Denver’s Lighthouse Writers’ Workshop talks expounds on the power of poetry at the Donauhof renovation project last Friday evening in Vienna. Her presentation was part of a special CRI conversation among writers, musicians, and visual artists (both American and Austrian) entitled “The Arts in Action”. How does art make a difference in today’s conflicted and storm-tossed world?

Taking Back Literature – Can Authors, Publishers, and Booksellers Mobilize Against the Corporatocracy’s Hostile Takeover of the Industry?

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Denver, Colorado Sunday, July 23 7-9:30 p.m. The Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop Lighthouse Writers Workshop, 1515 Race St. Denver, CO 80206 Donations appreciated. Map With novelist Nick Arvin, nonfiction author Tad DeLay, poet and Counterpath publisher Julie Carr, Conundrum Press publisher Caleb Seeling, and BookBar owner Nicole Sullivan We are all writers now. Whether through traditional industry publishing or self-publishing, in print or online, we can push new ideas and literature to interested readers. Unfortunately, the current situation is dire for authors, publishers, and booksellers; the reading public suffers along with them. Though over a million new books are published each year, only one percent land in a brick-and-mortar bookstore. Eighty percent of books sell less than one hundred copies per year. A book can reach the New York Times bestseller list without earning enough in royalties to push the author above the poverty line. Amazon promised and delivered unprecedented global access […]

“Crisis Cafe” Is Coming In August

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If you’ve been to either of our first two “critical community conversations” you’ve heard quite a bit about “critical theory.” But just what does that term mean, exactly? Perhaps you’d like to further pursue your curiosity by participating in a serious reading group–one that will explore key critical theory texts and “big ideas” that directly affect our contemporary lives. If so, please join us in August for the first of our monthly reading cohorts, which we’re calling the “Crisis Cafe.” With the launch of the Crisis Cafe, we’re hoping to promote the “cafe culture” that’s so easily lost in digital America: face-to-face encounters in real–not virtual–space. We’ll meet at a local cafe, where we’ll talk, listen, and learn together over a cup of coffee or a cold brew. Be sure to watch this space for details about date and location. But in the meantime, you may want to take a […]

The Arts In Action – Making Music, Painting, And Poetry A Force Of Change Once More

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Vienna, Austria  Friday, June 30 7:00-10:00 pm Donauhof, Engerthstraße 141, 1020 Wien Donation Map   In the 1950s, American art critic Harold Rosenberg wrote that “art must have the will to change the world”—and discerned that very passion and drive in postwar avant-garde movements in painting, poetry, and music. In our commercial age, art has increasingly degenerated into a global commodity rather than an agent of genuine change. So how do we revive the arts as radical, boundary-breaking, world-transforming forms of creative engagement Rosenberg envisioned more than half a century ago? Come join us for an evening of performance, encounter, and conversation with both Austrian and American painters, poets, and musicians in our quest to create something radically new in the tradition of Rosenberg’s “actional” art.  How does art inform social and political action, and vice-versa? The event is a benefit for the Donauhhof Coffee House/ Event and Co-Working Space in Vienna’s Second District.

Kickoff CRI Event Has Packed House

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The kickoff event for CRI (entitled “Something’s Happening Here: The Summer of Love and the Birth of the Counterculture”) at the Deer Pile in Denver yesterday afternoon was awesome. The room was full, and we had almost three hours of lively, focused, energizing, and at times brilliant conversation about the meaning of the Sixties both for historians and for those of us today. As the old saying goes, “a good time was had by all.” A variety of perspectives were offered by different contemporary observers and veterans of the Sixties, including writer and publisher Josiah Hess, Sixties cultural historian Roger Green, Denver photographer Richard Peterson, and University of Denver professors Christina Foust and Carl Raschke as well as Colorado college instructor Jan Briel. Join us for our next event on May 20 at the Lighthouse in Denver (http://crisis-cafe.com/the-midrashic-unconscious-unearthin…/). You don’t want to miss it!

The Midrashic Unconscious – Unearthing The Jewish Literary Voice Through Critical Theory

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Denver, Colorado Saturday, May 20 7-9 pm Lighthouse Writers Workshop, 1515 Race St. Denver, CO 80206 RSVP.  Donations appreciated. Map “Critical theory”—a broad intellectual movement dating back to 1920s Europe—profoundly helped shape the last generation’s progressive thought. What Frederic Jameson termed the “political unconscious” is now staging a major comeback amidst our current cultural climate.  And we desperately need quality literary voices to join the conversation. Max Horkheimer, a founder of the critical theory movement, once said that such theory is a multi-faceted thought enterprise which seeks “”to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them,” including both their thinking and means of communication. But what many avid proponents overlook (in what’s now called “new critical theory”) is the movement’s distinctively Jewish origins, and its unmistakable Jewish voice.  The founders of the movement aimed not only to foster prophetic conversational critiques of culture, politics, and society, but also to radicalize and […]