Dr. Weiss thought, as an assertion of faith, "I'm not going to let the galoots get me".
It's a vast cube of dark space, where pagan priests once prayed: a huge assertion of faith and power, high above a city now in ruins.
And yet because this is a painting, and one that relishes the story of western painting - Kitaj based its topography on Giorgione's Venetian masterpiece The Tempest - it's a defiant assertion of faith in art.
But any version of Christianity must resort, in the end, to an assertion of faith, to fundamentalism of a sort, be it as simple as shouts of assent at a revival meeting or as pondered and impressively phrased as Karl Barth's neo-orthodoxy.
If liberalism were a blind assertion of faith akin to other faiths -- belief in Christ or Allah -- we would have no grounds to defend free speech as opposed to "speech by permission," suited to the preferences of some, enforced by their power to coerce compliance.
As football fans are aware, Walker is the kind of media disciple who, if he lacks the official authority of, say, a Rev Richard Coles, our own Rev Giles Fraser, or their colleague, HSBC's Rev Stephen Green, more than compensates for this lay status with assertions of inflexible faith.
The park will be managed by a subsidiary of Answers in Genesis (AiG), which owns and runs the Creation Museum and requires its employees to adhere to a statement of faith that the Bible is "inerrant" and its assertions "factually true".
I am willing to be convinced…but only by actual reasoning, not by assertions of fact, accusations of bad faith, and the statement of simple equivalences".
The Republican plan is, in short, an assertion of a faith that transcends mundane economic logic.
And that brought me back to the SFA, which was basically an assertion of pagan faith in the aura of the artwork.
