The lectionary passage for this week begins in John 3 14 with a strange image of Jesus lifted up as a serpent in the wilderness.
This was a strange image to take home as the war in Iraq began on television.
And in a strange mirror image, secularists are perfectly capable of dissolving any notion of responsibility in an invocation of ancient, even pre-human patterns of behavior.
Whatever was original about Chassériau was probably what later artists like Gustave Moreau and Puvis de Chavannes admired, a slight streak of rhetorical eccentricity, maybe, which you find only rarely, in historical works like the last picture in the show, "Emperor Augustus in Spain": a violent, strange image, loosely painted as if it were an oil sketch, but on the scale of a mural.
In a strange way, the images restore the dignity that is taken away from a people when they become too much of a collective, when they are constantly formulated and summarised into categories and definitions.
But now, as a mother raising two young daughters in "a strange epidemic of body image and body dysmorphia," she said articles like that "just add to all those younger girls, that are not in a place in their life where they can say, 'That doesn't reflect on me.' " "That makes it more true," she said.
You can see why ballet companies today have sought an alternative to this strange image.
As a result, the volume features such oddities as "Intellectual Amos," about a little kid with a big brain, and "Captain Marvel in the Land of Surrealism," in which the superhero finds himself in a "strange grotto" where the Dali-esque images come to life.
So, in a strange way, the people queuing in these images are enjoying themselves.
Image caption Josef Frantisek, "shrouded in a strange sadness" Why was he so successful?
