United Methodist Church Announces Plan to Split Over Same-Sex Marriage
Under an agreement to be voted on in May, a new “traditionalist Methodist” denomination would continue to ban same-sex marriage and gay and lesbian clergy.
A group of leaders of the United Methodist Church, the second-largest Protestant denomination in the United States, announced on Friday a plan that would formally split the church, citing “fundamental differences” over same-sex marriage after years of division.
The plan would sunder a denomination with 13 million members globally — roughly half of them in the United States — and create at least one new “traditionalist Methodist” denomination that would continue to ban same-sex marriage as well as the ordination of gay and lesbian clergy.
It seems likely that the majority of the denomination’s churches in the United States would remain in the existing United Methodist Church, which would become a more liberal-leaning institution as conservative congregations worldwide depart.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/03/us/m ... ogin-email
Christianity
Ex-pope Benedict rejects opening up priesthood to married men
Former pope Benedict XVI has publicly urged his successor Pope Francis not to open the Catholic priesthood up to married men, in a plea that Sunday stunned Vatican experts.
The ex-pontiff, who retired in 2013, issued the defence of clerical celibacy in a book written with arch-conservative Cardinal Robert Sarah, extracts of which were published in exclusive by France's Le Figaro.
"I cannot keep silent!" Benedict wrote in the book, which follows an extraordinary meeting of bishops from the Amazonian at the Vatican last year that recommended the ordination of married men in certain circumstances.
The pope emeritus, 92, and Sarah from Guinea weighed in on the controversial question of whether or not to allow "viri probati" -- married "men of proven virtue" -- to join the priesthood.
Francis is currently considering allowing it in remote locations, such as the Amazon, where communities seldom have Mass due to a lack of priests, and is expected to publish his decision in the coming weeks.
The pair asked the whole Church not to be "swayed" by "bad pleas, theatrics, diabolical lies, fashionable errors that want to devalue priestly celibacy".
"It is urgent, necessary, that everyone, bishops, priests and laity, let themselves be guided once more by faith as they look upon the Church and on priestly celibacy that protects her mystery," they wrote.
They warned of priests "confused by the incessant questioning of their consecrated celibacy".
"The conjugal state concerns man in his totality, and since the service of the Lord also requires the total gift of man, it does not seem possible to realise the two vocations simultaneously," Benedict wrote.
Sarah insisted that while celibacy can be "a trial" it is also "a liberation".
More...
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/ex ... ailsignout
Former pope Benedict XVI has publicly urged his successor Pope Francis not to open the Catholic priesthood up to married men, in a plea that Sunday stunned Vatican experts.
The ex-pontiff, who retired in 2013, issued the defence of clerical celibacy in a book written with arch-conservative Cardinal Robert Sarah, extracts of which were published in exclusive by France's Le Figaro.
"I cannot keep silent!" Benedict wrote in the book, which follows an extraordinary meeting of bishops from the Amazonian at the Vatican last year that recommended the ordination of married men in certain circumstances.
The pope emeritus, 92, and Sarah from Guinea weighed in on the controversial question of whether or not to allow "viri probati" -- married "men of proven virtue" -- to join the priesthood.
Francis is currently considering allowing it in remote locations, such as the Amazon, where communities seldom have Mass due to a lack of priests, and is expected to publish his decision in the coming weeks.
The pair asked the whole Church not to be "swayed" by "bad pleas, theatrics, diabolical lies, fashionable errors that want to devalue priestly celibacy".
"It is urgent, necessary, that everyone, bishops, priests and laity, let themselves be guided once more by faith as they look upon the Church and on priestly celibacy that protects her mystery," they wrote.
They warned of priests "confused by the incessant questioning of their consecrated celibacy".
"The conjugal state concerns man in his totality, and since the service of the Lord also requires the total gift of man, it does not seem possible to realise the two vocations simultaneously," Benedict wrote.
Sarah insisted that while celibacy can be "a trial" it is also "a liberation".
More...
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/ex ... ailsignout
CHRISTIAN NATIONALISTS AIM TO DISMANTLE THIS CORE FREEDOM
As Frederick Clarkson noted on RD earlier this week, every January 16 we celebrate Religious Freedom Day. On this day 234 years ago, the Virginia Assembly passed the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, setting in motion what, according to Clarkson, “may be the most revolutionary and liberatory idea in the history of civilization.”
America’s unique contribution to political science is the separation of state and church. We invented it and it’s the only guarantee for true religious liberty. The “wall of separation” that Thomas Jefferson famously wrote of—a metaphor that the Supreme Court first adopted nearly 150 years ago—is an American original. The idea was born in the Enlightenment, but it was first implemented in the American Experiment. This is not just an improvement on political science, but one of our country’s unique contributions to humanity.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gary Wills put it nicely in his 1990 book, Under God: Religion and American Politics. The separation of state and church:
“more than anything else, made the United States a new thing on earth… . Everything else in our Constitution—separation of powers, balanced government, bicameralism, federalism—had been anticipated both in theory and practice. . . . But we invented nothing, except disestablishment. No other government in history had launched itself without the help of officially recognized gods and their state-connected ministers.”
Until America, no other government in the history of humanity had sought to protect citizens’ right to think freely by divorcing religion and government.
We should be proud of that contribution to the world, but Christian nationalists are doing their best to destroy it. Many groups are actively protecting the wall: the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, the ACLU, American Atheists, the Center For Inquiry, the American Humanist Association, and others. The wall of separation is crumbling, though not from neglect. It’s being attacked.
The Trump administration is rife with Christian nationalists attempting to rewrite the Constitution by revising American history and declare this a “Christian nation.” Betsy Devos, Mike Pence, Ben Carson, Rick Perry, Jeff Sessions, Bill Barr, and Mike Pompeo have been abusing their government power to promote their personal religion. But under the U.S. Constitution, the government “has no particle of spiritual jurisdiction,” as Alexander Hamilton explained in The Federalist Papers.
At the head of this Christian Nationalist beast is Donald Trump. Today, he’s issuing a guidance to put prayer back in public schools. He’s appointed not only the Christian nationalists above, but also megachurch preacher Paula White to a White House position for which she has no qualifications. Trump held his first 2020 campaign rally at a church run by “Apostle” Guillermo Maldonado who, like Paula White, preaches the prosperity gospel, a theology so controversial even many conservative Christian leaders denounce it as false. (Incidentally, Maldonado’s church, El Rey Jesus, likely violated IRS regulations as the Freedom From Religion Foundation and members of Congress pointed out.)
At that rally, less than two weeks before Religious Freedom Day, Trump was clear about his desire to unite state and church. He declared, “We will restore the role of faith and true foundation of American life and we will ensure that our country forever and always remains one people, one family, and one glorious nation under God.” In the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Jefferson skewered:
“the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavouring to impose them on others.”
He might have been writing about Trump.
Without the secular government our founders established, religious freedom, the foundational American value that we celebrate every January 16, cannot exist. There is no freedom of religion without a government that is free from religion. The United States realized the dream of genuine religious freedom because it embarked “upon a great and noble experiment . . . hazarded in the absence of all previous precedent—that of total separation of Church and State,” as President John Tyler put it.
https://religiondispatches.org/christia ... e-freedom/
As Frederick Clarkson noted on RD earlier this week, every January 16 we celebrate Religious Freedom Day. On this day 234 years ago, the Virginia Assembly passed the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, setting in motion what, according to Clarkson, “may be the most revolutionary and liberatory idea in the history of civilization.”
America’s unique contribution to political science is the separation of state and church. We invented it and it’s the only guarantee for true religious liberty. The “wall of separation” that Thomas Jefferson famously wrote of—a metaphor that the Supreme Court first adopted nearly 150 years ago—is an American original. The idea was born in the Enlightenment, but it was first implemented in the American Experiment. This is not just an improvement on political science, but one of our country’s unique contributions to humanity.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gary Wills put it nicely in his 1990 book, Under God: Religion and American Politics. The separation of state and church:
“more than anything else, made the United States a new thing on earth… . Everything else in our Constitution—separation of powers, balanced government, bicameralism, federalism—had been anticipated both in theory and practice. . . . But we invented nothing, except disestablishment. No other government in history had launched itself without the help of officially recognized gods and their state-connected ministers.”
Until America, no other government in the history of humanity had sought to protect citizens’ right to think freely by divorcing religion and government.
We should be proud of that contribution to the world, but Christian nationalists are doing their best to destroy it. Many groups are actively protecting the wall: the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, the ACLU, American Atheists, the Center For Inquiry, the American Humanist Association, and others. The wall of separation is crumbling, though not from neglect. It’s being attacked.
The Trump administration is rife with Christian nationalists attempting to rewrite the Constitution by revising American history and declare this a “Christian nation.” Betsy Devos, Mike Pence, Ben Carson, Rick Perry, Jeff Sessions, Bill Barr, and Mike Pompeo have been abusing their government power to promote their personal religion. But under the U.S. Constitution, the government “has no particle of spiritual jurisdiction,” as Alexander Hamilton explained in The Federalist Papers.
At the head of this Christian Nationalist beast is Donald Trump. Today, he’s issuing a guidance to put prayer back in public schools. He’s appointed not only the Christian nationalists above, but also megachurch preacher Paula White to a White House position for which she has no qualifications. Trump held his first 2020 campaign rally at a church run by “Apostle” Guillermo Maldonado who, like Paula White, preaches the prosperity gospel, a theology so controversial even many conservative Christian leaders denounce it as false. (Incidentally, Maldonado’s church, El Rey Jesus, likely violated IRS regulations as the Freedom From Religion Foundation and members of Congress pointed out.)
At that rally, less than two weeks before Religious Freedom Day, Trump was clear about his desire to unite state and church. He declared, “We will restore the role of faith and true foundation of American life and we will ensure that our country forever and always remains one people, one family, and one glorious nation under God.” In the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Jefferson skewered:
“the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavouring to impose them on others.”
He might have been writing about Trump.
Without the secular government our founders established, religious freedom, the foundational American value that we celebrate every January 16, cannot exist. There is no freedom of religion without a government that is free from religion. The United States realized the dream of genuine religious freedom because it embarked “upon a great and noble experiment . . . hazarded in the absence of all previous precedent—that of total separation of Church and State,” as President John Tyler put it.
https://religiondispatches.org/christia ... e-freedom/
At least 20 killed in stampede at Tanzania church service
DAR ES SALAAM (Reuters) - At least 20 people have been killed and over a dozen injured in a stampede during a church service at a stadium in northern Tanzania, a government official said on Sunday.
Hundreds of people packed a stadium on Saturday evening in Moshi town near the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro and crushed each other as they rushed to get anointed with "blessed oil".
"Twenty people died and 16 others were injured in the incident," Moshi district commissioner Kippi Warioba told Reuters by telephone. Five of those killed were children, he said.
"The stampede occurred when the worshippers were rushing to get anointed with blessed oil," Warioba said.
Pastor Boniface Mwamposa has been drawing huge crowds by promising prosperity and cure for disease to worshippers who walk on what he describes as "blessed oil" during his church services.
"The incident took place at night and there were many people, so there is a possibility that more casualties could emerge. We are still assessing the situation," Warioba said.
Tanzania has seen a rise in the number of "prosperity gospel" pastors in recent years, who promise to lift people out of poverty and perform what they call miracle cures.
Thousands of people in the nation of 55 million flock to Pentecostal churches, whose main source of income is "tithe", the 10% or so of income that worshippers are asked to contribute.
(Reporting by Fumbuka Ng'wanakilala; Editing by Elias Biryabarema and Christopher Cushing)
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/at ... ailsignout
DAR ES SALAAM (Reuters) - At least 20 people have been killed and over a dozen injured in a stampede during a church service at a stadium in northern Tanzania, a government official said on Sunday.
Hundreds of people packed a stadium on Saturday evening in Moshi town near the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro and crushed each other as they rushed to get anointed with "blessed oil".
"Twenty people died and 16 others were injured in the incident," Moshi district commissioner Kippi Warioba told Reuters by telephone. Five of those killed were children, he said.
"The stampede occurred when the worshippers were rushing to get anointed with blessed oil," Warioba said.
Pastor Boniface Mwamposa has been drawing huge crowds by promising prosperity and cure for disease to worshippers who walk on what he describes as "blessed oil" during his church services.
"The incident took place at night and there were many people, so there is a possibility that more casualties could emerge. We are still assessing the situation," Warioba said.
Tanzania has seen a rise in the number of "prosperity gospel" pastors in recent years, who promise to lift people out of poverty and perform what they call miracle cures.
Thousands of people in the nation of 55 million flock to Pentecostal churches, whose main source of income is "tithe", the 10% or so of income that worshippers are asked to contribute.
(Reporting by Fumbuka Ng'wanakilala; Editing by Elias Biryabarema and Christopher Cushing)
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/at ... ailsignout
The Gospel According to Kanye West
On the making of gospel music, from Gospel Pearls to Jesus Is King.
On January 6, 2019, the rapper Kanye West did what no superstar rapper before him has—he launched his own Sunday Service with a dynamic eighty-person gospel choir. West was the draw, but the gospel choir was the intended centerpiece. It is the highlight of his subsequent Jesus Is King and Jesus Is Born albums. While West’s highly acclaimed 2004 single “Jesus Walks” utilized a choir and rapped the protective power of Jesus, the Sunday Service made the choir the star, highlighting its unique ability to incite churchgoers and atheists alike to stand up and clap their hands. This has always been the gospel choir’s superpower—to rouse audiences and unite them for a common cause.
Although West’s Sunday Service has been surrounded by controversy for a variety of reasons, the main debate—namely, who is worthy to sing “the good news,” as well as how and where it should be sung—is not new. It is almost as old as gospel music itself, and West’s choir is symbolic, not just of the decades-old debate, but of the evolution of gospel music and its show-stopping choirs.
Featuring a rousing gospel choir—The Samples—mostly invite-only attendees, and uniform-style outfits in lieu of traditional choir robes (approved, of course, by the rapper himself), the Sunday Service deviates from a traditional church service and refuses to be labeled as such. Instead, the church-like service typically exudes the love of God through harmonious song in lieu of the preached word. Building on the foundation laid by gospel’s forefathers and foremothers, the service literally takes the good news out into the world, as its location rotates weekly and is set to go international in 2020.
More...
https://daily.jstor.org/the-gospel-acco ... dium=email
On the making of gospel music, from Gospel Pearls to Jesus Is King.
On January 6, 2019, the rapper Kanye West did what no superstar rapper before him has—he launched his own Sunday Service with a dynamic eighty-person gospel choir. West was the draw, but the gospel choir was the intended centerpiece. It is the highlight of his subsequent Jesus Is King and Jesus Is Born albums. While West’s highly acclaimed 2004 single “Jesus Walks” utilized a choir and rapped the protective power of Jesus, the Sunday Service made the choir the star, highlighting its unique ability to incite churchgoers and atheists alike to stand up and clap their hands. This has always been the gospel choir’s superpower—to rouse audiences and unite them for a common cause.
Although West’s Sunday Service has been surrounded by controversy for a variety of reasons, the main debate—namely, who is worthy to sing “the good news,” as well as how and where it should be sung—is not new. It is almost as old as gospel music itself, and West’s choir is symbolic, not just of the decades-old debate, but of the evolution of gospel music and its show-stopping choirs.
Featuring a rousing gospel choir—The Samples—mostly invite-only attendees, and uniform-style outfits in lieu of traditional choir robes (approved, of course, by the rapper himself), the Sunday Service deviates from a traditional church service and refuses to be labeled as such. Instead, the church-like service typically exudes the love of God through harmonious song in lieu of the preached word. Building on the foundation laid by gospel’s forefathers and foremothers, the service literally takes the good news out into the world, as its location rotates weekly and is set to go international in 2020.
More...
https://daily.jstor.org/the-gospel-acco ... dium=email
Pope Francis balks at a proposal to ordain married men in Amazonia
Instead, he urges, pray for more celibate men to take up the priesthood and become missionaries
THOUGH BRANDED a reckless radical by his conservative critics, when it comes to the rules and practices of the Catholic church, Pope Francis is anything but a revolutionary. In his handling of the clerical sex-abuse crisis, the pope’s instinct until very recently was to side with his fellow bishops, even when faced with compelling evidence that they had covered up for their subordinates.
On February 12th the pontiff gave fresh evidence of his resistance to ecclesiastical change. Faced with a recommendation from some of his own prelates that he ease open the door to the ordination of married men, Francis balked. Less unexpectedly, he also rejected a more contentious reform that would have admitted women to the clergy as deacons.
The pope’s response was contained in a so-called Apostolic Exhortation—his reply to a report from bishops and others who met at the Vatican last October to discuss the ecological, social and pastoral emergencies in the vast Amazon basin. Written in Spanish and entitled “Querida Amazonía” (Beloved Amazon), the document contains a powerful call for greater attention to be given to a region that contains 40% of the world’s rainforests; one plagued by increasing land invasions by illegal loggers, ranchers and miners, and by the weakening of legislation to protect the land and the people living on it.
More...
https://www.economist.com/the-americas/ ... n-amazonia
******
Pope Francis Sets Aside Proposal on Married Priests
The decision, in a letter on Catholic life in remote Amazon areas, is a victory for conservative forces who had warned that change there would put the church on a slippery slope.
VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis has for now rejected a landmark proposal by bishops to allow the ordination of married men in remote areas underserved by priests, a potentially momentous change that conservatives had warned could set the Roman Catholic Church on a path toward lifting priestly celibacy and weakening church traditions.
The decision, in a papal letter made public on Wednesday, was welcomed by conservatives, but it was a major setback for many of the Catholics who see Francis as their best hope for bringing fundamental change to the church.
With the church facing a shortage of priests and increasing competition from evangelicals in many countries, the idea of opening up the priesthood to married men had held broad appeal for liberals worried about the church’s future.
Coming seven years into Francis’ papacy, his decision also raised the question of whether his promotion of discussing once-taboo issues is resulting in a pontificate that is largely talk.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/worl ... 3053090213
Instead, he urges, pray for more celibate men to take up the priesthood and become missionaries
THOUGH BRANDED a reckless radical by his conservative critics, when it comes to the rules and practices of the Catholic church, Pope Francis is anything but a revolutionary. In his handling of the clerical sex-abuse crisis, the pope’s instinct until very recently was to side with his fellow bishops, even when faced with compelling evidence that they had covered up for their subordinates.
On February 12th the pontiff gave fresh evidence of his resistance to ecclesiastical change. Faced with a recommendation from some of his own prelates that he ease open the door to the ordination of married men, Francis balked. Less unexpectedly, he also rejected a more contentious reform that would have admitted women to the clergy as deacons.
The pope’s response was contained in a so-called Apostolic Exhortation—his reply to a report from bishops and others who met at the Vatican last October to discuss the ecological, social and pastoral emergencies in the vast Amazon basin. Written in Spanish and entitled “Querida Amazonía” (Beloved Amazon), the document contains a powerful call for greater attention to be given to a region that contains 40% of the world’s rainforests; one plagued by increasing land invasions by illegal loggers, ranchers and miners, and by the weakening of legislation to protect the land and the people living on it.
More...
https://www.economist.com/the-americas/ ... n-amazonia
******
Pope Francis Sets Aside Proposal on Married Priests
The decision, in a letter on Catholic life in remote Amazon areas, is a victory for conservative forces who had warned that change there would put the church on a slippery slope.
VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis has for now rejected a landmark proposal by bishops to allow the ordination of married men in remote areas underserved by priests, a potentially momentous change that conservatives had warned could set the Roman Catholic Church on a path toward lifting priestly celibacy and weakening church traditions.
The decision, in a papal letter made public on Wednesday, was welcomed by conservatives, but it was a major setback for many of the Catholics who see Francis as their best hope for bringing fundamental change to the church.
With the church facing a shortage of priests and increasing competition from evangelicals in many countries, the idea of opening up the priesthood to married men had held broad appeal for liberals worried about the church’s future.
Coming seven years into Francis’ papacy, his decision also raised the question of whether his promotion of discussing once-taboo issues is resulting in a pontificate that is largely talk.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/worl ... 3053090213
Last edited by kmaherali on Thu Feb 13, 2020 1:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.
My Father, the Parish Priest
Who pays the price when the church demands celibacy?
Want the human story on priestly celibacy? Talk to someone who’s paid the price.
I am bitterly disappointed by the news that Pope Francis will not be relaxing priestly celibacy rules in remote parts of the Amazon. The idea — intended to make it easier to recruit priests in underserved areas — was supported by a Vatican Conference in October, but in his papal document, released on Wednesday, Francis ignored their suggestion.
My interest in this isn’t the mild curiosity of a lapsed Catholic. I am the child of a priest who broke his vow of celibacy and left a legacy of secrecy that was devastating to him, to my mother and particularly to me.
To hide my father’s broken vow, I was told that I was adopted. I did not know until I was 35 that my “adoptive” mother was actually my grandmother and my adoptive sister was, in reality, my mother. But even then, I wasn’t told the whole truth. At the time, I was told my father had been a businessman from Pennsylvania.
If I had only known that my real father was the beloved young pastor of our local Polish parish in Norwood, Mass. He was a regular guest in our home, and we attended weekly Mass in his church. He died at the end of my freshman year at Smith College. I didn’t find out until the age of 50, on the day of my birth mother’s funeral, that the man I adored as “Pate” — my own nickname, short for the Latin pater — and the community knew as “Father Hip” was my father.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/opin ... 0920200213
Who pays the price when the church demands celibacy?
Want the human story on priestly celibacy? Talk to someone who’s paid the price.
I am bitterly disappointed by the news that Pope Francis will not be relaxing priestly celibacy rules in remote parts of the Amazon. The idea — intended to make it easier to recruit priests in underserved areas — was supported by a Vatican Conference in October, but in his papal document, released on Wednesday, Francis ignored their suggestion.
My interest in this isn’t the mild curiosity of a lapsed Catholic. I am the child of a priest who broke his vow of celibacy and left a legacy of secrecy that was devastating to him, to my mother and particularly to me.
To hide my father’s broken vow, I was told that I was adopted. I did not know until I was 35 that my “adoptive” mother was actually my grandmother and my adoptive sister was, in reality, my mother. But even then, I wasn’t told the whole truth. At the time, I was told my father had been a businessman from Pennsylvania.
If I had only known that my real father was the beloved young pastor of our local Polish parish in Norwood, Mass. He was a regular guest in our home, and we attended weekly Mass in his church. He died at the end of my freshman year at Smith College. I didn’t find out until the age of 50, on the day of my birth mother’s funeral, that the man I adored as “Pate” — my own nickname, short for the Latin pater — and the community knew as “Father Hip” was my father.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/opin ... 0920200213
What Is the Power of Celibacy?
For both traditionalists and modernizers in the Roman Catholic Church, everything seems tied up with this priestly requirement.
Pope Francis issued one of the most eagerly awaited documents of his papacy this month: a letter that could have laid the groundwork for eliminating the Roman Catholic Church’s requirement of priestly celibacy. But it didn’t. To the relief of conservative Catholics, and to the dismay of his progressive well-wishers, Francis let the matter drop.
Ever since Francis summoned 185 bishops to the Vatican in October for three weeks of discussion about the Amazon region, the church had been in a state of agitation — and not over burning rain forests or endangered indigenous cultures or the mercurial Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro. The controversy centered on whether certain married church deacons would be permitted to offer Mass in churches too remote for priests to reach regularly. While this might look to an outsider like a petty procedural question, it would have been a crack in the centuries-old edifice of celibacy.
Two-thirds of bishops at the conference approved the idea, arguing that it would help preserve the viability of the Catholic Church in remote parts of South America (where as many as 70 percent of Catholics have no priest to give them communion on Sunday). Some argued that priestly celibacy was dissuading young men from joining the priesthood.
Conservatives in the church, including a circle of intellectuals around former Pope Benedict XVI, countered that to speak of a “priest shortage” was to get the wrong end of the stick. The church is not a factory or a phone bank, with so many vacant “posts” — it is a holy calling. And the tradition of priestly celibacy, they argued, is central, not peripheral, to that vocation.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/24/opin ... 0920200225
For both traditionalists and modernizers in the Roman Catholic Church, everything seems tied up with this priestly requirement.
Pope Francis issued one of the most eagerly awaited documents of his papacy this month: a letter that could have laid the groundwork for eliminating the Roman Catholic Church’s requirement of priestly celibacy. But it didn’t. To the relief of conservative Catholics, and to the dismay of his progressive well-wishers, Francis let the matter drop.
Ever since Francis summoned 185 bishops to the Vatican in October for three weeks of discussion about the Amazon region, the church had been in a state of agitation — and not over burning rain forests or endangered indigenous cultures or the mercurial Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro. The controversy centered on whether certain married church deacons would be permitted to offer Mass in churches too remote for priests to reach regularly. While this might look to an outsider like a petty procedural question, it would have been a crack in the centuries-old edifice of celibacy.
Two-thirds of bishops at the conference approved the idea, arguing that it would help preserve the viability of the Catholic Church in remote parts of South America (where as many as 70 percent of Catholics have no priest to give them communion on Sunday). Some argued that priestly celibacy was dissuading young men from joining the priesthood.
Conservatives in the church, including a circle of intellectuals around former Pope Benedict XVI, countered that to speak of a “priest shortage” was to get the wrong end of the stick. The church is not a factory or a phone bank, with so many vacant “posts” — it is a holy calling. And the tradition of priestly celibacy, they argued, is central, not peripheral, to that vocation.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/24/opin ... 0920200225
The Christian Response to the Coronavirus: Stay Home
When loving your neighbor means keeping your distance.
The church, the actual building that houses black bodies and souls, stands at the center of black life and culture. It is a fact hiding in plain sight that one of the first cooperative economic ventures former slaves undertook was the purchase and maintenance of churches. Without the cooperation of the church, many black colleges, universities and political organizations would not exist. To this day, American black Christians attend church at a higher rate than any other ethnic group.
It is not then surprising that when terrorists wanted to strike fear in the hearts of black believers, they burn and attack our churches. Despite the trauma, the church has remained a source of hope. The marches and sit-ins of the civil rights movement were often preceded by mass worship services.
But what happens when the church is a part of the danger?
With the novel coronavirus spreading rapidly, this is not simply a question for individual church members. The pandemic forces the church as an institution to consider its role during a time of crisis. Many religious communities are suspending their typical operations. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has stopped services worldwide. The Catholic Church in Rome shuttered its doors temporarily. Much of Washington State has done the same. What should we think about this? Are Christians abandoning their responsibility to the sick and suffering?
Some Christians may be tempted to look back on their history of remaining physically present during times of distress. Starting around 250 A.D., A.D., a plague that at its height was said to kill 5,000 people a day ravaged the Roman empire. The Christians stood out in their service to the infirm. Because they believed that God was sovereign over death, they were willing to minister to the sick even at the cost of their lives. This witness won many to the Christian cause. Should we follow their example and gather to celebrate in word and ritual, in the sermon as well as the bread and the wine?
Doctors and nurses of faith can indeed draw upon this story today to inspire them to tend to those sickened by the pandemic. What about the rest of us? This remains certain in the ever-shifting narrative of Covid-19: the most effective ways of stopping the spread of the virus is by social distancing (avoiding large gatherings) and good personal hygiene (washing our hands). The data suggests that what the world needs now is not our physical presence, but our absence.
This does not seem like the stuff of legend. What did the church do in the year of our Lord 2020 when sickness swept our land? We met in smaller groups, washed our hands and prayed. Unglamorous as this is, it may be the shape of faithfulness in our time.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/14/opin ... 3053090315
When loving your neighbor means keeping your distance.
The church, the actual building that houses black bodies and souls, stands at the center of black life and culture. It is a fact hiding in plain sight that one of the first cooperative economic ventures former slaves undertook was the purchase and maintenance of churches. Without the cooperation of the church, many black colleges, universities and political organizations would not exist. To this day, American black Christians attend church at a higher rate than any other ethnic group.
It is not then surprising that when terrorists wanted to strike fear in the hearts of black believers, they burn and attack our churches. Despite the trauma, the church has remained a source of hope. The marches and sit-ins of the civil rights movement were often preceded by mass worship services.
But what happens when the church is a part of the danger?
With the novel coronavirus spreading rapidly, this is not simply a question for individual church members. The pandemic forces the church as an institution to consider its role during a time of crisis. Many religious communities are suspending their typical operations. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has stopped services worldwide. The Catholic Church in Rome shuttered its doors temporarily. Much of Washington State has done the same. What should we think about this? Are Christians abandoning their responsibility to the sick and suffering?
Some Christians may be tempted to look back on their history of remaining physically present during times of distress. Starting around 250 A.D., A.D., a plague that at its height was said to kill 5,000 people a day ravaged the Roman empire. The Christians stood out in their service to the infirm. Because they believed that God was sovereign over death, they were willing to minister to the sick even at the cost of their lives. This witness won many to the Christian cause. Should we follow their example and gather to celebrate in word and ritual, in the sermon as well as the bread and the wine?
Doctors and nurses of faith can indeed draw upon this story today to inspire them to tend to those sickened by the pandemic. What about the rest of us? This remains certain in the ever-shifting narrative of Covid-19: the most effective ways of stopping the spread of the virus is by social distancing (avoiding large gatherings) and good personal hygiene (washing our hands). The data suggests that what the world needs now is not our physical presence, but our absence.
This does not seem like the stuff of legend. What did the church do in the year of our Lord 2020 when sickness swept our land? We met in smaller groups, washed our hands and prayed. Unglamorous as this is, it may be the shape of faithfulness in our time.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/14/opin ... 3053090315
I Miss Singing at Church
The coronavirus crisis reminds us that we are bodies, not simply souls trapped in a mortal prison.
I miss things I did not know I would.
I miss people’s smells. Isn’t that funny? I didn’t know that I even noticed people’s smells, unless they smelled very good or very bad, but now that I have to talk to friends, family and co-workers only through screens, I notice the staleness in the air that comes from sitting alone.
I miss walks with friends, how I could look in a friend’s eyes and see light in them, not flattened into two dimensions. I miss the sadness or laughter those eyes reveal up close, the hard days, the mirth. I miss how we could note the weather together, complain about it, talk casually as we walked together, notice a new for-sale sign on a house or (yet another) new macaron place opening soon.
I miss idle chat with my barista — my favorite one, who one time when I mentioned that I had a deadline and was having trouble focusing told me that I could not have a refill of my tea until I had written at least 400 words. After that, every time I ordered from him, I called it my accountabili-tea. I miss asking him about his niece. I’m only about 90 percent certain of what his name is, but I know he has a newborn niece whom he adores, and I used to ask for updates on her.
I miss bumping into people I know and giving them a side hug and asking how they are. (I am a born Texan and we hug. It’s just what we do, whether you like it or not.)
I miss the congregation singing at the church where I’ve served as a priest for three years. If I could hear them sing this morning, I wouldn’t mind if the person behind me was off key. I would even take a whole load of my least favorite songs, the ones I find plodding or cheesy or overdramatic, if I could just hear them sing with me.
And though I’m an introvert, I miss gathering together, watching the sanctuary slowly fill, hearing the soft murmur of the crowd, the trills of children, the coughs, the handshaking, strangers sitting side by side, everything that is now most dangerous.
And I miss taking and giving communion. I miss seeing hands after hands cupped open to receive. Some rough, axel grease under the nails. Some smooth and manicured. Every age, every skin color. I miss watching their faces as they receive the meal together, how tired they look, how happy some of them seem, how a few receive the bread and then close their eyes and whisper a deep, earnest “thank you,” how certain parishioners cry every single time I give them the host.
God did not sic coronavirus on us to teach us a lesson; nor does he delight in the chaos and death it is causing. God hates sickness and death. But God also lets no crisis, no suffering and nothing in our lives go to waste. God is resourceful and takes it all as the raw material of redemption.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/05/opin ... 778d3e6de3
The coronavirus crisis reminds us that we are bodies, not simply souls trapped in a mortal prison.
I miss things I did not know I would.
I miss people’s smells. Isn’t that funny? I didn’t know that I even noticed people’s smells, unless they smelled very good or very bad, but now that I have to talk to friends, family and co-workers only through screens, I notice the staleness in the air that comes from sitting alone.
I miss walks with friends, how I could look in a friend’s eyes and see light in them, not flattened into two dimensions. I miss the sadness or laughter those eyes reveal up close, the hard days, the mirth. I miss how we could note the weather together, complain about it, talk casually as we walked together, notice a new for-sale sign on a house or (yet another) new macaron place opening soon.
I miss idle chat with my barista — my favorite one, who one time when I mentioned that I had a deadline and was having trouble focusing told me that I could not have a refill of my tea until I had written at least 400 words. After that, every time I ordered from him, I called it my accountabili-tea. I miss asking him about his niece. I’m only about 90 percent certain of what his name is, but I know he has a newborn niece whom he adores, and I used to ask for updates on her.
I miss bumping into people I know and giving them a side hug and asking how they are. (I am a born Texan and we hug. It’s just what we do, whether you like it or not.)
I miss the congregation singing at the church where I’ve served as a priest for three years. If I could hear them sing this morning, I wouldn’t mind if the person behind me was off key. I would even take a whole load of my least favorite songs, the ones I find plodding or cheesy or overdramatic, if I could just hear them sing with me.
And though I’m an introvert, I miss gathering together, watching the sanctuary slowly fill, hearing the soft murmur of the crowd, the trills of children, the coughs, the handshaking, strangers sitting side by side, everything that is now most dangerous.
And I miss taking and giving communion. I miss seeing hands after hands cupped open to receive. Some rough, axel grease under the nails. Some smooth and manicured. Every age, every skin color. I miss watching their faces as they receive the meal together, how tired they look, how happy some of them seem, how a few receive the bread and then close their eyes and whisper a deep, earnest “thank you,” how certain parishioners cry every single time I give them the host.
God did not sic coronavirus on us to teach us a lesson; nor does he delight in the chaos and death it is causing. God hates sickness and death. But God also lets no crisis, no suffering and nothing in our lives go to waste. God is resourceful and takes it all as the raw material of redemption.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/05/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Christianity Gets Weird
Modern life is ugly, brutal and barren. Maybe you should try a Latin Mass.
A few weeks ago, I dialed into the Eucharist for the first time, praying for spiritual communion as my priest consumed the host in front of the altar. The webcam was clear. The sound quality was top-notch. But the Mass was decidedly old-school.
In the absence of a choir, my church, the Episcopal Church of St. Ignatius of Antioch in New York City, had the organist sing the traditional Mass in Gregorian chant. To follow along with the melody, our priest suggested the Liber Usualis, a book of religious chant music dating back to the 11th century.
This was just one of many remote religious activities I’ve participated in recently. I have also, for example, gathered over Zoom with friends for compline, a nighttime prayer with roots in the medieval monastic tradition. And I’m not alone. One friend has been dialing into Latin Masses at churches across the United States: a Washington Mass at 11 a.m.; a Chicago one at noon.
The coronavirus has led many people to seek solace from and engage more seriously with religion. But these particular expressions of faith, with their anachronistic language and sense of historical pageantry, are part of a wider trend, one that predates the pandemic, and yet which this crisis makes all the clearer.
More and more young Christians, disillusioned by the political binaries, economic uncertainties and spiritual emptiness that have come to define modern America, are finding solace in a decidedly anti-modern vision of faith. As the coronavirus and the subsequent lockdowns throw the failures of the current social order into stark relief, old forms of religiosity offer a glimpse of the transcendent beyond the present.
Many of us call ourselves “Weird Christians,” albeit partly in jest. What we have in common is that we see a return to old-school forms of worship as a way of escaping from the crisis of modernity and the liberal-capitalist faith in individualism.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/opin ... ogin-email
Modern life is ugly, brutal and barren. Maybe you should try a Latin Mass.
A few weeks ago, I dialed into the Eucharist for the first time, praying for spiritual communion as my priest consumed the host in front of the altar. The webcam was clear. The sound quality was top-notch. But the Mass was decidedly old-school.
In the absence of a choir, my church, the Episcopal Church of St. Ignatius of Antioch in New York City, had the organist sing the traditional Mass in Gregorian chant. To follow along with the melody, our priest suggested the Liber Usualis, a book of religious chant music dating back to the 11th century.
This was just one of many remote religious activities I’ve participated in recently. I have also, for example, gathered over Zoom with friends for compline, a nighttime prayer with roots in the medieval monastic tradition. And I’m not alone. One friend has been dialing into Latin Masses at churches across the United States: a Washington Mass at 11 a.m.; a Chicago one at noon.
The coronavirus has led many people to seek solace from and engage more seriously with religion. But these particular expressions of faith, with their anachronistic language and sense of historical pageantry, are part of a wider trend, one that predates the pandemic, and yet which this crisis makes all the clearer.
More and more young Christians, disillusioned by the political binaries, economic uncertainties and spiritual emptiness that have come to define modern America, are finding solace in a decidedly anti-modern vision of faith. As the coronavirus and the subsequent lockdowns throw the failures of the current social order into stark relief, old forms of religiosity offer a glimpse of the transcendent beyond the present.
Many of us call ourselves “Weird Christians,” albeit partly in jest. What we have in common is that we see a return to old-school forms of worship as a way of escaping from the crisis of modernity and the liberal-capitalist faith in individualism.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/opin ... ogin-email
An Open Letter to My Fellow White Christians
Our sins are grievous, but we are not yet beyond redemption.
NASHVILLE — Since long before it was a country, our country has been in flames. When we arrived on our big ships and decimated this land’s original peoples with our viruses and our guns, when we used our Christian faith as a justification for killing both “heretic” and “heathen,” we founded this country in flames. And every month, every week, every day, for the last 400 years, we have been setting new fires.
White Christians who came before us captured human beings and beat them and raped them and stole their babies from them and stole their parents from them and stole their husbands and their wives from them and locked them in chains and made them work in inhuman conditions. Our spiritual ancestors went to church and listened to their pastors argue that these human beings weren’t human at all.
Our pastors don’t tell us that anymore, but we are still setting fires.
Christians set a fire every time we allow our leaders to weaponize our fears against us. We set a fire every time our faith in good police officers prevents us from seeing the bad ones. Christian voters preserve a system that permits police violence, unjust prosecutions and hellhole prisons filled with people who should have received the same addiction treatment we give our own troubled kids.
We set a fire every time we fail to scrutinize a police culture that allows an officer’s own fear and hatred to justify the most casual brutality against another human being. It would be almost unbelievable to match an adjective like “casual” with a noun like “brutality,” but we have seen the videos. Watch the faces of justice shove an old man aside and leave him bleeding on the ground. Watch them drive their vehicles into protesters protected by the United States Constitution. Watch them fire rubber bullets directly at journalists doing work that is also protected by the United States Constitution. In video after video, note their unconcern with people who are bleeding or screaming in pain.
Make yourself look https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/g ... Position=3. Study the air of perfect nonchalance on Derek Chauvin’s face as he kneels on the neck of George Floyd. Register the blithe indifference in his posture, the way he puts his hand in his pocket as though he were just walking along the street on a sunny summer day. Nothing in his whole body suggests concern. He is not the least bit troubled by taking another human life.
We created Derek Chauvin.
Every single aspect of our criminal justice system is permeated by racism, but too many Christians continue to vote for “law and order” candidates anyway, failing to notice that more cops and more weapons and more prisons have done exactly nothing to make us safer. Failing to notice that they have instead endangered all Americans, but black people most of all.
We should know better by now. There are so many resources to help us know better, yet too many Christians ignore the history books that document the terrible legacy of slavery. We ignore the novelists who tell us why the caged bird sings. We ignore the poets who teach us the cruel cost of a dream deferred. In our carefully preserved ignorance, we pile all their books up in a great pyre, and we set them on fire.
We set the fire when we heard a peaceful crowd singing, “We shall overcome someday,” and understood that someday would never be today, that someday was at best still decades and decades away. We set the fire when we heard a peaceful crowd singing, “Lean on me when you’re not strong,” and believed it was time to call in the military. We set the fire when our “Christian” president cleared a peaceful crowd by spraying them with tear gas as though they were enemy combatants, marched to a nearby church for a photo-op and held up a Bible to imply that God is on his side.
We have to stop letting this president turn our faith into a travesty. Love is the only way to put out this fire, love and listening and the hard work of changing, but this “Christian” president doesn’t want to put out the fire. Fire is his homeplace. Fire is his native land.
Perhaps it is ours, as well.
“Blessed are the merciful,” Jesus taught us, but we built prison after prison. “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also,” Jesus taught us, but we did not turn our cheek. We turned instead our billy stick. We turned instead our pepper spray. We turned instead our rubber bullets and our tear gas and our riot gear. To George Floyd, and so many others, we turned instead our knee.
There are positive models for what Christian faith in the public sphere can look like. Think of John Alexander, a Baptist philosophy teacher who published a journal designed to convert white evangelicals to the cause of civil rights. Think of the Rev. Daniel J. Berrigan, a Jesuit priest who opposed the Vietnam War. Think of the Rev. Jennifer Butler, a Presbyterian minister who founded the activist group Faith in Public Life. Here in Nashville we have the Rev. Stacy Rector, the Presbyterian executive director of Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, and the Rev. Becca Stevens, an Episcopal priest and founder of a nonprofit group that works to “rise up against systems that commoditize, criminalize and abuse women,” as the Thistle Farms website puts it. There are many, many others, all across the country.
Our sins are grievous, but these Christians remind us that we are not yet beyond redemption. It is time to act on what we say we believe. We need to remember the words of the prophet Isaiah: “And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.” We need to remember the words of Jesus — “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’s sake” — and join the righteous cause of the protesters. For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/08/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Our sins are grievous, but we are not yet beyond redemption.
NASHVILLE — Since long before it was a country, our country has been in flames. When we arrived on our big ships and decimated this land’s original peoples with our viruses and our guns, when we used our Christian faith as a justification for killing both “heretic” and “heathen,” we founded this country in flames. And every month, every week, every day, for the last 400 years, we have been setting new fires.
White Christians who came before us captured human beings and beat them and raped them and stole their babies from them and stole their parents from them and stole their husbands and their wives from them and locked them in chains and made them work in inhuman conditions. Our spiritual ancestors went to church and listened to their pastors argue that these human beings weren’t human at all.
Our pastors don’t tell us that anymore, but we are still setting fires.
Christians set a fire every time we allow our leaders to weaponize our fears against us. We set a fire every time our faith in good police officers prevents us from seeing the bad ones. Christian voters preserve a system that permits police violence, unjust prosecutions and hellhole prisons filled with people who should have received the same addiction treatment we give our own troubled kids.
We set a fire every time we fail to scrutinize a police culture that allows an officer’s own fear and hatred to justify the most casual brutality against another human being. It would be almost unbelievable to match an adjective like “casual” with a noun like “brutality,” but we have seen the videos. Watch the faces of justice shove an old man aside and leave him bleeding on the ground. Watch them drive their vehicles into protesters protected by the United States Constitution. Watch them fire rubber bullets directly at journalists doing work that is also protected by the United States Constitution. In video after video, note their unconcern with people who are bleeding or screaming in pain.
Make yourself look https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/g ... Position=3. Study the air of perfect nonchalance on Derek Chauvin’s face as he kneels on the neck of George Floyd. Register the blithe indifference in his posture, the way he puts his hand in his pocket as though he were just walking along the street on a sunny summer day. Nothing in his whole body suggests concern. He is not the least bit troubled by taking another human life.
We created Derek Chauvin.
Every single aspect of our criminal justice system is permeated by racism, but too many Christians continue to vote for “law and order” candidates anyway, failing to notice that more cops and more weapons and more prisons have done exactly nothing to make us safer. Failing to notice that they have instead endangered all Americans, but black people most of all.
We should know better by now. There are so many resources to help us know better, yet too many Christians ignore the history books that document the terrible legacy of slavery. We ignore the novelists who tell us why the caged bird sings. We ignore the poets who teach us the cruel cost of a dream deferred. In our carefully preserved ignorance, we pile all their books up in a great pyre, and we set them on fire.
We set the fire when we heard a peaceful crowd singing, “We shall overcome someday,” and understood that someday would never be today, that someday was at best still decades and decades away. We set the fire when we heard a peaceful crowd singing, “Lean on me when you’re not strong,” and believed it was time to call in the military. We set the fire when our “Christian” president cleared a peaceful crowd by spraying them with tear gas as though they were enemy combatants, marched to a nearby church for a photo-op and held up a Bible to imply that God is on his side.
We have to stop letting this president turn our faith into a travesty. Love is the only way to put out this fire, love and listening and the hard work of changing, but this “Christian” president doesn’t want to put out the fire. Fire is his homeplace. Fire is his native land.
Perhaps it is ours, as well.
“Blessed are the merciful,” Jesus taught us, but we built prison after prison. “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also,” Jesus taught us, but we did not turn our cheek. We turned instead our billy stick. We turned instead our pepper spray. We turned instead our rubber bullets and our tear gas and our riot gear. To George Floyd, and so many others, we turned instead our knee.
There are positive models for what Christian faith in the public sphere can look like. Think of John Alexander, a Baptist philosophy teacher who published a journal designed to convert white evangelicals to the cause of civil rights. Think of the Rev. Daniel J. Berrigan, a Jesuit priest who opposed the Vietnam War. Think of the Rev. Jennifer Butler, a Presbyterian minister who founded the activist group Faith in Public Life. Here in Nashville we have the Rev. Stacy Rector, the Presbyterian executive director of Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, and the Rev. Becca Stevens, an Episcopal priest and founder of a nonprofit group that works to “rise up against systems that commoditize, criminalize and abuse women,” as the Thistle Farms website puts it. There are many, many others, all across the country.
Our sins are grievous, but these Christians remind us that we are not yet beyond redemption. It is time to act on what we say we believe. We need to remember the words of the prophet Isaiah: “And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.” We need to remember the words of Jesus — “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’s sake” — and join the righteous cause of the protesters. For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/08/opin ... 778d3e6de3
What the Bible Has to Say About Black Anger
The Psalms are not silent about the rage of the oppressed.
There are videos of Eric Garner and George Floyd being choked to death by police officers while pleading for their lives. There is a video of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy who was shot to death while playing with a toy gun. There is a video of Ahmaud Arbery, who was hunted and killed while out on a run. There is a video of a police officer mounting and handcuffing Dajerria Becton, 15 years old at the time, at a pool party.
Visible evidence of black suffering is not new. We have photographs of black lynchings. The screams of black voices and the smell of charred flesh was insufficient to mar the smiling poses gathered ’round our corpses.
The videos are a reminder that the issue was never about a lack of evidence. They reveal the lengths to which those in power will go to avoid facing the truth. What is happening in those videos is a manifestation of systemic racism — and to acknowledge that would call into question the system that benefits the powerful.
When these videos stack one upon another and are added to our personal slights, a deep unsettling anger rises in the soul of a disinherited and beleaguered people. James Baldwin said, “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.”
What is the focus of our rage? Are we upset with the police officer who placed his knee on the neck of a man pleading for his life for nearly nine minutes while three fellow officers looked on? Are we mad at the vigilantes who got in a pickup truck to hunt down an unarmed black man? Are we enraged by the white woman who tried to weaponize the police by claiming that a black man who requested that she leash her dog in Central Park was threatening her life? Are we frustrated by the laws and customs that cast a pall over the black experience? Are we wearied with the apathy of so many?
The Bible is not silent about the rage of the oppressed. One of the most startlingly violent passages in the Bible comes from the lips of the disinherited. In Psalm 137 the psalmist says, “Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is the one who repays you according to what you have done to us. Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.”
How can wishing such an atrocity be in any sense a religious text? Psalm 137 is a psalm of the traumatized. It depicts the aftermath of the destruction of Jerusalem, the sack of the city, sexual assault and brutalization of the innocent. What kind of song do you write if you are forced to watch the murder of your wife, your child, your neighbor?
Psalm 137 is trauma literature, the rage of those who lived. The question isn’t why the Psalmist wrote this. The question is what kind of song would the families of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd and Eric Garner be tempted to write after watching the video of their deaths? It would be raw and unfiltered. But more than an expression of rage, this psalm is a written record in time. It is a call to remember. This psalm, and the other psalms of rage, require us to remember the trauma that led to their composition.
The miracle of the Bible is not that it records the rage of the oppressed. The miracle is that it has more to say. The same texts that include a call for vengeance upon Israel’s enemies look to the salvation of its oppressors. Isaiah 49 says, “It is too small a thing for you to be my servant to restore the tribes of Jacob and bring back those of Israel I have kept. I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.”
For Christians, rage (Psalm 137) must eventually give way to hope (Isaiah 49). And we find the spiritual resources to make this transition at the cross. Jesus could have called down the psalms of rage upon his enemies and shouted a final word of defiance before he breathed his last. Instead he called for forgiveness: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing,” he says in Luke 23.
It was not a false reconciliation: Jesus experienced the reality of state-sponsored terror. That is why the black Christian has always felt a particular kinship with this crucified king from an oppressed ethnic group. The cross helps us make sense of the lynching tree.
And Jesus’ resurrection three days after his crucifixion shows that neither the lynching tree nor the cross have the final say about those whom God values. The state thought that violence could stop God’s purposes. For the Christian, the resurrection makes clear the futility of the attempt. Further, Jesus’ profound act of forgiving his opponents provides me with the theological resources to hope.
Dare we speak of hope when chants of “I can’t breathe” echo in the streets? Do we risk the criticism commonly levied at Christians that we move too quickly to hope because faith pacifies? Resurrection hope doesn’t remove the Christian from the struggle for justice. It empties the state’s greatest weapon — the fear of death — of its power.
Hope is possible if we recognize that it does not rule out justice. It is what separates justice from vengeance. Howard Thurman wrote in his classic work “Jesus and the Disinherited” about how rage, once unleashed, tends to spill out beyond its intended target and consume everything. The hatred of our enemy that we take to the streets returns with us to our friendships, marriages and communities. It damages our own souls.
Christians contend for justice because we care about black lives, families and communities. We contend for reconciliation after the establishment of justice because there must be a future that is more than mutual contempt and suspicion. But justice and reconciliation cannot come at the cost of black lives. The only peaceful future is a just future. And because Christians should be a people for peace, we must be a people for justice even when it seems ever to elude us. Too many black lives have been lost to accept anything else.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/14/opin ... 778d3e6de3
The Psalms are not silent about the rage of the oppressed.
There are videos of Eric Garner and George Floyd being choked to death by police officers while pleading for their lives. There is a video of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy who was shot to death while playing with a toy gun. There is a video of Ahmaud Arbery, who was hunted and killed while out on a run. There is a video of a police officer mounting and handcuffing Dajerria Becton, 15 years old at the time, at a pool party.
Visible evidence of black suffering is not new. We have photographs of black lynchings. The screams of black voices and the smell of charred flesh was insufficient to mar the smiling poses gathered ’round our corpses.
The videos are a reminder that the issue was never about a lack of evidence. They reveal the lengths to which those in power will go to avoid facing the truth. What is happening in those videos is a manifestation of systemic racism — and to acknowledge that would call into question the system that benefits the powerful.
When these videos stack one upon another and are added to our personal slights, a deep unsettling anger rises in the soul of a disinherited and beleaguered people. James Baldwin said, “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.”
What is the focus of our rage? Are we upset with the police officer who placed his knee on the neck of a man pleading for his life for nearly nine minutes while three fellow officers looked on? Are we mad at the vigilantes who got in a pickup truck to hunt down an unarmed black man? Are we enraged by the white woman who tried to weaponize the police by claiming that a black man who requested that she leash her dog in Central Park was threatening her life? Are we frustrated by the laws and customs that cast a pall over the black experience? Are we wearied with the apathy of so many?
The Bible is not silent about the rage of the oppressed. One of the most startlingly violent passages in the Bible comes from the lips of the disinherited. In Psalm 137 the psalmist says, “Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is the one who repays you according to what you have done to us. Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.”
How can wishing such an atrocity be in any sense a religious text? Psalm 137 is a psalm of the traumatized. It depicts the aftermath of the destruction of Jerusalem, the sack of the city, sexual assault and brutalization of the innocent. What kind of song do you write if you are forced to watch the murder of your wife, your child, your neighbor?
Psalm 137 is trauma literature, the rage of those who lived. The question isn’t why the Psalmist wrote this. The question is what kind of song would the families of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd and Eric Garner be tempted to write after watching the video of their deaths? It would be raw and unfiltered. But more than an expression of rage, this psalm is a written record in time. It is a call to remember. This psalm, and the other psalms of rage, require us to remember the trauma that led to their composition.
The miracle of the Bible is not that it records the rage of the oppressed. The miracle is that it has more to say. The same texts that include a call for vengeance upon Israel’s enemies look to the salvation of its oppressors. Isaiah 49 says, “It is too small a thing for you to be my servant to restore the tribes of Jacob and bring back those of Israel I have kept. I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.”
For Christians, rage (Psalm 137) must eventually give way to hope (Isaiah 49). And we find the spiritual resources to make this transition at the cross. Jesus could have called down the psalms of rage upon his enemies and shouted a final word of defiance before he breathed his last. Instead he called for forgiveness: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing,” he says in Luke 23.
It was not a false reconciliation: Jesus experienced the reality of state-sponsored terror. That is why the black Christian has always felt a particular kinship with this crucified king from an oppressed ethnic group. The cross helps us make sense of the lynching tree.
And Jesus’ resurrection three days after his crucifixion shows that neither the lynching tree nor the cross have the final say about those whom God values. The state thought that violence could stop God’s purposes. For the Christian, the resurrection makes clear the futility of the attempt. Further, Jesus’ profound act of forgiving his opponents provides me with the theological resources to hope.
Dare we speak of hope when chants of “I can’t breathe” echo in the streets? Do we risk the criticism commonly levied at Christians that we move too quickly to hope because faith pacifies? Resurrection hope doesn’t remove the Christian from the struggle for justice. It empties the state’s greatest weapon — the fear of death — of its power.
Hope is possible if we recognize that it does not rule out justice. It is what separates justice from vengeance. Howard Thurman wrote in his classic work “Jesus and the Disinherited” about how rage, once unleashed, tends to spill out beyond its intended target and consume everything. The hatred of our enemy that we take to the streets returns with us to our friendships, marriages and communities. It damages our own souls.
Christians contend for justice because we care about black lives, families and communities. We contend for reconciliation after the establishment of justice because there must be a future that is more than mutual contempt and suspicion. But justice and reconciliation cannot come at the cost of black lives. The only peaceful future is a just future. And because Christians should be a people for peace, we must be a people for justice even when it seems ever to elude us. Too many black lives have been lost to accept anything else.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/14/opin ... 778d3e6de3
As received..
NEW LOCKDOWN RULES
Wash your heart with Christ’s blood ( Psalm 73-1)
Keep a social distance from evil (Job 28:28)
Avoid the crowd of wickedness and wicked man (Psalm 1:1)
Cover your mind from being infected from the sneeze of sin and hatred (Lev 19:17)
Do not shake hands with abomination (Deut 25:16)
Do not hug heresey and false teachings (2 Pet.2:1)
Be safe so that you will be saved (Jer 17:14)
Sanitize your life with the Word of God (Psalm 1:2)
In case you notice any symtoms of sin, call the helpline of Christ in PRAYER (Jer 33:3)
Always remember to boost your spiritual immunity with Faith and the Power of the Holy Spirit (Jude 1:20)
Stay blessed Stay safe!
NEW LOCKDOWN RULES
Wash your heart with Christ’s blood ( Psalm 73-1)
Keep a social distance from evil (Job 28:28)
Avoid the crowd of wickedness and wicked man (Psalm 1:1)
Cover your mind from being infected from the sneeze of sin and hatred (Lev 19:17)
Do not shake hands with abomination (Deut 25:16)
Do not hug heresey and false teachings (2 Pet.2:1)
Be safe so that you will be saved (Jer 17:14)
Sanitize your life with the Word of God (Psalm 1:2)
In case you notice any symtoms of sin, call the helpline of Christ in PRAYER (Jer 33:3)
Always remember to boost your spiritual immunity with Faith and the Power of the Holy Spirit (Jude 1:20)
Stay blessed Stay safe!
-
swamidada_2
- Posts: 297
- Joined: Mon Aug 19, 2019 8:18 pm
Statue Wars come for JESUS as activist claims Christ and Virgin Mary are ‘white supremacy’
22 Jun, 2020 23:03
It began with Confederate generals and quickly escalated to Columbus and former US presidents; now the monument-removal crusade has come for Jesus, with racial activist Shaun King insisting his depictions are ‘racist propaganda.’
“Yes, I think the statues of the white European they claim is Jesus should also come down,” King tweeted on Monday. “They are a form of white supremacy. Always have been.”
He also argued that all “murals and stained glass windows of white Jesus, and his European mother, and their white friends should also come down,” calling them “a gross form white supremacy… tools of oppression [and] Racist propaganda.”
Shaun King
✔
@shaunking
· 9h
Replying to @shaunking
Yes.
All murals and stained glass windows of white Jesus, and his European mother, and their white friends should also come down.
They are a gross form white supremacy.
Created as tools of oppression.
Racist propaganda.
They should all come down.
Patrick Henningsen
✔
@21WIRE
Sorry, there's this thing called freedom of religion in US. Easier solution to your neuroses Shaun: just start your own new church and make your own artistic representations.
This could actually be a viable career option for you.
179
4:46 PM - Jun 22, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
20 people are talking about this
King is no fringe figure, either – the well-known racial justice activist rose to prominence through the Black Lives Matter movement and most recently served as a surrogate for Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator who sought the Democrat presidential nomination.
His tweets came just a day after conservative pundits predicted the statue-smashing spree would come after Jesus.
Matt Schlapp
✔
@mschlapp
Statues of Jesus are next. It won't end. Pray for the USA
Jack Posobiec
✔
@JackPosobiec
Patriots knew what as coming. Shaun King went full mask off today https://twitter.com/Malcolm_fleX48/stat ... 1791145984 …
Malcolm FleX
@Malcolm_fleX48
You will start seeing Christian churches suddenly vandalized and interruption of Worship ceremonies. Count on it. https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status ... 2680560646 …
912 people are talking about this
For several weeks now, protesters across the US have targeted “racist” statues – starting with generals who fought for the Confederacy during the American Civil War, but quickly moving onto Christopher Columbus, President Ulysses S. Grant, and others, including Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, two of the Founding Fathers of the US.
Not even the monument to the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry – an African-American regiment that fought in the Civil War – was spared vandalism. Meanwhile, the Natural History Museum in New York has decided to remove the statue of 26th US President Theodore Roosevelt, saying that its depictions of Native Americans and Africans made it a “hurtful symbol of systemic racism.”
King’s tweet amounted to inciting federal hate crimes, argued conservative filmmaker Mike Cernovich, comparing it to the Ku Klux Klan’s terror campaign against churches.
https://www.rt.com/usa/492639-shaun-king-jesus-racist/
22 Jun, 2020 23:03
It began with Confederate generals and quickly escalated to Columbus and former US presidents; now the monument-removal crusade has come for Jesus, with racial activist Shaun King insisting his depictions are ‘racist propaganda.’
“Yes, I think the statues of the white European they claim is Jesus should also come down,” King tweeted on Monday. “They are a form of white supremacy. Always have been.”
He also argued that all “murals and stained glass windows of white Jesus, and his European mother, and their white friends should also come down,” calling them “a gross form white supremacy… tools of oppression [and] Racist propaganda.”
Shaun King
✔
@shaunking
· 9h
Replying to @shaunking
Yes.
All murals and stained glass windows of white Jesus, and his European mother, and their white friends should also come down.
They are a gross form white supremacy.
Created as tools of oppression.
Racist propaganda.
They should all come down.
Patrick Henningsen
✔
@21WIRE
Sorry, there's this thing called freedom of religion in US. Easier solution to your neuroses Shaun: just start your own new church and make your own artistic representations.
This could actually be a viable career option for you.
179
4:46 PM - Jun 22, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
20 people are talking about this
King is no fringe figure, either – the well-known racial justice activist rose to prominence through the Black Lives Matter movement and most recently served as a surrogate for Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator who sought the Democrat presidential nomination.
His tweets came just a day after conservative pundits predicted the statue-smashing spree would come after Jesus.
Matt Schlapp
✔
@mschlapp
Statues of Jesus are next. It won't end. Pray for the USA
Jack Posobiec
✔
@JackPosobiec
Patriots knew what as coming. Shaun King went full mask off today https://twitter.com/Malcolm_fleX48/stat ... 1791145984 …
Malcolm FleX
@Malcolm_fleX48
You will start seeing Christian churches suddenly vandalized and interruption of Worship ceremonies. Count on it. https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status ... 2680560646 …
912 people are talking about this
For several weeks now, protesters across the US have targeted “racist” statues – starting with generals who fought for the Confederacy during the American Civil War, but quickly moving onto Christopher Columbus, President Ulysses S. Grant, and others, including Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, two of the Founding Fathers of the US.
Not even the monument to the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry – an African-American regiment that fought in the Civil War – was spared vandalism. Meanwhile, the Natural History Museum in New York has decided to remove the statue of 26th US President Theodore Roosevelt, saying that its depictions of Native Americans and Africans made it a “hurtful symbol of systemic racism.”
King’s tweet amounted to inciting federal hate crimes, argued conservative filmmaker Mike Cernovich, comparing it to the Ku Klux Klan’s terror campaign against churches.
https://www.rt.com/usa/492639-shaun-king-jesus-racist/
-
swamidada_2
- Posts: 297
- Joined: Mon Aug 19, 2019 8:18 pm
History's Most Dangerous Toddler
Candida Moss
The Daily BeastJuly 5, 2020, 4:14 AM CDT
Public Domain
On Easter Sunday, 1475, in the city of Trent, a German-Italian city in what is now Northern Italy, a tragedy occurred. A 2-year-old boy named Simon was found dead. His death, a devastating blow to his family, would set in motion a chain of events that would leave almost all of the male members of the Jewish community in Trent dead, create an almost heretical flock of devoted followers who saw him as the new baby Jesus, and perpetuate and foster widespread anti-Semitism in the region for hundreds of years.
According to historian Po-Chia Hsia in his book Trent 1475: Stories of a Ritual Murder Trial, Simon went missing in the early evening of Thursday, 23 March and the following day, Good Friday, the boy’s father had asked the prince-bishop of the city, Johannes Hinderbach, for help in locating his missing son.
Searches ensued and by Easter Saturday suspicion had lighted on the small Jewish community in the city. The chief magistrate, Giovanni de Salis, had the households of the three main Jewish families searched, but Simon was not to be found. Then on Easter Sunday Seligman, a cook in the household of Samuel (a moneylender), discovered Simon’s body in a water cellar on Samuel’s extensive property. As all historians agree, the body had clearly been planted there. Samuel could have fled but had, up until this point, enjoyed an amicable relationship with the city’s authorities. So, instead, he “trusted the system” and reported the discovery. He also insisted that all members of the community stay put, including visitors who just happened to be in town for the Jewish Passover. That Samuel came forward and complied with the authorities was never mentioned in the ensuing trials.
In the aftermath of the discovery, things escalated quickly. Anti-Jewish feeling in the city had recently been inflamed by the arrival of an itinerant Franciscan preacher, Bernardino da Feltre, who had spent the Lenten season railing against Jewish usury and amplifying local hostilities. There were others in the local community, Hsia writes, who had exploited the vulnerability of this small religious minority in order to blackmail members of the Jewish community. All of these elements coupled with centuries-old rumors of blood libel (the dangerous myth that Jews used the blood of Christian children in their religious rituals) combined to create a kind of tinderbox of hatred that was sparked by Simon’s death.
Over the course of several months, the entire Jewish community were arrested and tortured and were forced to confess to having murdered Simon in order to use his blood in their Passover rituals. At first, Samuel withstood several bouts of torture and protested that Jews simply did not use human blood in their rituals. When he reached the limits of his endurance and in an effort to spare others, he confessed that only he and one other had suffocated Simon with a handkerchief. Other members of the community were forced both to confess and to invent fictitious religious motivations for exsanguinating the child. By the time the torture was over 15 male members of the Jewish community were sentenced to death: they were subsequently burned at the stake. Interestingly, female members of the community escaped on the grounds that, as women, they were unable to participate in these rituals (They were eventually freed in 1478 after the pope intervened). The news of the trials spread throughout Northern Italy to Veneto, Lombardy and Tyrol. By 1479 Jewish moneylending had been banned and by 1486 Jews were expelled from the region.
While Hinderbach supported the trials and even forged documents to promote the idea that Jews in Trent were responsible for Simon’s death, the pope was not so sure. In early August 1475, Pope Sixtus IV, commanded Hinderbach to suspend the trials until his representative, Battista De’ Giudici, arrived in Trent. At every turn Hinderbach thwarted De’ Giudici’s attempts to investigate: De’ Giudici was not granted access to those accused and was denied proper access to the original trial documents. When De’ Giudici voiced concerns about the process at Rome, he was accused of being paid off by Jews. He eventually wrote several treatises including an Apology for the Jews defending himself and the Jewish community of any wrongdoing. In 1478, Sixtus IV issued a papal bull on the matter that was something of a political compromise: he accepted that the trials in Trent had been legal but did not acknowledge either the conclusions of the trial or the supposed cause of death of the child. He also reasserted papal protections for Jews and reiterated the ban on blood libel trials.
While this power struggle played out in the halls of ecclesial power, a different more popular movement was gaining support in Northern Italy. There were many who wanted to canonize the murdered toddler. Within three weeks of the Simon’s death a “passio” (an account of his martyrdom) was circulating throughout the region. Hinderbach gathered together documentation that included over a hundred miracles supposedly performed by the boy ‘martyr’ and support for his canonization as a saint gathered steam in Austria, Italy, and Germany.
Sixtus IV, however, was having none of it. The Simon of Trent cult was dangerous and a threat to his authority. He forbade the production of images of Simon (although many grizzly violence-inducing woodcuts of his murder have survived). He was also understandably alarmed by the ferocity of devotion Simon inspired. De’ Giudici reported in his Apology for the Jews that the people in Trent “adored their blessed one as a second Christ and as a second Messiah.” Statements like this, which border on heresy, were troubling to the Franciscan pope, who correctly noted that toddlers are incapable of choosing to die as martyrs. As Christopher MacEvitt, a professor at Dartmouth, told The Daily Beast, “Sixtus IV did not canonize Simon of Trent not because he was particularly sympathetic to the plight of Jewish communities, but because he was determined to uphold papal authority; the popes had made clear that accusations of blood libel and putting Jews on trial for such claims was unacceptable.”
Part of Sixtus IV’s refusal to canonize the child as a martyr was motivated by what was in his mind a far more pressing problem involving non-Christian murderers and persecutors. In 1480 the Ottomans invaded Southern Italy and drew steadily closer to Rome, the pope, and the heart of Christianity. It was a political and military threat as much as a religious one. Sixtus IV wanted martyrs to rally Christians to the anti-Ottoman cause. He turned to five Franciscans who had died attempting to evangelize in Muslim countries roughly a century earlier. There was very little popular interest or support for these martyrs; they had been demonstrably unsuccessful and had failed to convert any Muslims whatsoever. On the contrary, as MacEvitt told me, when Franciscans engaged in efforts to evangelize in Muslim countries “they tended to focus on… fellow Christians living in Muslim lands—merchants, mercenaries, and captives.”
But these martyrs who, like Sixtus IV, were Franciscans, were politically and religiously useful. In his exquisitely written and recently published The Martyrdom of the Franciscans: Islam, the Papacy, and an Order of Conflict, MacEvitt shows that Sixtus IV found that, “Martyrdom was useful for Christians as a way to depict the Ottomans not as a rival for political and economic power in the Mediterranean and eastern Europe, but as a primordial threat to Christians and Christendom. Stories of martyrdom assimilated the Ottomans with demonic forces that were the enemy of goodness, virtue, and salvation.” Over time, MacEvitt shows, “death by Saracen” came to rival other definitions of what made someone a martyr.
All of Sixtus IV’s power, however, could not crush the cult of Simon the child martyr. Stories, poems, and images of his supposed martyrdom continued to circulate. In 1588, Pope Sixtus V beatified him (he was never made a saint) and approved his veneration in Trent. It was only in 1965, in the wake of the Holocaust and Vatican II, that Pope Paul VI removed Simon of Trent from the Roman Martyrology and formally tried to suppress his cult. Yet, most of the statues and images of Simon in the city of Trent are, as Sara Lipton has noted, unaccompanied by placards explaining the anti-Semitic history of his veneration. Three years ago a reddit thread for traditional Catholics discussed the “feast day of Simon of Trent” and there’s even a wildly anti-Semitic webpage bearing his name. Five hundred years after his death, slanderous propaganda about the tragic death of this abducted child continues to languish online and among conservative groups.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/his ... 25564.html
Candida Moss
The Daily BeastJuly 5, 2020, 4:14 AM CDT
Public Domain
On Easter Sunday, 1475, in the city of Trent, a German-Italian city in what is now Northern Italy, a tragedy occurred. A 2-year-old boy named Simon was found dead. His death, a devastating blow to his family, would set in motion a chain of events that would leave almost all of the male members of the Jewish community in Trent dead, create an almost heretical flock of devoted followers who saw him as the new baby Jesus, and perpetuate and foster widespread anti-Semitism in the region for hundreds of years.
According to historian Po-Chia Hsia in his book Trent 1475: Stories of a Ritual Murder Trial, Simon went missing in the early evening of Thursday, 23 March and the following day, Good Friday, the boy’s father had asked the prince-bishop of the city, Johannes Hinderbach, for help in locating his missing son.
Searches ensued and by Easter Saturday suspicion had lighted on the small Jewish community in the city. The chief magistrate, Giovanni de Salis, had the households of the three main Jewish families searched, but Simon was not to be found. Then on Easter Sunday Seligman, a cook in the household of Samuel (a moneylender), discovered Simon’s body in a water cellar on Samuel’s extensive property. As all historians agree, the body had clearly been planted there. Samuel could have fled but had, up until this point, enjoyed an amicable relationship with the city’s authorities. So, instead, he “trusted the system” and reported the discovery. He also insisted that all members of the community stay put, including visitors who just happened to be in town for the Jewish Passover. That Samuel came forward and complied with the authorities was never mentioned in the ensuing trials.
In the aftermath of the discovery, things escalated quickly. Anti-Jewish feeling in the city had recently been inflamed by the arrival of an itinerant Franciscan preacher, Bernardino da Feltre, who had spent the Lenten season railing against Jewish usury and amplifying local hostilities. There were others in the local community, Hsia writes, who had exploited the vulnerability of this small religious minority in order to blackmail members of the Jewish community. All of these elements coupled with centuries-old rumors of blood libel (the dangerous myth that Jews used the blood of Christian children in their religious rituals) combined to create a kind of tinderbox of hatred that was sparked by Simon’s death.
Over the course of several months, the entire Jewish community were arrested and tortured and were forced to confess to having murdered Simon in order to use his blood in their Passover rituals. At first, Samuel withstood several bouts of torture and protested that Jews simply did not use human blood in their rituals. When he reached the limits of his endurance and in an effort to spare others, he confessed that only he and one other had suffocated Simon with a handkerchief. Other members of the community were forced both to confess and to invent fictitious religious motivations for exsanguinating the child. By the time the torture was over 15 male members of the Jewish community were sentenced to death: they were subsequently burned at the stake. Interestingly, female members of the community escaped on the grounds that, as women, they were unable to participate in these rituals (They were eventually freed in 1478 after the pope intervened). The news of the trials spread throughout Northern Italy to Veneto, Lombardy and Tyrol. By 1479 Jewish moneylending had been banned and by 1486 Jews were expelled from the region.
While Hinderbach supported the trials and even forged documents to promote the idea that Jews in Trent were responsible for Simon’s death, the pope was not so sure. In early August 1475, Pope Sixtus IV, commanded Hinderbach to suspend the trials until his representative, Battista De’ Giudici, arrived in Trent. At every turn Hinderbach thwarted De’ Giudici’s attempts to investigate: De’ Giudici was not granted access to those accused and was denied proper access to the original trial documents. When De’ Giudici voiced concerns about the process at Rome, he was accused of being paid off by Jews. He eventually wrote several treatises including an Apology for the Jews defending himself and the Jewish community of any wrongdoing. In 1478, Sixtus IV issued a papal bull on the matter that was something of a political compromise: he accepted that the trials in Trent had been legal but did not acknowledge either the conclusions of the trial or the supposed cause of death of the child. He also reasserted papal protections for Jews and reiterated the ban on blood libel trials.
While this power struggle played out in the halls of ecclesial power, a different more popular movement was gaining support in Northern Italy. There were many who wanted to canonize the murdered toddler. Within three weeks of the Simon’s death a “passio” (an account of his martyrdom) was circulating throughout the region. Hinderbach gathered together documentation that included over a hundred miracles supposedly performed by the boy ‘martyr’ and support for his canonization as a saint gathered steam in Austria, Italy, and Germany.
Sixtus IV, however, was having none of it. The Simon of Trent cult was dangerous and a threat to his authority. He forbade the production of images of Simon (although many grizzly violence-inducing woodcuts of his murder have survived). He was also understandably alarmed by the ferocity of devotion Simon inspired. De’ Giudici reported in his Apology for the Jews that the people in Trent “adored their blessed one as a second Christ and as a second Messiah.” Statements like this, which border on heresy, were troubling to the Franciscan pope, who correctly noted that toddlers are incapable of choosing to die as martyrs. As Christopher MacEvitt, a professor at Dartmouth, told The Daily Beast, “Sixtus IV did not canonize Simon of Trent not because he was particularly sympathetic to the plight of Jewish communities, but because he was determined to uphold papal authority; the popes had made clear that accusations of blood libel and putting Jews on trial for such claims was unacceptable.”
Part of Sixtus IV’s refusal to canonize the child as a martyr was motivated by what was in his mind a far more pressing problem involving non-Christian murderers and persecutors. In 1480 the Ottomans invaded Southern Italy and drew steadily closer to Rome, the pope, and the heart of Christianity. It was a political and military threat as much as a religious one. Sixtus IV wanted martyrs to rally Christians to the anti-Ottoman cause. He turned to five Franciscans who had died attempting to evangelize in Muslim countries roughly a century earlier. There was very little popular interest or support for these martyrs; they had been demonstrably unsuccessful and had failed to convert any Muslims whatsoever. On the contrary, as MacEvitt told me, when Franciscans engaged in efforts to evangelize in Muslim countries “they tended to focus on… fellow Christians living in Muslim lands—merchants, mercenaries, and captives.”
But these martyrs who, like Sixtus IV, were Franciscans, were politically and religiously useful. In his exquisitely written and recently published The Martyrdom of the Franciscans: Islam, the Papacy, and an Order of Conflict, MacEvitt shows that Sixtus IV found that, “Martyrdom was useful for Christians as a way to depict the Ottomans not as a rival for political and economic power in the Mediterranean and eastern Europe, but as a primordial threat to Christians and Christendom. Stories of martyrdom assimilated the Ottomans with demonic forces that were the enemy of goodness, virtue, and salvation.” Over time, MacEvitt shows, “death by Saracen” came to rival other definitions of what made someone a martyr.
All of Sixtus IV’s power, however, could not crush the cult of Simon the child martyr. Stories, poems, and images of his supposed martyrdom continued to circulate. In 1588, Pope Sixtus V beatified him (he was never made a saint) and approved his veneration in Trent. It was only in 1965, in the wake of the Holocaust and Vatican II, that Pope Paul VI removed Simon of Trent from the Roman Martyrology and formally tried to suppress his cult. Yet, most of the statues and images of Simon in the city of Trent are, as Sara Lipton has noted, unaccompanied by placards explaining the anti-Semitic history of his veneration. Three years ago a reddit thread for traditional Catholics discussed the “feast day of Simon of Trent” and there’s even a wildly anti-Semitic webpage bearing his name. Five hundred years after his death, slanderous propaganda about the tragic death of this abducted child continues to languish online and among conservative groups.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/his ... 25564.html
-
swamidada_2
- Posts: 297
- Joined: Mon Aug 19, 2019 8:18 pm
TODAY'S PAPER | JULY 17, 2020
New status of Hagia Sophia
Zahid HussainUpdated 15 Jul, 2020
THE reversion of the celebrated Hagia Sophia museum into a mosque is perhaps the most telling sign of the rolling back of Turkey’s secular character and a reflection of the rise of religious nationalism in the country. As a museum, this architectural wonder symbolised the idea of a common cultural heritage that transcended faith. The change of its status has removed that symbolism.
While the decision by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan may have pleased his Islamist followers and his populist base, millions of Turks, as the country’s Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk noted, “are crying against this but their voices are not heard”. The move has not only shaken the world, it has also divided the nation.
Built some 1,500 years ago as an Orthodox Christian cathedral, the Hagia Sophia was converted into a mosque after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople (Istanbul) in 1453. It was turned into a museum on the orders of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founding father of secular Turkey in 1934. The majestic complex has been declared by Unicef as a World Heritage Site and is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world.
Some sections of conservative Muslims had long campaigned for reopening the complex for prayers but they were in a minority. Turkey’s strong secular culture would not permit restoration of the heritage as a place of worship. However, the rise of the Islamists led by Erdogan is changing the country’s political landscape.
The rise of the Islamists led by Erdogan is changing the country’s political landscape.
Although the secular character of the state is still protected by the Turkish constitution, the resurgence of faith and the confluence of faith and politics has weakened the Kemalist order. Erdogan’s latest action, coming after a court ruling, has raised questions about Turkey’s image as a moderate Muslim country.
By changing its status, the universal nature of Hagia Sophia’s heritage is affected. The complex reflects centuries of interaction between Europe and Asia, and to treat it as the heritage of a particular faith will be seen as a negation of its overall historical value. Such an approach can also fuel religious fanaticism and widen religious divides, besides causing a shift in the perception of Turkey as an open society. Many may see it as shift towards exclusion.
During the mediaeval ages, it was a common practice of conquerors everywhere to convert places of worship of the vanquished to premises for the practice of their own religion. There have been a number of examples where churches were turned into mosques and mosques into churches. Hagia Sophia was also such an example. By turning it into a museum, Mustafa Kemal had restored history. It also reinforced Istanbul’s position as the city where different cultures and faiths could coexist.
Erdogan’s action of reversing this aspect of the Kemalist legacy has intensified the clash between those who want Turkey to remain secular and the conservative support base of the Turkish president. The issue has highlighted the battle for the soul of Turkey. “To convert it back to a mosque is to say to the rest of the world unfortunately we are not secular anymore,” Orhan Pamuk was quoted as saying.
Predictably, the decision has provoked intense international outrage. In a statement, Unesco, the UN’s cultural agency, has warned Turkish authorities against “taking any decision that might impact the universal value of the site”. Several Western countries have also protested.
But the Turkish president does not seem bothered over the outcry. He has defended his action by stressing that the country had exercised its sovereign right in converting the museum into a mosque. This argument does not sound very convincing.
Many Turks also question the timing of the move at a time when the country is badly affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, the economy is in a slump and tourism is non-existent. Some see it as a political move in that it is meant to assert a strident nationalism as part of the battle against the president’s secular rivals.
Erdogan’s move cannot be seen in isolation. It reflects the increasing instrumentalization of religion in order to solidify his populist support base. In fact, at a more general level, it symbolizes the rise of right-wing nationalism and religious chauvinism around the world today.
In recent years, religiously inspired nationalist movements have gained prominence in several countries around the world. The confluence of politics and religion has also generated exclusiveness and majoritianism. The tendency to drive political legitimacy through religion has serious implications for the democratic process and political development in society.
Turkey under President Erdogan is such an example. He has used religious nationalism to undermine democratic rights and freedom of expression and faith. According to media reports in the past decade, less famous former churches in other parts of Turkey have resumed services as mosques.
Yet Turkey is not the only country that is witnessing the rise of a strident religious nationalism and chauvinism. There are many democracies worldwide that are also experiencing the emergence of such political movements holding a strong religious appeal, including countries as diverse as India and some countries of Latin America and Western Europe.
In fact, Hagia Sophia is not the only historical site that has seen a religious reversion. Similar moves have been part of state policy elsewhere too. For instance, the Indian supreme court last year endorsed the 1992 demolition of the 16th-century Babri Masjid by Hindu fundamentalists aligned with the current ruling BJP, who believed it was built atop the birthplace of Ram. The issue may have helped the party galvanise the religious vote bank, but at the expense of India’s secular character.
Religious conflicts are being increasingly weaponised by virulent nationalist forces to assert their political brand. It is a highly dangerous proposition as appeals to religion invariably create an opening for a more strident nationalism. Conversions of such sites reflect an aggressive nationalism that presents one of the most serious challenges for the civilised world. What is happening in Turkey, India and some other parts of the world must be a serious cause of international concern.
The writer is an author and journalist.
Published in Dawn, July 15th, 2020
https://www.dawn.com/news/1569107/new-s ... gia-sophia
New status of Hagia Sophia
Zahid HussainUpdated 15 Jul, 2020
THE reversion of the celebrated Hagia Sophia museum into a mosque is perhaps the most telling sign of the rolling back of Turkey’s secular character and a reflection of the rise of religious nationalism in the country. As a museum, this architectural wonder symbolised the idea of a common cultural heritage that transcended faith. The change of its status has removed that symbolism.
While the decision by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan may have pleased his Islamist followers and his populist base, millions of Turks, as the country’s Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk noted, “are crying against this but their voices are not heard”. The move has not only shaken the world, it has also divided the nation.
Built some 1,500 years ago as an Orthodox Christian cathedral, the Hagia Sophia was converted into a mosque after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople (Istanbul) in 1453. It was turned into a museum on the orders of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founding father of secular Turkey in 1934. The majestic complex has been declared by Unicef as a World Heritage Site and is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world.
Some sections of conservative Muslims had long campaigned for reopening the complex for prayers but they were in a minority. Turkey’s strong secular culture would not permit restoration of the heritage as a place of worship. However, the rise of the Islamists led by Erdogan is changing the country’s political landscape.
The rise of the Islamists led by Erdogan is changing the country’s political landscape.
Although the secular character of the state is still protected by the Turkish constitution, the resurgence of faith and the confluence of faith and politics has weakened the Kemalist order. Erdogan’s latest action, coming after a court ruling, has raised questions about Turkey’s image as a moderate Muslim country.
By changing its status, the universal nature of Hagia Sophia’s heritage is affected. The complex reflects centuries of interaction between Europe and Asia, and to treat it as the heritage of a particular faith will be seen as a negation of its overall historical value. Such an approach can also fuel religious fanaticism and widen religious divides, besides causing a shift in the perception of Turkey as an open society. Many may see it as shift towards exclusion.
During the mediaeval ages, it was a common practice of conquerors everywhere to convert places of worship of the vanquished to premises for the practice of their own religion. There have been a number of examples where churches were turned into mosques and mosques into churches. Hagia Sophia was also such an example. By turning it into a museum, Mustafa Kemal had restored history. It also reinforced Istanbul’s position as the city where different cultures and faiths could coexist.
Erdogan’s action of reversing this aspect of the Kemalist legacy has intensified the clash between those who want Turkey to remain secular and the conservative support base of the Turkish president. The issue has highlighted the battle for the soul of Turkey. “To convert it back to a mosque is to say to the rest of the world unfortunately we are not secular anymore,” Orhan Pamuk was quoted as saying.
Predictably, the decision has provoked intense international outrage. In a statement, Unesco, the UN’s cultural agency, has warned Turkish authorities against “taking any decision that might impact the universal value of the site”. Several Western countries have also protested.
But the Turkish president does not seem bothered over the outcry. He has defended his action by stressing that the country had exercised its sovereign right in converting the museum into a mosque. This argument does not sound very convincing.
Many Turks also question the timing of the move at a time when the country is badly affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, the economy is in a slump and tourism is non-existent. Some see it as a political move in that it is meant to assert a strident nationalism as part of the battle against the president’s secular rivals.
Erdogan’s move cannot be seen in isolation. It reflects the increasing instrumentalization of religion in order to solidify his populist support base. In fact, at a more general level, it symbolizes the rise of right-wing nationalism and religious chauvinism around the world today.
In recent years, religiously inspired nationalist movements have gained prominence in several countries around the world. The confluence of politics and religion has also generated exclusiveness and majoritianism. The tendency to drive political legitimacy through religion has serious implications for the democratic process and political development in society.
Turkey under President Erdogan is such an example. He has used religious nationalism to undermine democratic rights and freedom of expression and faith. According to media reports in the past decade, less famous former churches in other parts of Turkey have resumed services as mosques.
Yet Turkey is not the only country that is witnessing the rise of a strident religious nationalism and chauvinism. There are many democracies worldwide that are also experiencing the emergence of such political movements holding a strong religious appeal, including countries as diverse as India and some countries of Latin America and Western Europe.
In fact, Hagia Sophia is not the only historical site that has seen a religious reversion. Similar moves have been part of state policy elsewhere too. For instance, the Indian supreme court last year endorsed the 1992 demolition of the 16th-century Babri Masjid by Hindu fundamentalists aligned with the current ruling BJP, who believed it was built atop the birthplace of Ram. The issue may have helped the party galvanise the religious vote bank, but at the expense of India’s secular character.
Religious conflicts are being increasingly weaponised by virulent nationalist forces to assert their political brand. It is a highly dangerous proposition as appeals to religion invariably create an opening for a more strident nationalism. Conversions of such sites reflect an aggressive nationalism that presents one of the most serious challenges for the civilised world. What is happening in Turkey, India and some other parts of the world must be a serious cause of international concern.
The writer is an author and journalist.
Published in Dawn, July 15th, 2020
https://www.dawn.com/news/1569107/new-s ... gia-sophia
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Monty Python’s classic ‘The Life of Brian’ relentlessly mocked Christianity. Now we must do the same thing to the Church of Woke
Michael McCaffrey
Michael McCaffrey is a writer and cultural critic who lives in Los Angeles. His work can be read at RT, Counterpunch and at his website mpmacting.com/blog. He is also the host of the popular cinema podcast Looking California and Feeling Minnesota. .
20 Jul, 2020 14:10
Monty Python’s classic ‘The Life of Brian’ relentlessly mocked Christianity. Now we must do the same thing to the Church of Woke
Graham Chapman, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin in Life of Brian (1979) Dir: Terry Jones © Mary Evans Picture Library 2010
Once banned for blasphemy, the Life of Brian has been recertified in Britain. Its eviscerating take on Christianity is exactly what’s needed on the new religion of Woke before the PC brigade win the culture war for good.
‘The Life of Brian’, Monty Python’s classic cinematic mocking of Christianity, was so scandalous for its blasphemy when it was released back in 1979 that it was actually banned by some British movie theaters, while others gave it the scarlet letter of an X rating.
An X certificate in those days was the movie rating equivalent of being stoned to death for saying, “Jehovah!”
As a sign of how dramatically the culture has shifted in the past 40 years, the British Board of Film Classification now rates ‘The Life of Brian’ a very warm and fuzzy 12A – suitable for viewers 12 and up.
The film isn’t considered dangerous for its blasphemy anymore, because Christianity doesn’t much matter anymore… and I say that as a practising Catholic.
Christianity, with its endemic corruption, devout fanatics, and exuberant magical thinking has been usurped in our culture by a newly ascendant religious force even more severe in nature. That force is wokeness, which is accompanied by its own inquisition and enforcement wing – cancel culture.
If you doubt that wokeness is the new dominant cultural religion, consider this: in most places in the US, you aren’t allowed to go to church because of coronavirus, but are wholly encouraged to attend Black Lives Matter protests, which apparently confer some mystical power of immunity upon attendees.
Meet the new religion… same as the old religion.
Monty Python were such a brilliant comedic force, they not only obliterated the old religion in ‘The Life of Brian’, but ridiculed the new one too, 40 years before it rose to power.
There’s a scene in the film – which would never get made in today’s stultifying politically correct environment – that deals with transgenderism.
Set in the Colosseum of Jerusalem, the scene shows the People’s Front of Judea (not to be confused with the Judean People’s Front) – comprising Stan (Eric Idle), Reg (John Cleese), Francis (Michael Palin) and Judith (Sue Jones-Davies) – meeting to discuss their goals.
When Stan keeps interjecting feminine pronouns into the discussion about the movement’s proposed aims, he’s asked by Francis why he’s “always on about women.”
Stan: “I want to be one … I want to be a woman. From now on, I want you all to call me Loretta … It’s my right as a man.”
Judith: “Why would you want to be Loretta, Stan?
Stan: “I want to have babies … It’s every man’s right to have babies if he wants them.”
Reg: “But you can’t have babies!”
Stan: “Don’t you oppress me!”
Reg: “I’m not oppressing you, Stan – you haven’t got a womb! Where’s the fetus gonna gestate? You gonna keep it in a box?”
We need a new, anti-woke TV station to stave off comedy’s impending EXTINCTION at the hands of cancel culture
After some hemming and hawing, Francis chimes in with a solution.
Francis (to Stan): “We shall fight our oppressors for your right to have babies, brother – sister, sorry.”
Reg: “What’s the point of fighting for his right to have babies when he can’t have babies?”
Francis: “It’s symbolic of our struggle against oppression!”
Reg: “It’s symbolic of his struggle against reality.”
It is impossible to imagine any comedy of today having the testicular fortitude to do a scene as brutally honest and savagely insightful as that.
“Symbolic struggle against reality” is the perfect definition of wokeness, and this is why we need a new Monty Python-esque group to make a film eviscerating wokeness as exquisitely and relentlessly as the ‘The Life of Brian’ did Christianity… maybe calling it ‘The Life of Karen’.
Wokeness, with its incessant self-righteousness, aggressive illogic, absurd preferred pronouns and ridiculously insufferable PC jargon, is a gloriously target-rich comedy environment.
Comedians must never apologize if comedy is to survive in the age of cancel culture
Sadly, there’s no Monty Python equivalent in our times comically capable of dismantling the new Church of Wokeness. The most prominent sketch comedy show today is ‘Saturday Night Live’, and it’s shamelessly politically correct.
In stark contrast to the ballsy comedy bravado displayed by Monty Python four decades ago, watching its woke-approved humor is like getting a scolding from a Methodist temperance movement 100 years ago.
‘Saturday Night Live’ is so blunted by wokeness that, in 2019, it actually fired comedian Shane Gillis before he ever appeared on the show because he offended the Cancel Culture Centurions and Tiny Torquemadas of Twitter… the horror!
Besides suffocating the comedy of today, the woke are actively scouring TV and film history searching for retroactive blasphemers to silence.
‘The Office’, ‘Community’, ‘30 Rock’, ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’, ‘Scrubs’, and ‘Fawlty Towers’, among others, have all had episodes scrubbed from streaming services for their past politically incorrect sins.
Let us pray to our Lord and Savior Brian and his Sacred Shoe and Holy Gourd that Monty Python’s glorious canon is not next on the cancel culture crucifixion list.
By today’s woke standards, they’d certainly deserve it for their insightful dismantling of transgenderism, their mockery of speech impediments in the form of ‘pwonouncements’ by Pilate and his ‘fwiend’ Biggus Dickus, and for the crime of having men play female roles!
“On the bright side”…if Monty Python do get crucified, at least they’ll go out singing!
The bottom line is this: wokeness must be stopped, and I believe the best way to stop it is to mock it. Sadly, though, the Church of Wokeness is winning the culture war because, unlike Monty Python 40 years ago, today’s comedy hasn’t found the courage to tell the unvarnished, hysterical truth. And we are all worse off because of it.
Michael McCaffrey
Michael McCaffrey is a writer and cultural critic who lives in Los Angeles. His work can be read at RT, Counterpunch and at his website mpmacting.com/blog. He is also the host of the popular cinema podcast Looking California and Feeling Minnesota. .
20 Jul, 2020 14:10
Monty Python’s classic ‘The Life of Brian’ relentlessly mocked Christianity. Now we must do the same thing to the Church of Woke
Graham Chapman, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin in Life of Brian (1979) Dir: Terry Jones © Mary Evans Picture Library 2010
Once banned for blasphemy, the Life of Brian has been recertified in Britain. Its eviscerating take on Christianity is exactly what’s needed on the new religion of Woke before the PC brigade win the culture war for good.
‘The Life of Brian’, Monty Python’s classic cinematic mocking of Christianity, was so scandalous for its blasphemy when it was released back in 1979 that it was actually banned by some British movie theaters, while others gave it the scarlet letter of an X rating.
An X certificate in those days was the movie rating equivalent of being stoned to death for saying, “Jehovah!”
As a sign of how dramatically the culture has shifted in the past 40 years, the British Board of Film Classification now rates ‘The Life of Brian’ a very warm and fuzzy 12A – suitable for viewers 12 and up.
The film isn’t considered dangerous for its blasphemy anymore, because Christianity doesn’t much matter anymore… and I say that as a practising Catholic.
Christianity, with its endemic corruption, devout fanatics, and exuberant magical thinking has been usurped in our culture by a newly ascendant religious force even more severe in nature. That force is wokeness, which is accompanied by its own inquisition and enforcement wing – cancel culture.
If you doubt that wokeness is the new dominant cultural religion, consider this: in most places in the US, you aren’t allowed to go to church because of coronavirus, but are wholly encouraged to attend Black Lives Matter protests, which apparently confer some mystical power of immunity upon attendees.
Meet the new religion… same as the old religion.
Monty Python were such a brilliant comedic force, they not only obliterated the old religion in ‘The Life of Brian’, but ridiculed the new one too, 40 years before it rose to power.
There’s a scene in the film – which would never get made in today’s stultifying politically correct environment – that deals with transgenderism.
Set in the Colosseum of Jerusalem, the scene shows the People’s Front of Judea (not to be confused with the Judean People’s Front) – comprising Stan (Eric Idle), Reg (John Cleese), Francis (Michael Palin) and Judith (Sue Jones-Davies) – meeting to discuss their goals.
When Stan keeps interjecting feminine pronouns into the discussion about the movement’s proposed aims, he’s asked by Francis why he’s “always on about women.”
Stan: “I want to be one … I want to be a woman. From now on, I want you all to call me Loretta … It’s my right as a man.”
Judith: “Why would you want to be Loretta, Stan?
Stan: “I want to have babies … It’s every man’s right to have babies if he wants them.”
Reg: “But you can’t have babies!”
Stan: “Don’t you oppress me!”
Reg: “I’m not oppressing you, Stan – you haven’t got a womb! Where’s the fetus gonna gestate? You gonna keep it in a box?”
We need a new, anti-woke TV station to stave off comedy’s impending EXTINCTION at the hands of cancel culture
After some hemming and hawing, Francis chimes in with a solution.
Francis (to Stan): “We shall fight our oppressors for your right to have babies, brother – sister, sorry.”
Reg: “What’s the point of fighting for his right to have babies when he can’t have babies?”
Francis: “It’s symbolic of our struggle against oppression!”
Reg: “It’s symbolic of his struggle against reality.”
It is impossible to imagine any comedy of today having the testicular fortitude to do a scene as brutally honest and savagely insightful as that.
“Symbolic struggle against reality” is the perfect definition of wokeness, and this is why we need a new Monty Python-esque group to make a film eviscerating wokeness as exquisitely and relentlessly as the ‘The Life of Brian’ did Christianity… maybe calling it ‘The Life of Karen’.
Wokeness, with its incessant self-righteousness, aggressive illogic, absurd preferred pronouns and ridiculously insufferable PC jargon, is a gloriously target-rich comedy environment.
Comedians must never apologize if comedy is to survive in the age of cancel culture
Sadly, there’s no Monty Python equivalent in our times comically capable of dismantling the new Church of Wokeness. The most prominent sketch comedy show today is ‘Saturday Night Live’, and it’s shamelessly politically correct.
In stark contrast to the ballsy comedy bravado displayed by Monty Python four decades ago, watching its woke-approved humor is like getting a scolding from a Methodist temperance movement 100 years ago.
‘Saturday Night Live’ is so blunted by wokeness that, in 2019, it actually fired comedian Shane Gillis before he ever appeared on the show because he offended the Cancel Culture Centurions and Tiny Torquemadas of Twitter… the horror!
Besides suffocating the comedy of today, the woke are actively scouring TV and film history searching for retroactive blasphemers to silence.
‘The Office’, ‘Community’, ‘30 Rock’, ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’, ‘Scrubs’, and ‘Fawlty Towers’, among others, have all had episodes scrubbed from streaming services for their past politically incorrect sins.
Let us pray to our Lord and Savior Brian and his Sacred Shoe and Holy Gourd that Monty Python’s glorious canon is not next on the cancel culture crucifixion list.
By today’s woke standards, they’d certainly deserve it for their insightful dismantling of transgenderism, their mockery of speech impediments in the form of ‘pwonouncements’ by Pilate and his ‘fwiend’ Biggus Dickus, and for the crime of having men play female roles!
“On the bright side”…if Monty Python do get crucified, at least they’ll go out singing!
The bottom line is this: wokeness must be stopped, and I believe the best way to stop it is to mock it. Sadly, though, the Church of Wokeness is winning the culture war because, unlike Monty Python 40 years ago, today’s comedy hasn’t found the courage to tell the unvarnished, hysterical truth. And we are all worse off because of it.
WATCH ‘peaceful’ Portland protesters burn Bible & flag, 24 hours after torching pig’s head in cop hat
1 Aug, 2020 12:58 / Updated 12 hours ago
Demonstrators in Portland set Bibles and US flags on fire amid protests that have spanned nearly 2 months. The day before, protesters torched a pig’s head with police clothing, though they still claim their movement is peaceful.
Footage published by RT’s Ruptly video agency shows a group of protesters on Friday night gathered around a burning Bible, with several individuals mockingly warming their hands around the fire. Laughter and shouts of “F**k Trump” can be heard in the background.
US flags were also burned by the protesters, who were seen crowding around the fire and taking photographs.
The provocative bonfires come one night after demonstrators torched a severed pig’s head that was placed under an American flag. The head was decorated with a police officer’s hat, leaving little to the imagination.
Although Friday night saw considerably less violence than in previous days, protesters were still spotted setting fires and committing other acts of vandalism in the downtown area.
Tensions in the city have been on the rise following the deployment of federal agents tasked with protecting the Mark O. Hatfield US Courthouse. The federal officers have been accused of using excessive force to protect the building, but the task force claims that it has come under repeated assault by demonstrators and has responded accordingly.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reached a deal with Oregon Governor Kate Brown earlier this week, in which state police would be used to keep the peace during demonstrations. Federal forces will remain in the city but will only be used as a last resort. US President Donald Trump has warned that “anarchists and agitators” must be dealt with before federal officers can be withdrawn from the city.
https://www.rt.com/usa/496847-portland- ... -flag-pig/
1 Aug, 2020 12:58 / Updated 12 hours ago
Demonstrators in Portland set Bibles and US flags on fire amid protests that have spanned nearly 2 months. The day before, protesters torched a pig’s head with police clothing, though they still claim their movement is peaceful.
Footage published by RT’s Ruptly video agency shows a group of protesters on Friday night gathered around a burning Bible, with several individuals mockingly warming their hands around the fire. Laughter and shouts of “F**k Trump” can be heard in the background.
US flags were also burned by the protesters, who were seen crowding around the fire and taking photographs.
The provocative bonfires come one night after demonstrators torched a severed pig’s head that was placed under an American flag. The head was decorated with a police officer’s hat, leaving little to the imagination.
Although Friday night saw considerably less violence than in previous days, protesters were still spotted setting fires and committing other acts of vandalism in the downtown area.
Tensions in the city have been on the rise following the deployment of federal agents tasked with protecting the Mark O. Hatfield US Courthouse. The federal officers have been accused of using excessive force to protect the building, but the task force claims that it has come under repeated assault by demonstrators and has responded accordingly.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reached a deal with Oregon Governor Kate Brown earlier this week, in which state police would be used to keep the peace during demonstrations. Federal forces will remain in the city but will only be used as a last resort. US President Donald Trump has warned that “anarchists and agitators” must be dealt with before federal officers can be withdrawn from the city.
https://www.rt.com/usa/496847-portland- ... -flag-pig/
‘Racism Makes a Liar of God’
How the American Catholic church is wrestling with the Black Lives Matter movement.
In 1963, when 250,000 demonstrators gathered at the Lincoln Memorial and heard the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech, they did so under the prayerful invocation of Archbishop Patrick O’Boyle of Washington. He called for the Holy Spirit to open the eyes of Christians to the injustice of racial discrimination, condemned violence and praised the activists who had possessed the courage to go forth, like Moses, in search of a beautiful country.
Five decades later, these hopes seem in many respects unfulfilled. About one in five Americans identify as Catholic, and as of 2018, roughly six in 10 white Catholics felt that police killings of Black men were isolated incidents rather than evidence of a profound and lethal bias. Prominent Catholic commentators, including Bill O’Reilly and Father Dwight Longenecker, fear and reject the Black Lives Matter movement.
American Catholic unease with Black Lives Matter has been particularly noticeable during the protests over the killing of George Floyd. Statues commemorating Junipero Serra, a Spanish monk responsible for founding several of California’s Catholic missions in the early days of European colonization, have been torn down by protesters outraged by Father Serra’s eager participation in the conquest of North America, including the torture, enslavement and murder of some of the Native Americans he intended to convert.
Other religious statues, too, have been damaged by protesters. Coupled with the vandalism of a handful of Catholic churches along with a slew of ordinary buildings, the attacks on statuary have sparked fury among conservative Catholics, confirming what they perhaps already believed: that racial justice movements — or at least this particular one — are antithetical to the Christian faith, rooted in Marxism and atheism.
A Catholic anti-abortion activist, Abby Johnson, tweeted in June: “The Catholic Church is burning. And everyday, liberal Catholics continue to throw matches on Her with sacrilegious nonsense like this,” in reference to an icon showing Mr. Floyd as a Jesus figure, dying in his mother’s arms.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/06/opin ... ogin-email
How the American Catholic church is wrestling with the Black Lives Matter movement.
In 1963, when 250,000 demonstrators gathered at the Lincoln Memorial and heard the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech, they did so under the prayerful invocation of Archbishop Patrick O’Boyle of Washington. He called for the Holy Spirit to open the eyes of Christians to the injustice of racial discrimination, condemned violence and praised the activists who had possessed the courage to go forth, like Moses, in search of a beautiful country.
Five decades later, these hopes seem in many respects unfulfilled. About one in five Americans identify as Catholic, and as of 2018, roughly six in 10 white Catholics felt that police killings of Black men were isolated incidents rather than evidence of a profound and lethal bias. Prominent Catholic commentators, including Bill O’Reilly and Father Dwight Longenecker, fear and reject the Black Lives Matter movement.
American Catholic unease with Black Lives Matter has been particularly noticeable during the protests over the killing of George Floyd. Statues commemorating Junipero Serra, a Spanish monk responsible for founding several of California’s Catholic missions in the early days of European colonization, have been torn down by protesters outraged by Father Serra’s eager participation in the conquest of North America, including the torture, enslavement and murder of some of the Native Americans he intended to convert.
Other religious statues, too, have been damaged by protesters. Coupled with the vandalism of a handful of Catholic churches along with a slew of ordinary buildings, the attacks on statuary have sparked fury among conservative Catholics, confirming what they perhaps already believed: that racial justice movements — or at least this particular one — are antithetical to the Christian faith, rooted in Marxism and atheism.
A Catholic anti-abortion activist, Abby Johnson, tweeted in June: “The Catholic Church is burning. And everyday, liberal Catholics continue to throw matches on Her with sacrilegious nonsense like this,” in reference to an icon showing Mr. Floyd as a Jesus figure, dying in his mother’s arms.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/06/opin ... ogin-email
Pakistani court sparks outrage by ruling 14-year-old Christian girl must stay married to alleged abductor
Joe Wallen
The Telegraph August 5, 2020, 8:24 AM
Around 1,000 Christian and Hindu women are kidnapped each year and typically forced to convert to Islam - Mohsin Raza/Reuters
A Pakistani court has sparked outrage by ruling a 14-year-old Christian girl was legally married to a Muslim man who allegedly abducted her at gunpoint.
In a case that has renewed focus on the persecution of Pakistan's Christian minority, the Lahore High Court ruled on Tuesday that Maira Shahbaz had willingly converted to Islam and married Mohamad Nakash.
The girl and her family claim that she was kidnapped in April by Mr Nakash and two accomplices from near her home in the city of Faisalabad. If the ruling is not reversed, Ms Shahbaz will have to return to Mr Nakash's home from the shelter she was temporarily placed in.
Around 1,000 Christian and Hindu women are abducted each year in Pakistan and typically forced to convert to Islam, according to the Movement for Solidarity and Peace.
Mr Nakash, who is already married, tried to claim Ms Shahbaz was 19-years-old but this was discounted by the victim’s family who produced birth certificates and school records to show she was a minor.
After this evidence was provided last week, a local court ruled Ms Shahbaz should be removed from Mr Nakash’s house and placed in a girls’ shelter, pending further investigation.
However, that decision was reversed on Tuesday by a court with a greater jurisdiction in Pakistan. The victim's lawyer, Khalil Tahir Sandhu, claimed 150 of Mr Nakash’s associates arrived at the court.
“It is unbelievable. What we have seen today is an Islamic judgement. The arguments we put forwards were very strong and coherent,” Mr Sandhu told the Independent Catholic News (ICN).
“With this ruling, no Christian girl in Pakistan is safe,” echoed Pakistani Christian advocate, Lala Robin Daniel.
The victim's parents say they will take the case to Pakistan's Supreme Court, which infamously overturned the death penalty given to Asia Bibi for blasphemy - AFP
Ms Shahbaz was brought to tears by the ruling and her mother refused to speak to the media immediately afterwards, according to the ICN.
Christians constitute approximately two percent of the Pakistani population but face increasing violence, discrimination and intolerance in the majority conservative Muslim nation.
Ms Shahbaz’s family has said they will appeal the decision and take it to the highest court in Pakistan to get their daughter back.
The Pakistani Supreme Court infamously overturned the death penalty sentence of Asia Bibi, a Christian woman charged with blasphemy.
In May, after the high-profile case, Ms Bibi was able to leave Pakistan to claim asylum in Canada after a prominent Islamic cleric led mass protests over the acquittal.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/pak ... 17190.html
Joe Wallen
The Telegraph August 5, 2020, 8:24 AM
Around 1,000 Christian and Hindu women are kidnapped each year and typically forced to convert to Islam - Mohsin Raza/Reuters
A Pakistani court has sparked outrage by ruling a 14-year-old Christian girl was legally married to a Muslim man who allegedly abducted her at gunpoint.
In a case that has renewed focus on the persecution of Pakistan's Christian minority, the Lahore High Court ruled on Tuesday that Maira Shahbaz had willingly converted to Islam and married Mohamad Nakash.
The girl and her family claim that she was kidnapped in April by Mr Nakash and two accomplices from near her home in the city of Faisalabad. If the ruling is not reversed, Ms Shahbaz will have to return to Mr Nakash's home from the shelter she was temporarily placed in.
Around 1,000 Christian and Hindu women are abducted each year in Pakistan and typically forced to convert to Islam, according to the Movement for Solidarity and Peace.
Mr Nakash, who is already married, tried to claim Ms Shahbaz was 19-years-old but this was discounted by the victim’s family who produced birth certificates and school records to show she was a minor.
After this evidence was provided last week, a local court ruled Ms Shahbaz should be removed from Mr Nakash’s house and placed in a girls’ shelter, pending further investigation.
However, that decision was reversed on Tuesday by a court with a greater jurisdiction in Pakistan. The victim's lawyer, Khalil Tahir Sandhu, claimed 150 of Mr Nakash’s associates arrived at the court.
“It is unbelievable. What we have seen today is an Islamic judgement. The arguments we put forwards were very strong and coherent,” Mr Sandhu told the Independent Catholic News (ICN).
“With this ruling, no Christian girl in Pakistan is safe,” echoed Pakistani Christian advocate, Lala Robin Daniel.
The victim's parents say they will take the case to Pakistan's Supreme Court, which infamously overturned the death penalty given to Asia Bibi for blasphemy - AFP
Ms Shahbaz was brought to tears by the ruling and her mother refused to speak to the media immediately afterwards, according to the ICN.
Christians constitute approximately two percent of the Pakistani population but face increasing violence, discrimination and intolerance in the majority conservative Muslim nation.
Ms Shahbaz’s family has said they will appeal the decision and take it to the highest court in Pakistan to get their daughter back.
The Pakistani Supreme Court infamously overturned the death penalty sentence of Asia Bibi, a Christian woman charged with blasphemy.
In May, after the high-profile case, Ms Bibi was able to leave Pakistan to claim asylum in Canada after a prominent Islamic cleric led mass protests over the acquittal.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/pak ... 17190.html
Catholic Churches Drop Hymns After Accusations Against Composer
David Haas, a composer known for “Blest Are They,” “We Are Called,” “You Are Mine” and other favorites, has been accused of sexual abuse and harassment by multiple women, an advocacy group says.
Several Roman Catholic archdioceses have banned a well-known liturgical composer from performing in their churches and many others have stopped playing his music after dozens of women accused him of sexual misconduct and harassment over more than 40 years.
The allegations against the composer, David Haas, 63, include harassment and cyberstalking, lewd propositions, forced kissing and groping, and other unwanted sexual behavior, according to accusations from 38 women compiled by Into Account, a survivor advocacy group. The New York Times interviewed six of the women.
Many of the women were musicians or aspiring liturgical composers who considered Mr. Haas a mentor and said they feared professional retaliation if they spoke out earlier. One described him as a “rock star in the Catholic liturgical realm” who created his own rules.
After multiple women approached Into Account with allegations, the organization emailed a letter to church leaders, publishers and some of his liturgical peers in May, said Stephanie Krehbiel, the group’s executive director, who added that women continued to come forward.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/10/us/d ... ogin-email
David Haas, a composer known for “Blest Are They,” “We Are Called,” “You Are Mine” and other favorites, has been accused of sexual abuse and harassment by multiple women, an advocacy group says.
Several Roman Catholic archdioceses have banned a well-known liturgical composer from performing in their churches and many others have stopped playing his music after dozens of women accused him of sexual misconduct and harassment over more than 40 years.
The allegations against the composer, David Haas, 63, include harassment and cyberstalking, lewd propositions, forced kissing and groping, and other unwanted sexual behavior, according to accusations from 38 women compiled by Into Account, a survivor advocacy group. The New York Times interviewed six of the women.
Many of the women were musicians or aspiring liturgical composers who considered Mr. Haas a mentor and said they feared professional retaliation if they spoke out earlier. One described him as a “rock star in the Catholic liturgical realm” who created his own rules.
After multiple women approached Into Account with allegations, the organization emailed a letter to church leaders, publishers and some of his liturgical peers in May, said Stephanie Krehbiel, the group’s executive director, who added that women continued to come forward.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/10/us/d ... ogin-email
A Saint’s Sins
In California, protesters have toppled statues of Junipero Serra, whose missions brutalized Native Americans. How should we think of him now?
Last week, a few hours after publishing an essay about American Catholics’ reaction to the Black Lives Matter movement, I received a flood of ill tidings via email. My correspondents’ anger was unrelated to the subject of my article, but was instead inflamed by a mention of Junipero Serra, a canonized Franciscan friar who founded Spanish missions throughout California in the 18th century.
I had referred to him to explain one factor behind Catholic outrage over the anti-racist protests after the murder of George Floyd. Namely, some protesters have attacked statues of the saint because they believed he “eagerly participated in the conquest of North America, including the torture, enslavement and murder of some of the Native Americans he intended to convert.”
Many of my interlocutors identified themselves as Catholic, and argued that, since the canonization process involves consultation with historians, it wasn’t possible — or at least likely — that such horrors could rightly be ascribed to Father Serra.
Because Father Serra has become a contested property in the culture wars, and thus been declared either flawless or irredeemable for reasons that have more to do with current events than colonial history, I thought the issue they raised was worth addressing.
As Pope Francis wrote in 2018, saints are not generally thought to have lived perfect lives. “Yet,” he wrote, “even amid their faults and failings they kept moving forward and proved pleasing to the Lord.” People are canonized, in other words, not for what is widely agreed to be good in a liberal democracy, but for a kind of goodness less evident to the modern eye. (“A fornicator I always was, but a heretic I never was,” went the legendary last words of the promiscuous Dutch priest Andreas Wouters; that and a Calvinist’s noose made him a saint.)
Father Serra’s story is thornier.
Beginning in 1749, Father Serra served the Roman Catholic Church and Spain as a gifted evangelist and capable administrator of a Franciscan seminary in Mexico City and, later, of the missions he led throughout California. For clergy members like Father Serra, the missions were places to save the souls of Native Americans and educate them in what the Spaniards believed was a more civilized way of life.
The Spanish colonists “wanted to change the culture from hunter-gatherers to agricultural cultivators, and that was going to mean a huge transformation in the way Native Americans in Southern California lived their lives,” James Sandos, a historian of California at the University of Redlands, told me.
In a 2015 interview with the National Catholic Reporter, Robert Senkewicz, a Santa Clara University historian and biographer of Father Serra, noted that the Spanish military and missionaries introduced animals that destroyed the plants the Native Americans relied upon to sustain themselves, and quickly drove out the wild game Native peoples hunted. Thus, Mr. Senkewicz observed, “the presence of the Spanish colonial enterprise very quickly rendered it almost impossible for the traditional native ways of life to be maintained.”
And so many Native Americans found their way to the missions, where they were offered food and, more important from the missionaries’ perspective, the sacrament of baptism. Once on the grounds of the missions, the Native people were not permitted to leave freely. They were made to cultivate crops considered valuable by the Spanish and were instructed, often brutally, in the ways of European Christian life.
“Father Serra believed very strongly that corporal punishment was an integral part of the California mission system and the discipline and control of Native peoples,” the historian Steven Hackel of the University of California Riverside told me. “In the matter of correcting the Indians,” Father Serra wrote to the governor of California in 1780, “when it appeared to us that punishment was deserved, they were flogged, or put into the stocks, according to the gravity of their offense.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/16/opin ... ogin-email
In California, protesters have toppled statues of Junipero Serra, whose missions brutalized Native Americans. How should we think of him now?
Last week, a few hours after publishing an essay about American Catholics’ reaction to the Black Lives Matter movement, I received a flood of ill tidings via email. My correspondents’ anger was unrelated to the subject of my article, but was instead inflamed by a mention of Junipero Serra, a canonized Franciscan friar who founded Spanish missions throughout California in the 18th century.
I had referred to him to explain one factor behind Catholic outrage over the anti-racist protests after the murder of George Floyd. Namely, some protesters have attacked statues of the saint because they believed he “eagerly participated in the conquest of North America, including the torture, enslavement and murder of some of the Native Americans he intended to convert.”
Many of my interlocutors identified themselves as Catholic, and argued that, since the canonization process involves consultation with historians, it wasn’t possible — or at least likely — that such horrors could rightly be ascribed to Father Serra.
Because Father Serra has become a contested property in the culture wars, and thus been declared either flawless or irredeemable for reasons that have more to do with current events than colonial history, I thought the issue they raised was worth addressing.
As Pope Francis wrote in 2018, saints are not generally thought to have lived perfect lives. “Yet,” he wrote, “even amid their faults and failings they kept moving forward and proved pleasing to the Lord.” People are canonized, in other words, not for what is widely agreed to be good in a liberal democracy, but for a kind of goodness less evident to the modern eye. (“A fornicator I always was, but a heretic I never was,” went the legendary last words of the promiscuous Dutch priest Andreas Wouters; that and a Calvinist’s noose made him a saint.)
Father Serra’s story is thornier.
Beginning in 1749, Father Serra served the Roman Catholic Church and Spain as a gifted evangelist and capable administrator of a Franciscan seminary in Mexico City and, later, of the missions he led throughout California. For clergy members like Father Serra, the missions were places to save the souls of Native Americans and educate them in what the Spaniards believed was a more civilized way of life.
The Spanish colonists “wanted to change the culture from hunter-gatherers to agricultural cultivators, and that was going to mean a huge transformation in the way Native Americans in Southern California lived their lives,” James Sandos, a historian of California at the University of Redlands, told me.
In a 2015 interview with the National Catholic Reporter, Robert Senkewicz, a Santa Clara University historian and biographer of Father Serra, noted that the Spanish military and missionaries introduced animals that destroyed the plants the Native Americans relied upon to sustain themselves, and quickly drove out the wild game Native peoples hunted. Thus, Mr. Senkewicz observed, “the presence of the Spanish colonial enterprise very quickly rendered it almost impossible for the traditional native ways of life to be maintained.”
And so many Native Americans found their way to the missions, where they were offered food and, more important from the missionaries’ perspective, the sacrament of baptism. Once on the grounds of the missions, the Native people were not permitted to leave freely. They were made to cultivate crops considered valuable by the Spanish and were instructed, often brutally, in the ways of European Christian life.
“Father Serra believed very strongly that corporal punishment was an integral part of the California mission system and the discipline and control of Native peoples,” the historian Steven Hackel of the University of California Riverside told me. “In the matter of correcting the Indians,” Father Serra wrote to the governor of California in 1780, “when it appeared to us that punishment was deserved, they were flogged, or put into the stocks, according to the gravity of their offense.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/16/opin ... ogin-email
DAWN.COM
TODAY'S PAPER | AUGUST 24, 2020
Turkey's Erdogan converts another former church into mosque
AFP 21 Aug 2020
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday ordered another ancient Orthodox church, that became a mosque and then a popular Istanbul museum, to be turned back into a mosque.
The decision to transform the Kariye Museum into a mosque came just a month after a similarly controversial conversion for the Unesco World Heritage-recognised Hagia Sophia.
Both changes reflect Erdogan's apparent efforts to galvanise his more conservative and nationalist supporters at a time when Turkey is suffering a new spell of inflation and economic uncertainty caused by the coronavirus.
But they have added to Turkey's tensions with Greece and its Orthodox Church.
The Greek foreign ministry called the decision “yet another provocation against religious persons everywhere” by the Turkish government.
'Steeped in history'
The 1,000-year-old building's history closely mirrors that of the Hagia Sophia — its bigger neighbour on the historic western bank of the Golden Horn estuary on the European side of Istanbul.
The Holy Saviour in Chora was a medieval Byzantine church decorated with 14th century frescoes of the Last Judgement that remain treasured in the Christian world.
It was originally converted into the Kariye Mosque half a century after the 1453 conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks.
It became the Kariye Museum after World War II as Turkey pushed ahead with the creation of a more secular new republic out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire.
A group of American art historians then helped restore the original church's mosaics and opened them up for public display in 1958.
But Erdogan is placing an ever greater political emphasis on the battles that resulted in the defeat of Byzantium by the Ottomans.
Turkey's top administrative court approved the museum's conversion into a mosque in November.
“It's a place steeped in history which holds a lot of symbolism for a lot of different people,” said 48-year-old French tourist Frederic Sicard outside the building.
“For me, [these conversions] are a little difficult to understand and to follow. But we would visit if it were a mosque. We might just have to arrange visits around prayer times.”
'Tolerance'
The sandy-coloured structure visible today replaced one created as part of a monastery in the fourth century when Constantinople was the new capital of the Roman Empire.
It features a minaret in one corner and small cascading domes similar to those of other grand mosques whose calls to prayer echo over Istanbul.
But inside it is filled with magnificent frescoes and mosaics that represent some of the finest examples of Byzantine art in the Christian world.
Turkey's tumultuous efforts to reconcile these two histories form the underpinnings of the country's contemporary politics and social life.
Opposition HDP party lawmaker Garo Paylan called the transformation “a shame for our country”.
“One of the symbols of our country's deep, multicultural identity and multi-religious history has been sacrificed,” he said in a tweet.
Yet some locals fully supported the change.
“There are dozens, hundreds of churches, synagogues in Istanbul and only a few of them have been opened to prayer as mosques,” said Yucel Sahin as he strolled by the building after the morning rain.
“There is a lot of tolerance in our culture.“
https://www.dawn.com/news/1575661/turke ... nto-mosque
TODAY'S PAPER | AUGUST 24, 2020
Turkey's Erdogan converts another former church into mosque
AFP 21 Aug 2020
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday ordered another ancient Orthodox church, that became a mosque and then a popular Istanbul museum, to be turned back into a mosque.
The decision to transform the Kariye Museum into a mosque came just a month after a similarly controversial conversion for the Unesco World Heritage-recognised Hagia Sophia.
Both changes reflect Erdogan's apparent efforts to galvanise his more conservative and nationalist supporters at a time when Turkey is suffering a new spell of inflation and economic uncertainty caused by the coronavirus.
But they have added to Turkey's tensions with Greece and its Orthodox Church.
The Greek foreign ministry called the decision “yet another provocation against religious persons everywhere” by the Turkish government.
'Steeped in history'
The 1,000-year-old building's history closely mirrors that of the Hagia Sophia — its bigger neighbour on the historic western bank of the Golden Horn estuary on the European side of Istanbul.
The Holy Saviour in Chora was a medieval Byzantine church decorated with 14th century frescoes of the Last Judgement that remain treasured in the Christian world.
It was originally converted into the Kariye Mosque half a century after the 1453 conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks.
It became the Kariye Museum after World War II as Turkey pushed ahead with the creation of a more secular new republic out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire.
A group of American art historians then helped restore the original church's mosaics and opened them up for public display in 1958.
But Erdogan is placing an ever greater political emphasis on the battles that resulted in the defeat of Byzantium by the Ottomans.
Turkey's top administrative court approved the museum's conversion into a mosque in November.
“It's a place steeped in history which holds a lot of symbolism for a lot of different people,” said 48-year-old French tourist Frederic Sicard outside the building.
“For me, [these conversions] are a little difficult to understand and to follow. But we would visit if it were a mosque. We might just have to arrange visits around prayer times.”
'Tolerance'
The sandy-coloured structure visible today replaced one created as part of a monastery in the fourth century when Constantinople was the new capital of the Roman Empire.
It features a minaret in one corner and small cascading domes similar to those of other grand mosques whose calls to prayer echo over Istanbul.
But inside it is filled with magnificent frescoes and mosaics that represent some of the finest examples of Byzantine art in the Christian world.
Turkey's tumultuous efforts to reconcile these two histories form the underpinnings of the country's contemporary politics and social life.
Opposition HDP party lawmaker Garo Paylan called the transformation “a shame for our country”.
“One of the symbols of our country's deep, multicultural identity and multi-religious history has been sacrificed,” he said in a tweet.
Yet some locals fully supported the change.
“There are dozens, hundreds of churches, synagogues in Istanbul and only a few of them have been opened to prayer as mosques,” said Yucel Sahin as he strolled by the building after the morning rain.
“There is a lot of tolerance in our culture.“
https://www.dawn.com/news/1575661/turke ... nto-mosque
White God and white Jesus Christ.
By Lila MacLellan
Quartz at Work reporter
August 28, 2020
As a child in New York City, Steven Roberts attended a predominantly Black church where—as is common in Black churches across the US—God and Jesus were depicted as white men.
Being watched and policed by a white Jesus was confusing, says Roberts, now an assistant professor of psychology at Stanford University and co-director of its Social Concepts Lab. Perhaps it was partly his pastor’s framing of God as a judge, he tells Quartz, but the contrast between the Black congregants and the all-seeing white man who featured prominently in the room, high and mighty, made him feel uncomfortable.
Many Black Americans have made similar observations. In a BBC interview in 1971, Muhammad Ali famously cataloged all the questionable “white” cultural symbols—including angels, the men in Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, and a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Jesus—that he would ask his mother about when he was a boy. The writer James Baldwin spoke of his community being victimized by “an alabaster Christ.” And more recently, Black Lives Matter activists have called to remove images of a white, Eurocentric Jesus—which are counterfactual—as intentional symbols of white supremacy in the US.
Scholars have documented how those depictions have supported a white supremacist agenda. And they’re beginning to investigate how the whiteness of divine images has impacted the mental landscape for Black Americans. Recent research led by Simon Howard, a psychology professor at Marquette University, suggested that white religious icons are linked to subtle anti-Black and more marked pro-white sentiment among Black Americans who have been exposed to those images.
Roberts is continuing that line of investigation. He led a team of psychologists for a study published this year in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that investigated a related question: How does the race and gender assigned to a metaphysical God relate to real life ideas about who belongs in positions of leadership? And how might God’s whiteness contribute to overwhelmingly white and male corporate leadership?
They discovered that among US Christians and non-Christians alike, and among adults and children, the more people see God as white, the more likely they are to favor a white candidate for a corporate managerial role.
Roberts and his team are not suggesting that, on its own, the widely viewed image of a white God explains the grossly unequal racial representation in US corporate leadership. The reasons for that are myriad. But their results indicate that the widespread imagining of God as white has helped to build and protect the rigid racial hierarchy that exists in organizations.
“Racism is not about bad apples or people who hate other people,” says Roberts. “Racism is embedded in our images and in our school systems, it’s the air that we breathe. We’re all affected and infected by it.”
Western culture has wallpapered people’s psyches with images of a bearded supreme figure who is white and masculine. The effects of that conditioning on how we choose managers and CEOs need to be made visible.
“Draw a picture of God”
Roberts’ paper, co-authored by other Stanford researchers and psychologists from Vanderbilt and California Polytechnic State University, involved several studies that tried to get to heart of the dynamics between racialized leaders and religious figures.
First, controlling for racist, sexist, and conservative belief systems, the psychologists found that white Christians were indeed more likely to see God as white, whereas Black Christians were more likely to see God as Black. When asked to select candidates for a hypothetical leadership role at an invented company, participants who saw God as white were more likely to choose a white man for the role. But if someone saw God as Black, they were more likely to select a Black candidate.
“The extent to which God is conceptualized as White, which may be a deeply rooted intuition, predicted increased ratings of White candidates, even among Black Christians,” the study authors write.
For another study, the psychologists recruited Christian children of various races and asked them to draw pictures of God. Separately, they presented the kids with photos showing the faces of Black men and women, and followed up: “There are lots and lots of people at the place where I work,” the psychologists said. “But only three of them are bosses. Which three do you think are bosses?”
Both Black and white children depicted God as male and white, suggesting that this vision of God forms early in a person’s development, says Roberts, and is only later adjusted to match their in-group. And similarly to the adults who saw God as white in the first study, the children were not partial to Black faces as contenders for “boss.”
In brighter news, the children were just as likely to select women as men as bosses. For children, the psychologists surmised, God’s race was more relevant than God’s gender. Sadly, however, the first few studies all supported the hypothesis that the more adults and children see God as white, the more inclined they are to view white people as the best fit for a managerial role.
Who should rule the planet Zombot?
Roberts and his team also wanted to explore the association between God’s image and a leader’s physical attributes in isolation, outside of a strictly Christian context. What would happen if God had an entirely different identity? Asking people to picture God as a different race or gender was ruled out, so they dreamed up a fictional planet instead.
The planet used in their study, called Zombot, is inhabited by two peoples, Hibbles and Glerks. These peoples shared one supreme being, Liakbor, who “created everything on Zombot, including the water and lands, the grass and trees, and all of the creatures that live on it.”
Even on planet Zombot, the psychologists found that US Christian adults believed that Hibbles should rule when Liakbor was a Hibble, and that Glerks should rule when Liakbor was a Glerk. Neither group was expected to take control when the creator was a generic alien.
The psychological associations participants made between “God” and the beings that looked like God also worked in reverse: When shown images of one group—either Hibbles or Glerks—living in a fine castle on Zombot, participants assumed that Liakbor was of the same Zombotian extraction as that privileged tribe.
Roberts and his team then recruited 51 preschoolers of various backgrounds who had never heard of God at all and introduced them to Zombot. Like the adults, the four and five-year-olds in that study used “information about a fictional God to make inferences about who should be in leadership,” Roberts says. “It was one of the more important findings because it shows that this is not a Christian thing. It’s a psychological thing about, ‘What identity do you attribute to God?’”
What is going on?
Simon Howard at Marquette University—who was not involved in Roberts’ study, and also remembers being puzzled by a white Jesus in his childhood—calls the research “phenomenal.”
“It’s pretty compelling evidence when you take all his studies together and the interpretation is that the way in which people imagine or conceptualize deities does influence who they think should be in power,” he told Quartz.
Still, Roberts and his co-authors acknowledge the study’s limitations: It focuses on US culture and Christianity, and future research may want to pose the same questions in multiple cultures and among other faith groups. They ask: “Does the conception of God as a White man emerge among racial minorities in predominately European contexts, such as Germany and Sweden? What about in predominantly Black and Brown contexts with a heavy Christian influence, such as Ghana and Mexico?”
Howard, too, believes the color of God’s skin in famous paintings like Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ, which has been reproduced a billion times all over the world, is “part of the story,” but not the full explanation for the racial hierarchy in American business. He sees the relationship as mostly indirect.
“When someone in power shares racial membership with God or a boss-like figure in our lives, people might be reluctant to question those individuals,” Howard proposes. “If this person is likening themselves as a God…and we’re not necessarily supposed to challenge authority or challenge God, then we might be less likely to challenge the white men who are in positions of power. And if they’re going unchallenged, they may maintain power.”
In hiring practices, he says, a societal bias towards white candidates might be explained by associating Godliness with whiteness, meaning “whiteness is either superior or more competent than blackness or non-whiteness.”
The very existence of a white-dominated hierarchy also reinforces the notion that God is white, as Roberts’ Zombot study would suggest. We’re stuck in a kind of self-perpetuating loop of racial oppression. Its existence is real and meaningful, the authors write, no matter why God’s race was deemed white in the public imagination in the first place.
How do we change?
In a delightful moment within the mostly discouraging project, Roberts was leading a group of researchers working with children when he learned just how open young minds could be. One of the psychologists asked a child, “What does a boss look like?” The kid pointed at Roberts.
“It was so cute to me because it highlighted that they didn’t really know what we were talking about,” Roberts says. “And they have such a flexible concept. I’m not a white guy, so that was fun.”
But by adulthood, he says, “it’s just a whole different situation.”
Indeed, in another one of his studies, an adult participant who was shown a painting featuring a Black, female deity by the Afro-Cuban American artist Harmonia Rosales, left this written response for the researchers: “The artist is challenging the notion that #1 God is a man, #2 God is White. If I were at an art gallery and saw this painting, I would walk by shaking my head as it is just one more politically correct recreation of who God is. Disgusting! Oh, and I say this as an African American woman.”
That was shocking, says Roberts. It was also sobering evidence about how adults might reject or even be repulsed by information that challenges their long-established vision of God’s human form. To address racial inequities in leadership by asking people to rethink God’s skin color or gender might not be fruitful.
Addressing this issue early in a person’s life, when children are still forming their ideas about the world, might be the best way to disrupt the pattern of mental model making. “My belief is that kids don’t come into the world with this belief that there’s a white man floating in the sky. That’s something you learn,” says Roberts, who also teaches a popular undergraduate class called How to Make a Racist. “Nobody enters into the world wanting to believe that some people are more deserving or better than others; that’s something that people learn and pick up on the way, and that has consequences,” he says.
The study offers “clear evidence to suggest that if kids don’t have that belief in mind, they’re not going to make that inference that whoever God is, whoever shares that identity on Earth is actually the best,” he continues. “But the problem is: how do we, in practice, prevent them from getting that concept?”
“Maybe with this research and other work, teachers, educators, everyone can start to think: How can we prevent those things being learned? How do we prevent ourselves from even teaching those things? How do we change?”
Simon also argues for rethinking the religious imagery children are exposed to in the same way that Americans are now questioning Confederate symbols. “A Confederate statue conveys a certain meaning, and if people think that they should come down based on what they represent, then why aren’t we having that same conversation about statues and images of Jesus being portrayed as white?” he asks. “We’re not ready as a society to have that conversation, but it’s one that should be had, because—and I say this without any reservation—I think images of Christ portrayed as white are white supremacy in plain sight.”
The members of Roberts’ Social Concepts Lab are also studying interracial relationships and racism within science. The findings of their work, Roberts says, doesn’t lay blame for racist outcomes with one group or even bad intentions. “Nobody is saying that the church is bad or this kind of relationship is bad,” he explains, “We’re just saying, ‘Hey look, race and racism in our images and our culture has implications for how we behave. It has implications for who we elect to leadership positions as implications for who we fall in love with.”
Black ministers who have been talking for decades about how damaging it is to portray God as white have written to Roberts with notes of gratitude. “They’ve been trying to preach to their congregations and to people about how these images can be damaging,” he says, “but no one ever believed them.” Now they have the data as proof.
https://qz.com/work/1893701/how-white-d ... yptr=yahoo
By Lila MacLellan
Quartz at Work reporter
August 28, 2020
As a child in New York City, Steven Roberts attended a predominantly Black church where—as is common in Black churches across the US—God and Jesus were depicted as white men.
Being watched and policed by a white Jesus was confusing, says Roberts, now an assistant professor of psychology at Stanford University and co-director of its Social Concepts Lab. Perhaps it was partly his pastor’s framing of God as a judge, he tells Quartz, but the contrast between the Black congregants and the all-seeing white man who featured prominently in the room, high and mighty, made him feel uncomfortable.
Many Black Americans have made similar observations. In a BBC interview in 1971, Muhammad Ali famously cataloged all the questionable “white” cultural symbols—including angels, the men in Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, and a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Jesus—that he would ask his mother about when he was a boy. The writer James Baldwin spoke of his community being victimized by “an alabaster Christ.” And more recently, Black Lives Matter activists have called to remove images of a white, Eurocentric Jesus—which are counterfactual—as intentional symbols of white supremacy in the US.
Scholars have documented how those depictions have supported a white supremacist agenda. And they’re beginning to investigate how the whiteness of divine images has impacted the mental landscape for Black Americans. Recent research led by Simon Howard, a psychology professor at Marquette University, suggested that white religious icons are linked to subtle anti-Black and more marked pro-white sentiment among Black Americans who have been exposed to those images.
Roberts is continuing that line of investigation. He led a team of psychologists for a study published this year in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that investigated a related question: How does the race and gender assigned to a metaphysical God relate to real life ideas about who belongs in positions of leadership? And how might God’s whiteness contribute to overwhelmingly white and male corporate leadership?
They discovered that among US Christians and non-Christians alike, and among adults and children, the more people see God as white, the more likely they are to favor a white candidate for a corporate managerial role.
Roberts and his team are not suggesting that, on its own, the widely viewed image of a white God explains the grossly unequal racial representation in US corporate leadership. The reasons for that are myriad. But their results indicate that the widespread imagining of God as white has helped to build and protect the rigid racial hierarchy that exists in organizations.
“Racism is not about bad apples or people who hate other people,” says Roberts. “Racism is embedded in our images and in our school systems, it’s the air that we breathe. We’re all affected and infected by it.”
Western culture has wallpapered people’s psyches with images of a bearded supreme figure who is white and masculine. The effects of that conditioning on how we choose managers and CEOs need to be made visible.
“Draw a picture of God”
Roberts’ paper, co-authored by other Stanford researchers and psychologists from Vanderbilt and California Polytechnic State University, involved several studies that tried to get to heart of the dynamics between racialized leaders and religious figures.
First, controlling for racist, sexist, and conservative belief systems, the psychologists found that white Christians were indeed more likely to see God as white, whereas Black Christians were more likely to see God as Black. When asked to select candidates for a hypothetical leadership role at an invented company, participants who saw God as white were more likely to choose a white man for the role. But if someone saw God as Black, they were more likely to select a Black candidate.
“The extent to which God is conceptualized as White, which may be a deeply rooted intuition, predicted increased ratings of White candidates, even among Black Christians,” the study authors write.
For another study, the psychologists recruited Christian children of various races and asked them to draw pictures of God. Separately, they presented the kids with photos showing the faces of Black men and women, and followed up: “There are lots and lots of people at the place where I work,” the psychologists said. “But only three of them are bosses. Which three do you think are bosses?”
Both Black and white children depicted God as male and white, suggesting that this vision of God forms early in a person’s development, says Roberts, and is only later adjusted to match their in-group. And similarly to the adults who saw God as white in the first study, the children were not partial to Black faces as contenders for “boss.”
In brighter news, the children were just as likely to select women as men as bosses. For children, the psychologists surmised, God’s race was more relevant than God’s gender. Sadly, however, the first few studies all supported the hypothesis that the more adults and children see God as white, the more inclined they are to view white people as the best fit for a managerial role.
Who should rule the planet Zombot?
Roberts and his team also wanted to explore the association between God’s image and a leader’s physical attributes in isolation, outside of a strictly Christian context. What would happen if God had an entirely different identity? Asking people to picture God as a different race or gender was ruled out, so they dreamed up a fictional planet instead.
The planet used in their study, called Zombot, is inhabited by two peoples, Hibbles and Glerks. These peoples shared one supreme being, Liakbor, who “created everything on Zombot, including the water and lands, the grass and trees, and all of the creatures that live on it.”
Even on planet Zombot, the psychologists found that US Christian adults believed that Hibbles should rule when Liakbor was a Hibble, and that Glerks should rule when Liakbor was a Glerk. Neither group was expected to take control when the creator was a generic alien.
The psychological associations participants made between “God” and the beings that looked like God also worked in reverse: When shown images of one group—either Hibbles or Glerks—living in a fine castle on Zombot, participants assumed that Liakbor was of the same Zombotian extraction as that privileged tribe.
Roberts and his team then recruited 51 preschoolers of various backgrounds who had never heard of God at all and introduced them to Zombot. Like the adults, the four and five-year-olds in that study used “information about a fictional God to make inferences about who should be in leadership,” Roberts says. “It was one of the more important findings because it shows that this is not a Christian thing. It’s a psychological thing about, ‘What identity do you attribute to God?’”
What is going on?
Simon Howard at Marquette University—who was not involved in Roberts’ study, and also remembers being puzzled by a white Jesus in his childhood—calls the research “phenomenal.”
“It’s pretty compelling evidence when you take all his studies together and the interpretation is that the way in which people imagine or conceptualize deities does influence who they think should be in power,” he told Quartz.
Still, Roberts and his co-authors acknowledge the study’s limitations: It focuses on US culture and Christianity, and future research may want to pose the same questions in multiple cultures and among other faith groups. They ask: “Does the conception of God as a White man emerge among racial minorities in predominately European contexts, such as Germany and Sweden? What about in predominantly Black and Brown contexts with a heavy Christian influence, such as Ghana and Mexico?”
Howard, too, believes the color of God’s skin in famous paintings like Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ, which has been reproduced a billion times all over the world, is “part of the story,” but not the full explanation for the racial hierarchy in American business. He sees the relationship as mostly indirect.
“When someone in power shares racial membership with God or a boss-like figure in our lives, people might be reluctant to question those individuals,” Howard proposes. “If this person is likening themselves as a God…and we’re not necessarily supposed to challenge authority or challenge God, then we might be less likely to challenge the white men who are in positions of power. And if they’re going unchallenged, they may maintain power.”
In hiring practices, he says, a societal bias towards white candidates might be explained by associating Godliness with whiteness, meaning “whiteness is either superior or more competent than blackness or non-whiteness.”
The very existence of a white-dominated hierarchy also reinforces the notion that God is white, as Roberts’ Zombot study would suggest. We’re stuck in a kind of self-perpetuating loop of racial oppression. Its existence is real and meaningful, the authors write, no matter why God’s race was deemed white in the public imagination in the first place.
How do we change?
In a delightful moment within the mostly discouraging project, Roberts was leading a group of researchers working with children when he learned just how open young minds could be. One of the psychologists asked a child, “What does a boss look like?” The kid pointed at Roberts.
“It was so cute to me because it highlighted that they didn’t really know what we were talking about,” Roberts says. “And they have such a flexible concept. I’m not a white guy, so that was fun.”
But by adulthood, he says, “it’s just a whole different situation.”
Indeed, in another one of his studies, an adult participant who was shown a painting featuring a Black, female deity by the Afro-Cuban American artist Harmonia Rosales, left this written response for the researchers: “The artist is challenging the notion that #1 God is a man, #2 God is White. If I were at an art gallery and saw this painting, I would walk by shaking my head as it is just one more politically correct recreation of who God is. Disgusting! Oh, and I say this as an African American woman.”
That was shocking, says Roberts. It was also sobering evidence about how adults might reject or even be repulsed by information that challenges their long-established vision of God’s human form. To address racial inequities in leadership by asking people to rethink God’s skin color or gender might not be fruitful.
Addressing this issue early in a person’s life, when children are still forming their ideas about the world, might be the best way to disrupt the pattern of mental model making. “My belief is that kids don’t come into the world with this belief that there’s a white man floating in the sky. That’s something you learn,” says Roberts, who also teaches a popular undergraduate class called How to Make a Racist. “Nobody enters into the world wanting to believe that some people are more deserving or better than others; that’s something that people learn and pick up on the way, and that has consequences,” he says.
The study offers “clear evidence to suggest that if kids don’t have that belief in mind, they’re not going to make that inference that whoever God is, whoever shares that identity on Earth is actually the best,” he continues. “But the problem is: how do we, in practice, prevent them from getting that concept?”
“Maybe with this research and other work, teachers, educators, everyone can start to think: How can we prevent those things being learned? How do we prevent ourselves from even teaching those things? How do we change?”
Simon also argues for rethinking the religious imagery children are exposed to in the same way that Americans are now questioning Confederate symbols. “A Confederate statue conveys a certain meaning, and if people think that they should come down based on what they represent, then why aren’t we having that same conversation about statues and images of Jesus being portrayed as white?” he asks. “We’re not ready as a society to have that conversation, but it’s one that should be had, because—and I say this without any reservation—I think images of Christ portrayed as white are white supremacy in plain sight.”
The members of Roberts’ Social Concepts Lab are also studying interracial relationships and racism within science. The findings of their work, Roberts says, doesn’t lay blame for racist outcomes with one group or even bad intentions. “Nobody is saying that the church is bad or this kind of relationship is bad,” he explains, “We’re just saying, ‘Hey look, race and racism in our images and our culture has implications for how we behave. It has implications for who we elect to leadership positions as implications for who we fall in love with.”
Black ministers who have been talking for decades about how damaging it is to portray God as white have written to Roberts with notes of gratitude. “They’ve been trying to preach to their congregations and to people about how these images can be damaging,” he says, “but no one ever believed them.” Now they have the data as proof.
https://qz.com/work/1893701/how-white-d ... yptr=yahoo
Early Christians were open-minded and willing to listen to heretics
Gabriella Swerling
The Telegraph September 9, 2020, 12:00 PM CDT
The Codex Zacynthius contains extracts from writings by early Christian theologians - Codex Zacynthius Project/Codex Zacynthius Project
The Codex Zacynthius contains extracts from writings by early Christian theologians - Codex Zacynthius Project/Codex Zacynthius Project
Early Christians were “open-minded” and willing to listen to heretics, a study of ancient texts has revealed.
The Codex Zacynthius is the oldest manuscript of the Greek New Testament to contain extracts from writings by early Christian theologians, as well as the biblical text. It is regarded as an important text in studying the development of the New Testament.
However, the document is a palimpsest, created by erasing the ink from an earlier manuscript in order to re-use the parchment to make another book. The undertext is an eighth-century manuscript, with the overtext dating from the twelfth-century.
In 2014, scholars managed to secure funds to uncover its hidden secrets.
By using multi-spectral imaging – which captures image data via wavelength ranges across the electromagnetic spectrum – the original underlying text has finally become readable for the first time, enabling the first complete transcription.
Now, academics have revealed the first ever digital edition of the Codex Zacynthius. As a result, they discovered the “surprising” “open-mindedness” of early Christians.
The ancient texts have been rendered readable as a result of multi-spectral imagery - Codex Zacynthius Project/Codex Zacynthius Project
The ancient texts have been rendered readable as a result of multi-spectral imagery - Codex Zacynthius Project/Codex Zacynthius Project
Prof Hugh Houghton, director of the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing at the University of Birmingham, said that, for the first time it can be revealed that heretical thinkers were included in the Codex Zacynthius, the “ultimate Bible study guide”, alongside their more traditional counterparts.
Prof Houghton cited the example of Severus of Antioch, a sixth-century thinker whose books were burned because he questioned that Jesus Christ could be both God and man.
The only reason we do know about him, Prof Houghton said, is because his works were translated.
Following the new digital reading of the Codex Zacynthius, scholars have found that 38 lengthy extracts written by the theologian were included side-by-side among other more established thinkers.
“This shows that the people responsible for making this had a very open approach to Biblical interpretations, by showing heretics alongside more respected thinkers.
"It’s really interesting to see this plurality of different thoughts… and that there are all these different voices,” Prof Houghton said.
He added that this shows that early Christians were “more open-minded than you might expect”.
The excerpts from his letters and sermons in Codex Zacynthius are the only evidence for these writings known to survive in Greek, and “will offer scholars new insights into doctrinal controversies in the early sixth century”.
“We are delighted that this project has been so successful in enabling this important manuscript to be read once again, and to take its place in scholarship on the transmission and interpretation of the New Testament in the early Church," Prof Houghton added.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/
Gabriella Swerling
The Telegraph September 9, 2020, 12:00 PM CDT
The Codex Zacynthius contains extracts from writings by early Christian theologians - Codex Zacynthius Project/Codex Zacynthius Project
The Codex Zacynthius contains extracts from writings by early Christian theologians - Codex Zacynthius Project/Codex Zacynthius Project
Early Christians were “open-minded” and willing to listen to heretics, a study of ancient texts has revealed.
The Codex Zacynthius is the oldest manuscript of the Greek New Testament to contain extracts from writings by early Christian theologians, as well as the biblical text. It is regarded as an important text in studying the development of the New Testament.
However, the document is a palimpsest, created by erasing the ink from an earlier manuscript in order to re-use the parchment to make another book. The undertext is an eighth-century manuscript, with the overtext dating from the twelfth-century.
In 2014, scholars managed to secure funds to uncover its hidden secrets.
By using multi-spectral imaging – which captures image data via wavelength ranges across the electromagnetic spectrum – the original underlying text has finally become readable for the first time, enabling the first complete transcription.
Now, academics have revealed the first ever digital edition of the Codex Zacynthius. As a result, they discovered the “surprising” “open-mindedness” of early Christians.
The ancient texts have been rendered readable as a result of multi-spectral imagery - Codex Zacynthius Project/Codex Zacynthius Project
The ancient texts have been rendered readable as a result of multi-spectral imagery - Codex Zacynthius Project/Codex Zacynthius Project
Prof Hugh Houghton, director of the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing at the University of Birmingham, said that, for the first time it can be revealed that heretical thinkers were included in the Codex Zacynthius, the “ultimate Bible study guide”, alongside their more traditional counterparts.
Prof Houghton cited the example of Severus of Antioch, a sixth-century thinker whose books were burned because he questioned that Jesus Christ could be both God and man.
The only reason we do know about him, Prof Houghton said, is because his works were translated.
Following the new digital reading of the Codex Zacynthius, scholars have found that 38 lengthy extracts written by the theologian were included side-by-side among other more established thinkers.
“This shows that the people responsible for making this had a very open approach to Biblical interpretations, by showing heretics alongside more respected thinkers.
"It’s really interesting to see this plurality of different thoughts… and that there are all these different voices,” Prof Houghton said.
He added that this shows that early Christians were “more open-minded than you might expect”.
The excerpts from his letters and sermons in Codex Zacynthius are the only evidence for these writings known to survive in Greek, and “will offer scholars new insights into doctrinal controversies in the early sixth century”.
“We are delighted that this project has been so successful in enabling this important manuscript to be read once again, and to take its place in scholarship on the transmission and interpretation of the New Testament in the early Church," Prof Houghton added.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/
'Jesus of Siberia' arrested in Russian security services raid
Nataliya Vasilyeva
The TelegraphTue, September 22, 2020, 11:40 AM CDT
"Vissarion the Teacher", or "Jesus of Siberia", is Russian ex-traffic cop Sergei Torop - ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images
Russian security agents have conducted a sweeping raid on an isolated messianic cult and arrested its leader, dubbed “Jesus of Siberia”, who was at the helm of the group for nearly three decades.
Helicopters, dozens of vans and buses were deployed in the raid on the so-called "City of Sun," home to the Church of the Last Testament, in Siberia on Tuesday.
The cult’s leader, Sergei Torop who goes by the name of Vissarion, and two of his assistants were put on a helicopter and taken into custody.
Alexander Staroverov, a member of the church, earlier on Tuesday posted a video on social media, showing dozens of masked men with automatic weapons searching the remote settlement which is home to about 200 people.
Mr Torop and two of his associates are facing charges of running a religious group that caused grievous bodily harm to its adherents, according to Russia’s top investigative body.
The Investigative Committee said in a statement that Mr Torop is suspected of “taking funds from citizens by using psychological pressure on them in order to make profit from religious activities.”
Mr Torop, a 59-year-old former traffic police officer, founded the Church of the Last Testament in 1991, claiming to be a reincarnation of Jesus Christ. The group claimed to have about 10,000 adherents who live in several remote communes in the south of the Krasnoyarsk region.
In the 1990s, some of Vissarion's devotees died either by suicide or as a result of harsh living conditions and lack of medical care.
Mr Torop, who has long brown hair and trademark loose tunics, had refused to meet journalists over recent years.
The group rejects modern technology, calling for living in harmony with nature, barring its members from using money, drinking alcohol or smoking.
Russian authorities in recent years sought to crack down on non-Orthodox Christian denominations, mostly focusing on Jehovah’s Witnesses while sects like the Church of the Last Testament were largely left alone.
The church’s headquarters, however, were searched in February in response to allegations of fraud in the commune.
Most recently, Mr Torop’s followers have described the coronavirus pandemic as a “blessing”, saying that requests to join their communities have skyrocketed since the outbreak began.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/je ... 29768.html
Nataliya Vasilyeva
The TelegraphTue, September 22, 2020, 11:40 AM CDT
"Vissarion the Teacher", or "Jesus of Siberia", is Russian ex-traffic cop Sergei Torop - ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images
Russian security agents have conducted a sweeping raid on an isolated messianic cult and arrested its leader, dubbed “Jesus of Siberia”, who was at the helm of the group for nearly three decades.
Helicopters, dozens of vans and buses were deployed in the raid on the so-called "City of Sun," home to the Church of the Last Testament, in Siberia on Tuesday.
The cult’s leader, Sergei Torop who goes by the name of Vissarion, and two of his assistants were put on a helicopter and taken into custody.
Alexander Staroverov, a member of the church, earlier on Tuesday posted a video on social media, showing dozens of masked men with automatic weapons searching the remote settlement which is home to about 200 people.
Mr Torop and two of his associates are facing charges of running a religious group that caused grievous bodily harm to its adherents, according to Russia’s top investigative body.
The Investigative Committee said in a statement that Mr Torop is suspected of “taking funds from citizens by using psychological pressure on them in order to make profit from religious activities.”
Mr Torop, a 59-year-old former traffic police officer, founded the Church of the Last Testament in 1991, claiming to be a reincarnation of Jesus Christ. The group claimed to have about 10,000 adherents who live in several remote communes in the south of the Krasnoyarsk region.
In the 1990s, some of Vissarion's devotees died either by suicide or as a result of harsh living conditions and lack of medical care.
Mr Torop, who has long brown hair and trademark loose tunics, had refused to meet journalists over recent years.
The group rejects modern technology, calling for living in harmony with nature, barring its members from using money, drinking alcohol or smoking.
Russian authorities in recent years sought to crack down on non-Orthodox Christian denominations, mostly focusing on Jehovah’s Witnesses while sects like the Church of the Last Testament were largely left alone.
The church’s headquarters, however, were searched in February in response to allegations of fraud in the commune.
Most recently, Mr Torop’s followers have described the coronavirus pandemic as a “blessing”, saying that requests to join their communities have skyrocketed since the outbreak began.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/je ... 29768.html
Vatican says it was 'swindled' over property deals as it reveals net worth of €4bn
Nick Squires
The Telegraph Thu, October 1, 2020, 10:28 AM CDT
The Vatican says it has been “swindled” in some of its investments, including a multi-million-pound property deal in London, as it revealed for the first time that it holds total assets worth about €4 billion.
The Holy See took the unusual decision to release on Thursday the most detailed breakdown of its finances ever disclosed, including pie charts showing its income, investments and expenses.
“It is possible that in some cases, the Holy See was, apart from being badly advised, also swindled,” said Father Juan Antonio Guerrero Alves, the Vatican’s minister for the economy.
The Vatican has been mired in a scandal over the 2014 purchase of a €350 million property in Sloane Avenue in London, in which the building was reportedly bought for far more than its market value, resulting in substantial losses for the Holy See.
Money was allegedly skimmed off by intermediaries, with an investigation by the Vatican still ongoing.
A powerful cardinal who has been linked to the deal was last week forced to resign over allegations of embezzlement and nepotism, with Pope Francis taking the rare decision to strip him of his rights as a cardinal.
Giovanni Angelo Becciu, who was head of the Vatican department that decides which Catholics should be made saints, has also been accused of funneling money and contracts to companies and charities run by his three brothers, but has strongly denied any wrongdoing.
Compounding his problems, the cardinal’s lawyer was forced to resign on Thursday after posting on social media photos of himself posing on a beach in a pair of skimpy swimming trunks.
Ivano Iai said he was sorry for the embarrassment he had caused with the photos, in which he was draped over rocks and lay on the sand on a beach in Sardinia. He had posted the revealing photos on Twitter and Instagram.
The cardinal's lawyer resigned after posting photos of himself on social media wearing a pair of skimpy trunks at the beach
The cardinal's lawyer resigned after posting photos of himself on social media wearing a pair of skimpy trunks at the beach
He said it was with “great sorrow” that he had resigned as lawyer for the cardinal and his brothers.
The debacle added to the sense of chaos within the Vatican, where Pope Francis has fought for years to introduce more transparency and accountability to its byzantine finances.
In the last few months, Vatican investigators have carried out raids on various departments, including the Vatican’s financial watchdog, in connection with the London property deal. Computers and files have been seized and several staff members suspended.
They also arrested an Italian businessman who allegedly helped broker the purchase of the building in Chelsea.
Francis has been trying to improve financial transparency since the start of his papacy - Shutterstock
The release of the 12-page consolidated financial statement, as well as an interview with Father Guerrero, appeared to be an attempt by the Vatican to counter criticism that its finances remain opaque and riddled with corruption.
"I think that we are learning from the errors or the imprudence of the past,” he said. The finances of the Vatican must be as transparent as “a house of glass. The faithful have the right to know how we use the money.”
The Vatican was working to introduce more transparency and to improve communication between its different departments.
“We can certainly make mistakes, or be swindled, but that is harder when we collaborate together,” he said.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/va ... 58689.html
Nick Squires
The Telegraph Thu, October 1, 2020, 10:28 AM CDT
The Vatican says it has been “swindled” in some of its investments, including a multi-million-pound property deal in London, as it revealed for the first time that it holds total assets worth about €4 billion.
The Holy See took the unusual decision to release on Thursday the most detailed breakdown of its finances ever disclosed, including pie charts showing its income, investments and expenses.
“It is possible that in some cases, the Holy See was, apart from being badly advised, also swindled,” said Father Juan Antonio Guerrero Alves, the Vatican’s minister for the economy.
The Vatican has been mired in a scandal over the 2014 purchase of a €350 million property in Sloane Avenue in London, in which the building was reportedly bought for far more than its market value, resulting in substantial losses for the Holy See.
Money was allegedly skimmed off by intermediaries, with an investigation by the Vatican still ongoing.
A powerful cardinal who has been linked to the deal was last week forced to resign over allegations of embezzlement and nepotism, with Pope Francis taking the rare decision to strip him of his rights as a cardinal.
Giovanni Angelo Becciu, who was head of the Vatican department that decides which Catholics should be made saints, has also been accused of funneling money and contracts to companies and charities run by his three brothers, but has strongly denied any wrongdoing.
Compounding his problems, the cardinal’s lawyer was forced to resign on Thursday after posting on social media photos of himself posing on a beach in a pair of skimpy swimming trunks.
Ivano Iai said he was sorry for the embarrassment he had caused with the photos, in which he was draped over rocks and lay on the sand on a beach in Sardinia. He had posted the revealing photos on Twitter and Instagram.
The cardinal's lawyer resigned after posting photos of himself on social media wearing a pair of skimpy trunks at the beach
The cardinal's lawyer resigned after posting photos of himself on social media wearing a pair of skimpy trunks at the beach
He said it was with “great sorrow” that he had resigned as lawyer for the cardinal and his brothers.
The debacle added to the sense of chaos within the Vatican, where Pope Francis has fought for years to introduce more transparency and accountability to its byzantine finances.
In the last few months, Vatican investigators have carried out raids on various departments, including the Vatican’s financial watchdog, in connection with the London property deal. Computers and files have been seized and several staff members suspended.
They also arrested an Italian businessman who allegedly helped broker the purchase of the building in Chelsea.
Francis has been trying to improve financial transparency since the start of his papacy - Shutterstock
The release of the 12-page consolidated financial statement, as well as an interview with Father Guerrero, appeared to be an attempt by the Vatican to counter criticism that its finances remain opaque and riddled with corruption.
"I think that we are learning from the errors or the imprudence of the past,” he said. The finances of the Vatican must be as transparent as “a house of glass. The faithful have the right to know how we use the money.”
The Vatican was working to introduce more transparency and to improve communication between its different departments.
“We can certainly make mistakes, or be swindled, but that is harder when we collaborate together,” he said.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/va ... 58689.html
Pope Francis, in Shift for Church, Voices Support for Same-Sex Civil Unions
The comments, shown in a new documentary, are the strongest yet from a pontificate that has taken a more tolerant and inclusive tone.
ROME — Pope Francis expressed support for same-sex civil unions in remarks revealed in a documentary film that premiered on Wednesday, a significant break from his predecessors that staked out new ground for the church in its recognition of gay people.
The remarks, coming from the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, had the potential to shift debates about the legal status of same-sex couples in nations around the globe and unsettle bishops worried that the unions threaten what the church considers traditional marriage — between one man and one woman.
“What we have to create is a civil union law. That way they are legally covered,” Francis said in the documentary, “Francesco,” which debuted at the Rome Film Festival, reiterating his view that gay people are children of God. “I stood up for that.”
Many gay Catholics and their allies outside the church welcomed the pope’s remarks, though Francis’ opposition to gay marriage within the church remained absolute.
His conservative critics within the church hierarchy, and especially in the conservative wing of the church in the United States, who have for years accused him of diluting church doctrine, saw the remarks as a reversal of church teaching.
“The pope’s statement clearly contradicts what has been the longstanding teaching of the church about same-sex unions,” said Bishop Thomas Tobin of Providence, R.I., adding that the remarks needed to be clarified.
There was little doubt that Francis, recorded on camera, made the statements during his pontificate. But there was confusion on Wednesday about when he had said them and to whom. The Vatican dismissed them as old news.
Francis has a tendency for making off-the-cuff public remarks, a trait that maddens both supporters and critics alike. The comments shown in the film are likely to generate exactly the sort of discussion the pope has repeatedly sought to foster on issues once considered forbidden in the church’s culture wars.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/worl ... 778d3e6de3
The comments, shown in a new documentary, are the strongest yet from a pontificate that has taken a more tolerant and inclusive tone.
ROME — Pope Francis expressed support for same-sex civil unions in remarks revealed in a documentary film that premiered on Wednesday, a significant break from his predecessors that staked out new ground for the church in its recognition of gay people.
The remarks, coming from the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, had the potential to shift debates about the legal status of same-sex couples in nations around the globe and unsettle bishops worried that the unions threaten what the church considers traditional marriage — between one man and one woman.
“What we have to create is a civil union law. That way they are legally covered,” Francis said in the documentary, “Francesco,” which debuted at the Rome Film Festival, reiterating his view that gay people are children of God. “I stood up for that.”
Many gay Catholics and their allies outside the church welcomed the pope’s remarks, though Francis’ opposition to gay marriage within the church remained absolute.
His conservative critics within the church hierarchy, and especially in the conservative wing of the church in the United States, who have for years accused him of diluting church doctrine, saw the remarks as a reversal of church teaching.
“The pope’s statement clearly contradicts what has been the longstanding teaching of the church about same-sex unions,” said Bishop Thomas Tobin of Providence, R.I., adding that the remarks needed to be clarified.
There was little doubt that Francis, recorded on camera, made the statements during his pontificate. But there was confusion on Wednesday about when he had said them and to whom. The Vatican dismissed them as old news.
Francis has a tendency for making off-the-cuff public remarks, a trait that maddens both supporters and critics alike. The comments shown in the film are likely to generate exactly the sort of discussion the pope has repeatedly sought to foster on issues once considered forbidden in the church’s culture wars.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Vatican asks Instagram to get to the bottom of Pope account's lingerie model 'like'
CNN Fri, November 20, 2020, 11:03 AM CST
<p>The pontiff's official Instagram account 'liked' the photo, though there is no evidence the endorsement came from Francis himself.</p><div class="cnn--image__credit"><em><small>Credit: Andreas Solaro/Pool/AFP/Getty Images / Getty Images</small></em></div>
The pontiff's official Instagram account 'liked' the photo, though there is no evidence the endorsement came from Francis himself.
Credit: Andreas Solaro/Pool/AFP/Getty Images / Getty Images
More
The Vatican is seeking an explanation from Instagram, after the official account of Pope Francis liked a photograph of a lingerie-clad Brazilian model.
A photograph of model Natalia Garibotto, who was dressed in schoolgirl-style undergarments, was liked by Francis' verified account, franciscus, the Catholic News Agency (CNA) reported.
It is unclear when the photograph -- which shows Garibotto's skimpily clad buttocks -- was first liked, but the interaction was visible on November 13, before being unliked the next day, after CNA approached the Holy See Press Office for comment, the news agency said.
Now, the Vatican said it is trying to get to the bottom of the incident.
"We are in touch with Instagram to find out what happened," Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni told CNN on Friday.
CNN has reached out to Facebook, which owns Instagram, for comment.
Some 7.4 million people follow the pontiff on his official Instagram account, but the account does not follow anyone back. There is no evidence that the Pope liked the image himself.
COY Co, Garibotto's management company, posted about the incident on its own Instagram account, writing: "COY Co. has received the POPE'S OFFICIAL BLESSING."
Garibotto also responded to the incident, writing on Twitter on November 13: "At least I'm going to heaven."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/cm/ ... 41489.html
CNN Fri, November 20, 2020, 11:03 AM CST
<p>The pontiff's official Instagram account 'liked' the photo, though there is no evidence the endorsement came from Francis himself.</p><div class="cnn--image__credit"><em><small>Credit: Andreas Solaro/Pool/AFP/Getty Images / Getty Images</small></em></div>
The pontiff's official Instagram account 'liked' the photo, though there is no evidence the endorsement came from Francis himself.
Credit: Andreas Solaro/Pool/AFP/Getty Images / Getty Images
More
The Vatican is seeking an explanation from Instagram, after the official account of Pope Francis liked a photograph of a lingerie-clad Brazilian model.
A photograph of model Natalia Garibotto, who was dressed in schoolgirl-style undergarments, was liked by Francis' verified account, franciscus, the Catholic News Agency (CNA) reported.
It is unclear when the photograph -- which shows Garibotto's skimpily clad buttocks -- was first liked, but the interaction was visible on November 13, before being unliked the next day, after CNA approached the Holy See Press Office for comment, the news agency said.
Now, the Vatican said it is trying to get to the bottom of the incident.
"We are in touch with Instagram to find out what happened," Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni told CNN on Friday.
CNN has reached out to Facebook, which owns Instagram, for comment.
Some 7.4 million people follow the pontiff on his official Instagram account, but the account does not follow anyone back. There is no evidence that the Pope liked the image himself.
COY Co, Garibotto's management company, posted about the incident on its own Instagram account, writing: "COY Co. has received the POPE'S OFFICIAL BLESSING."
Garibotto also responded to the incident, writing on Twitter on November 13: "At least I'm going to heaven."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/cm/ ... 41489.html