How Baptists hold differing views on the resurrection of Christ and why this matters
Jason Oliver Evans, Ph.D. Student in Religious Studies, University of Virginia
Sat, January 15, 2022, 8:31 AM
Early on April 4 morning, the following message appeared on the Twitter account of the Rev. Raphael Warnock, the newly elected U.S. senator from Georgia: “The meaning of Easter is more transcendent than the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Whether you are Christian or not, through a commitment to helping others we are able to save ourselves.”
He later deleted the tweet, but not before strong reaction from both conservative and progressive Christians. Some conservative Christians denounced Warnock as a “heretic” for, in their view, downplaying the story of Jesus’ bodily resurrection and for claiming that humans can save themselves rather than God, who alone saves humans from their sins. Other Christians came to Warnock’s defense, citing his credentials as a theologian and pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church. Rather than condemn his message, they applauded him for sharing a more humanistic message that included non-Christians.
As a Baptist minister and theologian myself, I believe it is important to understand how Baptists hold differing views on the meaning of the Resurrection.
The Resurrection
Easter is the Christian holiday which commemorates the story of Jesus Christ’s resurrection. According to the Christian faith, resurrection is the pivotal event on which “God raised Jesus from the dead on the third day” after he was crucified by the Roman governor Pontius Pilate and then buried in a tomb owned by Joseph of Arimathea.
While none of the four canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John describe the actual event of the resurrection in detail, they nonetheless give varying reports about the empty tomb and Christ’s post-resurrection appearances among his followers both in Galilee and Jerusalem.
They also report that it was women who discovered the empty tomb and received and proclaimed the first message that Christ was risen from the dead. These narratives passed down orally among the earliest Christian communities and then codified in the Gospel writings beginning some 30 years after Jesus’ death.
Earliest Christians believed that by raising Jesus of Nazareth from the dead, God vindicated Jesus from the torture and death he unjustly incurred at the order of Pilate, and that Jesus now as the “crucified and risen Lord” shares in God’s power to transform the creation and put an end to evil and suffering.
By affirming the resurrection, Christians do not mean that Jesus’ body was merely resuscitated. Rather, as New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson indicates, resurrection means that “[Jesus] entered into an entirely new form of existence.”
As the risen Christ, Jesus is believed to share God’s power to transform all life and also to share this same power with his followers. So the resurrection is believed to be something that happened not only to Jesus, but also an experience that happens to his followers.
Over the years, Christians have engaged in passionate debates over this central doctrine of Christian faith.
Two major approaches emerged: the “liberal” view and the “conservative” or “traditional” view. Current perspectives on the resurrection have been predominated by questions: “Was Jesus’ body literally raised from the dead?” and “What relevance does the resurrection have for those struggling for justice?”
These questions emerged in the wake of theological modernism, a European and North American movement dating back to the mid-19th century that sought to reinterpret Christianity to accommodate the emergence of modern science, history and ethics.
Also known as liberal theology, theological modernism led liberal Christian theologians to attempt to create an alternative path between the rigid orthodoxies of Christian churches and the rationalism of atheists and others.
This meant that liberal Christians were willing to revise or jettison cherished Christian beliefs, such as the bodily resurrection of Jesus, if such beliefs could not be explained against the bar of human reason.
Baptist views on the Resurrection
Just like all other Christian denominations, Baptists are divided on the issue of the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Arguably, what may be unique about the group is that Baptists believe that no external religious authority can force an individual member to adhere to the tenets of Christian faith in any prescribed way. One must be free to accept or reject any teaching of the church.
In the early 20th century, Baptists in the United States found themselves on both sides of a schism within American Christianity over doctrinal issues, known as the fundamentalist-modernist controversy.
The Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick, a liberal Baptist pastor who served First Presbyterian Church and later Riverside Church in Manhattan, rejected the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Rather, Fosdick viewed the resurrection as a “persistence in [Christ’s] personality.”
In 1922, Fosdick delivered his famous sermon “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” rebuking fundamentalists for their failure to tolerate difference on doctrinal matters such as the infallibility of the Bible, the virgin birth, and bodily Resurrection, among others, and for downplaying the weightier matter of addressing the societal needs of the day.
In his autobiography, the late civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. explains that in his early adolescence he denied the bodily resurrection of Jesus.
While attending Crozer Seminary in 1949, King wrote a paper trying to make sense of what led to the development of the Christian doctrine of Jesus’ bodily resurrection. For King, the experience of the early followers of Jesus was at the root of their belief in his resurrection.
“They had been captivated by the magnetic power of his personality,” King argued. “This basic experience led to the faith that he could never die.” In other words, the bodily resurrection of Jesus simply is the outward expression of early Christian experience, not an actual, or at least, a verifiable event in human history.
Others within the Baptist movement disagreed. Like his fundamentalist forebears, conservative evangelical Baptist theologian Carl F.H. Henry argued in 1976 that all Christian doctrine can be rationally explained and can persuade any nonbeliever. Henry rigorously defended the bodily resurrection of Christ as a historical occurrence by appealing to the Gospels’ telling of the empty tomb and Christ’s appearances among his disciples after his resurrection.
In his six-volume magnum opus, “God, Revelation, and Authority,” Henry read these two elements of the Gospels as historical records that can be verified through modern historical methods.
Alternative views
Christ with lifted arms, his head encircled by a halo, or nimbus, wearing a tunic and a mantle.
Christ with lifted arms, his head encircled by a halo, or nimbus, wearing a tunic and a mantle.
Despite their predominance, the liberal and conservative arguments on the resurrection of Jesus are not the only approaches held among Baptists.
In his book “Resurrection and Discipleship,” Baptist theologian Thorwald Lorenzen also outlines what he calls the “evangelical” approach, which seeks to transcend the distinctions of “liberal” and “conservative” approaches. He affirms, with the conservatives, the historical reality of the Resurrection, but agrees with the liberals that such an event cannot be verified in the modern historical sense.
Other than these, there is a “liberation” approach, which stresses the social and political implications of the Resurrection. Baptists who hold this view primarily interpret the resurrection as God’s response and commitment to liberating those who, like Jesus, experience poverty and oppression.
Given this diversity of perspectives on the Resurrection, Baptists are not unique among Christians in engaging matters of faith practice. However, I argue that Baptists may be distinct in how they engage the question of Jesus’ resurrection and why it matters for their faith.
According to Warnock’s tweet, the meaning of Easter goes beyond the question of what happened to Jesus’ body, making resurrection a matter of what human beings can do to make a more just and humane society regardless of religious affiliation.
However, as some Baptists protested, the meaning of the resurrection is a matter of precisely what happened to Jesus’ body some 20 centuries ago – which has implications for how Christians live out their beliefs today.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ba ... 43339.html
Christianity
In Congo, Floating Pastors Follow Mobile Flocks Along Busy River
To find the faithful, preachers in some areas of the Democratic Republic of Congo hold church where the crowds are, on boats traveling the country’s water highway.
MBANDAKA, Democratic Republic of Congo — The ebullient soukous music had been blasting from speakers since before dawn, but at 8 a.m., someone aboard the brightly painted boat docked along the Congo River pressed pause, and a pastor picked up a microphone and began preaching at a volume easily heard on shore.
“You will go to heaven,” he promised his bleary-eyed flock, tired from partying all night aboard the boat, the Super Malou Express. “And also — you will get cars and houses!”
Striding along the deck of the boat, which was slowly taking on passengers for the weeklong journey to Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, he delivered his message for about half an hour. As he spoke, the morning sun illuminated the hulls of the long, slender pirogues — hand-carved canoes — that glided past on the gleaming river below.
Onshore, Fifi Bale Mombonde lay in bed, hoping the pastor’s proselytizing wouldn’t wake her daughter, Annie, 2. Her house was right by the Super Malou Express’s dock, so she was by default a regular at its floating services. They took place almost every day the boat was in port in Mbandaka, an equatorial city surrounded by tropical forests.
“Sometimes I get up and listen,” Ms. Mombonde said. While she didn’t know the names of the pastors, she had come to recognize many of their voices and had listened to their prayers so many times she knew the words by heart. “Sometimes I just listen from bed.”
As in New York’s subway, or on buses in Nigeria and Ghana, evangelical pastors in the Democratic Republic of Congo have spilled out of their churches and are spreading the word to congregations always on the move.
Churches have long been a powerful force in Congo. The biggest, the Roman Catholic Church, wields huge power in election years, when tens of thousands of its faithful fan out across the country to observe the polls and report on any vote-rigging.
Millions of Congolese are members of the Kimbanguist church, named for its revered founder who died in a Belgian colonial prison. And the number of Pentecostal churches in the country has exploded in the past few decades.
In much of Congo, life is based around the river that gives the country its name, and so it’s on the river that many pastors go fishing for souls. They journey along the river’s vast arc, which stretches northeast from Kinshasa, the capital, and up through dense rainforest before bending south again in the country’s east.
Most waterborne pastors in Congo ply their trade aboard the river’s many baleinières, which means “whaleboats,” although they have nothing to do with whale hunting and look nothing like the ship that inspired “Moby Dick.”
The wide, diesel-chugging baleinières are how many people get from Kinshasa to towns and cities upstream, like Mbandaka, and Kisangani, the last navigable port on the Congo River.
José Sumpi, whom many call Apostle, does his preaching aboard the baleinière known as the Ibenge. On a recent day in Mbandaka, he unzipped his battered, leather-bound Bible and rested it on his jeans as some members of the boat’s crew made repairs, getting ready for the 140-mile journey upriver, to the fishing town of Makanza.
Off-duty crew members swung in hammocks. Near the engine, a monkey, the ship’s mascot, scampered and slipped on boards slick with diesel.
From Mr. Sumpi’s Bible spilled out photographs documenting his three decades “in the lord’s service,” as he put it — one snapshot of him blessing a child, another showing him laying hands on the sick. But all the pictures were from his landlubber life, taken when he was standing on the solid ground of his church, a branch of the Ministry of the Word, a modest Pentecostal church.
Why were there no pictures of him on the Ibenge? Perhaps because he is simply too busy preaching while aboard to stop to pose.
“I preach at night, I preach in the daytime,” he said, as the wind ruffled the leaves of the palms lining the river’s banks. “All the time, I’m preaching.”
The Ibenge’s repairs were soon done, and it was about to shove off on its two-day voyage to Makanza, or three days at most, but “that’s God’s problem,” Mr. Sumpi said.
Soon after Mr. Sumpi and the Ibenge departed, an ancient craft hung with tattered tarpaulins thunk-thunked past, a woman pouring fuel into an engine belching smoke. Then another, this one with two men just visible on the lower deck, bailing out river water with yellow plastic tubs.
Women paddled pirogues weighed down almost to the waterline with pondu, or cassava leaves, to sell at busy markets that, after miles and miles of tropical forest, would appear at the river’s edge as if from nowhere.
Many of the baleinières’ passengers are also traders, taking bales of goods upriver to sell.
Several pastors said divine messages of prosperity and smooth business transactions, as well as the usual ones about forgiveness of sins and eternal life, went down well on the baleinières.
Some of the pastors are traders themselves, with a sideline in preaching Pentecostal Christianity when they travel, in part to share the word of God, in part to make a little extra cash.
Because journeys on the baleinières can last weeks, the pastors have captive audiences and plenty of time. And congregations, even those boat-bound and not necessarily ardent believers, are expected to contribute when the collection plate comes around.
The money he can make on the river is part of what motivates Bionique Ebeke, an evangelical pastor who has grown used to the hardships of life there.
For days on end, passengers sleep packed on the hard boards of the boats, breathing in thick smoke from the engine, whose roar drowns out all conversation. If it rains, they get drenched. Food is limited.
Mr. Ebeke spends half his time preaching in a church on land in Bomongo, a town north of Mbandaka, but he also makes about 30 journeys every year aboard a baleinière, offering services each morning and night on the three- or four-day journey between the two spots.
“I work everywhere,” said Mr. Ebeke, 34. “There are lost souls on the baleinières who haven’t even heard the word of God.”
Evangelizing somehow feels more urgent on the river, he said, in part because trips are so hazardous. Traveling at night is technically banned, but this is rarely enforced. Life jackets are mandatory, but this is rarely enforced either. There are many accidents.
Last January at least nine people died when an overloaded vessel capsized. In February, at least 16 died when another ship overturned 60 miles from Kinshasa.
“There are many dangers, everywhere,” Mr. Ebeke said. “You can lose your life, just like that.”
Because of the risks, travelers tend to be religious, he said, and join in his prayers. But the worshipers on the river are not exactly model parishioners, he added.
“It’s not like a church where people listen to you and call you ‘Spiritual Father,’” he said. “People drink and bother other passengers. And other people say: ‘Leave us alone, stop with all your stories, man. We don’t want your God.’”
When they do, Mr. Ebeke said, he merely looks at them, says, “God is just” in his imperturbable voice and moves on down the deck.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/01/worl ... iversified
To find the faithful, preachers in some areas of the Democratic Republic of Congo hold church where the crowds are, on boats traveling the country’s water highway.
MBANDAKA, Democratic Republic of Congo — The ebullient soukous music had been blasting from speakers since before dawn, but at 8 a.m., someone aboard the brightly painted boat docked along the Congo River pressed pause, and a pastor picked up a microphone and began preaching at a volume easily heard on shore.
“You will go to heaven,” he promised his bleary-eyed flock, tired from partying all night aboard the boat, the Super Malou Express. “And also — you will get cars and houses!”
Striding along the deck of the boat, which was slowly taking on passengers for the weeklong journey to Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, he delivered his message for about half an hour. As he spoke, the morning sun illuminated the hulls of the long, slender pirogues — hand-carved canoes — that glided past on the gleaming river below.
Onshore, Fifi Bale Mombonde lay in bed, hoping the pastor’s proselytizing wouldn’t wake her daughter, Annie, 2. Her house was right by the Super Malou Express’s dock, so she was by default a regular at its floating services. They took place almost every day the boat was in port in Mbandaka, an equatorial city surrounded by tropical forests.
“Sometimes I get up and listen,” Ms. Mombonde said. While she didn’t know the names of the pastors, she had come to recognize many of their voices and had listened to their prayers so many times she knew the words by heart. “Sometimes I just listen from bed.”
As in New York’s subway, or on buses in Nigeria and Ghana, evangelical pastors in the Democratic Republic of Congo have spilled out of their churches and are spreading the word to congregations always on the move.
Churches have long been a powerful force in Congo. The biggest, the Roman Catholic Church, wields huge power in election years, when tens of thousands of its faithful fan out across the country to observe the polls and report on any vote-rigging.
Millions of Congolese are members of the Kimbanguist church, named for its revered founder who died in a Belgian colonial prison. And the number of Pentecostal churches in the country has exploded in the past few decades.
In much of Congo, life is based around the river that gives the country its name, and so it’s on the river that many pastors go fishing for souls. They journey along the river’s vast arc, which stretches northeast from Kinshasa, the capital, and up through dense rainforest before bending south again in the country’s east.
Most waterborne pastors in Congo ply their trade aboard the river’s many baleinières, which means “whaleboats,” although they have nothing to do with whale hunting and look nothing like the ship that inspired “Moby Dick.”
The wide, diesel-chugging baleinières are how many people get from Kinshasa to towns and cities upstream, like Mbandaka, and Kisangani, the last navigable port on the Congo River.
José Sumpi, whom many call Apostle, does his preaching aboard the baleinière known as the Ibenge. On a recent day in Mbandaka, he unzipped his battered, leather-bound Bible and rested it on his jeans as some members of the boat’s crew made repairs, getting ready for the 140-mile journey upriver, to the fishing town of Makanza.
Off-duty crew members swung in hammocks. Near the engine, a monkey, the ship’s mascot, scampered and slipped on boards slick with diesel.
From Mr. Sumpi’s Bible spilled out photographs documenting his three decades “in the lord’s service,” as he put it — one snapshot of him blessing a child, another showing him laying hands on the sick. But all the pictures were from his landlubber life, taken when he was standing on the solid ground of his church, a branch of the Ministry of the Word, a modest Pentecostal church.
Why were there no pictures of him on the Ibenge? Perhaps because he is simply too busy preaching while aboard to stop to pose.
“I preach at night, I preach in the daytime,” he said, as the wind ruffled the leaves of the palms lining the river’s banks. “All the time, I’m preaching.”
The Ibenge’s repairs were soon done, and it was about to shove off on its two-day voyage to Makanza, or three days at most, but “that’s God’s problem,” Mr. Sumpi said.
Soon after Mr. Sumpi and the Ibenge departed, an ancient craft hung with tattered tarpaulins thunk-thunked past, a woman pouring fuel into an engine belching smoke. Then another, this one with two men just visible on the lower deck, bailing out river water with yellow plastic tubs.
Women paddled pirogues weighed down almost to the waterline with pondu, or cassava leaves, to sell at busy markets that, after miles and miles of tropical forest, would appear at the river’s edge as if from nowhere.
Many of the baleinières’ passengers are also traders, taking bales of goods upriver to sell.
Several pastors said divine messages of prosperity and smooth business transactions, as well as the usual ones about forgiveness of sins and eternal life, went down well on the baleinières.
Some of the pastors are traders themselves, with a sideline in preaching Pentecostal Christianity when they travel, in part to share the word of God, in part to make a little extra cash.
Because journeys on the baleinières can last weeks, the pastors have captive audiences and plenty of time. And congregations, even those boat-bound and not necessarily ardent believers, are expected to contribute when the collection plate comes around.
The money he can make on the river is part of what motivates Bionique Ebeke, an evangelical pastor who has grown used to the hardships of life there.
For days on end, passengers sleep packed on the hard boards of the boats, breathing in thick smoke from the engine, whose roar drowns out all conversation. If it rains, they get drenched. Food is limited.
Mr. Ebeke spends half his time preaching in a church on land in Bomongo, a town north of Mbandaka, but he also makes about 30 journeys every year aboard a baleinière, offering services each morning and night on the three- or four-day journey between the two spots.
“I work everywhere,” said Mr. Ebeke, 34. “There are lost souls on the baleinières who haven’t even heard the word of God.”
Evangelizing somehow feels more urgent on the river, he said, in part because trips are so hazardous. Traveling at night is technically banned, but this is rarely enforced. Life jackets are mandatory, but this is rarely enforced either. There are many accidents.
Last January at least nine people died when an overloaded vessel capsized. In February, at least 16 died when another ship overturned 60 miles from Kinshasa.
“There are many dangers, everywhere,” Mr. Ebeke said. “You can lose your life, just like that.”
Because of the risks, travelers tend to be religious, he said, and join in his prayers. But the worshipers on the river are not exactly model parishioners, he added.
“It’s not like a church where people listen to you and call you ‘Spiritual Father,’” he said. “People drink and bother other passengers. And other people say: ‘Leave us alone, stop with all your stories, man. We don’t want your God.’”
When they do, Mr. Ebeke said, he merely looks at them, says, “God is just” in his imperturbable voice and moves on down the deck.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/01/worl ... iversified
Reuters
Gunmen kill priest on his way home from church in Pakistan
Relative mourns the death of priest William Siraj, who was killed by unknown armed men in Peshawar
Sun, January 30, 2022, 8:22 AM
By Jibran Ahmad
PESHAWAR, Pakistan (Reuters) -Gunmen killed a Christian priest and wounded another as the clerics drove home from church in Pakistan’s northwestern city of Peshawar on Sunday, police said.
Two attackers on a motorcycle opened fire on the car on the city's ring-road, killing Pastor William Siraj instantly, officers added.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the shooting in a city where scores of people died in a twin suicide bombing outside a church in 2013 - one of the deadliest attacks on Pakistan's Christian minority.
Azad Marshall, the most senior bishop in the Church of Pakistan, condemned the attack and tweeted: "We demand justice and protection of Christians from the Government of Pakistan."
Pakistan's northwestern areas bordering Afghanistan have seen a rise in militant attacks on security forces in recent days, many of them claimed by Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a group which associates itself with the Afghan Taliban.
TV footage showed emergency services removing Siraj from the car, and people chanting "Long live Jesus Christ" as they carried his body on a bed through the streets to a house. Mourners hugged each other and sobbed.
Pastor Siraj's colleague - named by Bishop Azad as the Reverend Patrick Naeem - was out of danger and being treated for his injuries, a spokesman for the city's Lady Reading hospital said.
Bishop Azad said both were clergy of the Diocese of Peshawar in the Church of Pakistan, which is a union of protestant churches including the Methodists and the Anglicans.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/pr ... 52654.html
Gunmen kill priest on his way home from church in Pakistan
Relative mourns the death of priest William Siraj, who was killed by unknown armed men in Peshawar
Sun, January 30, 2022, 8:22 AM
By Jibran Ahmad
PESHAWAR, Pakistan (Reuters) -Gunmen killed a Christian priest and wounded another as the clerics drove home from church in Pakistan’s northwestern city of Peshawar on Sunday, police said.
Two attackers on a motorcycle opened fire on the car on the city's ring-road, killing Pastor William Siraj instantly, officers added.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the shooting in a city where scores of people died in a twin suicide bombing outside a church in 2013 - one of the deadliest attacks on Pakistan's Christian minority.
Azad Marshall, the most senior bishop in the Church of Pakistan, condemned the attack and tweeted: "We demand justice and protection of Christians from the Government of Pakistan."
Pakistan's northwestern areas bordering Afghanistan have seen a rise in militant attacks on security forces in recent days, many of them claimed by Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a group which associates itself with the Afghan Taliban.
TV footage showed emergency services removing Siraj from the car, and people chanting "Long live Jesus Christ" as they carried his body on a bed through the streets to a house. Mourners hugged each other and sobbed.
Pastor Siraj's colleague - named by Bishop Azad as the Reverend Patrick Naeem - was out of danger and being treated for his injuries, a spokesman for the city's Lady Reading hospital said.
Bishop Azad said both were clergy of the Diocese of Peshawar in the Church of Pakistan, which is a union of protestant churches including the Methodists and the Anglicans.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/pr ... 52654.html
The Dissenters Trying to Save Evangelicalism From Itself
Think of your 12 closest friends. These are the people you vacation with, talk about your problems with, do life with in the most intimate and meaningful ways. Now imagine if six of those people suddenly took a political or public position you found utterly vile. Now imagine learning that those six people think that your position is utterly vile. You would suddenly realize that the people you thought you knew best and cared about most had actually been total strangers all along. You would feel disoriented, disturbed, unmoored. Your life would change.
This is what has happened over the past six years to millions of American Christians, especially evangelicals. There have been three big issues that have profoundly divided them: the white evangelical embrace of Donald Trump, sex abuse scandals in evangelical churches and parachurch organizations, and attitudes about race relations, especially after the killing of George Floyd.
Thabiti Anyabwile pastors the largely Black Anacostia River Church in Washington, D.C. “It’s been at times agonizing and bewildering,” he says. “My entire relationship landscape has been rearranged. I’ve lost 20-year friendships. I’ve had great distance inserted into relationships that were once close and I thought would be close for life. I’ve grieved.”
Tim Dalrymple is president of the prominent evangelical magazine Christianity Today, which called for Trump’s removal from office after his first impeachment. “As an evangelical, I’ve found the last five years to be shocking, disorienting and deeply disheartening,” he says. “One of the most surprising elements is that I’ve realized that the people who I used to stand shoulder to shoulder with on almost every issue, I now realize that we are separated by a yawning chasm of mutual incomprehension. I would never have thought that could have happened so quickly.”
Kristin Kobes Du Mez is a professor of history at Calvin University, a Christian school in Michigan, and is the author of “Jesus and John Wayne,” about how rugged masculinity pervades the evangelical world. “I’ve had so many moms I don’t know come up to me in the playground,” she tells me, “and whisper, ‘Are you the author of that book?’ They pour out their hearts: ‘This is not my faith. This is not what I was raised to believe in.’ These are 30-something white Christian women. They are in deep crisis, questioning everything.”
Of course there is a lot of division across many parts of American society. But for evangelicals, who have dedicated their lives to Jesus, the problem is deeper. Christians are supposed to believe in the spiritual unity of the church. While differing over politics and other secondary matters, they are in theory supposed to be unified by their shared first love — as brothers and sisters in Christ. Their common devotion is supposed to bring out the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
“We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord,” say the opening lines of a famous Christian song commonly known as “By Our Love.” In its chorus it proclaims, “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love.” The world envisioned by that song seems very far away right now. The bitter recriminations have caused some believers to wonder if the whole religion is a crock.
Russell Moore resigned from his leadership position in the Southern Baptist Convention last spring over the denomination’s resistance to addressing the racism and sexual abuse scandals in its ranks. He tells me that every day he has conversations with Christians who are losing their faith because of what they see in their churches. He made a haunting point last summer when I saw him speak in New York State at a conference at a Bruderhof community, which has roots in the Anabaptist tradition. “We now see young evangelicals walking away from evangelicalism not because they do not believe what the church teaches,” he said, “but because they believe that the church itself does not believe what the church teaches.”
The proximate cause of all this disruption is Trump. But that is not the deepest cause. Trump is merely the embodiment of many of the raw wounds that already existed in parts of the white evangelical world: misogyny, racism, racial obliviousness, celebrity worship, resentment and the willingness to sacrifice principle for power.
Over the past decade or so, many of the country’s most celebrated Christian institutions were rocked by a series of horrific scandals. If you’re not evangelical, you may not know names like Willow Creek Community Church, Ravi Zacharias or Kanakuk Kamps. But if you’re evangelical, these are large presences on your mental landscape, and all have been destroyed or tarnished in recent years by sexual abuse allegations. The former leader of another prominent congregation, Mars Hill Church, has been accused of abuses of power.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/04/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Think of your 12 closest friends. These are the people you vacation with, talk about your problems with, do life with in the most intimate and meaningful ways. Now imagine if six of those people suddenly took a political or public position you found utterly vile. Now imagine learning that those six people think that your position is utterly vile. You would suddenly realize that the people you thought you knew best and cared about most had actually been total strangers all along. You would feel disoriented, disturbed, unmoored. Your life would change.
This is what has happened over the past six years to millions of American Christians, especially evangelicals. There have been three big issues that have profoundly divided them: the white evangelical embrace of Donald Trump, sex abuse scandals in evangelical churches and parachurch organizations, and attitudes about race relations, especially after the killing of George Floyd.
Thabiti Anyabwile pastors the largely Black Anacostia River Church in Washington, D.C. “It’s been at times agonizing and bewildering,” he says. “My entire relationship landscape has been rearranged. I’ve lost 20-year friendships. I’ve had great distance inserted into relationships that were once close and I thought would be close for life. I’ve grieved.”
Tim Dalrymple is president of the prominent evangelical magazine Christianity Today, which called for Trump’s removal from office after his first impeachment. “As an evangelical, I’ve found the last five years to be shocking, disorienting and deeply disheartening,” he says. “One of the most surprising elements is that I’ve realized that the people who I used to stand shoulder to shoulder with on almost every issue, I now realize that we are separated by a yawning chasm of mutual incomprehension. I would never have thought that could have happened so quickly.”
Kristin Kobes Du Mez is a professor of history at Calvin University, a Christian school in Michigan, and is the author of “Jesus and John Wayne,” about how rugged masculinity pervades the evangelical world. “I’ve had so many moms I don’t know come up to me in the playground,” she tells me, “and whisper, ‘Are you the author of that book?’ They pour out their hearts: ‘This is not my faith. This is not what I was raised to believe in.’ These are 30-something white Christian women. They are in deep crisis, questioning everything.”
Of course there is a lot of division across many parts of American society. But for evangelicals, who have dedicated their lives to Jesus, the problem is deeper. Christians are supposed to believe in the spiritual unity of the church. While differing over politics and other secondary matters, they are in theory supposed to be unified by their shared first love — as brothers and sisters in Christ. Their common devotion is supposed to bring out the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
“We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord,” say the opening lines of a famous Christian song commonly known as “By Our Love.” In its chorus it proclaims, “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love.” The world envisioned by that song seems very far away right now. The bitter recriminations have caused some believers to wonder if the whole religion is a crock.
Russell Moore resigned from his leadership position in the Southern Baptist Convention last spring over the denomination’s resistance to addressing the racism and sexual abuse scandals in its ranks. He tells me that every day he has conversations with Christians who are losing their faith because of what they see in their churches. He made a haunting point last summer when I saw him speak in New York State at a conference at a Bruderhof community, which has roots in the Anabaptist tradition. “We now see young evangelicals walking away from evangelicalism not because they do not believe what the church teaches,” he said, “but because they believe that the church itself does not believe what the church teaches.”
The proximate cause of all this disruption is Trump. But that is not the deepest cause. Trump is merely the embodiment of many of the raw wounds that already existed in parts of the white evangelical world: misogyny, racism, racial obliviousness, celebrity worship, resentment and the willingness to sacrifice principle for power.
Over the past decade or so, many of the country’s most celebrated Christian institutions were rocked by a series of horrific scandals. If you’re not evangelical, you may not know names like Willow Creek Community Church, Ravi Zacharias or Kanakuk Kamps. But if you’re evangelical, these are large presences on your mental landscape, and all have been destroyed or tarnished in recent years by sexual abuse allegations. The former leader of another prominent congregation, Mars Hill Church, has been accused of abuses of power.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/04/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Re: Christianity
A Catholic priest in Arizona resigned after discovering he'd incorrectly performed thousands of baptisms for over 20 years
Matthew Loh
Tue, February 15, 2022, 1:29 AM
All baptisms performed by the Rev. Andres Arango up until June 17 are presumed invalid, the Diocese of Phoenix said.Vatican Media/Handout via REUTERS
A priest in Arizona performed thousands of baptisms incorrectly by erroneously changing one word.
The error rendered thousands of baptisms performed by the Rev. Andres Arango invalid.
No priest "may add, remove, or change anything in the liturgy on his own authority," the diocese said.
A Catholic priest in Phoenix has resigned after realizing he'd been incorrectly performing baptisms for over 20 years, rendering the rite invalid for thousands of people.
As he administered the ritual, the Rev. Andres Arango would say, "We baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit." But the correct wording is "I baptize," according to the Vatican's instruction, Thomas J. Olmsted, bishop of the Diocese of Phoenix, wrote in a January 14 message.
No one, including priests, "may add, remove, or change anything in the liturgy on his own authority," Olmsted wrote, citing Vatican teachings. Olmsted added that he didn't believe Arango had "intentions to harm the faithful or deprive them of the grace of baptism and the sacraments."
Still, the official Diocese of Phoenix website said that Arango's one-word alteration means that "all of the baptisms he has performed until June 17, 2021, are presumed invalid." The diocese also called for those who believe Arango had incorrectly baptized them to submit their contact details to receive the proper rite.
In an open letter, Arango apologized for his error and announced that he'd resigned as pastor of the St. Gregory parish in Phoenix as of February 1.
"It saddens me to learn that I have performed invalid baptisms throughout my ministry as a priest by regularly using an incorrect formula," he wrote.
"With the help of the Holy Spirit and in communion with the Diocese of Phoenix I will dedicate my energy and full time ministry to help remedy this and heal those affected," he added.
According to the Catholic News Service, Arango previously served in parishes in Brazil and San Diego. The diocese told USA Today that he had administered thousands of baptisms throughout his ministry.
Catholic baptisms involve water being poured on a person's head to signify they have been purified and are now part of the church. Baptisms are typically performed on infants and are considered a requirement for Catholic salvation.
Despite the error, some St. Gregory Catholic Church members have launched a petition asking that Arango stay on as pastor of their parish.
"As part of his pastoral leadership, Father Andres reinvigorated the church community by renovating its facilities, giving parishioners and faith seekers a spiritual home that is open to all," it said. "The St. Gregory's community will never be the same without him."
Arango's blunder was not the first time a one-word alteration has affected baptisms in the US.
In 2020, the Rev. Matthew Hood in Detroit realized while watching a family video that the deacon who baptized him as a baby had also used the wrong phrase of "We baptize you."
The discovery resulted in Hood being rebaptized, then reconfirmed, and subsequently reordained. The mistake also affected the validity of the sacraments that Hood had previously performed for his parishioners.
The archbishop of Detroit, Allen H. Vigneron, apologized on behalf of the local church and attributed the discrepancy to "human error."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ca ... 27816.html
Matthew Loh
Tue, February 15, 2022, 1:29 AM
All baptisms performed by the Rev. Andres Arango up until June 17 are presumed invalid, the Diocese of Phoenix said.Vatican Media/Handout via REUTERS
A priest in Arizona performed thousands of baptisms incorrectly by erroneously changing one word.
The error rendered thousands of baptisms performed by the Rev. Andres Arango invalid.
No priest "may add, remove, or change anything in the liturgy on his own authority," the diocese said.
A Catholic priest in Phoenix has resigned after realizing he'd been incorrectly performing baptisms for over 20 years, rendering the rite invalid for thousands of people.
As he administered the ritual, the Rev. Andres Arango would say, "We baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit." But the correct wording is "I baptize," according to the Vatican's instruction, Thomas J. Olmsted, bishop of the Diocese of Phoenix, wrote in a January 14 message.
No one, including priests, "may add, remove, or change anything in the liturgy on his own authority," Olmsted wrote, citing Vatican teachings. Olmsted added that he didn't believe Arango had "intentions to harm the faithful or deprive them of the grace of baptism and the sacraments."
Still, the official Diocese of Phoenix website said that Arango's one-word alteration means that "all of the baptisms he has performed until June 17, 2021, are presumed invalid." The diocese also called for those who believe Arango had incorrectly baptized them to submit their contact details to receive the proper rite.
In an open letter, Arango apologized for his error and announced that he'd resigned as pastor of the St. Gregory parish in Phoenix as of February 1.
"It saddens me to learn that I have performed invalid baptisms throughout my ministry as a priest by regularly using an incorrect formula," he wrote.
"With the help of the Holy Spirit and in communion with the Diocese of Phoenix I will dedicate my energy and full time ministry to help remedy this and heal those affected," he added.
According to the Catholic News Service, Arango previously served in parishes in Brazil and San Diego. The diocese told USA Today that he had administered thousands of baptisms throughout his ministry.
Catholic baptisms involve water being poured on a person's head to signify they have been purified and are now part of the church. Baptisms are typically performed on infants and are considered a requirement for Catholic salvation.
Despite the error, some St. Gregory Catholic Church members have launched a petition asking that Arango stay on as pastor of their parish.
"As part of his pastoral leadership, Father Andres reinvigorated the church community by renovating its facilities, giving parishioners and faith seekers a spiritual home that is open to all," it said. "The St. Gregory's community will never be the same without him."
Arango's blunder was not the first time a one-word alteration has affected baptisms in the US.
In 2020, the Rev. Matthew Hood in Detroit realized while watching a family video that the deacon who baptized him as a baby had also used the wrong phrase of "We baptize you."
The discovery resulted in Hood being rebaptized, then reconfirmed, and subsequently reordained. The mistake also affected the validity of the sacraments that Hood had previously performed for his parishioners.
The archbishop of Detroit, Allen H. Vigneron, apologized on behalf of the local church and attributed the discrepancy to "human error."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ca ... 27816.html
Re: Christianity
The Meaning of Lent to This Unchurched Christian
NASHVILLE — On Wednesday, in Catholic parishes across the world, a priest will dip his thumb into a pot of ashes — the burned remains of blessed palms from last year’s Palm Sunday Mass — and smudge the sign of the cross on each congregant’s forehead. Performing this ancient ritual, he will murmur, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
The priest will say these words on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, but he will not be saying these words to me.
I have had a troubled relationship with the church of my childhood since childhood itself, when I learned in Catholic school that I would never be allowed to become a priest. For decades, nevertheless, the gifts of my faith outweighed the pronouncements of the institutional church that I found alienating or enraging. Human institutions are inherently flawed, and I have always loved the rituals that linked me across time to so many others facing fear and loneliness and pain, to so many others finding solace in their faith.
Then the pandemic quarantines left me unchurched through no choice of my own, and the death of our last parent, for whom there would only ever be one Church, left my husband and me free to make our own choices about where to worship. I came to understand that my growing feeling of spiritual alienation wasn’t temporary. I loved my parish, and I loved our brilliant, compassionate pastor, but I was done with the institutional church.
Still, I miss the community. I miss the singing. I miss serving in social justice ministries. I even miss the ashes.
Ash Wednesday isn’t a day for rebellion. It’s a day for fasting, reflection and prayer, a somber reminder that our lives are brief, our days running out. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” The longer this pandemic drags on, the clearer those words become.
At 60, I am making peace with the dust to which I will return. For myself, at least — and only for myself — I don’t even mind the idea of mortality, for I have thrown in my lot with immortality. And isn’t the promise of immortality what Lent prepares us for? How will I make ready, now that I am without a church? What rituals will I observe, now that the stations of the cross no longer belong to me?
In the old days, my Lenten resolution almost always meant giving up something whose absence I would feel acutely: coffee, perhaps, or cussing. In that way I would be reminded, again and again, of what this season is for. But the practice of imposed sacrifice feels as alien to me now as anything else from my decades as a practicing Catholic. Haven’t we all had enough sacrifice in these last years? Every day I grieve two beloved family members lost during this pandemic. Every day I bear the grief of a burning world. I don’t need to give up cussing at Vladimir Putin, too.
During their midlife years of creeping weight gain, my mother and father would announce that they were losing 10 pounds for Lent, a goal I always found hilarious. As a Lenten resolution, it did bear some resemblance to the fasting and sackcloth of the early days of Christianity, if not for an entirely spiritual reason. I’m no theologian, but I feel sure that Jesus did not spend 40 days and 40 nights in the desert so he could fit into his old jeans.
It’s not that I disapprove of the secular expressions of the Lenten observation that have sprung up during this century of steeply declining church membership. If someone wants to lose 10 pounds, or jump start their new novel, or give veganism a try, I say more power to them. And God knows I’m all for a social media fast.
Life is hard for all living things. To make it harder — knowingly and willingly, for even a contained period of time — is a uniquely human exercise. We want to be better than we are. We want living to mean more than surviving. There is something truly beautiful about that impulse, whatever form it takes.
But as a new member of the unchurched Christian faithful, what am I supposed to do with Lent? Surely there must be some spiritual practice that falls between a church-ordained ritual and a secular perfectibility project. Something that would help me use this time of prayer and reflection to move away from the fears I cannot shake — for my country, for my planet — and toward a stronger faith in the possibility of redemption, a more certain conviction that all is not yet lost in this deeply troubled world.
My maternal forebears, all Protestants, were great believers in starting the day with a prayer and an entry from that season’s devotional. But my idea of a daily spiritual practice is less a prayer written by someone else than a walk in the woods alone. A devotional isn’t what I’m looking for, and neither is another church’s Lenten program. Not yet, anyway.
Honestly, I don’t know what I’m looking for.
Forty years ago, I took a college course in the philosophy of religion. I still have the textbook, and I’ve been looking at what I underlined in that book, at which passages I carefully marked with a star. Why did the girl I was 40 years ago decide certain passages should be marked with a star?
I signed up for the class because I was having my first crisis of faith. The class itself did nothing to clarify my confusion, and continually thinking about the questions that plagued me wasn’t helping either. Still I fretted. Still I tried to figure out what I believed and why.
Then one summer afternoon, months later, I was sitting in my parents’ backyard, listening to a mockingbird sing. Suddenly, inexplicably, a feeling of peace came over me. A feeling of perfect, absolute peace. No voice of reassurance came with it, and no words formed in my own mind to explain it. But if there had been words, they would’ve sounded something like: “It’s OK. Don’t worry. It’s OK.”
I didn’t need to understand. I didn’t need to decide.
It was the closest thing I have ever known to the sort of moment William James described in “The Varieties of Religious Experience” — a work that is heavily highlighted and marked with stars in my old textbook. And maybe that memory is enough for me now, too. I can continue to ponder, to be puzzled. I will almost certainly continue to feel just a little bit lost. I’ll look for a new church someday, a new place to put all this sorrow and a new community with whom to share it, but I’m not obliged to find that place just now. Ash Wednesday tells me only to keep trying: to believe, to be better, not to give up hope. And that’s faith enough for any season.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/28/opin ... 778d3e6de3
NASHVILLE — On Wednesday, in Catholic parishes across the world, a priest will dip his thumb into a pot of ashes — the burned remains of blessed palms from last year’s Palm Sunday Mass — and smudge the sign of the cross on each congregant’s forehead. Performing this ancient ritual, he will murmur, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
The priest will say these words on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, but he will not be saying these words to me.
I have had a troubled relationship with the church of my childhood since childhood itself, when I learned in Catholic school that I would never be allowed to become a priest. For decades, nevertheless, the gifts of my faith outweighed the pronouncements of the institutional church that I found alienating or enraging. Human institutions are inherently flawed, and I have always loved the rituals that linked me across time to so many others facing fear and loneliness and pain, to so many others finding solace in their faith.
Then the pandemic quarantines left me unchurched through no choice of my own, and the death of our last parent, for whom there would only ever be one Church, left my husband and me free to make our own choices about where to worship. I came to understand that my growing feeling of spiritual alienation wasn’t temporary. I loved my parish, and I loved our brilliant, compassionate pastor, but I was done with the institutional church.
Still, I miss the community. I miss the singing. I miss serving in social justice ministries. I even miss the ashes.
Ash Wednesday isn’t a day for rebellion. It’s a day for fasting, reflection and prayer, a somber reminder that our lives are brief, our days running out. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” The longer this pandemic drags on, the clearer those words become.
At 60, I am making peace with the dust to which I will return. For myself, at least — and only for myself — I don’t even mind the idea of mortality, for I have thrown in my lot with immortality. And isn’t the promise of immortality what Lent prepares us for? How will I make ready, now that I am without a church? What rituals will I observe, now that the stations of the cross no longer belong to me?
In the old days, my Lenten resolution almost always meant giving up something whose absence I would feel acutely: coffee, perhaps, or cussing. In that way I would be reminded, again and again, of what this season is for. But the practice of imposed sacrifice feels as alien to me now as anything else from my decades as a practicing Catholic. Haven’t we all had enough sacrifice in these last years? Every day I grieve two beloved family members lost during this pandemic. Every day I bear the grief of a burning world. I don’t need to give up cussing at Vladimir Putin, too.
During their midlife years of creeping weight gain, my mother and father would announce that they were losing 10 pounds for Lent, a goal I always found hilarious. As a Lenten resolution, it did bear some resemblance to the fasting and sackcloth of the early days of Christianity, if not for an entirely spiritual reason. I’m no theologian, but I feel sure that Jesus did not spend 40 days and 40 nights in the desert so he could fit into his old jeans.
It’s not that I disapprove of the secular expressions of the Lenten observation that have sprung up during this century of steeply declining church membership. If someone wants to lose 10 pounds, or jump start their new novel, or give veganism a try, I say more power to them. And God knows I’m all for a social media fast.
Life is hard for all living things. To make it harder — knowingly and willingly, for even a contained period of time — is a uniquely human exercise. We want to be better than we are. We want living to mean more than surviving. There is something truly beautiful about that impulse, whatever form it takes.
But as a new member of the unchurched Christian faithful, what am I supposed to do with Lent? Surely there must be some spiritual practice that falls between a church-ordained ritual and a secular perfectibility project. Something that would help me use this time of prayer and reflection to move away from the fears I cannot shake — for my country, for my planet — and toward a stronger faith in the possibility of redemption, a more certain conviction that all is not yet lost in this deeply troubled world.
My maternal forebears, all Protestants, were great believers in starting the day with a prayer and an entry from that season’s devotional. But my idea of a daily spiritual practice is less a prayer written by someone else than a walk in the woods alone. A devotional isn’t what I’m looking for, and neither is another church’s Lenten program. Not yet, anyway.
Honestly, I don’t know what I’m looking for.
Forty years ago, I took a college course in the philosophy of religion. I still have the textbook, and I’ve been looking at what I underlined in that book, at which passages I carefully marked with a star. Why did the girl I was 40 years ago decide certain passages should be marked with a star?
I signed up for the class because I was having my first crisis of faith. The class itself did nothing to clarify my confusion, and continually thinking about the questions that plagued me wasn’t helping either. Still I fretted. Still I tried to figure out what I believed and why.
Then one summer afternoon, months later, I was sitting in my parents’ backyard, listening to a mockingbird sing. Suddenly, inexplicably, a feeling of peace came over me. A feeling of perfect, absolute peace. No voice of reassurance came with it, and no words formed in my own mind to explain it. But if there had been words, they would’ve sounded something like: “It’s OK. Don’t worry. It’s OK.”
I didn’t need to understand. I didn’t need to decide.
It was the closest thing I have ever known to the sort of moment William James described in “The Varieties of Religious Experience” — a work that is heavily highlighted and marked with stars in my old textbook. And maybe that memory is enough for me now, too. I can continue to ponder, to be puzzled. I will almost certainly continue to feel just a little bit lost. I’ll look for a new church someday, a new place to put all this sorrow and a new community with whom to share it, but I’m not obliged to find that place just now. Ash Wednesday tells me only to keep trying: to believe, to be better, not to give up hope. And that’s faith enough for any season.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/28/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Re: Christianity
Do Catholics need to abstain from meat on Fridays in Lent when it's a feast day?
Victoria Dodge, Lafayette Daily Advertiser
Tue, March 1, 2022, 3:26 PM
Lent is a 40-day period where Catholics abstain from luxuries and refrain from eating any meat, except fish, on Fridays in preparation for Easter. But what happens when religious observances with different obligations fall on the same day?
In 2021 during Lent two major Feast Days occurred on Friday — he Solemnity of the Feast of St. Joseph on March 19, and the Solemnity of the Feast of the Annunciation on March 25.
This year, the Feast of the Annunciation again falls on Friday
Feast days, or solemnities, are days in the Catholic church where Saints and events in the Bible are celebrated. Despite the name, the days are not always commemorated with a banquet of food but instead mean "an annual religious celebration, a day dedicated to a particular saint" according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
The laws of the Catholic Church provide for the occurrence of Feast Days during Fridays in Lent. Canon 1251 from the 1983 Code of Canon Law addresses this situation:
Canon 1251: Abstinence from meat, or from some other food as determined by the Episcopal Conference, is to be observed on all Fridays, unless a solemnity should fall on a Friday. Abstinence and fasting are to be observed on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.
When a solemnity falls on a Friday in Lent, the celebration of the Solemnity takes precedence over the requirement of fasting from meat or some other food.
In other words, celebration of the solemnity overrides the Lenten requirement.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ca ... 59962.html
Victoria Dodge, Lafayette Daily Advertiser
Tue, March 1, 2022, 3:26 PM
Lent is a 40-day period where Catholics abstain from luxuries and refrain from eating any meat, except fish, on Fridays in preparation for Easter. But what happens when religious observances with different obligations fall on the same day?
In 2021 during Lent two major Feast Days occurred on Friday — he Solemnity of the Feast of St. Joseph on March 19, and the Solemnity of the Feast of the Annunciation on March 25.
This year, the Feast of the Annunciation again falls on Friday
Feast days, or solemnities, are days in the Catholic church where Saints and events in the Bible are celebrated. Despite the name, the days are not always commemorated with a banquet of food but instead mean "an annual religious celebration, a day dedicated to a particular saint" according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
The laws of the Catholic Church provide for the occurrence of Feast Days during Fridays in Lent. Canon 1251 from the 1983 Code of Canon Law addresses this situation:
Canon 1251: Abstinence from meat, or from some other food as determined by the Episcopal Conference, is to be observed on all Fridays, unless a solemnity should fall on a Friday. Abstinence and fasting are to be observed on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.
When a solemnity falls on a Friday in Lent, the celebration of the Solemnity takes precedence over the requirement of fasting from meat or some other food.
In other words, celebration of the solemnity overrides the Lenten requirement.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ca ... 59962.html
Re: Christianity
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Maundy Thursday? Good Friday? What the days leading up to Easter are called and mean
Megan Cardona
Thu, April 14, 2022, 2:38 PM
Each year Easter falls on a different Sunday than it did the previous year. Easter 2022 is this Sunday, April 17, and Orthodox Easter is on April 24.
Easter, a Christian holiday, is a “movable feast” meaning the day does not have to fall on the same day each year as opposed to a fixed holiday like Christmas.
The days before Easter Sunday are also celebrated by Christian institutions, including Orthodox Christians, commemorating the days leading up to the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Here’s what each day means and a look at why Easter and Orthodox Easter are on different days.
What is Maundy Thursday?
Maundy Thursday, also known as Holy Thursday, takes place on the Thursday before Easter Sunday. In the Christian faith, Holy Thursday commemorates the Last Supper of Christ.
Maundy is used in reference to a ritual foot washing.
In Maundy Thursday ceremonies, a foot washing ritual takes place in remembrance of Christ washing his 12 disciples’ feet at the Last Supper as a sign of hospitality and purification.
Washing of the feet is a ritual performed during Maundy Thursday, also known as Holy Thursday, services.
What is Good Friday?
Good Friday is the Friday before Easter Sunday. The day commemorates the crucifixion of Christ, who is believed in the Christian faith to have died for the sins of humanity.
The day is also known as Great Friday and Holy Friday.
What is Holy Saturday?
The day before Easter Sunday is Holy Saturday, a day Christians remember the entombment of Christ.
Holy Saturday is also known as Great Saturday and the Easter Vigil.
Why are Easter and Orthodox Easter on separate days?
Western Christianity celebrates their Easter usually one to two weeks ahead of Eastern Christianity’s Orthodox Easter.
This is due to the difference in calendar years used by the faiths. Christians use the Gregorian Calendar meaning their Easter falls on a Sunday within March 22 and April 25. The Gregorian calendar was introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 based on reformation of the vernal equinox.
Orthodox Christians use the Julian Calendar, which is about 13 days longer than the Gregorian Calendar. The Julian Calendar was started by Julius Caesar in 45 B.C. basing the calendar off the sun.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ma ... 54276.html
Maundy Thursday? Good Friday? What the days leading up to Easter are called and mean
Megan Cardona
Thu, April 14, 2022, 2:38 PM
Each year Easter falls on a different Sunday than it did the previous year. Easter 2022 is this Sunday, April 17, and Orthodox Easter is on April 24.
Easter, a Christian holiday, is a “movable feast” meaning the day does not have to fall on the same day each year as opposed to a fixed holiday like Christmas.
The days before Easter Sunday are also celebrated by Christian institutions, including Orthodox Christians, commemorating the days leading up to the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Here’s what each day means and a look at why Easter and Orthodox Easter are on different days.
What is Maundy Thursday?
Maundy Thursday, also known as Holy Thursday, takes place on the Thursday before Easter Sunday. In the Christian faith, Holy Thursday commemorates the Last Supper of Christ.
Maundy is used in reference to a ritual foot washing.
In Maundy Thursday ceremonies, a foot washing ritual takes place in remembrance of Christ washing his 12 disciples’ feet at the Last Supper as a sign of hospitality and purification.
Washing of the feet is a ritual performed during Maundy Thursday, also known as Holy Thursday, services.
What is Good Friday?
Good Friday is the Friday before Easter Sunday. The day commemorates the crucifixion of Christ, who is believed in the Christian faith to have died for the sins of humanity.
The day is also known as Great Friday and Holy Friday.
What is Holy Saturday?
The day before Easter Sunday is Holy Saturday, a day Christians remember the entombment of Christ.
Holy Saturday is also known as Great Saturday and the Easter Vigil.
Why are Easter and Orthodox Easter on separate days?
Western Christianity celebrates their Easter usually one to two weeks ahead of Eastern Christianity’s Orthodox Easter.
This is due to the difference in calendar years used by the faiths. Christians use the Gregorian Calendar meaning their Easter falls on a Sunday within March 22 and April 25. The Gregorian calendar was introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 based on reformation of the vernal equinox.
Orthodox Christians use the Julian Calendar, which is about 13 days longer than the Gregorian Calendar. The Julian Calendar was started by Julius Caesar in 45 B.C. basing the calendar off the sun.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ma ... 54276.html
Re: Christianity
Fox News
Seminary student dies in Jesus crucifixion reenactment
Photo by: Godong/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Adam Sabes
Sun, April 17, 2022, 5:10 PM
A university student in Nigeria died Friday while participating in a reenactment of Jesus's crucifixion.
Sule Ambrose, 25, was a first-year student at the Claratian Institute of Philosophy and was taking classes to become a priest when the horrific incident happened, according to the BBC.
Ambrose was taking part in a reenactment of Jesus's crucifixion and was given the role of Simon Peter, a Disciple of Jesus, during the play "Passion of Christ."
During Ambrose's performance in the play, he collapsed and was taken to a nearby hospital where he was pronounced dead.
One person at the university said that people thought Ambrose was joking when he collapsed, thinking it was part of the drama, according to Vanguard, a Nigerian news outlet.
"Initially when it happened we thought it was a joke, and that it was part of the drama, it was when he could not get up that was when we knew it was a serious matter and he was rushed to hospital," the person said.
Administrators at the university have suspended all Easter activities as a result of the incident, according to the report.
The school is located in southeastern Nigeria.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/cm/ ... 13951.html
Seminary student dies in Jesus crucifixion reenactment
Photo by: Godong/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Adam Sabes
Sun, April 17, 2022, 5:10 PM
A university student in Nigeria died Friday while participating in a reenactment of Jesus's crucifixion.
Sule Ambrose, 25, was a first-year student at the Claratian Institute of Philosophy and was taking classes to become a priest when the horrific incident happened, according to the BBC.
Ambrose was taking part in a reenactment of Jesus's crucifixion and was given the role of Simon Peter, a Disciple of Jesus, during the play "Passion of Christ."
During Ambrose's performance in the play, he collapsed and was taken to a nearby hospital where he was pronounced dead.
One person at the university said that people thought Ambrose was joking when he collapsed, thinking it was part of the drama, according to Vanguard, a Nigerian news outlet.
"Initially when it happened we thought it was a joke, and that it was part of the drama, it was when he could not get up that was when we knew it was a serious matter and he was rushed to hospital," the person said.
Administrators at the university have suspended all Easter activities as a result of the incident, according to the report.
The school is located in southeastern Nigeria.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/cm/ ... 13951.html
‘HOW PENTECOSTAL CHRISTIANITY IS TAKING OVER THE WORLD’: AN INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR ELLE HARDY
How did you first become interested in reporting on the rise of Pentecostalism?
My interest came about entirely by accident. A few years ago, I stumbled on the “John school” movement—faith-based remedial programs for guys caught soliciting prostitutes.
This phenomenon had not been widely reported at the time, so a few months later I traveled to Waco, Texas to profile one such program that agreed to host me. After a few days they revealed that they were inspired to found the school by Christine Caine, an Australian Hillsong Church alumna who grew up in Sydney like me. After Waco, I traveled to Mississippi to see Caine’s traveling roadshow, Propel Women Activate, a Bible-study-meets-self-help-seminar for busy moms.
In the course of researching both stories, I began learning about the scale and scope of the Pentecostal/Charismatic/Spirit-led movements. I read the work of other scholars and writers, most notably Richard Flory and Brad Christerson’s book, The Rise of Network Christianity.
A massive story is taking place largely under the radar. Some brilliant academics and journalists are reporting on the Pentecostal revolution, but their work is not as broadly appreciated as it deserves to be. How many people know that Catholics are no longer the majority in Brazil; that North Korean defectors are turning to Pentecostalism as they adjust to life in the South; and that Romani and Gypsy populations across the UK and Europe are rapidly converting to this form of the faith?
I’m attracted to big, global stories and wanted to tackle the topic in a way that’s fun and engaging.
Tell us a little about the origin story of the Pentecostal movement and William J. Seymour, and the ideas and events that shaped his work.
I think it’s instructive that Seymour—the son of emancipated slaves from Louisiana—is widely considered the founder of the movement, rather than his (white) mentor, Charles Fox Parham, who I think has a better claim. While this is largely for historical reasons—Seymour had a much larger audience in Los Angeles, and news of the revival was reported in the city’s press the same day as the San Francisco earthquake—it also speaks to the fact that, from the beginning, Pentecostalism has appealed to minorities, migrants, the downtrodden.
William J. Seymour was born in Louisiana in 1870 and grew up in African-American Catholicism steeped in strong elements of the supernatural. In 1895, he fled the poverty of subsistence farming and racial persecution.
In his travels through the Midwest, he was born again into the Methodist faith and introduced to the Holiness movement, a forerunner of Pentecostalism. But it was an outbreak of smallpox, which cost him an eye, that changed his life—he thought God was punishing him for being too slow to answer the call to the ministry.
Seymour studied under Parham in Houston in 1905. Jim Crow laws meant he had to take his instruction from outside the classroom. Parham was horribly racist, with a quick temper. Seymour, on the other hand, has been described as kind and considerate. In spite of their differences, Seymour and Parham began street-preaching together.
Though his character was temperate, Seymour’s theology had a hellfire streak. Many people really thought that the earthquake meant the End Times were almost here and it was time for them to spread out around the world and save not just souls but entire nations.
Many people are broadly aware of the rise of Pentecostalism, yet know so little of its origins.
While writing the book, I went to Los Angeles a couple of times and stayed downtown right near Azusa Street, which is considered the birthplace of the movement. Twice a day, I’d walk by the little plaque that marks the spot where the spirit allegedly came to William J. Seymour and his congregation in 1906.
Part of me was wondering if some divine inspiration might come my way, but mostly I was hoping to find an interesting pilgrim to speak to. Not once did I find another soul pausing to see this historical landmark. I even interviewed a very pious young Latina woman from a Pentecostal congregation not a mile from Azusa Street. I asked her about Seymour—she said: “Who?”
That’s fascinating. The movement’s origins aren’t important to most Pentecostals I encountered, but I suppose that shouldn’t be surprising. One of the most common themes of my book is that Pentecostals (and I use that as a catch-all term to include charismatics and the “Spirit-led” nondenominationals) speak to the here-and-now. As someone said to me in Brazil, “The difference between Pentecostalism and Catholicism is that Pentecostalism says that you can be happy in this life.”
Is Pentecostalism substantively unique in its activism and organization?
I don’t need to tell you that evangelicals have long been really good at organizing politically, but Pentecostals have changed the emphasis. John Wimber, a key figure in the ‘60s and ‘70s, pioneered what’s called ‘power evangelism’—or as he called it, “Doin’ the stuff.” It’s all about direct participation in the miraculous—Christianity ‘on demand,’ if you will.
For example, in Redding, California, you get groups from the Bethel Church barging into emergency rooms to lay hands on the sick. The church recruits charismatic ER doctors and healthcare workers to their town.
Traditional evangelical networks have tended to organize within formal political—or at least politically adjacent—structures, such as the Family Research Council. Pentecostals might get involved with such groups too, but they’re also out there doing their own thing. They take the view that we’re in God’s advancing kingdom—go out there and do whatever you can. Prayer walk through the red-light district to cast out the demons; stop that woman in her wheelchair and command her to be healed in Jesus’ name.
There’s also a spirit of innovation at play. Leaders of many modern Pentecostal churches see themselves as ‘brands,’ and they’re looking at new ideas and product differentiation. So they’re meeting up with like-minded people from around the world and seeing how they do church, how they do political organizing, and swapping ideas.
How do you distinguish Pentecostals from charismatic Christians?
Charismatics are what’s referred to as the second wave of Pentecostalism, which got its start in 1960s California. It’s Spirit-led, personalized, and focused on power evangelism—that is, performing miracles and providing signs and wonders, as they see it, through the Holy Spirit’s ability to manifest success in the mind, body, spirit, and wallet.
Pentecostalism is quick to look more like the world it’s in. In 1960s California, it offered hippie spiritual experiences through the Jesus People movement.
These ideas spread quickly into Catholic Latin America. Rome was losing its congregants to Pentecostal churches—Pope John Paul II called Pentecostals “ravenous wolves”—and had to adapt. The charismatic Catholic Renewal was created to accommodate a Spirit-led practice, where you could keep the Virgin Mary and the Saints you grew up with. But these churches have much in common with, and are greatly influenced by, the Pentecostal movement.
By the 1980s, a third wave, called the neo-charismatic movement, brought together all of the ideas of the first two waves and doubled down on experiences with the miraculous. Structurally, they were becoming really good at digital and other media (think Hillsong’s music), and evolving into global, corporate brands.
How does Pentecostalism relate to the political cultures of some of the countries in which it is most prevalent?
Pentecostalism has become extremely influential, not just in America but around the world. I want to point to two modern doctrines that are entwined with Pentecostalism and that are both highly politically charged and quite troubling.
First, there’s the Seven Mountain Mandate, or 7M—the idea that right-thinking Christians are to take over the seven mountains or “spheres of influence” of culture and society. This includes education, religion, family, business, government, arts and entertainment, and media. The ideology draws from Pentecostalism and Christian Reconstructionism, among other strands. It is repackaged Christian Dominionism for the 21st century, and it’s fortifying the radical right of U.S. politics.
The second doctrine is Spiritual Warfare, and it’s hugely influential, particularly in the global south. It’s changed politics around the world. In Nigeria, for instance, it has significant political sway. In order to get the support of powerful preachers, political figures (even Muslims) have accepted that the world is defined as a spiritual battle between good and evil.
How is the Pentecostal idea of spiritual battle substantially unique?
This kind of demonology allows people to merge traditional cultural beliefs with evangelicalism. This is particularly prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and Latin America, but also in the West too.
Spiritual Warfare isn’t simply about the salvation of individuals; there’s a belief that evil spirits operate ‘strategically,’ i.e. in geographical areas and institutions. So people who advocate these types of ideas might say that the Las Vegas strip or the Democratic Party or their local school board has been taken over by evil spirits.
I can’t emphasize enough how rapidly the idea of Spiritual Warfare is growing. Trump’s spiritual advisor, Paula White Cain, was mocked for asking for termination of ‘all Satanic pregnancies’ in the 2020 election. People thought she was mad. No, she was speaking to a huge audience, both in America and overseas!
What are some popular misconceptions about Pentecostalism and its relationship to evangelicalism in America?
Many (though not all) Pentecostal churches in the U.S. and Europe stand out in particular for their racial diversity. Walk into any Hillsong in the West, for example, and the congregation will be young, exuberant, and majority non-white.
Tell us a little bit about how Pentecostalism spreads through entrepreneurial leaders and parachurch networks.
Charismatic leaders are a lot like Silicon Valley entrepreneurs in that they’re keenly aware that they’re operating in a marketplace of ideas. They’re big on ‘disruption’—making faith accessible and convenient. This might mean opening church at 5 a.m. so people can attend a service before work (as in Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in Brazil), or streaming a 24-hour worship chapel online (International House of Prayer Kansas City).
In time, I think the pandemic will prove significant in changing the way people attend church. More and more, people are following pastors they find on social media who align with their particular interests and have good digital infrastructure.
As for the networks, Flory and Christerson have done great work in this area. There’s been a real exodus from denominations such as Assemblies of God in favor of informal cooperation networks, where different prophets and apostles are appearing on one another’s Facebook shows, speaking at conferences, cross-promoting books and so on.
They recognize that a rising tide lifts all boats, but they’re also focused on maintaining their personal brand. After all, these days they’re not competing with the preacher down the road, they’re competing with preachers from all over the world on the YouTube sidebar.
https://religiondispatches.org/how-pent ... elle-hardy
Sam Harris demolishes Christianity and Kirk Durston Responds
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ_sQwwg6oQ
A reaction video for the short video, Sam Harris "demolishes Christianity".
Link to full debate - Craig vs Harris https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqaHX...
Links to Kirk Durston's YouTube videos, peer-reviewed papers, and short articles, referred to in the reaction video:
1. Video: Why is Hell necessary? https://youtu.be/usakiMefq68
2. Video: Is Hell unjust? https://youtu.be/cgBrOJmjYkw
3. Video: Why is Hell awful? (Why can't it be a five-star resort?)
https://youtu.be/VjWultuQtSI
4. Short article: On the death of a child https://www.kirkdurston.com/blog/loss
5. Video: Why does God let children die? https://youtu.be/0EVcLfPO630
6. Peer-reviewed paper: The consequential complexity of history and gratuitous evil https://p2c.com/sites/default/files/d...
7. Peer-reviewed paper: The failure of Type-4 arguments from evil, in the face of the consequential complexity of history https://p2c.com/sites/default/files/d...
8. Video: The 'butterfly effect' and what God should allow https://youtu.be/TY5iB1KVdak
9. Video: Why evil requires an ultimate moral standard https://youtu.be/dFqrnZdcnH0
10. Video: Did God order genocide? https://youtu.be/pPoYXdQtvYk
11. Short article: The destruction of the Canaanites: Why God must sometimes destroy civilizations and cultures https://www.kirkdurston.com/blog/cana...
12. Peer-reviewed paper: The incompatibility of God and gratuitous evil - implications for the termination of civilizations http://p2c.com/wp-content/uploads/201...
13: Four short videos on the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus https://youtu.be/GQvZ2d2SoTo and https://youtu.be/nLErLflAWDY and
https://youtu.be/SxHmDDEWGcQ and https://youtu.be/6SuRjb44x8E
14. Short article: Why did God ask Abraham to sacrifice his son? https://www.kirkdurston.com/blog/2019...
15. Video: The sacrifice of Isaac https://youtu.be/60P3agEOTiI
@Sam Harris @DrWilliamCraigVideos
Want to discuss something further from this video? Go to https://www.kirkdurston.com/conversation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ_sQwwg6oQ
A reaction video for the short video, Sam Harris "demolishes Christianity".
Link to full debate - Craig vs Harris https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqaHX...
Links to Kirk Durston's YouTube videos, peer-reviewed papers, and short articles, referred to in the reaction video:
1. Video: Why is Hell necessary? https://youtu.be/usakiMefq68
2. Video: Is Hell unjust? https://youtu.be/cgBrOJmjYkw
3. Video: Why is Hell awful? (Why can't it be a five-star resort?)
https://youtu.be/VjWultuQtSI
4. Short article: On the death of a child https://www.kirkdurston.com/blog/loss
5. Video: Why does God let children die? https://youtu.be/0EVcLfPO630
6. Peer-reviewed paper: The consequential complexity of history and gratuitous evil https://p2c.com/sites/default/files/d...
7. Peer-reviewed paper: The failure of Type-4 arguments from evil, in the face of the consequential complexity of history https://p2c.com/sites/default/files/d...
8. Video: The 'butterfly effect' and what God should allow https://youtu.be/TY5iB1KVdak
9. Video: Why evil requires an ultimate moral standard https://youtu.be/dFqrnZdcnH0
10. Video: Did God order genocide? https://youtu.be/pPoYXdQtvYk
11. Short article: The destruction of the Canaanites: Why God must sometimes destroy civilizations and cultures https://www.kirkdurston.com/blog/cana...
12. Peer-reviewed paper: The incompatibility of God and gratuitous evil - implications for the termination of civilizations http://p2c.com/wp-content/uploads/201...
13: Four short videos on the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus https://youtu.be/GQvZ2d2SoTo and https://youtu.be/nLErLflAWDY and
https://youtu.be/SxHmDDEWGcQ and https://youtu.be/6SuRjb44x8E
14. Short article: Why did God ask Abraham to sacrifice his son? https://www.kirkdurston.com/blog/2019...
15. Video: The sacrifice of Isaac https://youtu.be/60P3agEOTiI
@Sam Harris @DrWilliamCraigVideos
Want to discuss something further from this video? Go to https://www.kirkdurston.com/conversation
Re: Christianity
Business Insider
Medieval ceramic vessel found in Jerusalem offers potential evidence of Crusader knights using hand grenades, study finds
Joshua Zitser
Sat, April 30, 2022, 3:59 AM
A fragment of the sphero-conical vessel that was identified as containing remnants of explosive material, left, and an illustration of a knight at the time of the First Crusade, right.
A fragment of the sphero-conical vessel that was identified as containing remnants of explosive material (L) and an illustration of a knight at the time of the First Crusade (R).Robert Mason/Royal Ontario Museum, Getty Images
Archeologists analyzed the residue inside four ceramic vessels found in the Old City of Jerusalem.
One vessel was potentially a medieval grenade, consistent with first-hand accounts from the period.
It contained the remnants of an explosive mix of plant oils, animal fats, nitrates, and sulfur.
A new analysis of a medieval ceramic vessel excavated from the Old City of Jerusalem suggests the Crusader knights could have developed rudimentary hand grenades in their wars against the Muslim rulers of the Holy Land.
Archeologists from Griffith University, in South East Queensland, Australia, examined the residue inside four sphero-conical containers.
Three showed evidence of use for various purposes, including holding oils, scented materials, and medicine.
However, inside the so-called Sherd 737 vessel, archeologists found deposits suggesting that ceramic jars were potentially used as handheld explosive devices.
Sherd 737, which has thick walls, no decoration, and indications of a resin seal, had the remnants of the flammable chemical ingredients needed for an archaic explosive device.
The residue, according to the study published in the scientific journal PLOS One, is consistent with what would be required to build a medieval hand grenade.
Previously, researchers assumed that medieval grenades would have contained gunpowder. But gunpowder, first developed in China, did not appear in the Middle East until the 13th century.
The Crusades, a series of religious wars led by European Christians to conquer Jerusalem and the Holy Land from its Muslim rulers, were fought between 1095 and 1291. The vessels are believed to be from the 11th or 12th centuries.
Sherd 737, according to the archeologists, contained traces of a unique explosive mix composed of plant oils, animal fats, nitrates, and sulfur. It suggests that Crusader knights had invented their own blend of explosive chemicals.
"It shows that the explosive weapons described by the Crusaders were a local invention," said Carney Matheson, a molecular archaeologist at Griffith University, in an email to Insider.
"This shows for the first time a whole different mixture for the ingredients of an ancient explosive which is consistent with the historical Arab texts," Matheson continued.
The study is significant, he added, because it "advances our understanding of medieval weapons in the Middle East at this time" and verifies the accounts of the Crusaders.
First-hand accounts from Crusader knights and Arab texts mention the use of handheld devices that exploded with loud bangs and flashes of light, Griffith University said in a statement consistent with these findings.
More research on similar vessels will be needed to further understand the ancient explosive technology used during the medieval period, Matheson said in the statement.
Read the original article on Business Insider
Medieval ceramic vessel found in Jerusalem offers potential evidence of Crusader knights using hand grenades, study finds
Joshua Zitser
Sat, April 30, 2022, 3:59 AM
A fragment of the sphero-conical vessel that was identified as containing remnants of explosive material, left, and an illustration of a knight at the time of the First Crusade, right.
A fragment of the sphero-conical vessel that was identified as containing remnants of explosive material (L) and an illustration of a knight at the time of the First Crusade (R).Robert Mason/Royal Ontario Museum, Getty Images
Archeologists analyzed the residue inside four ceramic vessels found in the Old City of Jerusalem.
One vessel was potentially a medieval grenade, consistent with first-hand accounts from the period.
It contained the remnants of an explosive mix of plant oils, animal fats, nitrates, and sulfur.
A new analysis of a medieval ceramic vessel excavated from the Old City of Jerusalem suggests the Crusader knights could have developed rudimentary hand grenades in their wars against the Muslim rulers of the Holy Land.
Archeologists from Griffith University, in South East Queensland, Australia, examined the residue inside four sphero-conical containers.
Three showed evidence of use for various purposes, including holding oils, scented materials, and medicine.
However, inside the so-called Sherd 737 vessel, archeologists found deposits suggesting that ceramic jars were potentially used as handheld explosive devices.
Sherd 737, which has thick walls, no decoration, and indications of a resin seal, had the remnants of the flammable chemical ingredients needed for an archaic explosive device.
The residue, according to the study published in the scientific journal PLOS One, is consistent with what would be required to build a medieval hand grenade.
Previously, researchers assumed that medieval grenades would have contained gunpowder. But gunpowder, first developed in China, did not appear in the Middle East until the 13th century.
The Crusades, a series of religious wars led by European Christians to conquer Jerusalem and the Holy Land from its Muslim rulers, were fought between 1095 and 1291. The vessels are believed to be from the 11th or 12th centuries.
Sherd 737, according to the archeologists, contained traces of a unique explosive mix composed of plant oils, animal fats, nitrates, and sulfur. It suggests that Crusader knights had invented their own blend of explosive chemicals.
"It shows that the explosive weapons described by the Crusaders were a local invention," said Carney Matheson, a molecular archaeologist at Griffith University, in an email to Insider.
"This shows for the first time a whole different mixture for the ingredients of an ancient explosive which is consistent with the historical Arab texts," Matheson continued.
The study is significant, he added, because it "advances our understanding of medieval weapons in the Middle East at this time" and verifies the accounts of the Crusaders.
First-hand accounts from Crusader knights and Arab texts mention the use of handheld devices that exploded with loud bangs and flashes of light, Griffith University said in a statement consistent with these findings.
More research on similar vessels will be needed to further understand the ancient explosive technology used during the medieval period, Matheson said in the statement.
Read the original article on Business Insider
Re: Christianity
A religion that honors Christ is one that honors all of God's people
Rev. David Wilson Rogers
Sat, April 30, 2022, 9:06 AM
Popular theology does not necessarily make for fidelity to Scripture or equate genuine faith in God. In fact, there are many examples of populist religious perspectives that have the allure of seeming biblical and garnering the support of many Christians, but serve only to undermine the integrity of Jesus Christ. One such ideological perspective is Christian Zionism.
The whole concept of Christian Zionism is based on false doctrines, misguided interpretations of scripture, and a supremacist bias which all contradict the teachings of Jesus Christ. Yet, because of the nationalistic implications of Zionism and the fact that it can seem Biblical, many Christians blindly buy into this idolatrous fabrication of faith.
The dangerously destructive theology is built on lies that have been superimposed upon scripture in order to validate Christian support of a modern Apartheid regime in the Holy Land. It is a lie that the modern, secular State of Israel is a Divinely decreed extension of the ancient kingdom described in scripture. It is a lie to believe that one must bless the modern State of Israel to earn God’s blessing. It is a lie to think the Arab culture—and most particularly the Muslim Mosque on what was once the Temple Mount must be destroyed in order to usher in Christ’s second coming.
Israel is a modern, secular nation that was founded out of the aftermath of fierce anti-Jewish racism and discrimination in much of Europe and the United States. Beginning in the Second World War, England declared that Palestine be a Jewish Homeland and following the atrocities of Nazi Germany during the Second World War, populist sentiment grew to create a sovereign nation in Palestine for the Jewish People.
The problem with blessing Israel is that God does not bless that which is a violation of God’s will for humanity. Following its creation in 1948 and subsequent illegal invasion of Palestine in 1967, Israel has operated as an apartheid regime that continues to illegally subjugate Palestinians—including faithful Palestinian Christians—to a life of perpetual inhumanity. To bless Israel is to bless murder, rape, theft, and illegal occupation. Such is not what it means to bless Israel.
When Christ returns, it will be on God’s terms and not on the political, geographical, or secular terms that popular nationalism brings to the forefront. For Zionist Christians to call for, pray for, or even hope for the destruction of ancient Islamic holy sites out of a narcissistic belief that Jesus needs the land cleared for his return, cultivate a false Christianity which glorifies violence, destruction, and hatred—none of which represent Jesus Christ.
A religion that honors Christ is one that honors all of God’s people—including Palestinians. Israel has every right to exist as a sovereign nation, but that right must be extended to Palestine as well. It is equality and justice, not further punishment and the wretched denial of Palestinian human rights by Israel, that will work toward a meaningful and lasting peace in the Holy Land. Honoring Israel must come with honest and prayerful accountability to the many ways the modern nation has violated God in the name of establishing a Jewish Homeland.
Rather than fueling the fires of hatred and division that have made the Holy Land one of the most volatile regions on the planet, it is time Christians repent of the sinful ideologies of Zionism and embrace true pathways to lasting peace.
This article originally appeared on Carlsbad Current-Argus: A religion that honors Christ is one that honors all of God's people
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/re ... 40519.html
Rev. David Wilson Rogers
Sat, April 30, 2022, 9:06 AM
Popular theology does not necessarily make for fidelity to Scripture or equate genuine faith in God. In fact, there are many examples of populist religious perspectives that have the allure of seeming biblical and garnering the support of many Christians, but serve only to undermine the integrity of Jesus Christ. One such ideological perspective is Christian Zionism.
The whole concept of Christian Zionism is based on false doctrines, misguided interpretations of scripture, and a supremacist bias which all contradict the teachings of Jesus Christ. Yet, because of the nationalistic implications of Zionism and the fact that it can seem Biblical, many Christians blindly buy into this idolatrous fabrication of faith.
The dangerously destructive theology is built on lies that have been superimposed upon scripture in order to validate Christian support of a modern Apartheid regime in the Holy Land. It is a lie that the modern, secular State of Israel is a Divinely decreed extension of the ancient kingdom described in scripture. It is a lie to believe that one must bless the modern State of Israel to earn God’s blessing. It is a lie to think the Arab culture—and most particularly the Muslim Mosque on what was once the Temple Mount must be destroyed in order to usher in Christ’s second coming.
Israel is a modern, secular nation that was founded out of the aftermath of fierce anti-Jewish racism and discrimination in much of Europe and the United States. Beginning in the Second World War, England declared that Palestine be a Jewish Homeland and following the atrocities of Nazi Germany during the Second World War, populist sentiment grew to create a sovereign nation in Palestine for the Jewish People.
The problem with blessing Israel is that God does not bless that which is a violation of God’s will for humanity. Following its creation in 1948 and subsequent illegal invasion of Palestine in 1967, Israel has operated as an apartheid regime that continues to illegally subjugate Palestinians—including faithful Palestinian Christians—to a life of perpetual inhumanity. To bless Israel is to bless murder, rape, theft, and illegal occupation. Such is not what it means to bless Israel.
When Christ returns, it will be on God’s terms and not on the political, geographical, or secular terms that popular nationalism brings to the forefront. For Zionist Christians to call for, pray for, or even hope for the destruction of ancient Islamic holy sites out of a narcissistic belief that Jesus needs the land cleared for his return, cultivate a false Christianity which glorifies violence, destruction, and hatred—none of which represent Jesus Christ.
A religion that honors Christ is one that honors all of God’s people—including Palestinians. Israel has every right to exist as a sovereign nation, but that right must be extended to Palestine as well. It is equality and justice, not further punishment and the wretched denial of Palestinian human rights by Israel, that will work toward a meaningful and lasting peace in the Holy Land. Honoring Israel must come with honest and prayerful accountability to the many ways the modern nation has violated God in the name of establishing a Jewish Homeland.
Rather than fueling the fires of hatred and division that have made the Holy Land one of the most volatile regions on the planet, it is time Christians repent of the sinful ideologies of Zionism and embrace true pathways to lasting peace.
This article originally appeared on Carlsbad Current-Argus: A religion that honors Christ is one that honors all of God's people
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/re ... 40519.html
THE END OF ROE COMES COURTESY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
The article below highlights the differences of views on abortion within the catholic church
THE END OF ROE COMES COURTESY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH — BUT FROM ‘THE DOROTHY DAY ABORTION FUND’ TO ‘ST. VINCENT DE PAUL VASECTOMY CLINIC,’ HERE ARE SOME IDEAS FOR CATHOLICS LOOKING TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE
No matter how Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is decided finally, restrictions unto bans on abortions will be courtesy of the institutional Roman Catholic Church. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, their Pro-Life Activities Committee, and colleagues will and ought to take credit for rolling back a constitutionally guaranteed right, causing immeasurable harm especially to poor people, and putting their “preeminent priority” issue over the diverse views and needs of a nation. Congratulations, or something.
These few Catholics set their sights on this goal four decades ago. They have worked relentlessly and squandered resources that belong to the whole Catholic community, including the 57% of us who believe abortion should be legal. I dissent from the bishops’ efforts, as do many pro-choice Catholics who join millions of Americans in working to stem the tide.
Many factors converge to bring about this massive, despicable assault on the rights of women and other pregnant persons. There is the very real possibility that this judicial shift may affect those using birth control, those marrying interracially and as same-sex couples. But let history record that among the prime architects, engineers, and perpetrators were conservative Catholics, especially the Supreme Court justices who were groomed for their votes.
As a Catholic theologian who is a longtime public proponent of reproductive justice, including sex education, birth control, and abortion, I join millions who are not surprised by the draft’s tone and content.
Still, it is shocking in a religiously pluralistic society that not only are seven of nine justices Catholic by tradition and/or practice, but that the solid religious grounding of many other faith traditions is simply ignored. Many Christian denominations, among them Presbyterians, Methodists, and United Church of Christ, are committed to reproductive justice. The overwhelming majority of Jews (83%) support legal abortion, and, according to the Talmud, a fetus doesn’t gain the status of personhood until birth. Yet these and the views of non-religious pro-choice people are apparently trumped by the conservative Catholic formation and allegiances of the majority of the justices.
Thorough damage assessment cannot be done until the decision is final and public. But if the leaked draft statement is any indication, as Harvard legal scholar Lawrence Tribe thinks it is, we know what’s on the minds and in the hearts of the Catholic justices, save Justice Sonya Sotomayor who is stalwartly in favor of reproductive rights. Some of them were brought up from pups in an institutional Roman Catholic Church-supported legal culture.
The Trump Trio, Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, are well positioned for this and future such decisions. How coincidental is it that the two men graduated from Jesuit Georgetown Preparatory School? Then Gorsuch went to Columbia University and Harvard Law; Kavanaugh is, as they say, double Yale. They burnished their legal credentials while maintaining their Catholic bona fides. Barrett was spotted early in her career at Rhodes College and then went up the ladder at Notre Dame Law School where she joined a faculty which included John M. Finnis, who is footnoted in the draft.
These justices are surely aware of, if not part of, a subset of Catholics for whom outlawing abortion is a passion. Among the most extreme manifestations is the town of Ave Maria, Florida, with its eponymous law school dedicated to developing lawyers who will argue anti-abortion cases. The city is a planned community funded by developers and the foundation of Domino’s Pizza magnate Thomas S. Monaghan.
No pharmacy in town sells birth control. The law school—where Clarence Thomas delivered the first Ave Maria Lecture, Samuel Alito helped plan the curriculum, and Robert Bork taught—is a far cry from the Ivies on admissions criteria and bar exam passage rate. But the Catholic morality and natural laws studies it includes prepare the farm teams that try reproduction-related cases that wend their way to the high court.
‘We cannot remain silent’
There are many Catholic reactions to the leaked draft. As expected, and in line with the significant victory that the Catholic Right has seemingly achieved, the bishops are crowing. It has long been evident that most politicians and voters could care less what the bishops think about poverty, nuclear weapons or war, so they’ve instrumentalized pregnant bodies as their way to stay in the public debate.
Having created the problem, they have the temerity to offer to pay for pregnant women’s needs. The same bishops who’ve sought to eliminate women’s choices want to be seen as heroic and generous by offering pregnant women money instead of rights. It would be ludicrous if it weren’t so despicable.
Jesuit Thomas Reese offered an obtuse analysis. He passed over any mention of the damage to real people who are pregnant and simply advised the bishops to switch their political allegiance from the Republicans who oppose abortion to the Democratic Party which he thinks is more in keeping with Catholic social teaching. As he put it so indelicately, “The bishops got what they wanted out of this marriage; it is time to move on.” Where have women heard that before? Maybe he has annulment in mind. The price is surely high and it’s women who pay it.
The best Catholic response to date has come from the Midwestern-based church reform group Call to Action, launched in 1976 as part of a dialogue initiated by U.S. Catholic bishops and lay people after Vatican II. But when participants at the three-day conference joined social issues like poverty, sexism, and militarism, with ecclesial issues like birth control, homosexuality, and the ban on women priests, most of the bishops took a powder.
Annual CTA meetings kept some edge-of-the-pew Catholics in conversation with one another. The group has not, to my knowledge, been particularly public on abortion. But in a recent open letter that they admitted “may startle our members and supporters,” CTA declared that the content of the leaked draft “represents another turn toward state-sponsored violence, racism and misogyny.” They invite Catholics to dialogue again: “We cannot remain silent.”
I agree heartily.
Catholics who support reproductive rights are a majority, though many have not yet been public about it. Now is the time to clarify that the Bishops’ Conference does not speak for us, that Catholics have diverse views on this and other issues. The bishops are welcome to their views and their individual votes, but they do not speak for more than themselves.
It’s time for Catholics who’ve been on the sidelines on reproductive justice to step forward. I know from experience that this is a significant ask. Catholics who support abortion rights have paid a steep price since the New York Times ad, “A Catholics Statement on Pluralism and Diversity,” published in October, 1984 in response to Cardinal John O’Connor’s denunciation of pro-choice Vice Presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro. The virulent reaction of institutional church officials to the signers and the repercussions most of us faced instilled fear that lingers in many Catholics who support reproductive rights to this day.
Professors who are publicly in support of abortion rights risk their jobs at Catholic institutions. Nuns, whom many see as the most credible Catholic voices since the clergy are in disrepute, include women who support reproductive freedom. When nuns help pregnant people get needed medical care, they can expect negative consequences from hierarchs. Medical workers are in a bind when they work in Catholic facilities that do not permit them to practice as they see fit.
I suspect ecclesial disobedience is in many Catholics’ futures. Weigh these risks against one young girl who’s forced to give birth against her will and her parents’ better judgement and I trust Catholics who support abortion rights will step up now even if they never have before; I predict they will be emboldened, not shut down by the Supreme Court. My white skin and educational and economic privilege demand a full-throated theo-political response, not a hand-out at a baby shower as the bishops suggest.
If progressive Catholics can lobby for a just budget, against nuclear war, and in favor of immigration, then we can get serious about legislative and elective strategies that respect pregnant people’s personhood and right to decide about their own bodies. One reason for the current debacle is that many Catholics who are progressive on anti-racism, climate justice, and economic issues have chosen not to risk their touchstone with orthodoxy on abortion.
By passing over reproductive justice as if it weren’t a critical part of the common good, they fail to recognize that prohibiting abortion is racist and that the consequences fall most heavily on the poorest of the poor. Nor can groups claim an intersectional analysis that doesn’t include immigrants who get pregnant against their wishes among the many who are without the means to make choices. There’s no skimming over the hard issues, even when we disagree.
Some Catholics are responsible for this moral emergency and nightmare scenario that will be lived most intensely by poor, young, Black, and Brown people. Other Catholics need to up our efforts now for those who are pregnant and before the same forces undo more constitutional rights. It’s probably too late to sway the Court on this matter. But the deeply dangerous legal analysis leaves the judicial door wide open to overturn cases allowing birth control and marriage equality which the same anti-abortion Catholic bishops oppose.
Dorothy Day Abortion Fund and St. Vincent de Paul Vasectomy Clinics
Let me be very specific about what I think we need to do. First, Catholics for Choice, previously Catholics for a Free Choice on whose Board of Directors I served for more than a decade, is the foundation and scaffolding for a Catholic rejection of the one-dimensional Catholic teachings that have led many states to strictly curtail access to abortion. Thanks, and strength to CFC. But they cannot do it alone. To that end I propose some new Catholic feminist initiatives.
Catholics, including President Joe Biden, need to use the word ‘abortion.’ It is primarily a medical procedure, not an ethical or political dilemma. Try to say it along with ‘transplant’ and ‘tracheotomy’ to get used to the fact that, like those medical procedures, it is necessary and helpful in terms of human health, not for everyone, but for those in need. Reluctance to use the term ‘abortion’ is a signal of how successfully it has been stigmatized.
Catholic medical providers who support reproductive rights and who have structured their lives so as not to have to deal with abortion need to think again. Like the rest of us, they can expect some negative repercussions if they enhance their practices to include abortions rather than protect their reputations at the cost of some patients’ wellbeing. Of course, no one can ask another person to make a sacrifice. But a very small percentage of Ob/Gyns perform abortions, though more than 90% report seeing patients needing them. Assuming a quarter or so of Ob/Gyns are Catholic, even a small uptick in their participation would make a big difference.
The major immediate need is money to get those who want clinical abortions to places where they can procure them, as well as to get medical abortions for women who terminate their pregnancies at home. Some, especially young women, simply don’t have the money to choose.
To that end, I propose the Dorothy Day Abortion Fund. Dorothy Day, revered by so many Catholics for co-founding the Catholic Worker Movement, had an abortion when she needed it. So, it’s fitting to name a fund after her that would help others do the same. As states become more restrictive, those who choose to terminate their pregnancies need both a ride and a room as they travel for health care. Catholics who support abortion rights can donate to show our deep regard for Dorothy Day in the many dimensions of her life.
Catholics need to augment research and writing about abortion, including theological and pastoral resources. The Frances Kissling Activist Scholar Program is my suggestion. Longtime Catholics for a Free Choice president Frances Kissling took on the hard issues before some of today’s Catholics for Choice staff were born (and she’s written over 40 pieces for RD). She currently teaches at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Her very creative recent course on “How to Talk about Abortion” included a wide variety of perspectives and religious traditions. A university-based program to train future activist scholars in solid, well-founded arguments for justice developed in the crucible of theory and praxis will be a distinctly Catholic contribution.
The Sister Donna Quinn Clinic Escorts are high on my wish list. The late Sinsinawa Dominican sister escorted pregnant women in Chicago to abortion clinics much to the consternation of the local cardinal. She recognized the need to use her “nun privilege” for the well-being of frightened patients who were heckled and threatened as they sought to live out their constitutional right to reproductive health services. If some Catholics want to take those rights away, others like Donna Quinn will be sure they are protected.
I imagine that St. Vincent de Paul Vasectomy Clinics could be set up on a diocesan basis. Men who specialize in charity might want to begin at home by educating young men on the use of condoms and providing them with a supply. They could fund vasectomy clinics to make it easy for men to take responsibility for their sexual activity rather than leaving it all to women. And the occasional sermon on vasectomies would be a welcome change from the anti-abortion diatribes that are standard fare in so many parishes.
I welcome Catholics who support reproductive freedom to join in these efforts and others we can imagine together. We have a special responsibility to counter the democracy-destroying tendencies of the current Catholic hierarchs who would pretend to speak in our names unless we make clear that they do not. We speak ‘Catholic’ too.
When Justice Sonya Sotomayor asked during oral arguments on this case in December 2021, “Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its readings are just political acts?” I suspect she was smelling some beeswax and incense.
https://religiondispatches.org/the-end- ... ics-can-do
THE END OF ROE COMES COURTESY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH — BUT FROM ‘THE DOROTHY DAY ABORTION FUND’ TO ‘ST. VINCENT DE PAUL VASECTOMY CLINIC,’ HERE ARE SOME IDEAS FOR CATHOLICS LOOKING TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE
No matter how Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is decided finally, restrictions unto bans on abortions will be courtesy of the institutional Roman Catholic Church. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, their Pro-Life Activities Committee, and colleagues will and ought to take credit for rolling back a constitutionally guaranteed right, causing immeasurable harm especially to poor people, and putting their “preeminent priority” issue over the diverse views and needs of a nation. Congratulations, or something.
These few Catholics set their sights on this goal four decades ago. They have worked relentlessly and squandered resources that belong to the whole Catholic community, including the 57% of us who believe abortion should be legal. I dissent from the bishops’ efforts, as do many pro-choice Catholics who join millions of Americans in working to stem the tide.
Many factors converge to bring about this massive, despicable assault on the rights of women and other pregnant persons. There is the very real possibility that this judicial shift may affect those using birth control, those marrying interracially and as same-sex couples. But let history record that among the prime architects, engineers, and perpetrators were conservative Catholics, especially the Supreme Court justices who were groomed for their votes.
As a Catholic theologian who is a longtime public proponent of reproductive justice, including sex education, birth control, and abortion, I join millions who are not surprised by the draft’s tone and content.
Still, it is shocking in a religiously pluralistic society that not only are seven of nine justices Catholic by tradition and/or practice, but that the solid religious grounding of many other faith traditions is simply ignored. Many Christian denominations, among them Presbyterians, Methodists, and United Church of Christ, are committed to reproductive justice. The overwhelming majority of Jews (83%) support legal abortion, and, according to the Talmud, a fetus doesn’t gain the status of personhood until birth. Yet these and the views of non-religious pro-choice people are apparently trumped by the conservative Catholic formation and allegiances of the majority of the justices.
Thorough damage assessment cannot be done until the decision is final and public. But if the leaked draft statement is any indication, as Harvard legal scholar Lawrence Tribe thinks it is, we know what’s on the minds and in the hearts of the Catholic justices, save Justice Sonya Sotomayor who is stalwartly in favor of reproductive rights. Some of them were brought up from pups in an institutional Roman Catholic Church-supported legal culture.
The Trump Trio, Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, are well positioned for this and future such decisions. How coincidental is it that the two men graduated from Jesuit Georgetown Preparatory School? Then Gorsuch went to Columbia University and Harvard Law; Kavanaugh is, as they say, double Yale. They burnished their legal credentials while maintaining their Catholic bona fides. Barrett was spotted early in her career at Rhodes College and then went up the ladder at Notre Dame Law School where she joined a faculty which included John M. Finnis, who is footnoted in the draft.
These justices are surely aware of, if not part of, a subset of Catholics for whom outlawing abortion is a passion. Among the most extreme manifestations is the town of Ave Maria, Florida, with its eponymous law school dedicated to developing lawyers who will argue anti-abortion cases. The city is a planned community funded by developers and the foundation of Domino’s Pizza magnate Thomas S. Monaghan.
No pharmacy in town sells birth control. The law school—where Clarence Thomas delivered the first Ave Maria Lecture, Samuel Alito helped plan the curriculum, and Robert Bork taught—is a far cry from the Ivies on admissions criteria and bar exam passage rate. But the Catholic morality and natural laws studies it includes prepare the farm teams that try reproduction-related cases that wend their way to the high court.
‘We cannot remain silent’
There are many Catholic reactions to the leaked draft. As expected, and in line with the significant victory that the Catholic Right has seemingly achieved, the bishops are crowing. It has long been evident that most politicians and voters could care less what the bishops think about poverty, nuclear weapons or war, so they’ve instrumentalized pregnant bodies as their way to stay in the public debate.
Having created the problem, they have the temerity to offer to pay for pregnant women’s needs. The same bishops who’ve sought to eliminate women’s choices want to be seen as heroic and generous by offering pregnant women money instead of rights. It would be ludicrous if it weren’t so despicable.
Jesuit Thomas Reese offered an obtuse analysis. He passed over any mention of the damage to real people who are pregnant and simply advised the bishops to switch their political allegiance from the Republicans who oppose abortion to the Democratic Party which he thinks is more in keeping with Catholic social teaching. As he put it so indelicately, “The bishops got what they wanted out of this marriage; it is time to move on.” Where have women heard that before? Maybe he has annulment in mind. The price is surely high and it’s women who pay it.
The best Catholic response to date has come from the Midwestern-based church reform group Call to Action, launched in 1976 as part of a dialogue initiated by U.S. Catholic bishops and lay people after Vatican II. But when participants at the three-day conference joined social issues like poverty, sexism, and militarism, with ecclesial issues like birth control, homosexuality, and the ban on women priests, most of the bishops took a powder.
Annual CTA meetings kept some edge-of-the-pew Catholics in conversation with one another. The group has not, to my knowledge, been particularly public on abortion. But in a recent open letter that they admitted “may startle our members and supporters,” CTA declared that the content of the leaked draft “represents another turn toward state-sponsored violence, racism and misogyny.” They invite Catholics to dialogue again: “We cannot remain silent.”
I agree heartily.
Catholics who support reproductive rights are a majority, though many have not yet been public about it. Now is the time to clarify that the Bishops’ Conference does not speak for us, that Catholics have diverse views on this and other issues. The bishops are welcome to their views and their individual votes, but they do not speak for more than themselves.
It’s time for Catholics who’ve been on the sidelines on reproductive justice to step forward. I know from experience that this is a significant ask. Catholics who support abortion rights have paid a steep price since the New York Times ad, “A Catholics Statement on Pluralism and Diversity,” published in October, 1984 in response to Cardinal John O’Connor’s denunciation of pro-choice Vice Presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro. The virulent reaction of institutional church officials to the signers and the repercussions most of us faced instilled fear that lingers in many Catholics who support reproductive rights to this day.
Professors who are publicly in support of abortion rights risk their jobs at Catholic institutions. Nuns, whom many see as the most credible Catholic voices since the clergy are in disrepute, include women who support reproductive freedom. When nuns help pregnant people get needed medical care, they can expect negative consequences from hierarchs. Medical workers are in a bind when they work in Catholic facilities that do not permit them to practice as they see fit.
I suspect ecclesial disobedience is in many Catholics’ futures. Weigh these risks against one young girl who’s forced to give birth against her will and her parents’ better judgement and I trust Catholics who support abortion rights will step up now even if they never have before; I predict they will be emboldened, not shut down by the Supreme Court. My white skin and educational and economic privilege demand a full-throated theo-political response, not a hand-out at a baby shower as the bishops suggest.
If progressive Catholics can lobby for a just budget, against nuclear war, and in favor of immigration, then we can get serious about legislative and elective strategies that respect pregnant people’s personhood and right to decide about their own bodies. One reason for the current debacle is that many Catholics who are progressive on anti-racism, climate justice, and economic issues have chosen not to risk their touchstone with orthodoxy on abortion.
By passing over reproductive justice as if it weren’t a critical part of the common good, they fail to recognize that prohibiting abortion is racist and that the consequences fall most heavily on the poorest of the poor. Nor can groups claim an intersectional analysis that doesn’t include immigrants who get pregnant against their wishes among the many who are without the means to make choices. There’s no skimming over the hard issues, even when we disagree.
Some Catholics are responsible for this moral emergency and nightmare scenario that will be lived most intensely by poor, young, Black, and Brown people. Other Catholics need to up our efforts now for those who are pregnant and before the same forces undo more constitutional rights. It’s probably too late to sway the Court on this matter. But the deeply dangerous legal analysis leaves the judicial door wide open to overturn cases allowing birth control and marriage equality which the same anti-abortion Catholic bishops oppose.
Dorothy Day Abortion Fund and St. Vincent de Paul Vasectomy Clinics
Let me be very specific about what I think we need to do. First, Catholics for Choice, previously Catholics for a Free Choice on whose Board of Directors I served for more than a decade, is the foundation and scaffolding for a Catholic rejection of the one-dimensional Catholic teachings that have led many states to strictly curtail access to abortion. Thanks, and strength to CFC. But they cannot do it alone. To that end I propose some new Catholic feminist initiatives.
Catholics, including President Joe Biden, need to use the word ‘abortion.’ It is primarily a medical procedure, not an ethical or political dilemma. Try to say it along with ‘transplant’ and ‘tracheotomy’ to get used to the fact that, like those medical procedures, it is necessary and helpful in terms of human health, not for everyone, but for those in need. Reluctance to use the term ‘abortion’ is a signal of how successfully it has been stigmatized.
Catholic medical providers who support reproductive rights and who have structured their lives so as not to have to deal with abortion need to think again. Like the rest of us, they can expect some negative repercussions if they enhance their practices to include abortions rather than protect their reputations at the cost of some patients’ wellbeing. Of course, no one can ask another person to make a sacrifice. But a very small percentage of Ob/Gyns perform abortions, though more than 90% report seeing patients needing them. Assuming a quarter or so of Ob/Gyns are Catholic, even a small uptick in their participation would make a big difference.
The major immediate need is money to get those who want clinical abortions to places where they can procure them, as well as to get medical abortions for women who terminate their pregnancies at home. Some, especially young women, simply don’t have the money to choose.
To that end, I propose the Dorothy Day Abortion Fund. Dorothy Day, revered by so many Catholics for co-founding the Catholic Worker Movement, had an abortion when she needed it. So, it’s fitting to name a fund after her that would help others do the same. As states become more restrictive, those who choose to terminate their pregnancies need both a ride and a room as they travel for health care. Catholics who support abortion rights can donate to show our deep regard for Dorothy Day in the many dimensions of her life.
Catholics need to augment research and writing about abortion, including theological and pastoral resources. The Frances Kissling Activist Scholar Program is my suggestion. Longtime Catholics for a Free Choice president Frances Kissling took on the hard issues before some of today’s Catholics for Choice staff were born (and she’s written over 40 pieces for RD). She currently teaches at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Her very creative recent course on “How to Talk about Abortion” included a wide variety of perspectives and religious traditions. A university-based program to train future activist scholars in solid, well-founded arguments for justice developed in the crucible of theory and praxis will be a distinctly Catholic contribution.
The Sister Donna Quinn Clinic Escorts are high on my wish list. The late Sinsinawa Dominican sister escorted pregnant women in Chicago to abortion clinics much to the consternation of the local cardinal. She recognized the need to use her “nun privilege” for the well-being of frightened patients who were heckled and threatened as they sought to live out their constitutional right to reproductive health services. If some Catholics want to take those rights away, others like Donna Quinn will be sure they are protected.
I imagine that St. Vincent de Paul Vasectomy Clinics could be set up on a diocesan basis. Men who specialize in charity might want to begin at home by educating young men on the use of condoms and providing them with a supply. They could fund vasectomy clinics to make it easy for men to take responsibility for their sexual activity rather than leaving it all to women. And the occasional sermon on vasectomies would be a welcome change from the anti-abortion diatribes that are standard fare in so many parishes.
I welcome Catholics who support reproductive freedom to join in these efforts and others we can imagine together. We have a special responsibility to counter the democracy-destroying tendencies of the current Catholic hierarchs who would pretend to speak in our names unless we make clear that they do not. We speak ‘Catholic’ too.
When Justice Sonya Sotomayor asked during oral arguments on this case in December 2021, “Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its readings are just political acts?” I suspect she was smelling some beeswax and incense.
https://religiondispatches.org/the-end- ... ics-can-do
Re: Christianity
The New York Times
Deep in Vatican Archives, Scholar Discovers 'Flabbergasting' Secrets
Jason Horowitz
Sat, May 28, 2022
David Kertzer
American anthropologist
VATICAN CITY — David Kertzer put down his cappuccino, put on his backpack and went digging for more Vatican secrets.
“There’s an aspect of treasure-hunting,” said Kertzer, a 74-year-old historian.
Moments later, he cut through a crowd lined up to see Pope Francis, showed his credentials to the Swiss Guard and entered the archives of the former headquarters for the Holy Roman Inquisition.
Over the last few decades, Kertzer has turned the inquisitive tables on the church. Using the Vatican’s own archives, the soft-spoken Brown University professor and trustee at the American Academy in Rome has become arguably the most effective excavator of the Vatican’s hidden sins, especially those leading up to and during World War II.
The son of a rabbi who participated in the liberation of Rome as an Army chaplain, Kertzer grew up in a home that had taken in a foster child whose family was murdered in Auschwitz. That family background and his activism in college against the Vietnam War imbued him with a sense of moral outrage — tempered by a scholar’s caution.
The result are works that have won the Pulitzer Prize, captured the imagination of Steven Spielberg and shined a sometimes harsh light on one of Earth’s most shadowy institutions.
Kertzer’s latest book, “The Pope at War,” looks at the church’s role in World War II and the Holocaust — what he considers the formative event of his own life. It documents the private decision-making that led Pope Pius XII to stay essentially silent about Hitler’s genocide and argues that the pontiff’s impact on the war is underestimated — and not in a good way.
“Part of what I hope to accomplish,” Kertzer said, “is to show how important a role Pius XII played.”
The current pope, Francis, said, “The church is not afraid of history,” when in 2019 he ordered the archives of Pius XII opened. But as Francis wrestles with how forcefully to condemn a dictator, this time Vladimir Putin of Russia, Kertzer has unearthed some frightening evidence about the cost of keeping quiet about mass killings.
Kertzer makes the case that Pius XII’s overriding dread of Communism, his belief that the Axis powers would win the war, and his desire to protect the church’s interests all motivated him to avoid offending Adoph Hitler and Benito Mussolini, whose ambassadors had worked to put him on the throne. The pope was also worried, the book shows, that opposing the Führer would alienate millions of German Catholics.
The book further reveals that a German prince and fervent Nazi acted as a secret back channel between Pius XII and Hitler and that the pope’s top Vatican adviser on Jewish issues urged him in a letter not to protest a fascist order to arrest and send to concentration camps most of Italy’s Jews.
“That was flabbergasting,” Kertzer said about coming across the letter.
Defenders of Pius XII, whose case for sainthood is still being evaluated, have long argued that he worked behind the scenes to help Jews and that anti-Catholic enemies have sought to stain the institution by sullying the pontiff.
“A more open protest would not have saved a single Jew but killed even more,” Michael Hesemann, who considers Pius XII a champion of Jews, wrote in response to the evidence revealed by Kertzer, whom he called “heavily biased.”
Hesemann, who is also the author of a new book about the wartime pope based on the Vatican archives, argued that the Vatican, while following its tradition of neutrality, worked to hide Jews in convents and distribute fake baptism certificates.
Kertzer argues that the unearthed documents paint a more nuanced picture of Pius XII, showing him as neither the antisemitic monster often called “Hitler’s Pope” nor a hero. But the urge to protect Pius’ reputation, according to Kertzer, reflects a more general refusal by Italy — and apologists in the Vatican — to come to terms with their complicity in World War II, the Holocaust and the murder of Rome’s Jews.
On Oct. 16, 1943, Nazis rounded up more than 1,000 of them throughout the city, including hundreds in the Jewish ghetto, now a tourist attraction where crowds feast on Jewish-style artichokes near a church where Jews were once forced to attend conversion sermons.
For two days, the Germans held the Jews in a military college near the Vatican, checking to see who was baptized or had Catholic spouses.
“They didn’t want to offend the pope,” Kertzer said. His book shows that Pius XII’s top aides only interceded with the German ambassador to free “non-Aryan Catholics.” About 250 were released. More than 1,000 were murdered in Auschwitz.
In a nearby street, Kertzer bent down by one of the brass cobblestones memorializing the victims. Above him loomed the Tempio Maggiore, the Great Synagogue of Rome.
“I can’t think of that synagogue,” Kertzer said, “without thinking of my father.”
When the U.S. Fifth Army reached Rome, Kertzer’s father, Lt. Morris Kertzer, a Canadian-born rabbi, was with them and officiated at the synagogue.
One U.S. soldier, a Jew from Rome who had immigrated to America when Mussolini introduced Italy’s racial laws, asked Morris Kertzer if he could make an announcement to see if his mother had survived the war. The rabbi positioned the soldier at his side, and when the services started, a cry broke out, and the GI’s mother rushed up to embrace her son.
“That’s the one I remember the most of my father telling,” David Kertzer said.
A year before Kertzer’s birth in 1948, his parents took in a teenage survivor of Auschwitz. When footage of Nazi soldiers appeared on television, Kertzer and his older sister, Ruth, would leap to switch the set off to protect their foster sister, Eva.
By then, his father had become the director of interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee, essentially to try to strip Christian churches of antisemitism. As part of the normalizing effort, a young David Kertzer appeared on Jack Paar’s “Tonight Show,” singing prayers at the family’s Passover Seder.
At Brown University, his organizing against the Vietnam War nearly got him kicked out and landed him in a jail cell with Norman Mailer. He stayed in school and became enamored with anthropology and with Susan Dana, a religion major from Maine.
To stay close to her, he went in 1969 to graduate school at Brandeis, where an anthropology professor suggested that his interest in politics and religion made Italy a rich field of study.
The result was a year of research in Bologna, Italy, with Susan, now his wife, and his first book, “Comrades and Christians.” After earning his doctorate, positions at Bowdoin and Brown followed, as did two children, a lifelong connection to Italy and a growing familiarity with Italian — and then, by chance, Vatican — archives.
In the early 1990s, an Italian history professor told him about Edgardo Mortara, a 6-year-old child of Jewish parents in Bologna. In 1858, the church Inquisitor ordered the boy seized because a Christian servant girl had possibly, and secretly, had him baptized, and so he could not remain in a Jewish family.
The story represented what Kertzer called “a dual career shift,” toward writing for a general audience and about Jewish themes.
The result was his 1998 book, “The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara,” a National Book Award finalist in nonfiction. It caught the eye of his friend, playwright Tony Kushner, who later gave it to Steven Spielberg, who told Kertzer he wanted to make it into a movie. Mark Rylance came on board to play Pius IX. Kushner wrote the screenplay. All they needed was a boy to play Edgardo.
“They auditioned 4,000 — not 3,900 — 4,000 6-to-8-year-old boys in four continents,” Kertzer said. “Spielberg informs us that he’s not happy with any of the boys.”
The project stalled, but Kertzer did not. He emerged from the archives to publish “The Pope Against the Jews,” about the church’s role in the rise of modern antisemitism. In 2014, he published “The Pope and Mussolini,” examining Pius XI’s role in the rise of fascism and the antisemitic Racial Laws of 1938. It won the Pulitzer Prize.
Since then, Vatican archivists recognize and, sometimes, encourage him.
“Perhaps even they’re happy that some outsider is able to bring this to light because it’s awkward, perhaps, for some of them to do so,” he said.
After spending a recent morning in the archives, Kertzer emerged with a boyish grin. He had just discovered that even during the German occupation of Rome, Pius XII was still primarily focused on the dangers of Communism. The pope’s top cardinals advised him “to create a Catholic Party. It’s the origins of the Christian Democrats party,” Kertzer said, referring to the force that dominated Italy for decades to come.
“I doubt anyone has seen it before,” he said. “Well, outside of the Holy Office.”
https://news.yahoo.com/deep-vatican-arc ... 46059.html
Deep in Vatican Archives, Scholar Discovers 'Flabbergasting' Secrets
Jason Horowitz
Sat, May 28, 2022
David Kertzer
American anthropologist
VATICAN CITY — David Kertzer put down his cappuccino, put on his backpack and went digging for more Vatican secrets.
“There’s an aspect of treasure-hunting,” said Kertzer, a 74-year-old historian.
Moments later, he cut through a crowd lined up to see Pope Francis, showed his credentials to the Swiss Guard and entered the archives of the former headquarters for the Holy Roman Inquisition.
Over the last few decades, Kertzer has turned the inquisitive tables on the church. Using the Vatican’s own archives, the soft-spoken Brown University professor and trustee at the American Academy in Rome has become arguably the most effective excavator of the Vatican’s hidden sins, especially those leading up to and during World War II.
The son of a rabbi who participated in the liberation of Rome as an Army chaplain, Kertzer grew up in a home that had taken in a foster child whose family was murdered in Auschwitz. That family background and his activism in college against the Vietnam War imbued him with a sense of moral outrage — tempered by a scholar’s caution.
The result are works that have won the Pulitzer Prize, captured the imagination of Steven Spielberg and shined a sometimes harsh light on one of Earth’s most shadowy institutions.
Kertzer’s latest book, “The Pope at War,” looks at the church’s role in World War II and the Holocaust — what he considers the formative event of his own life. It documents the private decision-making that led Pope Pius XII to stay essentially silent about Hitler’s genocide and argues that the pontiff’s impact on the war is underestimated — and not in a good way.
“Part of what I hope to accomplish,” Kertzer said, “is to show how important a role Pius XII played.”
The current pope, Francis, said, “The church is not afraid of history,” when in 2019 he ordered the archives of Pius XII opened. But as Francis wrestles with how forcefully to condemn a dictator, this time Vladimir Putin of Russia, Kertzer has unearthed some frightening evidence about the cost of keeping quiet about mass killings.
Kertzer makes the case that Pius XII’s overriding dread of Communism, his belief that the Axis powers would win the war, and his desire to protect the church’s interests all motivated him to avoid offending Adoph Hitler and Benito Mussolini, whose ambassadors had worked to put him on the throne. The pope was also worried, the book shows, that opposing the Führer would alienate millions of German Catholics.
The book further reveals that a German prince and fervent Nazi acted as a secret back channel between Pius XII and Hitler and that the pope’s top Vatican adviser on Jewish issues urged him in a letter not to protest a fascist order to arrest and send to concentration camps most of Italy’s Jews.
“That was flabbergasting,” Kertzer said about coming across the letter.
Defenders of Pius XII, whose case for sainthood is still being evaluated, have long argued that he worked behind the scenes to help Jews and that anti-Catholic enemies have sought to stain the institution by sullying the pontiff.
“A more open protest would not have saved a single Jew but killed even more,” Michael Hesemann, who considers Pius XII a champion of Jews, wrote in response to the evidence revealed by Kertzer, whom he called “heavily biased.”
Hesemann, who is also the author of a new book about the wartime pope based on the Vatican archives, argued that the Vatican, while following its tradition of neutrality, worked to hide Jews in convents and distribute fake baptism certificates.
Kertzer argues that the unearthed documents paint a more nuanced picture of Pius XII, showing him as neither the antisemitic monster often called “Hitler’s Pope” nor a hero. But the urge to protect Pius’ reputation, according to Kertzer, reflects a more general refusal by Italy — and apologists in the Vatican — to come to terms with their complicity in World War II, the Holocaust and the murder of Rome’s Jews.
On Oct. 16, 1943, Nazis rounded up more than 1,000 of them throughout the city, including hundreds in the Jewish ghetto, now a tourist attraction where crowds feast on Jewish-style artichokes near a church where Jews were once forced to attend conversion sermons.
For two days, the Germans held the Jews in a military college near the Vatican, checking to see who was baptized or had Catholic spouses.
“They didn’t want to offend the pope,” Kertzer said. His book shows that Pius XII’s top aides only interceded with the German ambassador to free “non-Aryan Catholics.” About 250 were released. More than 1,000 were murdered in Auschwitz.
In a nearby street, Kertzer bent down by one of the brass cobblestones memorializing the victims. Above him loomed the Tempio Maggiore, the Great Synagogue of Rome.
“I can’t think of that synagogue,” Kertzer said, “without thinking of my father.”
When the U.S. Fifth Army reached Rome, Kertzer’s father, Lt. Morris Kertzer, a Canadian-born rabbi, was with them and officiated at the synagogue.
One U.S. soldier, a Jew from Rome who had immigrated to America when Mussolini introduced Italy’s racial laws, asked Morris Kertzer if he could make an announcement to see if his mother had survived the war. The rabbi positioned the soldier at his side, and when the services started, a cry broke out, and the GI’s mother rushed up to embrace her son.
“That’s the one I remember the most of my father telling,” David Kertzer said.
A year before Kertzer’s birth in 1948, his parents took in a teenage survivor of Auschwitz. When footage of Nazi soldiers appeared on television, Kertzer and his older sister, Ruth, would leap to switch the set off to protect their foster sister, Eva.
By then, his father had become the director of interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee, essentially to try to strip Christian churches of antisemitism. As part of the normalizing effort, a young David Kertzer appeared on Jack Paar’s “Tonight Show,” singing prayers at the family’s Passover Seder.
At Brown University, his organizing against the Vietnam War nearly got him kicked out and landed him in a jail cell with Norman Mailer. He stayed in school and became enamored with anthropology and with Susan Dana, a religion major from Maine.
To stay close to her, he went in 1969 to graduate school at Brandeis, where an anthropology professor suggested that his interest in politics and religion made Italy a rich field of study.
The result was a year of research in Bologna, Italy, with Susan, now his wife, and his first book, “Comrades and Christians.” After earning his doctorate, positions at Bowdoin and Brown followed, as did two children, a lifelong connection to Italy and a growing familiarity with Italian — and then, by chance, Vatican — archives.
In the early 1990s, an Italian history professor told him about Edgardo Mortara, a 6-year-old child of Jewish parents in Bologna. In 1858, the church Inquisitor ordered the boy seized because a Christian servant girl had possibly, and secretly, had him baptized, and so he could not remain in a Jewish family.
The story represented what Kertzer called “a dual career shift,” toward writing for a general audience and about Jewish themes.
The result was his 1998 book, “The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara,” a National Book Award finalist in nonfiction. It caught the eye of his friend, playwright Tony Kushner, who later gave it to Steven Spielberg, who told Kertzer he wanted to make it into a movie. Mark Rylance came on board to play Pius IX. Kushner wrote the screenplay. All they needed was a boy to play Edgardo.
“They auditioned 4,000 — not 3,900 — 4,000 6-to-8-year-old boys in four continents,” Kertzer said. “Spielberg informs us that he’s not happy with any of the boys.”
The project stalled, but Kertzer did not. He emerged from the archives to publish “The Pope Against the Jews,” about the church’s role in the rise of modern antisemitism. In 2014, he published “The Pope and Mussolini,” examining Pius XI’s role in the rise of fascism and the antisemitic Racial Laws of 1938. It won the Pulitzer Prize.
Since then, Vatican archivists recognize and, sometimes, encourage him.
“Perhaps even they’re happy that some outsider is able to bring this to light because it’s awkward, perhaps, for some of them to do so,” he said.
After spending a recent morning in the archives, Kertzer emerged with a boyish grin. He had just discovered that even during the German occupation of Rome, Pius XII was still primarily focused on the dangers of Communism. The pope’s top cardinals advised him “to create a Catholic Party. It’s the origins of the Christian Democrats party,” Kertzer said, referring to the force that dominated Italy for decades to come.
“I doubt anyone has seen it before,” he said. “Well, outside of the Holy Office.”
https://news.yahoo.com/deep-vatican-arc ... 46059.html
Our world needs repair. Here’s how to be part of the solution.
By Tish Harrison Warren
In Christian liturgical churches, today is Trinity Sunday, which kicks off a long sweep of “ordinary time.” This period — which will last till mid-November — is the longest season in the church year. Ordinary time is what we call the weeks that are not included in the major seasons of feasting or fasting in the church calendar, such as Easter and Lent.
In some circles, this span of months is referred to as “the long green growing season” because the liturgical color of the season is green, but also because it invites us to deepen our roots, to grow.
In his poem “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” Wendell Berry calls his readers to “Practice resurrection.” That’s how I think of this stretch of ordinary time. During Easter season we celebrate Jesus’ resurrection, and in this next season we learn to “practice resurrection” in our everyday lives. We seek those things which bring renewal and repair.
There is much that needs mending. There are signs that our society is unwell, with polarization and anger sizzling under the surface of our discourse. The problems of the world feel big and overwhelming. And we can look to big things to rescue us: national elections, a revolution, widespread revival, the apocalypse. Of course, big things matter. Voting and federal policies are important. Yet most of us, in our limited spheres, must learn to embrace small practices of repair. These practices, though small, are profoundly significant. They are the tiny threads that weave a society where, as Dorothy Day said, it is easier for people to be good.
I’d like to offer a short, certainly not complete, list of small, ordinary ways to practice repair:
1. Have more in-person conversations. To love people, or even to tolerate them, it helps to actually speak with them. This may look like small talk with neighbors or a long conversation with a friend where you look them in the eyes and ask how they are doing. It may be a family dinner or chatting with your barista while you wait for an order. All of this interaction, however profound, however fleeting, helps us connect with others in ways that cannot be replicated online but that form the very fabric of our lives and society.
2. Get outside. The benefits of the outdoors are so great that fresh air almost seems like a magical elixir. Being outside boosts immune systems and lowers stress levels. It also helps with anxiety. We are made to be creatures who spend a lot of time in the natural world, and doing so humanizes us in deeply necessary ways.
3. Eschew mobs — online and in real life. There is plenty to be upset about. There is plenty we need to protest and seek to change. There are important things to debate and address in our culture and society. But when a protest or conversation becomes unruly and vicious, certainly if it skews toward violence, then it contributes more heat than light to the world.
This is evident to most of us when it comes to in-person mobs. But the architecture of social media incentivizes vitriol and anger en masse. Tweets don’t go viral because they are the most brilliant, helpful or accurate things being said. Multiple studies show that social media rewards emotional language and indignation.
Noting James Madison’s warning that factions and fast-spreading outrage could sink the American experiment, Jonathan Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell wrote in The Atlantic, “Social media turns many of our most politically engaged citizens into Madison’s nightmare: arsonists who compete to create the most inflammatory posts and images, which they can distribute across the country in an instant.” Resisting the temptation to join an online pile-on is one step toward reknitting the social trust and political virtue necessary for sustaining a peaceful society.
4. Read books. While the internet trains our brains to take in lots of small snatches of information, it makes engaging with long, complicated arguments more difficult. But the world is complex. In order to even attempt to understand it, we have to sit with slower, longer arguments, stories and ideas.
One lovely and effective way to retrain ourselves away from too-easy answers is to read books. In his book “Stolen Focus,” Johann Hari argues that reading long books cultivates empathy. It asks us to put ourselves in the place of the author, investing enough in someone’s work to follow their argument or story to its end. This empathy is essential to a just and flourishing society.
5. Give money away. In “Reparations: A Christian Call for Repentance and Repair,” Duke L. Kwon and Gregory Thompson argue that injustice cannot be addressed unless we confront the ways that it inevitably robs people. Injustice isn’t an abstract idea but a financial reality that affects people every day.
One way to push back against injustice is for both individuals and corporations to voluntarily redistribute wealth by giving to organizations that invest in historically marginalized communities. Giving appears to be up in America, with lower-income workers often giving the most proportionally. A friend of mine told me that the first question to ask in making a budget is, “How can I use what I have to repair the world?”
6. Invest in institutions more than personal brands. Institutional trust in the United States is plummeting. Yuval Levin said that from “one arena to another in American life, we see people using institutions as stages, as a way to raise their profile or build their brand. And those kinds of institutions become much harder to trust.” With our focus on personal branding and celebrity, we neglect the often boring, tedious and slow work of institutional change. But institutional rot is at the heart of societal breakdown. One way to rebuild a better world is to invest time, money and energy into reforming broken institutions and sustaining healthy ones.
7. Invest in children. If we want a flourishing future, we must seek the flourishing of children in the present. One way to do this, of course, is to have children and be a loving parent. But, whether or not we have children, we can all invest in them. Whether it is spending time with nieces, nephews or friends’ children, volunteering for your church nursery, fostering or giving money or time to organizations that serve kids, children need our attention and effort.
8. Observe the Sabbath. We, as a people, need rest. One intentional way to find it is to use one day of seven to chill out. Don’t work. Don’t get on screens. Don’t spend money, if you can avoid it. Enjoy the world or a nap. Slow down. It’s amazing how a day of opting out can completely change my perspective.
But historically and scripturally, Sabbath keeping isn’t simply luxuriating in privilege for a day. Instead, it involves ensuring that others can rest as well. We seek as best we can to allow those who work for us or around us to also embrace both meaningful work and rest. “The Bible’s sabbath,” wrote the Old Testament professor Richard H. Lowery, critiques “the economic systems that create scarcity, overwork, and gross economic inequality.”
9. Make a steel man of others’ arguments. Making a straw man of our opponents’ arguments is easy. We portray them as ridiculous or as moral monsters, but dealing with steel men — that is, the best and smartest ideas of those with whom we disagree — not only strengthens our own thinking but helps us to better and more compassionately understand others. Straw manning is an easy way to get likes online, but it ultimately hurts us as individuals and as a society. Choosing to seek out the best arguments of those with whom we disagree requires humility and curiosity, and it makes for healthier societal discourse.
10. Practice patience. With our increasingly fast-paced world, nearly everything about our society encourages impatience. We prize efficiency and speed, and are losing the ability to wait patiently. But we can practice resistance.
Some brass-tacks ways to do so are to let yourself be still and slow. Wait in a line or at a stoplight without checking your phone. Make friends with boredom and the things you can’t control. In the words of the philosopher Dallas Willard, commit yourself to the “ruthless elimination of hurry.” Many of these other practices — from spending time with children to reading books and working for institutional change — demand and foster patience.
“Patience outfits faith, guides peace, assists love, equips humility, waits for penitence, seals confession, keeps the flesh in check, preserves the spirit, bridles the tongue, restrains the hands, tramples temptation underfoot, removes what causes us to stumble,” writes the historian Robert Louis Wilken. “It lightens the care of the poor, teaches moderation to the rich, lifts the burdens of the sick, delights the believer, welcomes the unbeliever.” He concludes, “For where God is there is his progeny, patience. When God’s Spirit descends patience is always at his side.”
11. Pray. Because prayer and work go together. And because, ultimately, true renewal requires more than we can do on our own.
This is nowhere near a complete list. What would you add? What are small, meaningful ways to practice repair and resurrection? Write to me at [email protected].
The Myth of the ‘Good Guy With a Gun’ Has Religious Roots
By Peter Manseau
Mr. Manseau is the author of 10 books on religion and history.
Is our gun problem a God problem?
The AR-15-style rifle used in the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, last month was made by an arms manufacturer that regards selling weapons as part of its Christian mission. In a state where Gov. Greg Abbott declared, six months after an earlier massacre, “The problem is not guns, it’s hearts without God,” the gun’s provenance challenged pious suggestions that declining religiosity might bear some of the blame.
Daniel Defense, the Georgia company whose gun enabled the slaughter at Robb Elementary School, presents its corporate identity in explicitly religious terms. At the time of the shooting, the company’s social media presence included an image of a toddler with a rifle in his lap above the text of Proverbs 22:6 (“Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it”). For Easter, it posted a photograph of a gun and a cross resting on scriptural passages recounting the Resurrection.
Its weapons have now been found at the scene of two mass shootings — Uvalde and Las Vegas — that left a combined total of 81 people dead.
While some might suggest a Christian firearms company is a contradiction in terms, Daniel Defense is hardly alone. According to a Public Religion Research Institute study, evangelicals have a higher rate of gun ownership than other religious groups. Across the country, they account for a significant share not only of the demand but of the supply.
In Florida, Spike’s Tactical (“the finest AR-15s on the planet”) makes a line of “Crusader” weapons adorned with a quote from the Psalms. Missouri-based CMMG (“the leading manufacturer of AR15 rifles, components and small parts”) advertises its employees’ “commitment to meet each and every morning to pray for God’s wisdom in managing the enormous responsibility that comes with this business.” And in Colorado, Cornerstone Arms explains that it is so named because “Jesus Christ is the cornerstone of our business, our family and our lives” and the “Second Amendment to our Constitution is the cornerstone of the freedom we enjoy as American citizens.”
For many American Christians, Jesus, guns and the Constitution are stitched together as durably as a Kevlar vest.
“We are in business, we believe, to be a supporter of the Gospel,” Daniel Defense’s founder, Marty Daniel, told Breitbart News in 2017. “And, therefore, a supporter of the Second Amendment.”
Entwining faith and firearms this way has a long history. It encompasses the so-called muscular Christianity movement that began in England in the 19th century with a focus on physical fitness as a path to spiritual strength and that in America made exemplars of pastors roaming the frontier armed with Bibles and six-shooters.
More than a hundred years ago, this trope was already so well established that a popular silent western from 1912, “The Two Gun Sermon,” told the story of a minister assigned to a rough and tumble outpost; when ruffians menace him he holds them at gunpoint until they listen to him preach. The film’s message is one with which 21st-century Christian gun enthusiasts would probably agree: Sometimes guns are necessary for the Lord’s work.
It is easy to miss, but this melding of evangelism and the right to bear arms is a step beyond the “natural rights” argument for gun ownership, which holds that self-defense is a law of nature required to protect life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These rights are often said to be God-given in the sense of being taken for granted, and they are enshrined as such in the Declaration of Independence. As interpreted by many evangelicals, the distant deistic “creator” Thomas Jefferson credited with endowing such rights has become a specific, biblical deity who apparently takes an active interest in the availability of assault rifles.
Why does this subtle shift in the meaning of “God-given” matter? It’s important to understand that for the manufacturer of the Uvalde killer’s rifle, and many others in the business, selling weapons is at once a patriotic and a religious act. For those who hold them to be sacred in this way, the meaning of firearms proceeds from their place at the intersection of American and Christian identities. Proposing limits on what kinds of guns they should be able to buy — or how, when, where and why they can carry them — is akin to proposing limits on who they are and what they should revere.
To be sure, there are gun owners for whom a gun is just a gun. But many of our fellow citizens don’t just own guns, they believe in them. They believe the stories told about guns’ power, their necessity, their righteousness.
We can see the implications of this even in ostensibly nonreligious aspects of our current gun debate, which are influenced by theological assumptions in surprising ways. The insistence that guns are used constantly and successfully for self-defense and protecting the community found its most infamous expression in the wake of the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, when the National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre said, “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
Since then, despite being debunked by data showing that firearms are more likely to injure their owners or their owners’ families than safeguard them, the protection offered by good guys with guns has emerged as an article of faith, supported with anecdotal evidence passed around like legends of the saints.
One of the most repeated of these tales recounts the story of a man who truly did halt a mass shooting, albeit only after 26 people were dead. On Nov. 5, 2017, when a gunman attacked the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas, a soft-spoken plumber and former firearms instructor named Stephen Willeford shot him with his AR-15. Contributing to the N.R.A.’s effort to spread the Gospel of the Good Guy With a Gun, Mr. Willeford spoke to the group’s Leadership Forum six months later.
“We are the people that stand between the people that would do evil to our neighbors,” he told the assembled gun owners. “I responded for what God told me to do. The Holy Spirit took care of me. … Each one of you would have done the same thing.” Invoking the name of Jesus, he added, “What happened in Sutherland Springs was all him and it’s his glory.”
As the thunderous applause that greeted this testimony made clear, gun culture is largely Christian culture. To imagine yourself as a Good Guy With a Gun, as Mr. Willeford invited N.R.A. members to do, may inspire action-movie day dreams, but it is ultimately a religious vision of a world in which good and evil are at war, where God and firepower make all the difference.
The Good Guy With a Gun is a religious myth so powerful it has begun to transform the tradition that bore it. When Representative Lauren Boebert recently quipped, “A lot of the little Twitter trolls, they like to say ‘Oh, Jesus didn’t need an AR-15. How many AR-15s do you think Jesus would have had?’ Well, he didn’t have enough to keep his government from killing him,” it was a joke meant to deride and dismiss charges of hypocrisy against followers of a man sometimes called the Prince of Peace arming themselves to the hilt. Yet it was also a view into a fascinating religious development currently underway, one shaped by an understanding that bullets could have prevented the sacrifice at the heart of the Christian faith.
It would be a mistake to paint the connection between firearms and religiosity with too broad a brush. The evangelical influence on the sale, use and marketing of firearms in the United States does not mean Christianity is at fault for the recent spate of shootings. After all, in Buffalo, in Uvalde, in Tulsa, and this month at a church supper in Vestavia Hills, Ala., Christians have been among the victims. Christian clergy members have rushed to every scene to comfort the survivors. Friends and families have gathered at Christian funerals to mourn the dead.
As the historian Daniel K. Williams has noted, “Gun rights advocacy is not an intrinsic feature of every brand of evangelicalism.” While recent surveys find that four in 10 white evangelicals own guns, the majority do not, and other denominational affiliations offer examples of religious participation discouraging a fixation on firearms. It is possible that the less one sees oneself as an itinerant loner in a hostile world, like the armed preacher in a silent western, the less one is likely to look to guns as a source of salvation.
Nonetheless, the ways Christian ideas may be contributing to a gun culture that abets our epidemic of mass shootings by helping to keep the nation well armed should inspire reflection. None of the recent mass shootings had explicitly religious motivations, but the religious contexts of our seemingly eternal problem with gun violence — its history, its theology, its myths — are too important to ignore.
Mass shootings are, in a way, assaults on the idea of community itself. They occur where there are people gathered — for entertainment, for learning, for shopping, for worship — in the spaces we create together. Some believe that such attacks are the fault of armed individuals alone and can be addressed only through armed individual response. Others believe they occur within the framework of what we collectively allow and must have communal solutions.
That these two positions each have beliefs at their core is one reason our disagreements over guns remain so intractable. We are arguing not just over policy or public health, bans or background checks. Without quite realizing it, we are also arguing over the theologian Paul Tillich’s definition of faith: a matter of “ultimate concern.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/23/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Re: Christianity
To believe in God or not is up to everyone. I feel the power believing gives me. IMO faith is a thing that helps you live through your darkest hour. You know, during my life I've seen quite a lot of families, but I usually pay close attention to children. Once I compared children that went to traditional and Christian schools. Luckily I have a church nearby my house https://firstchurchlove.com, so I didn't need to take a long way to another one. Guess what: I've never seen a child from a Christian school being extra aggressive and toxic. Of course, much depends on their parents and how they raise their children, but statistics usually don't deceive. The main idea of it that love is the key. Learn your child to love the people around, nature, and each flower they see. It's not said vain: "Make love, not war."
Why Catholicism Remains Strong in Canada
Even as Catholicism wanes in many Western countries, in Canada, it is holding steady as the largest religious denomination.
Angela Sanil, left, her sister Ashlyn, their mother Cinol and their friend Babitha Abraham came to see Pope Francis at Commonwealth Stadium, in Edmonton, Alberta. Cinol and her husband Jacob immigrated to Canada from South India in 2010. An influx of Catholic immigrants has helped the Canadian Catholic Church build up new membership.Credit...Ian Willms for The New York Times
EDMONTON, Alberta — The centerpiece of Pope Francis’s journey to Canada this week was his historic message of apology on Monday to the country’s Indigenous people for the Catholic Church’s role in the notorious residential school system that tried to erase their culture, and in which thousands of children were abused and died.
But as Francis continued his travels across the country — from Alberta, where he delivered the apology, to Quebec and Nunavut in the Arctic — his stops also told the story of the church’s unusually stable position in Canada.
Large numbers of immigrants from South Sudan, India, the Philippines, South Korea and elsewhere were prominent in the crowd at Commonwealth Stadium in Edmonton, Alberta, on Tuesday, just as they are in the country’s Catholic churches, a product of Canada’s generous immigration policy, which embraces immigrants and formally promotes multiculturalism.
While the Roman Catholic church is in severe decline in many Western countries, it remains the largest denomination in predominately Christian Canada, accounting for about 38 percent of people who identify with a particular faith. And outside Quebec, a French speaking province it once dominated, the church’s decline has been modest. In 1951, 41 percent of Canadians said they were Catholics.
The reason for the church’s stability, most analysts agree, is Canada’s relatively open immigration policies, which mean that immigrants make up a much larger share of Canada’s population than they do in the United States and other Western countries where Catholicism is waning.
A study by Canada’s census agency released late last year found that Catholicism represents the largest faith among newcomers to the country. More important, the survey also determined that most of those immigrants are active church participants.
Many of Canada’s Catholics are immigrants or the children of immigrants.Credit...Ian Willms for The New York Times
“Immigrants now make up a large proportion of the most faithful participants at Sunday mass,” said Gordon Davies, a former priest in the archdiocese of Toronto for 20 years who taught at the Toronto School of Theology and was a dean of Canada’s largest seminary, Saint Augustine. “The question is whether or not the second generation will continue to be as active in their faith.”
Mr. Davies and others say that the support immigrants have provided the Catholic Church in much of Canada doesn’t mean the church isn’t vulnerable to the declines that have diminished the country’s long established Protestant churches.
“There is in general some kind of disillusionment with the churches,” said Dr. Michel Andraos, the dean of the Faculty of Theology at Saint Paul University in Ottawa.
But Canada’s immigrants have strengthened the church and given it vitality, Mr. Davies said, something he has witnessed firsthand at his own Toronto church. Today he estimates that about 40 percent of his fellow parishioners are from the Philippines and a large number of others are Tamils from Sri Lanka.
“It’s like going to Manila every weekend,” he said. “It’s a cultural experience which is actually very healthy for me.”
Dr. Andraos is himself a Catholic immigrant to Canada, his family having fled the civil war in Lebanon during the 1990s.
For many immigrants, he said, churches are as much a settlement service and cultural community as they are a spiritual centers. And once they have established themselves in Canada, he said, they often drift away from the church.
“My whole family immigrated and all of them very active church goers the first 10 years or so,” Dr. Andraos said. “Now no one in my family goes to church.”
Regardless of what the future holds, Dr. Andraos said the arrival of Catholic immigrants has had a profound effect on the church in the largely French speaking province of Quebec where Pope Francis arrived on Wednesday.
For much of its history, the Roman Catholic church dominated not just the spiritual life of the province but also education and health care and had a significant influence over business and politics. But in what came to be known as the quiet revolution, a Liberal government formed in 1960 and began taking back those powers starting with schools. Secularism became a guiding principle.
The effects of that continue today and include a recently passed law that bans the wearing of religious symbols, including Christian ones, by public sector employees, including teachers. Over the decades churches and church institutions have closed and been converted to other uses.
Secularism has replaced Catholicism in Quebec more than in any other province, and Dr. Andraos said that the Catholic church is almost now extinct in rural parts of the province. Yet, even in Quebec there has been a resurgence of large, vibrant congregations in Montreal made up of immigrants, often from Africa.
When he meets with parishioners at those churches, he said, he finds that there is sometimes a disconnect between them and long established members of the church in Canada.
That is particularly true on the issue that brought Francis to Canada: reconciliation with Indigenous people for the harms they suffered at church run residential schools. After failing to largely make good on a class action settlement with former students, the church is now attempting to raise 30 million Canadian dollars from its members.
“They have no clue why they should contribute to that,” Dr. Andraos said, referring to recent Catholic immigrants. “What have they done?”
But he has found that once the suffering of the students is laid out, most of them understand the obligation.
Similarly, Mr. Davies said he has found members of many immigrant congregations to be far more conservative than many church members born in Canada.
“They have nothing to do with stirrings in the Canadian Catholic Church to accept same-sex marriage and to bring women in,” he said. “That’s not part of their sense of Catholicism and they’d be dead set against it.”
Immigration has also filled another need of the church in Canada. Dr. Andraos said few, if any, Canadians were willing to become priests and that situation is unlikely to change unless priests were allowed to marry. Not one of the 110 theological students at his university currently intends to become a priest.
So most of Canada’s priests now come from abroad. Father Susai Jesu who hosted the pope at his Indigenous parish in Edmonton this week was born in India.
Father Susai Jesu, who hosted the pope at his predominantly Indigenous parish in Edmonton this week, was born in India.Credit...Ian Willms for The New York Times
Vibrant, immigrant-based congregations have so far allowed some archdioceses, including Toronto’s, to not close churches, though Mr. Davies said closures are needed to consolidate financial and clerical resources, which are limited because many immigrants lack the wealth necessary to sustain large Canadian churches.
The one place where the church is currently disposing of churches and other buildings on a large scale is Newfoundland and Labrador. The archdiocese there filed for bankruptcy after a court ruled that it must compensate about 100 people who were sexually abused at an orphanage between the 1940s and the 1960s.
The boost provided by immigrants, Mr. Davies said, helped stop the church from disappearing. But it will not, in the long run, keep it from shrinking to a more sustainable version of itself.
“It might not be in my lifetime,” he said. “But I might see the beginnings of that restructuring and that healthy regrowth in my lifetime.”
As the crowd spilled out of Commonwealth Stadium in Edmonton on Tuesday, a sea of diverse faces appeared. Within the crush of people searching for buses or lining up for trains was Israel Izzo Odongi, who moved to Canada 23 years ago from South Sudan and who made the trip from Calgary, Alberta to see the pope with other members of a South Sudanese congregation.
Nearby was Jesu Bala, who moved to Edmonton, Alberta, from Chennai, India, 13 years ago. Mr. Bala, who was with four family members, said that they were part of a South Asian congregation.
Even when the pope made his way to Lac Ste. Anne, Alberta, a pilgrimage site founded in the 19th century for Indigenous Catholics that lies about an hour north of Edmonton, large numbers of immigrants were there.
Reina Donaire, 36, from Edmonton, stood at the lip of the lake, only feet from where Francis would minutes later bless the water, with four other friends from the Philippines.
“Mostly the churchgoing people are Filipino,” she said, adding that she and other immigrants, including from Africa, provided a lift to the Canadian church. “We’re strong Catholics and maybe in that way we help them.”
Pope Francis blessed the water at Lac Ste. Ann, Alberta.Credit...Ian Willms for The New York Times
Angela Sanil, left, her sister Ashlyn, their mother Cinol and their friend Babitha Abraham came to see Pope Francis at Commonwealth Stadium, in Edmonton, Alberta. Cinol and her husband Jacob immigrated to Canada from South India in 2010. An influx of Catholic immigrants has helped the Canadian Catholic Church build up new membership.Credit...Ian Willms for The New York Times
EDMONTON, Alberta — The centerpiece of Pope Francis’s journey to Canada this week was his historic message of apology on Monday to the country’s Indigenous people for the Catholic Church’s role in the notorious residential school system that tried to erase their culture, and in which thousands of children were abused and died.
But as Francis continued his travels across the country — from Alberta, where he delivered the apology, to Quebec and Nunavut in the Arctic — his stops also told the story of the church’s unusually stable position in Canada.
Large numbers of immigrants from South Sudan, India, the Philippines, South Korea and elsewhere were prominent in the crowd at Commonwealth Stadium in Edmonton, Alberta, on Tuesday, just as they are in the country’s Catholic churches, a product of Canada’s generous immigration policy, which embraces immigrants and formally promotes multiculturalism.
While the Roman Catholic church is in severe decline in many Western countries, it remains the largest denomination in predominately Christian Canada, accounting for about 38 percent of people who identify with a particular faith. And outside Quebec, a French speaking province it once dominated, the church’s decline has been modest. In 1951, 41 percent of Canadians said they were Catholics.
The reason for the church’s stability, most analysts agree, is Canada’s relatively open immigration policies, which mean that immigrants make up a much larger share of Canada’s population than they do in the United States and other Western countries where Catholicism is waning.
A study by Canada’s census agency released late last year found that Catholicism represents the largest faith among newcomers to the country. More important, the survey also determined that most of those immigrants are active church participants.
Many of Canada’s Catholics are immigrants or the children of immigrants.Credit...Ian Willms for The New York Times
“Immigrants now make up a large proportion of the most faithful participants at Sunday mass,” said Gordon Davies, a former priest in the archdiocese of Toronto for 20 years who taught at the Toronto School of Theology and was a dean of Canada’s largest seminary, Saint Augustine. “The question is whether or not the second generation will continue to be as active in their faith.”
Mr. Davies and others say that the support immigrants have provided the Catholic Church in much of Canada doesn’t mean the church isn’t vulnerable to the declines that have diminished the country’s long established Protestant churches.
“There is in general some kind of disillusionment with the churches,” said Dr. Michel Andraos, the dean of the Faculty of Theology at Saint Paul University in Ottawa.
But Canada’s immigrants have strengthened the church and given it vitality, Mr. Davies said, something he has witnessed firsthand at his own Toronto church. Today he estimates that about 40 percent of his fellow parishioners are from the Philippines and a large number of others are Tamils from Sri Lanka.
“It’s like going to Manila every weekend,” he said. “It’s a cultural experience which is actually very healthy for me.”
Dr. Andraos is himself a Catholic immigrant to Canada, his family having fled the civil war in Lebanon during the 1990s.
For many immigrants, he said, churches are as much a settlement service and cultural community as they are a spiritual centers. And once they have established themselves in Canada, he said, they often drift away from the church.
“My whole family immigrated and all of them very active church goers the first 10 years or so,” Dr. Andraos said. “Now no one in my family goes to church.”
Regardless of what the future holds, Dr. Andraos said the arrival of Catholic immigrants has had a profound effect on the church in the largely French speaking province of Quebec where Pope Francis arrived on Wednesday.
For much of its history, the Roman Catholic church dominated not just the spiritual life of the province but also education and health care and had a significant influence over business and politics. But in what came to be known as the quiet revolution, a Liberal government formed in 1960 and began taking back those powers starting with schools. Secularism became a guiding principle.
The effects of that continue today and include a recently passed law that bans the wearing of religious symbols, including Christian ones, by public sector employees, including teachers. Over the decades churches and church institutions have closed and been converted to other uses.
Secularism has replaced Catholicism in Quebec more than in any other province, and Dr. Andraos said that the Catholic church is almost now extinct in rural parts of the province. Yet, even in Quebec there has been a resurgence of large, vibrant congregations in Montreal made up of immigrants, often from Africa.
When he meets with parishioners at those churches, he said, he finds that there is sometimes a disconnect between them and long established members of the church in Canada.
That is particularly true on the issue that brought Francis to Canada: reconciliation with Indigenous people for the harms they suffered at church run residential schools. After failing to largely make good on a class action settlement with former students, the church is now attempting to raise 30 million Canadian dollars from its members.
“They have no clue why they should contribute to that,” Dr. Andraos said, referring to recent Catholic immigrants. “What have they done?”
But he has found that once the suffering of the students is laid out, most of them understand the obligation.
Similarly, Mr. Davies said he has found members of many immigrant congregations to be far more conservative than many church members born in Canada.
“They have nothing to do with stirrings in the Canadian Catholic Church to accept same-sex marriage and to bring women in,” he said. “That’s not part of their sense of Catholicism and they’d be dead set against it.”
Immigration has also filled another need of the church in Canada. Dr. Andraos said few, if any, Canadians were willing to become priests and that situation is unlikely to change unless priests were allowed to marry. Not one of the 110 theological students at his university currently intends to become a priest.
So most of Canada’s priests now come from abroad. Father Susai Jesu who hosted the pope at his Indigenous parish in Edmonton this week was born in India.
Father Susai Jesu, who hosted the pope at his predominantly Indigenous parish in Edmonton this week, was born in India.Credit...Ian Willms for The New York Times
Vibrant, immigrant-based congregations have so far allowed some archdioceses, including Toronto’s, to not close churches, though Mr. Davies said closures are needed to consolidate financial and clerical resources, which are limited because many immigrants lack the wealth necessary to sustain large Canadian churches.
The one place where the church is currently disposing of churches and other buildings on a large scale is Newfoundland and Labrador. The archdiocese there filed for bankruptcy after a court ruled that it must compensate about 100 people who were sexually abused at an orphanage between the 1940s and the 1960s.
The boost provided by immigrants, Mr. Davies said, helped stop the church from disappearing. But it will not, in the long run, keep it from shrinking to a more sustainable version of itself.
“It might not be in my lifetime,” he said. “But I might see the beginnings of that restructuring and that healthy regrowth in my lifetime.”
As the crowd spilled out of Commonwealth Stadium in Edmonton on Tuesday, a sea of diverse faces appeared. Within the crush of people searching for buses or lining up for trains was Israel Izzo Odongi, who moved to Canada 23 years ago from South Sudan and who made the trip from Calgary, Alberta to see the pope with other members of a South Sudanese congregation.
Nearby was Jesu Bala, who moved to Edmonton, Alberta, from Chennai, India, 13 years ago. Mr. Bala, who was with four family members, said that they were part of a South Asian congregation.
Even when the pope made his way to Lac Ste. Anne, Alberta, a pilgrimage site founded in the 19th century for Indigenous Catholics that lies about an hour north of Edmonton, large numbers of immigrants were there.
Reina Donaire, 36, from Edmonton, stood at the lip of the lake, only feet from where Francis would minutes later bless the water, with four other friends from the Philippines.
“Mostly the churchgoing people are Filipino,” she said, adding that she and other immigrants, including from Africa, provided a lift to the Canadian church. “We’re strong Catholics and maybe in that way we help them.”
Pope Francis blessed the water at Lac Ste. Ann, Alberta.Credit...Ian Willms for The New York Times
Re: Christianity
USA TODAY
How old was Jesus when he died? Why scholars are not in agreement on it.
Daryl Perry, USA TODAY
Sun, August 7, 2022 at 7:00 AM
Jesus Christ (also known as Jesus of Galilee or Jesus of Nazareth) is the central figure in Christianity who is seen as the son of God. Important aspects of the Christian canon are the Virgin Birth of Jesus from his mother, Mary, and Jesus’ death, which was the crucifixion.
This brings up the question of how long he lived. Different sources have different death and birth dates. Research concludes it is difficult to find the exact date of Jesus’ death because of differences in the chronology of narratives surrounding his final days.
How old was Jesus when he died?
Jesus was born around 4 B.C. and was crucified in A.D. 30, according to the PBS FRONTLINE show "From Jesus to Christ." Britannica cites his birth year as ranging from 6 to 4 B.C. and has the same death year as Frontline.
In general, Jesus’ age at death is heavily contested by scholars, according to "Dating the Death of Jesus" by Helen Bond and published online by Cambridge University Press in 2013. Some cite Jesus’ death as happening on 14th of Nisan, which would be “Friday April 7th 30 [A.D.] or April 3rd 33,” based on a scholar's timeline preference, but Bond does not subscribe to the specificity of those dates.
Depending on which calendars or accounts of Jesus’ final days people use, it is difficult to find one specific answer on when Jesus died and as a result, how old he was.
However, Bond makes the case Jesus died around Passover, between A.D. 29 and 34. Considering Jesus’ varying chronology, he was 33 to 40 years old at his time of death.
How old was Mary when Jesus died?
According to Christianity.com, Mary was 46 to 49 years old when Jesus died. Britannica states that she “flourished” from 25 B.C. to A.D. 75. Assuming this is in reference to her lifespan, according to Britannica, Mary was approximately 54 to 59 years old when Jesus died.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ol ... 19801.html
How old was Jesus when he died? Why scholars are not in agreement on it.
Daryl Perry, USA TODAY
Sun, August 7, 2022 at 7:00 AM
Jesus Christ (also known as Jesus of Galilee or Jesus of Nazareth) is the central figure in Christianity who is seen as the son of God. Important aspects of the Christian canon are the Virgin Birth of Jesus from his mother, Mary, and Jesus’ death, which was the crucifixion.
This brings up the question of how long he lived. Different sources have different death and birth dates. Research concludes it is difficult to find the exact date of Jesus’ death because of differences in the chronology of narratives surrounding his final days.
How old was Jesus when he died?
Jesus was born around 4 B.C. and was crucified in A.D. 30, according to the PBS FRONTLINE show "From Jesus to Christ." Britannica cites his birth year as ranging from 6 to 4 B.C. and has the same death year as Frontline.
In general, Jesus’ age at death is heavily contested by scholars, according to "Dating the Death of Jesus" by Helen Bond and published online by Cambridge University Press in 2013. Some cite Jesus’ death as happening on 14th of Nisan, which would be “Friday April 7th 30 [A.D.] or April 3rd 33,” based on a scholar's timeline preference, but Bond does not subscribe to the specificity of those dates.
Depending on which calendars or accounts of Jesus’ final days people use, it is difficult to find one specific answer on when Jesus died and as a result, how old he was.
However, Bond makes the case Jesus died around Passover, between A.D. 29 and 34. Considering Jesus’ varying chronology, he was 33 to 40 years old at his time of death.
How old was Mary when Jesus died?
According to Christianity.com, Mary was 46 to 49 years old when Jesus died. Britannica states that she “flourished” from 25 B.C. to A.D. 75. Assuming this is in reference to her lifespan, according to Britannica, Mary was approximately 54 to 59 years old when Jesus died.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ol ... 19801.html
Re: Christianity
The Daily Beast
The Mysterious ‘Fifth Evangelist’ Who Created the Bible as We Know It
Candida Moss
Sat, October 15, 2022 at 8:58 PM
If you were traveling through the verdant Ethiopian highlands, you might make a stop at the Abba Gärima monastery about three miles east of Adwa in the northernmost part of the country. If you were a man—and you’d have to be to gain entry into the Orthodox monastery—then you might be permitted to look at the Abba Gärima Gospel books. These exquisitely illuminated manuscripts are the earliest evidence of the art of the Christian Aksumite kingdom. Legend holds that God stopped the sun in the sky so the copyist could finish them. Leafing through a Gospel book you would come upon portraits of the four evangelists—Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—the authors of the book’s contents. You might be surprised to find, however, that there is a fifth evangelist included there.
“A fifth evangelist?!” you say, and rightly so. This fifth portrait is that of Eusebius of Caesarea, the man who taught us how to read the Gospels. A new book, Eusebius the Evangelist: Rewriting the Fourfold Gospel in Late Antiquity, by Dr. Jeremiah Coogan, an assistant professor of New Testament at the Jesuit School of Theology at Santa Clara University, sheds light on history’s lost “fifth evangelist” and explains the pervasive influence of the bishop who has, arguably, done more than anyone else to shape how we read the gospels.
Eusebius of Caesarea is not a very well-known name outside of scholarly circles. He was born in the last half of the third century in Caesarea Maritima, in what is today Israel. He became first a priest and then a bishop. He would later become a biographer of the emperor Constantine possibly even a wheeler-dealer in the ecclesiastical politics of the imperial court. Under the influence of the third-century theologian Origen, who spent a long period of his life in Caesarea, Eusebius became an accomplished textual scholar.
If you’ve heard Eusebius’s name before it’s probably because of his Church History, an account of Christianity’s origins from the Apostles to his own day. As influential as the Church History is—and it became the template for how people have written the history of Christianity ever since—it doesn’t compare to the impact of his less visible and least-known literary production, the canon tables (also known as the Eusebian Apparatus).
In Eusebius’ time the contents of the New Testament were not universally established. Though many agreed that there should be four Gospels, and even grounded this assumption in the natural order of the universe, they did not read the Gospels in parallel. At least part of the reason for this was that, practically speaking, this was hard to do. Even if you had a Gospel book that contained copies of the four canonical Gospels, identifying how the various stories related to one another involved familiarity with the text, deductive skills, and a real facility navigating the physical object itself. Gospel books were big and heavy; the text was usually written in a series of unbroken Greek letters; and there were no chapter, verse, or page numbers to help you find your way.
Enter Eusebius, the man whose invention made reading the Gospels in parallel possible. It is basically a carefully organized reference tool that allows you to navigate books. In a period before chapter and verse divisions, Eusebius and his team of literary assistants divided the canonical Gospels into numbered sections and produced a set of coordinating reference tables that allow readers to cross-reference versions of the same story in other Gospels. This was an important innovation in book technology in general. As Coogan put it “the Eusebian apparatus is the first system of cross-references ever invented—not just for the Gospels, but for any text.” Reference tables might not seem sexy, but by producing them Eusebius inaugurated a trend that would dominate how Christians ever since have read the Bible.
The enormity of his innovation is hard to see precisely because it has become ubiquitous. We thread the different sayings of Jesus from the Cross together into one story. We merge the infancy stories of Matthew and Luke together to produce a single shepherd and wise men-filled Nativity story. These decisions are relatively uncomplicated, but we should consider the amount of decision-making that went into the production of this reading scheme. First, the team had to decide on unit divisions: what is a unit, where does it begin, and where does it end? While today church services have designated readings, early Christians often read for as “long as time permitted.” In segmenting the Gospel, the Eusebian team was cementing preexisting yet informal distinctions about what constituted a particular story, episode, or section of the life of Jesus.
Once this was accomplished, each unit had to be correlated to the corresponding units in the other Gospels. Some decisions seem easy: Jesus feeds 5,000 people in all four Gospels, for example. But there is an additional story—relayed by Mark and Luke—in which he feeds 4,000 people. What should we do with them? What about chronological discrepancies? The incident in the Jerusalem Temple where Jesus gets into a physical dispute with moneychangers appears in the final week of his life in the Synoptics but kicks off his ministry in the Gospel of John. Are they the same story? Did Jesus cleanse the Temple twice? These were and indeed are live questions for Christian readers, but by drawing up his tables, Eusebius and his team provided answers by means of a simple chart. A great deal of interpretation and theological work happens in the construction of the chart, but the tables seem to be factual accounting. Instead of argumentation that makes itself open to disagreement, we see only beguilingly agent-less lines and numbering.
This kind of schematization might seem to be the ancient equivalent of administrative or clerical work. Indeed, it drew upon technologies and practices from ancient administration, mathematics, astrology, medicine, magic, and culinary arts. The portraits from the Ethiopian Gärima Gospel, however, capture an often-hidden truth: Schematization is theological work. Segmenting the Bible and mapping its contents created theologically motivated juxtapositions and connections. For example, by connecting the story of divine creation from the prologue of the Gospel of John (“In the beginning was the word…”) to the genealogies of Matthew and Luke (the so-and-so begat so-and-so parts), the Eusebian team could underscore the divine and human origins of Jesus. Equally important, they instructed the reader to read the Gospels in a new way: a way that reoriented the original organization. If this shift seems unimportant or intuitive to us, it is only because we have so thoroughly absorbed it.
Take, say, the interweaving of Jesus’s finals words at the crucifixion. Mark’s version ends with Jesus in psychic and physical distress crying that God has abandoned him. It’s an uncomfortable scene and it is meant to be. Luke and John have more self-controlled conclusions: Jesus commends his spirit into the hands of his father (Luke) and authoritatively proclaims his life “finished” (John). Though Eusebius doesn’t reconcile these portraits himself, his apparatus allowed future generations to combine them in a way that neutralizes the discomfort we have when we read Mark.
While others had thought about reading the Gospels alongside one another, it was Eusebius and his team who came up with the tool to do it in a systematic way. From Eusebius onwards, Coogan told The Daily Beast, “most manuscripts of the Gospels included the Eusebian apparatus. When a reader encountered the Gospels on the page, they generally did so in a form shaped by Eusebius’ innovative project. While Eusebius prepared his Gospel edition in Greek, the apparatus had an impact in almost every language the Gospels were translated into. We find it in manuscripts in Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopic, Gothic, Georgian, Arabic, Caucasian Albanian, Nubian, Slavonic, Old English, Middle German, and Dutch. Thousands of Gospel manuscripts, from the fourth century to the twentieth, reflect Eusebius’ approach to reading the Gospels.” Even today when academics think about the relationships between the Gospels and print Gospels in parallel with one another, we are asking the same questions as Eusebius did. It might be said that Eusebius is still controlling how we think.
The truth is however that any kind of supplementary material (scholars call them paratexts) like an index or a table of contents creates new ways to read a text. Matthew or Mark may have wanted you to read their stories linearly from start to finish, but Eusebius and his team gave you a new way to read. You could hunt and peck between the bindings. Reading out of order can be powerful work, as Wil Gafney’s A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church is, because it creates new pathways through the text that disrupt the ways that the authors meant the texts to be read. Most authors don’t write narratives with the expectation that people will just use Google to search inside it.
While Eusebius was never formally denounced as a heretic, some of his opinions—including some of the judgments that inform his apparatus—were pretty unorthodox. Like Origen he was sympathetic to views about the nature of Christ that would later be condemned as heresy. It’s probably because of the ambiguities surrounding his theological views that Eusebius, one of the most influential figures in Christian history, never became a saint. But his story proves that it is sometimes invisible actors who are the most powerful of all.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/my ... 10075.html
The Mysterious ‘Fifth Evangelist’ Who Created the Bible as We Know It
Candida Moss
Sat, October 15, 2022 at 8:58 PM
If you were traveling through the verdant Ethiopian highlands, you might make a stop at the Abba Gärima monastery about three miles east of Adwa in the northernmost part of the country. If you were a man—and you’d have to be to gain entry into the Orthodox monastery—then you might be permitted to look at the Abba Gärima Gospel books. These exquisitely illuminated manuscripts are the earliest evidence of the art of the Christian Aksumite kingdom. Legend holds that God stopped the sun in the sky so the copyist could finish them. Leafing through a Gospel book you would come upon portraits of the four evangelists—Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—the authors of the book’s contents. You might be surprised to find, however, that there is a fifth evangelist included there.
“A fifth evangelist?!” you say, and rightly so. This fifth portrait is that of Eusebius of Caesarea, the man who taught us how to read the Gospels. A new book, Eusebius the Evangelist: Rewriting the Fourfold Gospel in Late Antiquity, by Dr. Jeremiah Coogan, an assistant professor of New Testament at the Jesuit School of Theology at Santa Clara University, sheds light on history’s lost “fifth evangelist” and explains the pervasive influence of the bishop who has, arguably, done more than anyone else to shape how we read the gospels.
Eusebius of Caesarea is not a very well-known name outside of scholarly circles. He was born in the last half of the third century in Caesarea Maritima, in what is today Israel. He became first a priest and then a bishop. He would later become a biographer of the emperor Constantine possibly even a wheeler-dealer in the ecclesiastical politics of the imperial court. Under the influence of the third-century theologian Origen, who spent a long period of his life in Caesarea, Eusebius became an accomplished textual scholar.
If you’ve heard Eusebius’s name before it’s probably because of his Church History, an account of Christianity’s origins from the Apostles to his own day. As influential as the Church History is—and it became the template for how people have written the history of Christianity ever since—it doesn’t compare to the impact of his less visible and least-known literary production, the canon tables (also known as the Eusebian Apparatus).
In Eusebius’ time the contents of the New Testament were not universally established. Though many agreed that there should be four Gospels, and even grounded this assumption in the natural order of the universe, they did not read the Gospels in parallel. At least part of the reason for this was that, practically speaking, this was hard to do. Even if you had a Gospel book that contained copies of the four canonical Gospels, identifying how the various stories related to one another involved familiarity with the text, deductive skills, and a real facility navigating the physical object itself. Gospel books were big and heavy; the text was usually written in a series of unbroken Greek letters; and there were no chapter, verse, or page numbers to help you find your way.
Enter Eusebius, the man whose invention made reading the Gospels in parallel possible. It is basically a carefully organized reference tool that allows you to navigate books. In a period before chapter and verse divisions, Eusebius and his team of literary assistants divided the canonical Gospels into numbered sections and produced a set of coordinating reference tables that allow readers to cross-reference versions of the same story in other Gospels. This was an important innovation in book technology in general. As Coogan put it “the Eusebian apparatus is the first system of cross-references ever invented—not just for the Gospels, but for any text.” Reference tables might not seem sexy, but by producing them Eusebius inaugurated a trend that would dominate how Christians ever since have read the Bible.
The enormity of his innovation is hard to see precisely because it has become ubiquitous. We thread the different sayings of Jesus from the Cross together into one story. We merge the infancy stories of Matthew and Luke together to produce a single shepherd and wise men-filled Nativity story. These decisions are relatively uncomplicated, but we should consider the amount of decision-making that went into the production of this reading scheme. First, the team had to decide on unit divisions: what is a unit, where does it begin, and where does it end? While today church services have designated readings, early Christians often read for as “long as time permitted.” In segmenting the Gospel, the Eusebian team was cementing preexisting yet informal distinctions about what constituted a particular story, episode, or section of the life of Jesus.
Once this was accomplished, each unit had to be correlated to the corresponding units in the other Gospels. Some decisions seem easy: Jesus feeds 5,000 people in all four Gospels, for example. But there is an additional story—relayed by Mark and Luke—in which he feeds 4,000 people. What should we do with them? What about chronological discrepancies? The incident in the Jerusalem Temple where Jesus gets into a physical dispute with moneychangers appears in the final week of his life in the Synoptics but kicks off his ministry in the Gospel of John. Are they the same story? Did Jesus cleanse the Temple twice? These were and indeed are live questions for Christian readers, but by drawing up his tables, Eusebius and his team provided answers by means of a simple chart. A great deal of interpretation and theological work happens in the construction of the chart, but the tables seem to be factual accounting. Instead of argumentation that makes itself open to disagreement, we see only beguilingly agent-less lines and numbering.
This kind of schematization might seem to be the ancient equivalent of administrative or clerical work. Indeed, it drew upon technologies and practices from ancient administration, mathematics, astrology, medicine, magic, and culinary arts. The portraits from the Ethiopian Gärima Gospel, however, capture an often-hidden truth: Schematization is theological work. Segmenting the Bible and mapping its contents created theologically motivated juxtapositions and connections. For example, by connecting the story of divine creation from the prologue of the Gospel of John (“In the beginning was the word…”) to the genealogies of Matthew and Luke (the so-and-so begat so-and-so parts), the Eusebian team could underscore the divine and human origins of Jesus. Equally important, they instructed the reader to read the Gospels in a new way: a way that reoriented the original organization. If this shift seems unimportant or intuitive to us, it is only because we have so thoroughly absorbed it.
Take, say, the interweaving of Jesus’s finals words at the crucifixion. Mark’s version ends with Jesus in psychic and physical distress crying that God has abandoned him. It’s an uncomfortable scene and it is meant to be. Luke and John have more self-controlled conclusions: Jesus commends his spirit into the hands of his father (Luke) and authoritatively proclaims his life “finished” (John). Though Eusebius doesn’t reconcile these portraits himself, his apparatus allowed future generations to combine them in a way that neutralizes the discomfort we have when we read Mark.
While others had thought about reading the Gospels alongside one another, it was Eusebius and his team who came up with the tool to do it in a systematic way. From Eusebius onwards, Coogan told The Daily Beast, “most manuscripts of the Gospels included the Eusebian apparatus. When a reader encountered the Gospels on the page, they generally did so in a form shaped by Eusebius’ innovative project. While Eusebius prepared his Gospel edition in Greek, the apparatus had an impact in almost every language the Gospels were translated into. We find it in manuscripts in Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopic, Gothic, Georgian, Arabic, Caucasian Albanian, Nubian, Slavonic, Old English, Middle German, and Dutch. Thousands of Gospel manuscripts, from the fourth century to the twentieth, reflect Eusebius’ approach to reading the Gospels.” Even today when academics think about the relationships between the Gospels and print Gospels in parallel with one another, we are asking the same questions as Eusebius did. It might be said that Eusebius is still controlling how we think.
The truth is however that any kind of supplementary material (scholars call them paratexts) like an index or a table of contents creates new ways to read a text. Matthew or Mark may have wanted you to read their stories linearly from start to finish, but Eusebius and his team gave you a new way to read. You could hunt and peck between the bindings. Reading out of order can be powerful work, as Wil Gafney’s A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church is, because it creates new pathways through the text that disrupt the ways that the authors meant the texts to be read. Most authors don’t write narratives with the expectation that people will just use Google to search inside it.
While Eusebius was never formally denounced as a heretic, some of his opinions—including some of the judgments that inform his apparatus—were pretty unorthodox. Like Origen he was sympathetic to views about the nature of Christ that would later be condemned as heresy. It’s probably because of the ambiguities surrounding his theological views that Eusebius, one of the most influential figures in Christian history, never became a saint. But his story proves that it is sometimes invisible actors who are the most powerful of all.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/my ... 10075.html
Halloween Is for Heroes, Not Ghosts
In the days leading up to Halloween, our kids wrestled with what they wanted to be. Our youngest daughter, Miriam, chose to be a singer; Clare opted to be a pirate; and Peter became Miles Morales. Our oldest, Luke, the teenager of the group, demurred on dressing up. He probably now thinks of costumes as the province of his younger siblings.
I find kids decked out in the clothing of action heroes and book characters charming. The endless stream of social media posts from friends and family brings a smile to my face every year. Nonetheless, there is something fleeting about the holiday. Costumes that are funny one year feel dated by the next. That is why I’m drawn to the original and more weighty purpose of Halloween: It was meant to be a day set aside to remember the saints.
On the Christian calendar stretching back centuries, Halloween is the day before All Saints Day. (Halloween is a contraction of “all hallows,” or “all saints,” evening.) The holiday, then, is intended to inspire imitation, not of villains, goons and goblins but of lives of heroic virtue and service. The Catholic Church, where the holiday originated, has a formal process for choosing saints that involves final approval by the pope. The Protestant tradition, of which I am a part, is much less structured. Our saints are recognized by widespread affirmation of the lasting impacts of their lives.
Remembering the saints feels especially vital in this time of fallen heroes. One doesn’t have to look far to find a story of a religious leader, politician, musician or athlete whose life contradicts his or her publicly stated values. We fall in love with their music, athletic ability or speaking acumen, only to find out later they are cruel or abusive or hateful. Like kids on Halloween, we shuffle from failed hero to failed hero, looking for a treat only to be given a trick.
All these tales of hypocrisy can lead to a hopeless sense that everyone is out to take advantage of us and things can never change. The powerful benefit from a society in which oppressed people believe that all their actions are futile. But hope is the fuel of resistance. Hope can be inspired by the example of those who came before us. That is why we need the saints.
Few images are more firmly planted in my imagination than those of the civil rights protests of 1963 in Birmingham. As a child, I was transfixed by the video images of courageous men and women fighting against a system designed to keep Black people in line. The first time I heard the protesters sing “And before I’d be a slave I’ll be buried in my grave and go home to my lord and be free,” something came unshackled in my soul that no later disappointment has been able to chain since. Martin Luther King Jr. and many other civil rights leaders were dead long before my mother gave birth to me, but the testimony of their lives mattered.
They helped me see that a life in service to God and to others is not a waste of time. The powerful do not always win. The world is changeable, and God can use people to change it.
As a parent of four Black children, I care deeply about representation. I want my kids to see people on screens and in history books who look like them. But more than resemblance, I want them to find inspiration. “Black Panther” was special not because all the lead characters were Black. “Black Panther” was special because King T’Challa and the other characters in the film depicted Black excellence and the desire to do good. That is why Peter is drawn to Miles Morales, a young, brown-skinned kid trying to do the right thing with the powers given to him.
My children need a vision of the virtuous life as something worth pursuing. They need to see that holiness is beautiful.
Saints are not simply those with great outward achievements. St. Thérèse of Lisieux grew up in 19th-century France admiring the heroic actions of the saints and concluded that she could never accomplish such outstanding deeds. Instead, she chose what became known as “the little way.” She pursued the tiny virtues, believing that every interaction, no matter how small, gave her an opportunity to show God’s love through a kind word or act of service and to display patience with all the inconveniences of life.
Thérèse entered a convent at the age of 15 and died of tuberculosis at 24. She wasn’t on this earth for long, but her small acts of service, love and kindness had such a profound impact on those around her that her vision of the little way still inspires people today.
Neither Dr. King nor St. Thérèse was perfect. Each of them had their own failings and moments of doubt. But they pushed through their doubts, accepted their imperfections and found the faith to carry on.
My children will return home from their Halloween jaunt around the neighborhood with a large bounty of candy to be sorted, and my wife and I will do our best to keep them from eating it all in the first few days. The costumes will be given away, since their quickly growing bodies mean that they will not fit next year. Miles Morales will probably be replaced by a character from “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” But long after the candy is gone and forgotten, our family will continue a tradition that we started some years ago. After dinner a few times per week, we open a book called “Lesser Feasts and Fasts” that recounts the lives of the saints and discuss the saint of the day.
When important people are missing from the book, I tell the stories of saints my children should know. Black parents often have to correct the record and uncover hidden figures. Black saints are often in danger of being neglected as much in death as they were in life. For a long time we were not in charge of the writing of the history of this land or her churches, so we had to store the memories of our saints in our hearts. Their memory is revered locally; it is in the land, the places where they lived and died.
If we rely only on our national calendar or even our church calendar, we might believe that Dr. King marched alone, and that Black saints are few and far between. So I fill out the story in our home, stretching out to embrace Mamie Till and Medgar Evers and Fannie Lou Hamer and the nameless hosts that filled the streets, lunch counters and voting registration drives all over the South.
I teach my children about saints from my own life. I tell them about my great-grandmother Sophia, who died when I was 3. Our family remembers her as a woman of deep piety whose faith allowed her to survive and even at some points thrive despite the racist laws and customs of Jim Crow Alabama. When asked how she bore it, her answer was always the same: “The good lord carried me through.”
I recount the stories about my still-living grandfather. The sweet old man with the ever-present smile is more complex than he appears. He traveled the back roads of Alabama, dodging sundown towns to preach revivals in rundown country churches for little more than gas money and a meal. The bittersweetness of their lives is my children’s birthright. The costumes may not last beyond the year, nor will the candy survive the autumn, but I trust the memory of the saints will abide.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/30/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Re: Christianity
Associated Press
Christian monastery possibly pre-dating Islam found in UAE
Sheikh Majid bin Saud Al Mualla, chairman of the Umm Al Quwain Department of Tourism and Archaeology, front right, explains to Noura Al Kaabi, UAE Minister of Culture and Youth, during a visit of the ancient Christian monastery on Siniyah Island in Umm al-Quwain, United Arab Emirates, Thursday, Nov. 3, 2022. The monastery possibly dating as far back as the years before Islam rose across the Arabian Peninsula has been discovered on an island off the coast of the UAE officials announced Thursday, Nov. 3, 2022. (AP Photo/Kamran Jebreili)
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Emirati officials visit an ancient Christian monastery on Siniyah Island in Umm al-Quwain, United Arab Emirates, Thursday, Nov. 3, 2022. The monastery possibly dating as far back as the years before Islam rose across the Arabian Peninsula has been discovered on an island off the coast of the UAE officials announced Thursday, Nov. 3, 2022. (AP Photo/Kamran Jebreili)
Noura Al Kaabi, UAE Minister of Culture and Youth, left, and Sheikh Majid bin Saud Al Mualla, chairman of the Umm Al Quwain Department of Tourism and Archaeology, third right, listen to one of the staff during a visit of the ancient Christian monastery on Siniyah Island in Umm al-Quwain, United Arab Emirates, Thursday, Nov. 3, 2022. The monastery possibly dating as far back as the years before Islam rose across the Arabian Peninsula has been discovered on an island off the coast of the UAE officials announced Thursday, Nov. 3, 2022. (AP Photo/Kamran Jebreili)
JON GAMBRELL
Thu, November 3, 2022 at 2:12 AM
SINIYAH ISLAND, United Arab Emirates (AP) — An ancient Christian monastery possibly dating as far back as the years before Islam spread across the Arabian Peninsula has been discovered on an island off the coast of the United Arab Emirates, officials announced Thursday.
The monastery on Siniyah Island, part of the sand-dune sheikhdom of Umm al-Quwain, sheds new light on the history of early Christianity along the shores of the Persian Gulf. It marks the second such monastery found in the Emirates, dating back as many as 1,400 years — long before its desert expanses gave birth to a thriving oil industry that led to a unified nation home to the high-rise towers of Abu Dhabi and Dubai.
The two monasteries became lost to history in the sands of time as scholars believe Christians slowly converted to Islam as that faith grew more prevalent in the region.
Today, Christians remain a minority across the wider Middle East, though Pope Francis was arriving in nearby Bahrain on Thursday to promote interfaith dialogue with Muslim leaders.
For Timothy Power, an associate professor of archaeology at the United Arab Emirates University who helped investigate the newly discovered monastery, the UAE today is a “melting pot of nations.”
“The fact that something similar was happening here a 1,000 years ago is really remarkable and this is a story that deserves to be told,” he said.
The monastery sits on Siniyah Island, which shields the Khor al-Beida marshlands in Umm al-Quwain, an emirate some 50 kilometers (30 miles) northeast of Dubai along the coast of the Persian Gulf. The island, whose name means “blinking lights” likely due to the effect of the white-hot sun overhead, has a series of sandbars coming off of it like crooked fingers. On one, to the island's northeast, archaeologists discovered the monastery.
Carbon dating of samples found in the monastery's foundation date between 534 and 656. Islam's Prophet Muhammad was born around 570 and died in 632 after conquering Mecca in present-day Saudi Arabia.
Viewed from above, the monastery on Siniyah Island's floor plan suggests early Christian worshippers prayed within a single-aisle church at the monastery. Rooms within appear to hold a baptismal font, as well as an oven for baking bread or wafers for communion rites. A nave also likely held an altar and an installation for communion wine.
Next to the monastery sits a second building with four rooms, likely around a courtyard — possibly the home of an abbot or even a bishop in the early church.
On Thursday, the site saw a visit from Noura bint Mohammed al-Kaabi, the country's culture and youth minister, as well as Sheikh Majid bin Saud Al Mualla, the chairman of the Umm al-Quwain's Tourism and Archaeology Department and a son of the emirate's ruler.
The island remains part of the ruling family's holdings, protecting the land for years to allow the historical sites to be found as much of the UAE has rapidly developed.
The UAE's Culture Ministry has sponsored the dig in part, which continues at the site. Just hundreds of meters (yards) away from the church, a collection of buildings that archaeologists believe belongs to a pre-Islamic village sit.
Elsewhere on the island, piles of tossed-aside clams from pearl hunting make for massive, industrial-sized hills. Nearby also sits a village that the British blew up in 1820 before the region became part of what was known as the Trucial States, the precursor of the UAE. That village's destructions brought about the creation of the modern-day settlement of Umm al-Quwain on the mainland.
Historians say early churches and monasteries spread along the Persian Gulf to the coasts of present-day Oman and all the way to India. Archaeologist have found other similar churches and monasteries in Bahrain, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
In the early 1990s, archaeologists discovered the first Christian monastery in the UAE, on Sir Bani Yas Island, today a nature preserve and site of luxury hotels off the coast of Abu Dhabi, near the Saudi border. It similarly dates back to the same period as the new find in Umm al-Quwain.
However, evidence of early life along the Khor al-Beida marshlands in Umm al-Quwain dates as far back as the Neolithic period — suggesting continuous human inhabitance in the area for at least 10,000 years, Power said.
Today, the area near the marshland is more known for the low-cost liquor store at the emirate’s Barracuda Beach Resort. In recent months, authorities have demolished a hulking, Soviet-era cargo plane linked to a Russian gunrunner known as the “Merchant of Death” as it builds a bridge to Siniyah Island for a $675 million real estate development.
Power said that development spurred the archaeological work that discovered the monastery. That site and others will be fenced off and protected, he said, though it remains unclear what other secrets of the past remain hidden just under a thin layer of sand on the island.
“It’s a really fascinating discovery because in some ways it’s hidden history — it’s not something that’s widely known,” Power said.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ch ... 11450.html
Christian monastery possibly pre-dating Islam found in UAE
Sheikh Majid bin Saud Al Mualla, chairman of the Umm Al Quwain Department of Tourism and Archaeology, front right, explains to Noura Al Kaabi, UAE Minister of Culture and Youth, during a visit of the ancient Christian monastery on Siniyah Island in Umm al-Quwain, United Arab Emirates, Thursday, Nov. 3, 2022. The monastery possibly dating as far back as the years before Islam rose across the Arabian Peninsula has been discovered on an island off the coast of the UAE officials announced Thursday, Nov. 3, 2022. (AP Photo/Kamran Jebreili)
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Emirati officials visit an ancient Christian monastery on Siniyah Island in Umm al-Quwain, United Arab Emirates, Thursday, Nov. 3, 2022. The monastery possibly dating as far back as the years before Islam rose across the Arabian Peninsula has been discovered on an island off the coast of the UAE officials announced Thursday, Nov. 3, 2022. (AP Photo/Kamran Jebreili)
Noura Al Kaabi, UAE Minister of Culture and Youth, left, and Sheikh Majid bin Saud Al Mualla, chairman of the Umm Al Quwain Department of Tourism and Archaeology, third right, listen to one of the staff during a visit of the ancient Christian monastery on Siniyah Island in Umm al-Quwain, United Arab Emirates, Thursday, Nov. 3, 2022. The monastery possibly dating as far back as the years before Islam rose across the Arabian Peninsula has been discovered on an island off the coast of the UAE officials announced Thursday, Nov. 3, 2022. (AP Photo/Kamran Jebreili)
JON GAMBRELL
Thu, November 3, 2022 at 2:12 AM
SINIYAH ISLAND, United Arab Emirates (AP) — An ancient Christian monastery possibly dating as far back as the years before Islam spread across the Arabian Peninsula has been discovered on an island off the coast of the United Arab Emirates, officials announced Thursday.
The monastery on Siniyah Island, part of the sand-dune sheikhdom of Umm al-Quwain, sheds new light on the history of early Christianity along the shores of the Persian Gulf. It marks the second such monastery found in the Emirates, dating back as many as 1,400 years — long before its desert expanses gave birth to a thriving oil industry that led to a unified nation home to the high-rise towers of Abu Dhabi and Dubai.
The two monasteries became lost to history in the sands of time as scholars believe Christians slowly converted to Islam as that faith grew more prevalent in the region.
Today, Christians remain a minority across the wider Middle East, though Pope Francis was arriving in nearby Bahrain on Thursday to promote interfaith dialogue with Muslim leaders.
For Timothy Power, an associate professor of archaeology at the United Arab Emirates University who helped investigate the newly discovered monastery, the UAE today is a “melting pot of nations.”
“The fact that something similar was happening here a 1,000 years ago is really remarkable and this is a story that deserves to be told,” he said.
The monastery sits on Siniyah Island, which shields the Khor al-Beida marshlands in Umm al-Quwain, an emirate some 50 kilometers (30 miles) northeast of Dubai along the coast of the Persian Gulf. The island, whose name means “blinking lights” likely due to the effect of the white-hot sun overhead, has a series of sandbars coming off of it like crooked fingers. On one, to the island's northeast, archaeologists discovered the monastery.
Carbon dating of samples found in the monastery's foundation date between 534 and 656. Islam's Prophet Muhammad was born around 570 and died in 632 after conquering Mecca in present-day Saudi Arabia.
Viewed from above, the monastery on Siniyah Island's floor plan suggests early Christian worshippers prayed within a single-aisle church at the monastery. Rooms within appear to hold a baptismal font, as well as an oven for baking bread or wafers for communion rites. A nave also likely held an altar and an installation for communion wine.
Next to the monastery sits a second building with four rooms, likely around a courtyard — possibly the home of an abbot or even a bishop in the early church.
On Thursday, the site saw a visit from Noura bint Mohammed al-Kaabi, the country's culture and youth minister, as well as Sheikh Majid bin Saud Al Mualla, the chairman of the Umm al-Quwain's Tourism and Archaeology Department and a son of the emirate's ruler.
The island remains part of the ruling family's holdings, protecting the land for years to allow the historical sites to be found as much of the UAE has rapidly developed.
The UAE's Culture Ministry has sponsored the dig in part, which continues at the site. Just hundreds of meters (yards) away from the church, a collection of buildings that archaeologists believe belongs to a pre-Islamic village sit.
Elsewhere on the island, piles of tossed-aside clams from pearl hunting make for massive, industrial-sized hills. Nearby also sits a village that the British blew up in 1820 before the region became part of what was known as the Trucial States, the precursor of the UAE. That village's destructions brought about the creation of the modern-day settlement of Umm al-Quwain on the mainland.
Historians say early churches and monasteries spread along the Persian Gulf to the coasts of present-day Oman and all the way to India. Archaeologist have found other similar churches and monasteries in Bahrain, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
In the early 1990s, archaeologists discovered the first Christian monastery in the UAE, on Sir Bani Yas Island, today a nature preserve and site of luxury hotels off the coast of Abu Dhabi, near the Saudi border. It similarly dates back to the same period as the new find in Umm al-Quwain.
However, evidence of early life along the Khor al-Beida marshlands in Umm al-Quwain dates as far back as the Neolithic period — suggesting continuous human inhabitance in the area for at least 10,000 years, Power said.
Today, the area near the marshland is more known for the low-cost liquor store at the emirate’s Barracuda Beach Resort. In recent months, authorities have demolished a hulking, Soviet-era cargo plane linked to a Russian gunrunner known as the “Merchant of Death” as it builds a bridge to Siniyah Island for a $675 million real estate development.
Power said that development spurred the archaeological work that discovered the monastery. That site and others will be fenced off and protected, he said, though it remains unclear what other secrets of the past remain hidden just under a thin layer of sand on the island.
“It’s a really fascinating discovery because in some ways it’s hidden history — it’s not something that’s widely known,” Power said.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ch ... 11450.html
Re: Christianity
The Daily Beast
The Word ‘Homosexual’ Is in the Bible by Mistake: The Explosive Documentary That Is Under Attack
Kevin Fallon
Mon, November 7, 2022 at 2:29 AM
The first time the word “homosexual” appeared in the Bible was in 1946. That year, a committee gathered to translate an updated English version of the book from the Greek. Religious scholars, priests, theologists, linguists, anthropologists, and activists have done decades of research and investigation into the instances where the word appears in the book. Their conclusion is that it was a mistranslation.
In other words, the Biblical assertion that homosexuality is a sin—the catalyst for an entire shift in culture, with political repercussions, religious implications, consequences for LGBT rights and acceptance, and, frankly, deadly results—was, they allege, a mistake.
As a new film asserts, it was “the misuse of a single word that changed the course of history.”
1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture is a new documentary directed by Sharon “Rocky” Roggio. Ahead of its premiere this week at the DOC NYC festival, it has, as one might expect, gone viral within the conservative and Christian communities.
A grassroots campaign to promote the film on social media has gotten its official TikTok account more than 185,000 followers. That makes sense. For most people—practicing Christians or otherwise—what the film is stating is shocking.
There are layers to it: the realization that the Bible has been translated many times over the centuries, and that human error may have been involved in the process. That may be obvious, but it’s eye-opening. Moreover, there’s coming to terms with the notion that human error could be responsible for the stoking of homophobia—a mindset of hatred, oppression, and religious nationalism that has defined the last 75 years of our existence.
Before anyone has even seen the film, there has been an organized effort to attack and debunk the film’s claims. Roggio and others involved in the making of the documentary have received threats. Campaigns have been waged to get even innocuous social media posts taken down. An entire book was published to refute the evidence—even though the film has yet to be screened.
“The opposition is quite vocal about our film, trying to debunk it because they’re afraid,” Roggio tells The Daily Beast in an exclusive interview ahead of 1946’s New York premiere. “We’re literally unmooring them and pulling the anchors out from underneath.”
“We’ve been hit by the conservative audience,” Roggio says. “We’ve been hit by the atheist audience. We’ve been hit by LGBTQ people who have been hurt by the church and who have now left the church, because they feel that we are subscribing to religious supremacy by even playing along in this dialogue.”
1946 takes a journalistic, academic approach to substantiating these claims. Poring over thousands of historical documents, centuries of ancient texts, and Bible translations in many languages, the experts in the film conclude that two Greek words were mistranslated to mean homosexual. One more accurately means effeminate. The other connotes a person who was a sexual abuser and who had harmed someone.
As the film outlines, years after the translation, when the mistake was pointed out, the committee recognized and attempted to correct it. But, by the ’70s, the implications of those verses had become widespread. By the time the AIDS crisis arrived in the ’80s, that mindset was weaponized by the moral majority, particularly in the merging of politics and religion in the United States.
“A big point of our film has been biblical literalism,” Roggio says. “We do just think that it was a magical book that was just dropped down to us, but these are real people who have made these decisions that impact our real reality. People are going to feel unmoored by this idea that it’s man that has messed up, not God. As much as we are combating biblical literalism, we want our conservative audience to journey with us, in the sense that this is not an attack on God. This is not an attack on the Bible. This is a real issue of a mistranslation.”
Before 1946 premieres at DOC NYC on Nov. 12, we spoke with Roggio about the work she did (along with scholars and activists Kathy Baldock and Ed Oxford) to meticulously substantiate the film’s claims, the challenge of getting through to a Christian community that refuses even to hear the evidence, and how a documentary like this could change the world.
I grew up in the church, but I am still someone who found the idea of “homosexual” being a mistranslation in the Bible to be shocking. What has been people’s response to this?
We’re talking about the biggest book in the world. This impacts the three largest religions in the world. This impacts everyone. And we don’t discuss these things. That was what intrigued me as someone who grew up in the church, was a victim of bad theology, and was discriminated against because I’m a member of LGBTQ community. Realizing that the word homosexual wasn’t in the Bible until 1946, that was a click for me. I think that it’s gonna be a click for a lot of people.
Even the basic principle that the Bibles we read were translated by a human, and there may have been a mistake in that translation—that’s a mind-blowing realization for people.
One of the biggest concerns that we see in America today is Christian nationalism and people using the Bible who are saying that it is inerrant. They are biblical literalists. It has sovereignty over us. It can’t be changed. The word is the word. That is dangerous. It’s dangerous for so many people. We see it playing out in our reality today, and I call that religious supremacy, really. My idea in finessing these themes is to hopefully get the conservative audience to join with us and be honest about this. Words have power and words have meaning. The way that we use the Bible and use these old texts is very important. So what we try to do is contextualize.
Our movie is more than just theology. It’s history. It’s society. It’s politics. It’s law. It’s oppression. It’s how, again, these words have meaning. We as a group of people have had to negotiate the text. A group of people over time have had to pick and choose which verses stand out, which verses we follow—which verses play out in our land and our law. To really be an honest reader of Christian scripture, we have to find a way where we’re not oppressing people, where we’ve contextualized the text—we understand where it comes from and how it impacted a group of people.
When you’re introducing this idea, which is seismic and likely upsetting to a lot of people, how do you explain it to them at the most basic level?
1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture is about the first time the word “homosexual” appeared in the Bible. We had a team of researchers who wanted to ask the question: Who made this decision, and why? What was discovered, through a series of letters written by the translation committee that put the word “homosexual” in there, is that it was a mistake. Then it was discovered how the word “homosexual” went viral in print in the ’70s. That impacted the ’80s and the moral majority, and how we see the merger of politics and religion, specifically in America. What we now see today is the dangers of Christian nationalism, and it’s only grown.
Can you talk more specifically about the mistranslation of the word “homosexual” and what happened there?
We’re talking about a word, a medical term that has a connotation of a group of people that have an orientation, as opposed to what the original Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic texts are referring to, which is an aggressor, somebody who was an abuser—somebody who has abused someone else, and there is a victim on the other side. It’s a very different connotation. So that was my drive for making the movie, because now I have tangible evidence, letters written from the committee [acknowledging this].
This translation committee also has not only recognized the error but continues to rectify it and make their translations reflect the connotation of abusive behavior. Whereas now we see malice in the conservative committees, who since the ’80s have done the opposite. They say it refers to consensual acts, so it’s been amplified as homophobia because of this mistranslation.
From my experience, I know there are many Christians who are unmoving in their beliefs, who operate from a point of blind faith. What is it like to arrive with all of this evidence, research, and proof—even just an ask to listen to what the movie is alleging—but be met with that stubborn certitude?
It’s like hitting a wall. You get two kinds of Christians. You get people like my dad. [Roggio’s father is a pastor who appears in the film and repeatedly challenges its claims.] They want us to think they love us so much, that they’re just trying to give us the truth. And my dad is very kind and he’s never hurtful. But there are other people that I’ll see, especially on social media, who turn their fear into anger and then hatred. They’re vicious. A lot of what I see on social media and TikTok is the epitome of the phrase “There’s no love like Christian hate.” They’re just so disgusting
We have reached a couple of people who actually will listen and watch the movie. But there are so many people who are so close-minded. It’s heartbreaking that people aren’t even open to recognizing us as human. It’s just dehumanizing. With the church being comfortable othering people—it’s not us, it’s you—it’s easy for them to dehumanize the LGBTQ person. A key barrier is that even some of these theologians that will put out this harmful rhetoric, they don’t have relationships with LGBTQ people.
One reason why I wanted to put my dad in the movie and my story in the movie is because we are a prime example of that “hitting the wall.” Here’s an example of someone who I love very much, who is my biggest oppressor. There’s no getting through to him at all. And so the other thing is, you know, we’re not going to change everybody’s minds, and that’s OK. But at the end of the day, my dad needs to keep his beliefs where they belong, and stay out where my beliefs are.
I don’t impede his equal rights and he doesn’t need to impede mine. I’m doing this to provide equal protection for everyone under the law, because if we don’t get a handle on this now, with the Bible in this country, we’re all in trouble—no matter what you believe.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/cm/ ... 16707.html
The Word ‘Homosexual’ Is in the Bible by Mistake: The Explosive Documentary That Is Under Attack
Kevin Fallon
Mon, November 7, 2022 at 2:29 AM
The first time the word “homosexual” appeared in the Bible was in 1946. That year, a committee gathered to translate an updated English version of the book from the Greek. Religious scholars, priests, theologists, linguists, anthropologists, and activists have done decades of research and investigation into the instances where the word appears in the book. Their conclusion is that it was a mistranslation.
In other words, the Biblical assertion that homosexuality is a sin—the catalyst for an entire shift in culture, with political repercussions, religious implications, consequences for LGBT rights and acceptance, and, frankly, deadly results—was, they allege, a mistake.
As a new film asserts, it was “the misuse of a single word that changed the course of history.”
1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture is a new documentary directed by Sharon “Rocky” Roggio. Ahead of its premiere this week at the DOC NYC festival, it has, as one might expect, gone viral within the conservative and Christian communities.
A grassroots campaign to promote the film on social media has gotten its official TikTok account more than 185,000 followers. That makes sense. For most people—practicing Christians or otherwise—what the film is stating is shocking.
There are layers to it: the realization that the Bible has been translated many times over the centuries, and that human error may have been involved in the process. That may be obvious, but it’s eye-opening. Moreover, there’s coming to terms with the notion that human error could be responsible for the stoking of homophobia—a mindset of hatred, oppression, and religious nationalism that has defined the last 75 years of our existence.
Before anyone has even seen the film, there has been an organized effort to attack and debunk the film’s claims. Roggio and others involved in the making of the documentary have received threats. Campaigns have been waged to get even innocuous social media posts taken down. An entire book was published to refute the evidence—even though the film has yet to be screened.
“The opposition is quite vocal about our film, trying to debunk it because they’re afraid,” Roggio tells The Daily Beast in an exclusive interview ahead of 1946’s New York premiere. “We’re literally unmooring them and pulling the anchors out from underneath.”
“We’ve been hit by the conservative audience,” Roggio says. “We’ve been hit by the atheist audience. We’ve been hit by LGBTQ people who have been hurt by the church and who have now left the church, because they feel that we are subscribing to religious supremacy by even playing along in this dialogue.”
1946 takes a journalistic, academic approach to substantiating these claims. Poring over thousands of historical documents, centuries of ancient texts, and Bible translations in many languages, the experts in the film conclude that two Greek words were mistranslated to mean homosexual. One more accurately means effeminate. The other connotes a person who was a sexual abuser and who had harmed someone.
As the film outlines, years after the translation, when the mistake was pointed out, the committee recognized and attempted to correct it. But, by the ’70s, the implications of those verses had become widespread. By the time the AIDS crisis arrived in the ’80s, that mindset was weaponized by the moral majority, particularly in the merging of politics and religion in the United States.
“A big point of our film has been biblical literalism,” Roggio says. “We do just think that it was a magical book that was just dropped down to us, but these are real people who have made these decisions that impact our real reality. People are going to feel unmoored by this idea that it’s man that has messed up, not God. As much as we are combating biblical literalism, we want our conservative audience to journey with us, in the sense that this is not an attack on God. This is not an attack on the Bible. This is a real issue of a mistranslation.”
Before 1946 premieres at DOC NYC on Nov. 12, we spoke with Roggio about the work she did (along with scholars and activists Kathy Baldock and Ed Oxford) to meticulously substantiate the film’s claims, the challenge of getting through to a Christian community that refuses even to hear the evidence, and how a documentary like this could change the world.
I grew up in the church, but I am still someone who found the idea of “homosexual” being a mistranslation in the Bible to be shocking. What has been people’s response to this?
We’re talking about the biggest book in the world. This impacts the three largest religions in the world. This impacts everyone. And we don’t discuss these things. That was what intrigued me as someone who grew up in the church, was a victim of bad theology, and was discriminated against because I’m a member of LGBTQ community. Realizing that the word homosexual wasn’t in the Bible until 1946, that was a click for me. I think that it’s gonna be a click for a lot of people.
Even the basic principle that the Bibles we read were translated by a human, and there may have been a mistake in that translation—that’s a mind-blowing realization for people.
One of the biggest concerns that we see in America today is Christian nationalism and people using the Bible who are saying that it is inerrant. They are biblical literalists. It has sovereignty over us. It can’t be changed. The word is the word. That is dangerous. It’s dangerous for so many people. We see it playing out in our reality today, and I call that religious supremacy, really. My idea in finessing these themes is to hopefully get the conservative audience to join with us and be honest about this. Words have power and words have meaning. The way that we use the Bible and use these old texts is very important. So what we try to do is contextualize.
Our movie is more than just theology. It’s history. It’s society. It’s politics. It’s law. It’s oppression. It’s how, again, these words have meaning. We as a group of people have had to negotiate the text. A group of people over time have had to pick and choose which verses stand out, which verses we follow—which verses play out in our land and our law. To really be an honest reader of Christian scripture, we have to find a way where we’re not oppressing people, where we’ve contextualized the text—we understand where it comes from and how it impacted a group of people.
When you’re introducing this idea, which is seismic and likely upsetting to a lot of people, how do you explain it to them at the most basic level?
1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture is about the first time the word “homosexual” appeared in the Bible. We had a team of researchers who wanted to ask the question: Who made this decision, and why? What was discovered, through a series of letters written by the translation committee that put the word “homosexual” in there, is that it was a mistake. Then it was discovered how the word “homosexual” went viral in print in the ’70s. That impacted the ’80s and the moral majority, and how we see the merger of politics and religion, specifically in America. What we now see today is the dangers of Christian nationalism, and it’s only grown.
Can you talk more specifically about the mistranslation of the word “homosexual” and what happened there?
We’re talking about a word, a medical term that has a connotation of a group of people that have an orientation, as opposed to what the original Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic texts are referring to, which is an aggressor, somebody who was an abuser—somebody who has abused someone else, and there is a victim on the other side. It’s a very different connotation. So that was my drive for making the movie, because now I have tangible evidence, letters written from the committee [acknowledging this].
This translation committee also has not only recognized the error but continues to rectify it and make their translations reflect the connotation of abusive behavior. Whereas now we see malice in the conservative committees, who since the ’80s have done the opposite. They say it refers to consensual acts, so it’s been amplified as homophobia because of this mistranslation.
From my experience, I know there are many Christians who are unmoving in their beliefs, who operate from a point of blind faith. What is it like to arrive with all of this evidence, research, and proof—even just an ask to listen to what the movie is alleging—but be met with that stubborn certitude?
It’s like hitting a wall. You get two kinds of Christians. You get people like my dad. [Roggio’s father is a pastor who appears in the film and repeatedly challenges its claims.] They want us to think they love us so much, that they’re just trying to give us the truth. And my dad is very kind and he’s never hurtful. But there are other people that I’ll see, especially on social media, who turn their fear into anger and then hatred. They’re vicious. A lot of what I see on social media and TikTok is the epitome of the phrase “There’s no love like Christian hate.” They’re just so disgusting
We have reached a couple of people who actually will listen and watch the movie. But there are so many people who are so close-minded. It’s heartbreaking that people aren’t even open to recognizing us as human. It’s just dehumanizing. With the church being comfortable othering people—it’s not us, it’s you—it’s easy for them to dehumanize the LGBTQ person. A key barrier is that even some of these theologians that will put out this harmful rhetoric, they don’t have relationships with LGBTQ people.
One reason why I wanted to put my dad in the movie and my story in the movie is because we are a prime example of that “hitting the wall.” Here’s an example of someone who I love very much, who is my biggest oppressor. There’s no getting through to him at all. And so the other thing is, you know, we’re not going to change everybody’s minds, and that’s OK. But at the end of the day, my dad needs to keep his beliefs where they belong, and stay out where my beliefs are.
I don’t impede his equal rights and he doesn’t need to impede mine. I’m doing this to provide equal protection for everyone under the law, because if we don’t get a handle on this now, with the Bible in this country, we’re all in trouble—no matter what you believe.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/cm/ ... 16707.html
Re: Christianity
Fox News
Praying the rosary: Understanding the tradition that helps Catholics meditate on Jesus and Mother Mary
Christine Rousselle
Sun, November 13, 2022 at 8:02 AM
Scores of Catholics and other practicing Christians pray the rosary all year long — and many bestow gifts of rosaries on family and friends for Christmas and other special occasions.
What is the rosary, exactly — and how do the faithful use its beads?
"The rosary is a combination of vocal prayer (the Our Fathers and Hail Marys) and of mental prayer — namely, reflection on important events in the life of Christ and His Mother," according to the website for the Rosary Center & Confraternity, a ministry of the Dominicans of the Province of the Holy Name of Jesus, in Portland, Oregon.
The founder of the Dominican Order, St. Dominic, helped to popularize the rosary in the 13th century, the website also notes.
"St. Dominic was distressed at his lack of success in his preaching in countering heresy, and in his desperation turned to the Mother of God for help," the Rosary Center notes.
This heresy "wrongly taught that all material things, including the human body itself, were fundamentally evil," according to Catholic.org.
Rosary beads help a person keep place in the prayer, says the Rosary Center.
"She appeared to him (according to the tradition) and told him to use her Psalter in conjunction with his preaching of the mysteries of our salvation, as an instrument in combating the great heresy of his day."
Since then, the rosary and rosary beads have been associated with the Dominican Order — and modern-day Dominican friars and sisters wear a set of rosary beads as part of their habits.
A set of rosary beads today includes 50 smaller beads divided into groups of 10 by a larger bead, along with a pendant consisting of a cross and five additional smaller beads, explains the website.
"When one refers to the rosary" — meaning the prayer itself, which is sometimes capitalized — "it is usually understood to mean five decades, or one fourth of the entire rosary," the site says.
The full rosary prayer involves 20 decades, each meditating on a different supernatural mystery associated with Jesus Christ's life, death, resurrection and earthly ministry.
Each decade of the rosary involves saying 10 Hail Mary prayers while meditating on one mystery, says the Rosary Center website.
Due to the length of the prayer, the faithful may opt to use rosary beads in order to track their place. A Hail Mary is prayed on each of the smaller beads, and an Our Father (also known as "The Lord's Prayer") is prayed on the larger.
The five "Joyful Mysteries" about Jesus' birth and early life are traditionally prayed on Mondays and Saturdays, while the five "Sorrowful Mysteries" concerning the crucifixion of Jesus are traditionally prayed on Tuesdays and Fridays.
The five "Glorious Mysteries" regarding the resurrection of Christ are traditionally said on Wednesdays and Sundays — and the five "Luminous Mysteries" are prayed on Thursdays, according to the website.
Initially, the rosary prayer contained only 15 mysteries – the Joyful, Sorrowful and Glorious, Fr. Christopher M. Zelonis, pastor of Saints Peter and Paul Parish in Lehighton, Pennsylvania, told Fox News Digital.
"St. John Paul II’s letter ‘Rosarium Virginis Mariae’ in 2000 added the Mysteries of Light ('Luminous') to the 15 traditional mysteries," he said.
praying the rosary
"When one refers to the rosary" — meaning the prayer — "it is usually understood to mean five decades, or one fourth of the entire rosary," says the Rosary Center in Portland, Oregon.
Praying the 15 original mysteries involved reciting 150 Hail Mary prayers, a number that corresponds to the number of psalms in the Book of Psalms.
"I always understood [the rosary] as a ‘home version’ of the 150-psalm Psalter that monks recited daily," said Zelonis.
"The repeated Hail Mary serves as a backdrop for our personal meditation on the various aspects of Jesus’s life, seeking the unique perspective of his mother," he continued.
Zelonis said he is fond of using a scriptural rosary, which contains a passage to meditate on while praying. These can be found both printed and online, he said.
The meditative aspects of the rosary help immerse a person in prayer, said Zelonis. This is in comparison to the "pre-fab prayers" that are also part of church tradition.
Pre-written prayers "are best supplemented by our own meditation, by which God can lend some depth to our understanding and love of Jesus and Mary," he said.
"We can put ourselves in the biblical scene or envision it as if watching a film."
Another addition to the traditional rosary prayer is the inclusion of the optional "Fatima prayer" after each decade. The "Fatima prayer" originates from a reported 1917 apparition of the Virgin Mary in FATIMA, Portugal, according to the Rosary Center website.
October is known as the month of the rosary thanks in part to St. Pius V, a 16th-century pope, said Father William G. Most in his book, "Mary in Our Life."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/pr ... 25780.html
Praying the rosary: Understanding the tradition that helps Catholics meditate on Jesus and Mother Mary
Christine Rousselle
Sun, November 13, 2022 at 8:02 AM
Scores of Catholics and other practicing Christians pray the rosary all year long — and many bestow gifts of rosaries on family and friends for Christmas and other special occasions.
What is the rosary, exactly — and how do the faithful use its beads?
"The rosary is a combination of vocal prayer (the Our Fathers and Hail Marys) and of mental prayer — namely, reflection on important events in the life of Christ and His Mother," according to the website for the Rosary Center & Confraternity, a ministry of the Dominicans of the Province of the Holy Name of Jesus, in Portland, Oregon.
The founder of the Dominican Order, St. Dominic, helped to popularize the rosary in the 13th century, the website also notes.
"St. Dominic was distressed at his lack of success in his preaching in countering heresy, and in his desperation turned to the Mother of God for help," the Rosary Center notes.
This heresy "wrongly taught that all material things, including the human body itself, were fundamentally evil," according to Catholic.org.
Rosary beads help a person keep place in the prayer, says the Rosary Center.
"She appeared to him (according to the tradition) and told him to use her Psalter in conjunction with his preaching of the mysteries of our salvation, as an instrument in combating the great heresy of his day."
Since then, the rosary and rosary beads have been associated with the Dominican Order — and modern-day Dominican friars and sisters wear a set of rosary beads as part of their habits.
A set of rosary beads today includes 50 smaller beads divided into groups of 10 by a larger bead, along with a pendant consisting of a cross and five additional smaller beads, explains the website.
"When one refers to the rosary" — meaning the prayer itself, which is sometimes capitalized — "it is usually understood to mean five decades, or one fourth of the entire rosary," the site says.
The full rosary prayer involves 20 decades, each meditating on a different supernatural mystery associated with Jesus Christ's life, death, resurrection and earthly ministry.
Each decade of the rosary involves saying 10 Hail Mary prayers while meditating on one mystery, says the Rosary Center website.
Due to the length of the prayer, the faithful may opt to use rosary beads in order to track their place. A Hail Mary is prayed on each of the smaller beads, and an Our Father (also known as "The Lord's Prayer") is prayed on the larger.
The five "Joyful Mysteries" about Jesus' birth and early life are traditionally prayed on Mondays and Saturdays, while the five "Sorrowful Mysteries" concerning the crucifixion of Jesus are traditionally prayed on Tuesdays and Fridays.
The five "Glorious Mysteries" regarding the resurrection of Christ are traditionally said on Wednesdays and Sundays — and the five "Luminous Mysteries" are prayed on Thursdays, according to the website.
Initially, the rosary prayer contained only 15 mysteries – the Joyful, Sorrowful and Glorious, Fr. Christopher M. Zelonis, pastor of Saints Peter and Paul Parish in Lehighton, Pennsylvania, told Fox News Digital.
"St. John Paul II’s letter ‘Rosarium Virginis Mariae’ in 2000 added the Mysteries of Light ('Luminous') to the 15 traditional mysteries," he said.
praying the rosary
"When one refers to the rosary" — meaning the prayer — "it is usually understood to mean five decades, or one fourth of the entire rosary," says the Rosary Center in Portland, Oregon.
Praying the 15 original mysteries involved reciting 150 Hail Mary prayers, a number that corresponds to the number of psalms in the Book of Psalms.
"I always understood [the rosary] as a ‘home version’ of the 150-psalm Psalter that monks recited daily," said Zelonis.
"The repeated Hail Mary serves as a backdrop for our personal meditation on the various aspects of Jesus’s life, seeking the unique perspective of his mother," he continued.
Zelonis said he is fond of using a scriptural rosary, which contains a passage to meditate on while praying. These can be found both printed and online, he said.
The meditative aspects of the rosary help immerse a person in prayer, said Zelonis. This is in comparison to the "pre-fab prayers" that are also part of church tradition.
Pre-written prayers "are best supplemented by our own meditation, by which God can lend some depth to our understanding and love of Jesus and Mary," he said.
"We can put ourselves in the biblical scene or envision it as if watching a film."
Another addition to the traditional rosary prayer is the inclusion of the optional "Fatima prayer" after each decade. The "Fatima prayer" originates from a reported 1917 apparition of the Virgin Mary in FATIMA, Portugal, according to the Rosary Center website.
October is known as the month of the rosary thanks in part to St. Pius V, a 16th-century pope, said Father William G. Most in his book, "Mary in Our Life."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/pr ... 25780.html
Re: Christianity
The Conversation
Was Jesus really born in Bethlehem? Why the Gospels disagree over the circumstances of Christ's birth
Rodolfo Galvan Estrada III, Assistant Professor of the New Testament, Vanguard University
Sat, December 17, 2022 at 9:04 AM CS.
Yet the New Testament Gospels do not agree about the details of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem. Some do not mention Bethlehem or Jesus’ birth at all.
The Gospels’ different views might be hard to reconcile. But as a scholar of the New Testament, what I argue is that the Gospels offer an important insight into the Greco-Roman views of ethnic identity, including genealogies.
Today, genealogies may bring more awareness of one’s family medical history or help uncover lost family members. In the Greco-Roman era, birth stories and genealogical claims were used to establish rights to rule and link individuals with purported ancestral grandeur.
Gospel of Matthew
According to the Gospel of Matthew, the first Gospel in the canon of the New Testament, Joseph and Mary were in Bethlehem when Jesus was born. The story begins with wise men who come to the city of Jerusalem after seeing a star that they interpreted as signaling the birth of a new king.
It goes on to describe their meeting with the local Jewish king named Herod, of whom they inquire about the location of Jesus’ birth. The Gospel says that the star of Bethlehem subsequently leads them to a house – not a manger – where Jesus has been born to Joseph and Mary. Overjoyed, they worship Jesus and present gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. These were valuable gifts, especially frankincense and myrrh, which were costly fragrances that had medicinal use.
The Gospel explains that after their visit, Joseph has a dream where he is warned of Herod’s attempt to kill baby Jesus. When the wise men went to Herod with the news that a child had been born to be the king of the Jews, he made a plan to kill all young children to remove the threat to his throne. It then mentions how Joseph, Mary and infant Jesus leave for Egypt to escape King Herod’s attempt to assassinate all young children.
Matthew also says that after Herod dies from an illness, Joseph, Mary and Jesus do not return to Bethlehem. Instead, they travel north to Nazareth in Galilee, which is modern-day Nazareth in Israel.
Gospel of Luke
The Gospel of Luke, an account of Jesus’ life which was written during the same period as the Gospel of Matthew, has a different version of Jesus’ birth. The Gospel of Luke starts with Joseph and a pregnant Mary in Galilee. They journey to Bethlehem in response to a census that the Roman emperor Caesar Augustus required for all the Jewish people. Since Joseph was a descendant of King David, Bethlehem was the hometown where he was required to register.
The Gospel of Luke includes no flight to Egypt, no paranoid King Herod, no murder of children and no wise men visiting baby Jesus. Jesus is born in a manger because all the travelers overcrowded the guest rooms. After the birth, Joseph and Mary are visited not by wise men but shepherds, who were also overjoyed at Jesus’ birth.
Luke says these shepherds were notified about Jesus’ location in Bethlehem by angels. There is no guiding star in Luke’s story, nor do the shepherds bring gifts to baby Jesus. Luke also mentions that Joseph, Mary and Jesus leave Bethlehem eight days after his birth and travel to Jerusalem and then to Nazareth.
The differences between Matthew and Luke are nearly impossible to reconcile, although they do share some similarities. John Meier, a scholar on the historical Jesus, explains that Jesus’ “birth at Bethlehem is to be taken not as a historical fact” but as a “theological affirmation put into the form of an apparently historical narrative.” In other words, the belief that Jesus was a descendant of King David led to the development of a story about Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem.
Raymond Brown, another scholar on the Gospels, also states that “the two narratives are not only different – they are contrary to each other in a number of details.”
Mark’s and John’s Gospels
What makes it more difficult is that neither the other Gospels, that of Mark and John, mentions Jesus’ birth or his connection to Bethlehem.
The Gospel of Mark is the earliest account of Jesus’ life, written around A.D. 60. The opening chapter of Mark says that Jesus is from “Nazareth of Galilee.” This is repeated throughout the Gospel on several occasions, and Bethlehem is never mentioned.
A blind beggar in the Gospel of Mark describes Jesus as both from Nazareth and the son of David, the second king of Israel and Judah during 1010-970 B.C. But King David was not born in Nazareth, nor associated with that city. He was from Bethlehem. Yet Mark doesn’t identify Jesus with the city Bethlehem.
The Gospel of John, written approximately 15 to 20 years after that of Mark, also does not associate Jesus with Bethlehem. Galilee is Jesus’ hometown. Jesus finds his first disciples, does several miracles and has brothers in Galilee.
This is not to say that John was unaware of Bethlehem’s significance. John mentions a debate where some Jewish people referred to the prophecy which claimed that the messiah would be a descendant of David and come from Bethlehem. But Jesus according to John’s Gospel is never associated with Bethlehem, but with Galilee, and more specifically, Nazareth.
The Gospels of Mark and John reveal that they either had trouble linking Bethlehem with Jesus, did not know his birthplace, or were not concerned with this city.
These were not the only ones. Apostle Paul, who wrote the earliest documents of the New Testament, considered Jesus a descendant of David but does not associate him with Bethlehem. The Book of Revelation also affirms that Jesus was a descendant of David but does not mention Bethlehem.
An ethnic identity
During the period of Jesus’ life, there were multiple perspectives on the Messiah. In one stream of Jewish thought, the Messiah was expected to be an everlasting ruler from the lineage of David. Other Jewish texts, such as the book 4 Ezra, written in the same century as the Gospels, and the Jewish sectarian Qumran literature, which is written two centuries earlier, also echo this belief.
But within the Hebrew Bible, a prophetic book called Micah, thought to be written around B.C. 722, prophesies that the messiah would come from David’s hometown, Bethlehem. This text is repeated in Matthew’s version. Luke mentions that Jesus is not only genealogically connected to King David, but also born in Bethlehem, “the city of David.”
Genealogical claims were made for important ancient founders and political leaders. For example, Ion, the founder of the Greek colonies in Asia, was considered to be a descendant of Apollo. Alexander the Great, whose empire reached from Macedonia to India, was claimed to be a son of Hercules. Caesar Augustus, who was the first Roman emperor, was proclaimed as a descendant of Apollo. And a Jewish writer named Philo who lived in the first century wrote that Abraham and the Jewish priest and prophets were born of God.
Regardless of whether these claims were accepted at the time to be true, they shaped a person’s ethnic identity, political status and claims to honor. As the Greek historian Polybius explains, the renown deeds of ancestors are “part of the heritage of posterity.”
Matthew and Luke’s inclusion of the city of Bethlehem contributed to the claim that Jesus was the Messiah from a Davidic lineage. They made sure that readers were aware of Jesus’ genealogical connection to King David with the mention of this city. Birth stories in Bethlehem solidified the claim that Jesus was a rightful descendant of King David.
So today, when the importance of Bethlehem is heard in Christmas carols or displayed in Nativity scenes, the name of the town connects Jesus to an ancestral lineage and the prophetic hope for a new leader like King David.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/je ... 45326.html
Was Jesus really born in Bethlehem? Why the Gospels disagree over the circumstances of Christ's birth
Rodolfo Galvan Estrada III, Assistant Professor of the New Testament, Vanguard University
Sat, December 17, 2022 at 9:04 AM CS.
Yet the New Testament Gospels do not agree about the details of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem. Some do not mention Bethlehem or Jesus’ birth at all.
The Gospels’ different views might be hard to reconcile. But as a scholar of the New Testament, what I argue is that the Gospels offer an important insight into the Greco-Roman views of ethnic identity, including genealogies.
Today, genealogies may bring more awareness of one’s family medical history or help uncover lost family members. In the Greco-Roman era, birth stories and genealogical claims were used to establish rights to rule and link individuals with purported ancestral grandeur.
Gospel of Matthew
According to the Gospel of Matthew, the first Gospel in the canon of the New Testament, Joseph and Mary were in Bethlehem when Jesus was born. The story begins with wise men who come to the city of Jerusalem after seeing a star that they interpreted as signaling the birth of a new king.
It goes on to describe their meeting with the local Jewish king named Herod, of whom they inquire about the location of Jesus’ birth. The Gospel says that the star of Bethlehem subsequently leads them to a house – not a manger – where Jesus has been born to Joseph and Mary. Overjoyed, they worship Jesus and present gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. These were valuable gifts, especially frankincense and myrrh, which were costly fragrances that had medicinal use.
The Gospel explains that after their visit, Joseph has a dream where he is warned of Herod’s attempt to kill baby Jesus. When the wise men went to Herod with the news that a child had been born to be the king of the Jews, he made a plan to kill all young children to remove the threat to his throne. It then mentions how Joseph, Mary and infant Jesus leave for Egypt to escape King Herod’s attempt to assassinate all young children.
Matthew also says that after Herod dies from an illness, Joseph, Mary and Jesus do not return to Bethlehem. Instead, they travel north to Nazareth in Galilee, which is modern-day Nazareth in Israel.
Gospel of Luke
The Gospel of Luke, an account of Jesus’ life which was written during the same period as the Gospel of Matthew, has a different version of Jesus’ birth. The Gospel of Luke starts with Joseph and a pregnant Mary in Galilee. They journey to Bethlehem in response to a census that the Roman emperor Caesar Augustus required for all the Jewish people. Since Joseph was a descendant of King David, Bethlehem was the hometown where he was required to register.
The Gospel of Luke includes no flight to Egypt, no paranoid King Herod, no murder of children and no wise men visiting baby Jesus. Jesus is born in a manger because all the travelers overcrowded the guest rooms. After the birth, Joseph and Mary are visited not by wise men but shepherds, who were also overjoyed at Jesus’ birth.
Luke says these shepherds were notified about Jesus’ location in Bethlehem by angels. There is no guiding star in Luke’s story, nor do the shepherds bring gifts to baby Jesus. Luke also mentions that Joseph, Mary and Jesus leave Bethlehem eight days after his birth and travel to Jerusalem and then to Nazareth.
The differences between Matthew and Luke are nearly impossible to reconcile, although they do share some similarities. John Meier, a scholar on the historical Jesus, explains that Jesus’ “birth at Bethlehem is to be taken not as a historical fact” but as a “theological affirmation put into the form of an apparently historical narrative.” In other words, the belief that Jesus was a descendant of King David led to the development of a story about Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem.
Raymond Brown, another scholar on the Gospels, also states that “the two narratives are not only different – they are contrary to each other in a number of details.”
Mark’s and John’s Gospels
What makes it more difficult is that neither the other Gospels, that of Mark and John, mentions Jesus’ birth or his connection to Bethlehem.
The Gospel of Mark is the earliest account of Jesus’ life, written around A.D. 60. The opening chapter of Mark says that Jesus is from “Nazareth of Galilee.” This is repeated throughout the Gospel on several occasions, and Bethlehem is never mentioned.
A blind beggar in the Gospel of Mark describes Jesus as both from Nazareth and the son of David, the second king of Israel and Judah during 1010-970 B.C. But King David was not born in Nazareth, nor associated with that city. He was from Bethlehem. Yet Mark doesn’t identify Jesus with the city Bethlehem.
The Gospel of John, written approximately 15 to 20 years after that of Mark, also does not associate Jesus with Bethlehem. Galilee is Jesus’ hometown. Jesus finds his first disciples, does several miracles and has brothers in Galilee.
This is not to say that John was unaware of Bethlehem’s significance. John mentions a debate where some Jewish people referred to the prophecy which claimed that the messiah would be a descendant of David and come from Bethlehem. But Jesus according to John’s Gospel is never associated with Bethlehem, but with Galilee, and more specifically, Nazareth.
The Gospels of Mark and John reveal that they either had trouble linking Bethlehem with Jesus, did not know his birthplace, or were not concerned with this city.
These were not the only ones. Apostle Paul, who wrote the earliest documents of the New Testament, considered Jesus a descendant of David but does not associate him with Bethlehem. The Book of Revelation also affirms that Jesus was a descendant of David but does not mention Bethlehem.
An ethnic identity
During the period of Jesus’ life, there were multiple perspectives on the Messiah. In one stream of Jewish thought, the Messiah was expected to be an everlasting ruler from the lineage of David. Other Jewish texts, such as the book 4 Ezra, written in the same century as the Gospels, and the Jewish sectarian Qumran literature, which is written two centuries earlier, also echo this belief.
But within the Hebrew Bible, a prophetic book called Micah, thought to be written around B.C. 722, prophesies that the messiah would come from David’s hometown, Bethlehem. This text is repeated in Matthew’s version. Luke mentions that Jesus is not only genealogically connected to King David, but also born in Bethlehem, “the city of David.”
Genealogical claims were made for important ancient founders and political leaders. For example, Ion, the founder of the Greek colonies in Asia, was considered to be a descendant of Apollo. Alexander the Great, whose empire reached from Macedonia to India, was claimed to be a son of Hercules. Caesar Augustus, who was the first Roman emperor, was proclaimed as a descendant of Apollo. And a Jewish writer named Philo who lived in the first century wrote that Abraham and the Jewish priest and prophets were born of God.
Regardless of whether these claims were accepted at the time to be true, they shaped a person’s ethnic identity, political status and claims to honor. As the Greek historian Polybius explains, the renown deeds of ancestors are “part of the heritage of posterity.”
Matthew and Luke’s inclusion of the city of Bethlehem contributed to the claim that Jesus was the Messiah from a Davidic lineage. They made sure that readers were aware of Jesus’ genealogical connection to King David with the mention of this city. Birth stories in Bethlehem solidified the claim that Jesus was a rightful descendant of King David.
So today, when the importance of Bethlehem is heard in Christmas carols or displayed in Nativity scenes, the name of the town connects Jesus to an ancestral lineage and the prophetic hope for a new leader like King David.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/je ... 45326.html
Re: Christianity
The Daily Beast
The Wild Tale of How John the Baptist’s Head Ended Up in France’s Largest Cathedral
R. Howard Bloch
Fri, December 23, 2022 at 10:08 PM CS
On the evening of Sept. 8, 1206, Walon de Sarton, a minor cleric who had participated in the crusader capture of Constantinople in April 1204, made an astonishing discovery. As a canon of the church of Saint George Mangana along the water at the southeastern part of the city, he should have participated in the vespers service. But he had just returned from military maneuvers as part of the effort to secure control of the countryside wrested from the Byzantine or Greek leaders after the French and German knights who had participated in the fourth crusade had failed to reach their original goal of recapturing the Muslim-controlled city of Jerusalem and had turned upon the Christian city of Constantinople instead. Walon had not had time to shave or to tonsure his hair. This was no small matter. A Church council held at Toulouse in 1119 prescribed excommunication for any cleric who, “like a layman, allowed hair and beard to grow.” The current Pope Alexander III decreed that the churchman with excessively long hair or beard was to be shorn, by force if necessary. So, Walon hesitated to enter the choir with his fellow clerics.
In an alcove between the main altar and a building “where,” according to his own testimony, “no living creature lived,” a former pleasure palace of emperors, he had hoped to recite his prayers discreetly when his eyes fell upon a window stuffed with straw and other stray matter. Someone clearly had wanted to hide something but had neither the time nor the materials to seal the opening with mortar. In the pillaging of the Byzantine capital, there had been many such attempts to conceal precious secular and religious objects from the avid French and Venetian raiders. Removing the straw, Walon found a vase containing the remains of a finger and an arm, with other objects further in the recess.
Reaching beyond the vase, he felt two leather pouches, and, opening them, two large silver plates. In the safety of his room, he looked at the two silver dishes and noticed that each contained fragments of writing in Greek. On one, the inscription, “ΑΓΙΟΣ ΓΕΟΡΓΙΟΣ,” and, on the other, “ΑΓΙΟΣ ΙΟΑΝΝΗΣ ΠΡΟΔΡΟΜΟΣ.” Neither understanding Greek nor wanting to ask anyone for help, for fear of revealing what he had found, Walon wandered from church to church in Constantinople until he came upon images with similar letters. Imagine his surprise at learning that his discovery of the evening of September 8 was none other than the heads of Saint George and of Saint John the Baptist, as indicated by the word “ΠΡΟΔΡΟΜΟΣ,” “Precursor.” John, whose own birth was shrouded in mystery, proclaimed the arrival of Christ whom he baptized in the River Jordan before himself meeting a violent death at the hands of King Herod. The Gospels of Luke, Mark, and Matthew contain the story of John’s rebuke of King Herod for having put aside his legitimate wife and taken his brother’s wife, Herodias, who was angry at the reproach and repeatedly sought revenge. In the course of a banquet in or around the year 30 CE, Herod was captivated by the dancing of Herodias’s daughter Salome and offered her the reward of her choice. Salome, consulting her mother, asked for the head of John the Baptist, who was already in Herod’s prison, on a platter. In the cycle of the life of Christ, there is no more important figure than John the Baptist, no more sacred object than the head that had announced in real time the coming of the Messiah.
Holding the two sacred sacks in his hands, Walon faced a dilemma. In order to avoid the disorder of wild pillaging and to ensure equal distribution of booty, the crusaders had in the month before their successful assault upon the richest city in the world sworn an oath that liturgical objects—relics, crosses, icons, platters, and other vessels—should be placed in a common stockpile to be distributed under the supervision of Bishop Garnier of Troyes according to the “quality and merit” of individual knights, squires, and clerics. Not all had complied, of course. As one of the leaders of the fourth crusade and its most vivid chronicler, Marshal of Champagne Geoffrey Villehardouin, noted, “Some were honest in presenting their spoils, others deceitful,” risking excommunication by the Pope or even execution: “a good number were hanged.”
Walon had at the outset been one of the good ones. Having come into possession of the head of Saint Christopher, the arm of Saint Eleuthere, and the relics of several “other joyous saints,” he returned them to the general store and received nothing in return. He must have known that others had fewer scruples than he did and that they had provided for themselves the kind of generous homecoming that the heads of Saints George and John the Baptist might afford him. He might even have witnessed the defilement of holy objects in the most sacred of places, the church of Hagia Sophia, built by the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century as the cathedral of Constantinople and the largest and most elaborate building on earth. So great was the haul that the marauding crusaders, in the words of Niketas Choniates, the aristocratic former imperial secretary, brought into “the very sanctuary of the temple itself mules and asses with pack saddles; some of these, unable to keep their feet on the smoothly polished marble floors, slipped and were pierced by knives so that the excrement from the bowels and the spilled blood defiled the sacred floor.” All who were there remarked upon the extraordinary quantity of church possessions that were looted in the aftermath of 1204.
Given the extraordinary nature of his discovery, Walon made a decision. Separating the smaller bejeweled plates, which contained portions of the heads of Saints George and John the Baptist, from the larger silver plates on which they were mounted, he crossed the commercial districts formerly occupied by the Genoese, Amalfitan, and Pisan traders in Constantinople, to the Venetian quarter, which had dominated trade between Byzantium and the West since the Conquest. There Walon sold the fungible portion of his findings. He now had enough money for the journey home, and the smaller size of the bundles he would be carrying made the relics easier to hide. But Walon apparently felt guilty, and so he vowed to dedicate to pious works any money in excess of what would be needed for travel back to Picardie.
On September 30, 1206, with sacred loot under each arm, Walon headed for one of the Venetian-controlled harbors between the city wall and the Golden Horn. As he emerged from the city gate, he could see the warehouses and shops, the money-changing stalls and the taverns along the “steps” between the wall and the water. On one side of the deep curved port, he observed ships loading and unloading their commercial goods; on the other, the shipbuilding yard and the enclosure reserved for the manufacture of oars. On the far shore of the inlet, Walon caught a last glimpse of the Galata tower which, until the arrival of the crusaders in Constantinople, had been the place from which the iron chain across the harbor was controlled and was the first structure to fall under crusader attack.
When Walon boarded the ship for Venice, he was not traveling alone. His companion, a fellow cleric named Wibert, had been the chaplain of Aleaumes de Fontaines, a knight who had participated in the sacking of Constantinople but who had died in Greece in 1205. Wibert, too, was carrying relics back to a church near Amiens, the Abbey of Longpré. Walon’s and Wibert’s ship, one of the mixed genre combining sails with rowers, not a ship designed for the open seas, but for island and coastal hopping, sailed through the Sea of Marmara and the Dardanelles. Having alighted for only one night at the island and coastal natural ports along the way, the travelers to Venice probably spent several days on Crete while the crew rested, merchants on board bought wheat, wine, cheese, and wool, and sold spices picked up in Constantinople. The boat was no doubt reloaded with grain, oil, meat, eggs, dried fish, and especially with barrels of water for the trip against adverse winds and currents around the Peloponnesian peninsula and up the Adriatic. The voyage, managed until then mostly under sail, would now periodically require the manpower of rowers, and rowing required hydration.
Walon’s ship hugged the Balkan coast up the Adriatic, which was much more favorable than the Italian side, the lee shore toward which ships were naturally blown. The travelers reached Venice thirty days after setting out from Constantinople. They had made good time. The distance between the two ports is 1169 nautical miles, which meant that they had travelled thirty-nine miles per day. The average October day in the region provided twelve hours of sunlight, which put their average speed at a little over three miles per hour, perhaps even a little more, considering layovers in major trading and supply ports.
The port of Venice bustled with the trading and military energy of its newfound empire which stretched all along the route that Walon and Wibert had traveled. They were anxious to begin their overland journey to Picardie. Once ferried from Venice to the mainland, they retraced the route they had taken almost five years earlier. Crossing the Veneto and Lombardy, they arrived around the middle of the month of November in Piacenza, where crusaders from the North as well as from the West had originally assembled on their way to Venice in 1202. They pushed on to Asti, Chieri, and Turin, then to Susa at the foot of the mountains where they traversed into what is now France via the Mont-Cenis pass.
The returning crusaders headed north and, skirting the Lac du Bourget, turned west to the towns of Belley and Saint Rambert, currently Saint-Rambert-en-Bugey where Walon reports that they were robbed, losing some of jewels they had brought from Constantinople but not the holy head. They crossed the Ain river and then the Saône, probably at the bridge at Chalon-sur-Saône, which took them through rich wine country, past Beaune, Nuits-Saint-Georges, Vosne-Romanée, Chambolle-Musigny, and Gevrey-Chambertin, to Dijon, and from Dijon to Châtillon-sur-Seine, and on to Troyes. It was a day’s ride to Noyon, then to Roye, and another day to Beaufort-en-Santerre where Walon sent word to his uncle Pierre de Sarton of his return bearing one of the most sacred and prestigious relics ever to arrive in the West.
Pierre, a canon of the cathedral of Amiens, alerted Bishop Richard de Gerberoy, who sent a delegation to meet Walon at Beaufort, some twelve miles from the center of the city. On December 17, 1206, an assembly of clergy and representatives of all the various constituencies of Amiens accompanied Walon to the gates of town. There, they were met, according to the returning clerical hero, by the bishop, “dressed pontifically, and by the all the clergy, followed by a great rush of townspeople who, with all imaginable demonstrations of joy, broke out into hymns, canticles, and other prayers, all sung in honor of the Precursor. . . .” The head of Saint John the Baptist, having been taken out of hiding in Constantinople, smuggled by ship to Venice, and then overland along the most frequented trade routes of Europe, arrived at last in Amiens. As seen in this quatrefoil relief, Bishop Gerberoy took the sacred head of Saint John the Baptist in his hands and carried it into the church of Saint Firmin where it remained until the building of the great cathedral that still stands today.
Regardless of its reality, the arrival of the head of John the Baptist in Amiens coincided with the construction of a new cathedral in the Gothic style. As elsewhere, the story of building is one of fires. The town was destroyed by flames in the twelfth century, and a Romanesque cathedral was built between 1137 and 1152. That church was devastated in 1218 by another fire, like that of Chartres in 1194, of dubious origin. Amiens had gained enormous prestige with the arrival of the face relic of Saint John in 1206, yet a cathedral in the old Romanesque style was not sufficiently forward-looking in light of the new Gothic churches begun in Paris in 1163, Soissons in 1176, Chartres in 1194, and Reims in 1211. There was tremendous pressure to rebuild, and the laying of the equivalent of a cornerstone, a masonry block on the southern transept with the outline of a Dutch trowel, only two years after the fire of 1218, indicates a welcome readiness of funds, communal will, and urban initiative, all coordinated in this initial phase by two bishops—Évrard de Fouilly (d. 1222), described on his tombstone on the south part of the nave as “He who provided for the people, who laid the foundations of this edifice, to whose care the city was entrusted,” and Geoffroy d’Eu (d. 1236), who lies on the north side, on a “humble bed, in preparation for a lesser or an equal one for us all.” The enterprising builder-bishops negotiated a complicated plan for the urban renewal of thirteenth-century Amiens. The collegial school of Saint Firmin the Confessor and the hospital or Hôtel Dieu were displaced in order to align the towers of the new cathedral along the old Roman road between Senlis and the port of Boulogne.
A metal plaque at the center of the labyrinth in the nave of Notre-Dame d’Amiens—one of only two, along with that of Chartres—provides the names of the architects or master masons who supervised the work and attests to its rapidity: “In the year of grace one thousand two hundred and twenty was the work herein first begun. At that time Evrard was the blessed bishop of this bishopric and Louis King of France, who was the son of Philip the Wise (Philip Augustus). The one who was master builder was Master Robert, whose surname was Luzarches. It was Master Thomas de Cormont after him, and after him, his son Master Renaud who had these letters placed here, in the year of Incarnation 1300, minus 12 (1288).” Because of the speed with which first the transept, then the nave and apse, were completed, conditions favoring unity of design and execution, Amiens is considered by some to be the most perfect of French cathedrals—“the Parthenon of Gothic architecture,” in the phrase of Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, who contributed to its restoration in the 1850s. Notre-Dame d’Amiens is also the biggest cathedral of the thirteenth century—475 feet long, 230 feet wide through the transept, and 140 feet high under the vaults of the nave. Only Beauvais, at 158 feet, is higher, but was never completed beyond the transept crossing and choir.
Adapted from Paris and Her Cathedrals by R. Howard Bloch.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/wi ... 19123.html
The Wild Tale of How John the Baptist’s Head Ended Up in France’s Largest Cathedral
R. Howard Bloch
Fri, December 23, 2022 at 10:08 PM CS
On the evening of Sept. 8, 1206, Walon de Sarton, a minor cleric who had participated in the crusader capture of Constantinople in April 1204, made an astonishing discovery. As a canon of the church of Saint George Mangana along the water at the southeastern part of the city, he should have participated in the vespers service. But he had just returned from military maneuvers as part of the effort to secure control of the countryside wrested from the Byzantine or Greek leaders after the French and German knights who had participated in the fourth crusade had failed to reach their original goal of recapturing the Muslim-controlled city of Jerusalem and had turned upon the Christian city of Constantinople instead. Walon had not had time to shave or to tonsure his hair. This was no small matter. A Church council held at Toulouse in 1119 prescribed excommunication for any cleric who, “like a layman, allowed hair and beard to grow.” The current Pope Alexander III decreed that the churchman with excessively long hair or beard was to be shorn, by force if necessary. So, Walon hesitated to enter the choir with his fellow clerics.
In an alcove between the main altar and a building “where,” according to his own testimony, “no living creature lived,” a former pleasure palace of emperors, he had hoped to recite his prayers discreetly when his eyes fell upon a window stuffed with straw and other stray matter. Someone clearly had wanted to hide something but had neither the time nor the materials to seal the opening with mortar. In the pillaging of the Byzantine capital, there had been many such attempts to conceal precious secular and religious objects from the avid French and Venetian raiders. Removing the straw, Walon found a vase containing the remains of a finger and an arm, with other objects further in the recess.
Reaching beyond the vase, he felt two leather pouches, and, opening them, two large silver plates. In the safety of his room, he looked at the two silver dishes and noticed that each contained fragments of writing in Greek. On one, the inscription, “ΑΓΙΟΣ ΓΕΟΡΓΙΟΣ,” and, on the other, “ΑΓΙΟΣ ΙΟΑΝΝΗΣ ΠΡΟΔΡΟΜΟΣ.” Neither understanding Greek nor wanting to ask anyone for help, for fear of revealing what he had found, Walon wandered from church to church in Constantinople until he came upon images with similar letters. Imagine his surprise at learning that his discovery of the evening of September 8 was none other than the heads of Saint George and of Saint John the Baptist, as indicated by the word “ΠΡΟΔΡΟΜΟΣ,” “Precursor.” John, whose own birth was shrouded in mystery, proclaimed the arrival of Christ whom he baptized in the River Jordan before himself meeting a violent death at the hands of King Herod. The Gospels of Luke, Mark, and Matthew contain the story of John’s rebuke of King Herod for having put aside his legitimate wife and taken his brother’s wife, Herodias, who was angry at the reproach and repeatedly sought revenge. In the course of a banquet in or around the year 30 CE, Herod was captivated by the dancing of Herodias’s daughter Salome and offered her the reward of her choice. Salome, consulting her mother, asked for the head of John the Baptist, who was already in Herod’s prison, on a platter. In the cycle of the life of Christ, there is no more important figure than John the Baptist, no more sacred object than the head that had announced in real time the coming of the Messiah.
Holding the two sacred sacks in his hands, Walon faced a dilemma. In order to avoid the disorder of wild pillaging and to ensure equal distribution of booty, the crusaders had in the month before their successful assault upon the richest city in the world sworn an oath that liturgical objects—relics, crosses, icons, platters, and other vessels—should be placed in a common stockpile to be distributed under the supervision of Bishop Garnier of Troyes according to the “quality and merit” of individual knights, squires, and clerics. Not all had complied, of course. As one of the leaders of the fourth crusade and its most vivid chronicler, Marshal of Champagne Geoffrey Villehardouin, noted, “Some were honest in presenting their spoils, others deceitful,” risking excommunication by the Pope or even execution: “a good number were hanged.”
Walon had at the outset been one of the good ones. Having come into possession of the head of Saint Christopher, the arm of Saint Eleuthere, and the relics of several “other joyous saints,” he returned them to the general store and received nothing in return. He must have known that others had fewer scruples than he did and that they had provided for themselves the kind of generous homecoming that the heads of Saints George and John the Baptist might afford him. He might even have witnessed the defilement of holy objects in the most sacred of places, the church of Hagia Sophia, built by the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century as the cathedral of Constantinople and the largest and most elaborate building on earth. So great was the haul that the marauding crusaders, in the words of Niketas Choniates, the aristocratic former imperial secretary, brought into “the very sanctuary of the temple itself mules and asses with pack saddles; some of these, unable to keep their feet on the smoothly polished marble floors, slipped and were pierced by knives so that the excrement from the bowels and the spilled blood defiled the sacred floor.” All who were there remarked upon the extraordinary quantity of church possessions that were looted in the aftermath of 1204.
Given the extraordinary nature of his discovery, Walon made a decision. Separating the smaller bejeweled plates, which contained portions of the heads of Saints George and John the Baptist, from the larger silver plates on which they were mounted, he crossed the commercial districts formerly occupied by the Genoese, Amalfitan, and Pisan traders in Constantinople, to the Venetian quarter, which had dominated trade between Byzantium and the West since the Conquest. There Walon sold the fungible portion of his findings. He now had enough money for the journey home, and the smaller size of the bundles he would be carrying made the relics easier to hide. But Walon apparently felt guilty, and so he vowed to dedicate to pious works any money in excess of what would be needed for travel back to Picardie.
On September 30, 1206, with sacred loot under each arm, Walon headed for one of the Venetian-controlled harbors between the city wall and the Golden Horn. As he emerged from the city gate, he could see the warehouses and shops, the money-changing stalls and the taverns along the “steps” between the wall and the water. On one side of the deep curved port, he observed ships loading and unloading their commercial goods; on the other, the shipbuilding yard and the enclosure reserved for the manufacture of oars. On the far shore of the inlet, Walon caught a last glimpse of the Galata tower which, until the arrival of the crusaders in Constantinople, had been the place from which the iron chain across the harbor was controlled and was the first structure to fall under crusader attack.
When Walon boarded the ship for Venice, he was not traveling alone. His companion, a fellow cleric named Wibert, had been the chaplain of Aleaumes de Fontaines, a knight who had participated in the sacking of Constantinople but who had died in Greece in 1205. Wibert, too, was carrying relics back to a church near Amiens, the Abbey of Longpré. Walon’s and Wibert’s ship, one of the mixed genre combining sails with rowers, not a ship designed for the open seas, but for island and coastal hopping, sailed through the Sea of Marmara and the Dardanelles. Having alighted for only one night at the island and coastal natural ports along the way, the travelers to Venice probably spent several days on Crete while the crew rested, merchants on board bought wheat, wine, cheese, and wool, and sold spices picked up in Constantinople. The boat was no doubt reloaded with grain, oil, meat, eggs, dried fish, and especially with barrels of water for the trip against adverse winds and currents around the Peloponnesian peninsula and up the Adriatic. The voyage, managed until then mostly under sail, would now periodically require the manpower of rowers, and rowing required hydration.
Walon’s ship hugged the Balkan coast up the Adriatic, which was much more favorable than the Italian side, the lee shore toward which ships were naturally blown. The travelers reached Venice thirty days after setting out from Constantinople. They had made good time. The distance between the two ports is 1169 nautical miles, which meant that they had travelled thirty-nine miles per day. The average October day in the region provided twelve hours of sunlight, which put their average speed at a little over three miles per hour, perhaps even a little more, considering layovers in major trading and supply ports.
The port of Venice bustled with the trading and military energy of its newfound empire which stretched all along the route that Walon and Wibert had traveled. They were anxious to begin their overland journey to Picardie. Once ferried from Venice to the mainland, they retraced the route they had taken almost five years earlier. Crossing the Veneto and Lombardy, they arrived around the middle of the month of November in Piacenza, where crusaders from the North as well as from the West had originally assembled on their way to Venice in 1202. They pushed on to Asti, Chieri, and Turin, then to Susa at the foot of the mountains where they traversed into what is now France via the Mont-Cenis pass.
The returning crusaders headed north and, skirting the Lac du Bourget, turned west to the towns of Belley and Saint Rambert, currently Saint-Rambert-en-Bugey where Walon reports that they were robbed, losing some of jewels they had brought from Constantinople but not the holy head. They crossed the Ain river and then the Saône, probably at the bridge at Chalon-sur-Saône, which took them through rich wine country, past Beaune, Nuits-Saint-Georges, Vosne-Romanée, Chambolle-Musigny, and Gevrey-Chambertin, to Dijon, and from Dijon to Châtillon-sur-Seine, and on to Troyes. It was a day’s ride to Noyon, then to Roye, and another day to Beaufort-en-Santerre where Walon sent word to his uncle Pierre de Sarton of his return bearing one of the most sacred and prestigious relics ever to arrive in the West.
Pierre, a canon of the cathedral of Amiens, alerted Bishop Richard de Gerberoy, who sent a delegation to meet Walon at Beaufort, some twelve miles from the center of the city. On December 17, 1206, an assembly of clergy and representatives of all the various constituencies of Amiens accompanied Walon to the gates of town. There, they were met, according to the returning clerical hero, by the bishop, “dressed pontifically, and by the all the clergy, followed by a great rush of townspeople who, with all imaginable demonstrations of joy, broke out into hymns, canticles, and other prayers, all sung in honor of the Precursor. . . .” The head of Saint John the Baptist, having been taken out of hiding in Constantinople, smuggled by ship to Venice, and then overland along the most frequented trade routes of Europe, arrived at last in Amiens. As seen in this quatrefoil relief, Bishop Gerberoy took the sacred head of Saint John the Baptist in his hands and carried it into the church of Saint Firmin where it remained until the building of the great cathedral that still stands today.
Regardless of its reality, the arrival of the head of John the Baptist in Amiens coincided with the construction of a new cathedral in the Gothic style. As elsewhere, the story of building is one of fires. The town was destroyed by flames in the twelfth century, and a Romanesque cathedral was built between 1137 and 1152. That church was devastated in 1218 by another fire, like that of Chartres in 1194, of dubious origin. Amiens had gained enormous prestige with the arrival of the face relic of Saint John in 1206, yet a cathedral in the old Romanesque style was not sufficiently forward-looking in light of the new Gothic churches begun in Paris in 1163, Soissons in 1176, Chartres in 1194, and Reims in 1211. There was tremendous pressure to rebuild, and the laying of the equivalent of a cornerstone, a masonry block on the southern transept with the outline of a Dutch trowel, only two years after the fire of 1218, indicates a welcome readiness of funds, communal will, and urban initiative, all coordinated in this initial phase by two bishops—Évrard de Fouilly (d. 1222), described on his tombstone on the south part of the nave as “He who provided for the people, who laid the foundations of this edifice, to whose care the city was entrusted,” and Geoffroy d’Eu (d. 1236), who lies on the north side, on a “humble bed, in preparation for a lesser or an equal one for us all.” The enterprising builder-bishops negotiated a complicated plan for the urban renewal of thirteenth-century Amiens. The collegial school of Saint Firmin the Confessor and the hospital or Hôtel Dieu were displaced in order to align the towers of the new cathedral along the old Roman road between Senlis and the port of Boulogne.
A metal plaque at the center of the labyrinth in the nave of Notre-Dame d’Amiens—one of only two, along with that of Chartres—provides the names of the architects or master masons who supervised the work and attests to its rapidity: “In the year of grace one thousand two hundred and twenty was the work herein first begun. At that time Evrard was the blessed bishop of this bishopric and Louis King of France, who was the son of Philip the Wise (Philip Augustus). The one who was master builder was Master Robert, whose surname was Luzarches. It was Master Thomas de Cormont after him, and after him, his son Master Renaud who had these letters placed here, in the year of Incarnation 1300, minus 12 (1288).” Because of the speed with which first the transept, then the nave and apse, were completed, conditions favoring unity of design and execution, Amiens is considered by some to be the most perfect of French cathedrals—“the Parthenon of Gothic architecture,” in the phrase of Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, who contributed to its restoration in the 1850s. Notre-Dame d’Amiens is also the biggest cathedral of the thirteenth century—475 feet long, 230 feet wide through the transept, and 140 feet high under the vaults of the nave. Only Beauvais, at 158 feet, is higher, but was never completed beyond the transept crossing and choir.
Adapted from Paris and Her Cathedrals by R. Howard Bloch.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/wi ... 19123.html
Re: Christianity
Philippines holds bloody crucifixions on Good Friday despite Catholic church objection
Michelle De Pacina
Fri, April 7, 2023 at 4:35 PM CDT
A province in the Philippines held bloody crucifixions to uphold a local Good Friday tradition despite the objection of the Catholic church.
The religious tradition saw eight people nailed to wooden crosses wearing thorny crowns of twigs as they reenacted the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on Good Friday, according to The Associated Press.
Good Friday is a Christian holiday that commemorates the crucifixion and death of Christ before his resurrection on Easter Sunday.
The crucifixions, which were held in San Pedro Cutud, Pampanga, are the province’s first display of religious devotion after a three-year pause due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Prior to the crucifixions, devotees carried heavy crosses on their backs for more than half a mile to the top of a hill. Hundreds of others also walked barefoot and whipped their bare backs with sharp bamboo sticks.
Villagers dressed as Roman centurions later hammered 4-inch stainless steel nails through the eight men’s palms and feet. They were then left on the cross under the sun for about 10 minutes.
One of the men was 62-year-old sign painter Ruben Enaje, who has now reportedly participated in the crucifixions a total of 34 times.
“To be honest, I always feel nervous because I could end up dead on the cross,” Enaje told The Associated Press before his crucifixion. “When I’m laid down on the cross, my body begins to feel cold. When my hands are tied, I just close my eyes and tell myself, ‘I can do this. I can do this.’”
While on the cross, Enaje said he prayed to God for the end of the COVID-19 virus and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The 62-year-old reportedly chose to devote his life to Christ after surviving what he described as a miracle. Enaje said he survived uninjured after falling from a three-story building in 1985. He then extended the ritual after his loved ones recovered from serious illnesses.
Enaje became a village celebrity known as the “Christ” in the Lenten reenactment of the Way of the Cross.
Wilfredo Salvador, a 66-year-old former fisherman who played the role of Jesus Christ, said he began participating in the crucifixion 15 years ago after suffering a mental breakdown.
“[God] gives me physical strength unlike others who cannot bear it,” said Salvador, according to Digital Journal. “I do this by choice. I thank Him for giving me a second life.”
The bloody tradition draws thousands of devotees and tourists to the Philippines.
This year, organizers said more than 15,000 Filipino and foreign tourists gathered in Cutud and two other nearby villages.
Johnson Gareth, a British tour organizer, reportedly brought 15 tourists from eight countries to watch the crucifixions.
“They like this because there is really nothing like this on earth. It’s less gruesome than people think. They think it’s going to be very macabre or very disgusting but it’s not. It’s done in a very respectful way,” Gareth told The Associated Press, adding that the tourists were “genuinely inspired.”
“For me, it is an exceptional experience and chance to see such a cultural thing, which is unique in the world,” said Milan Dostal, a tourist from the Czech Republic. “I respect it, I’m very open-minded.”
However, church leaders in the country have objected to the crucifixions in the past, noting that devotees can express their devotion by doing charity work instead.
“It’s very clear that the crucifixion of Christ is more than enough to save humanity from sin,” said Father Jerome Secillano, executive secretary of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines’ public affairs committee. “If you want your sins to be forgiven, go to confession.”
The health department had also warned participants of getting infections from being whipped and nailed.
Catholic priest Robert Reyes, who is also a human rights activist in the country, said the bloody practice is a reflection of the church’s failure to educate Filipinos regarding Christian tenets, which then prompts many to explore alternative ways of seeking divine help.
“The question is, where were we church people when they started doing this?” Reyes asked. “If we judge them, we’ll just alienate them.”
Reyes suggested that the clergy should immerse themselves in the communities and regularly engage in conversations with the villagers.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ph ... 24915.html
Michelle De Pacina
Fri, April 7, 2023 at 4:35 PM CDT
A province in the Philippines held bloody crucifixions to uphold a local Good Friday tradition despite the objection of the Catholic church.
The religious tradition saw eight people nailed to wooden crosses wearing thorny crowns of twigs as they reenacted the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on Good Friday, according to The Associated Press.
Good Friday is a Christian holiday that commemorates the crucifixion and death of Christ before his resurrection on Easter Sunday.
The crucifixions, which were held in San Pedro Cutud, Pampanga, are the province’s first display of religious devotion after a three-year pause due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Prior to the crucifixions, devotees carried heavy crosses on their backs for more than half a mile to the top of a hill. Hundreds of others also walked barefoot and whipped their bare backs with sharp bamboo sticks.
Villagers dressed as Roman centurions later hammered 4-inch stainless steel nails through the eight men’s palms and feet. They were then left on the cross under the sun for about 10 minutes.
One of the men was 62-year-old sign painter Ruben Enaje, who has now reportedly participated in the crucifixions a total of 34 times.
“To be honest, I always feel nervous because I could end up dead on the cross,” Enaje told The Associated Press before his crucifixion. “When I’m laid down on the cross, my body begins to feel cold. When my hands are tied, I just close my eyes and tell myself, ‘I can do this. I can do this.’”
While on the cross, Enaje said he prayed to God for the end of the COVID-19 virus and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The 62-year-old reportedly chose to devote his life to Christ after surviving what he described as a miracle. Enaje said he survived uninjured after falling from a three-story building in 1985. He then extended the ritual after his loved ones recovered from serious illnesses.
Enaje became a village celebrity known as the “Christ” in the Lenten reenactment of the Way of the Cross.
Wilfredo Salvador, a 66-year-old former fisherman who played the role of Jesus Christ, said he began participating in the crucifixion 15 years ago after suffering a mental breakdown.
“[God] gives me physical strength unlike others who cannot bear it,” said Salvador, according to Digital Journal. “I do this by choice. I thank Him for giving me a second life.”
The bloody tradition draws thousands of devotees and tourists to the Philippines.
This year, organizers said more than 15,000 Filipino and foreign tourists gathered in Cutud and two other nearby villages.
Johnson Gareth, a British tour organizer, reportedly brought 15 tourists from eight countries to watch the crucifixions.
“They like this because there is really nothing like this on earth. It’s less gruesome than people think. They think it’s going to be very macabre or very disgusting but it’s not. It’s done in a very respectful way,” Gareth told The Associated Press, adding that the tourists were “genuinely inspired.”
“For me, it is an exceptional experience and chance to see such a cultural thing, which is unique in the world,” said Milan Dostal, a tourist from the Czech Republic. “I respect it, I’m very open-minded.”
However, church leaders in the country have objected to the crucifixions in the past, noting that devotees can express their devotion by doing charity work instead.
“It’s very clear that the crucifixion of Christ is more than enough to save humanity from sin,” said Father Jerome Secillano, executive secretary of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines’ public affairs committee. “If you want your sins to be forgiven, go to confession.”
The health department had also warned participants of getting infections from being whipped and nailed.
Catholic priest Robert Reyes, who is also a human rights activist in the country, said the bloody practice is a reflection of the church’s failure to educate Filipinos regarding Christian tenets, which then prompts many to explore alternative ways of seeking divine help.
“The question is, where were we church people when they started doing this?” Reyes asked. “If we judge them, we’ll just alienate them.”
Reyes suggested that the clergy should immerse themselves in the communities and regularly engage in conversations with the villagers.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ph ... 24915.html
Re: Christianity
Associated Press
Holy Land Christians say attacks rising in far-right Israel
Since the rise of Israel's most right-wing government in history, church leaders say the 2,000-year-old Christian community in Jerusalem has come under increasing attack, with an uptick in harassment of clergy and vandalism of religious properties. Several church leaders, including the head of the Roman Catholic Church in the region, told The Associated Press they fear that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's ultranationalist coalition has empowered extremists.
Israel's foreign ministry called the attack an "immoral act" and "an affront to religion." Police officers were sent to investigate the profanation.
n Jerusalem's Old City, Thursday, Feb. 2, 2023. Israeli police on Thursday arrested an American tourist after he allegedly pulled down and and smashed a statue of Jesus in a church in Jerusalem's Old City, in what Christians condemned as an attack on their faith.
ISABEL DEBRE
Thu, April 13, 2023 at 1:40 AM CDT
JERUSALEM (AP) — The head of the Roman Catholic Church in the Holy Land has warned in an interview that the rise of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's far-right government has made life worse for Christians in the birthplace of Christianity.
The influential Vatican-appointed Latin Patriarch, Pierbattista Pizzaballa, told The Associated Press that the region’s 2,000-year-old Christian community has come under increasing attack, with the most right-wing government in Israel’s history emboldening extremists who have harassed clergy and vandalized religious property at a quickening pace.
“The frequency of these attacks, the aggressions, has become something new,” Pizzaballa said during Easter week from his office, tucked in the limestone passageways of the Old City’s Christian Quarter. “These people feel they are protected … that the cultural and political atmosphere now can justify, or tolerate, actions against Christians.”
Pizzaballa’s concerns appear to undercut Israel’s stated commitment to freedom of worship, enshrined in the declaration that marked its founding 75 years ago. The Israeli government stressed it prioritizes religious freedom and relations with the churches, which have powerful links abroad.
“Israel’s commitment to freedom of religion has been important to us forever,” said Tania Berg-Rafaeli, the director of the world religions department at the Israeli Foreign Ministry. “It's the case for all religions and all minorities that have free access to holy sites.”
But Christians say they feel authorities don't protect their sites from targeted attacks. And tensions have surged after an Israeli police raid on the holy Al-Aqsa Mosque compound set off outrage among Muslims, and a regional confrontation last week.
For Christians, Jerusalem is where Jesus was crucified and resurrected. For Jews, it’s the ancient capital, home to two biblical Jewish temples. For Muslims, it’s where the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven.
The scorn heaped upon minority Christians is nothing new in the teeming Old City, a crucible of tension that the Israeli government annexed in 1967. Many Christians feel squeezed between Jews and Muslims, Israelis and Palestinians.
But now Netanyahu’s far-right government includes settler leaders in key roles — such as Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who holds criminal convictions from 2007 for incitement of anti-Arab racism and support for a Jewish militant group.
Their influence has empowered Israeli settlers seeking to entrench Jewish control of the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem, alarming church leaders who see such efforts — including government plans to create a national park on the Mount of Olives — as a threat to the Christian presence in the holy city. Palestinians claim east Jerusalem as the capital of their hoped-for state.
“The right-wing elements are out to Judaize the Old City and the other lands, and we feel nothing is holding them back now," said Father Don Binder, a pastor at St. George's Anglican Cathedral in Jerusalem. “Churches have been the major stumbling block."
The roughly 15,000 Christians in Jerusalem today, the majority of them Palestinians, were once 27,000 — before hardships that followed the 1967 Mideast war spurred many in the traditionally prosperous group to emigrate.
Now, 2023 is shaping up to be the worst year for Christians in a decade, according to Yusef Daher from the Inter-Church Center, a group that coordinates between the denominations.
Physical assaults and harassment of clergy often go unreported, the center said. It has documented at least seven serious cases of vandalism of church properties from January to mid-March — a sharp increase from six anti-Christian cases recorded in all of 2022. Church leaders blame Israeli extremists for most of the incidents, and say they fear an even greater surge.
“This escalation will bring more and more violence,” Pizzaballa said. “It will create a situation that will be very difficult to correct.”
In March, a pair of Israelis burst into the basilica beside the Garden of Gethsemane, where the Virgin Mary is said to have been buried. They pounced on a priest with a metal rod before being arrested.
In February, a religious American Jew yanked a 10-foot rendering of Christ from its pedestal and smashed it onto the floor, striking its face with a hammer a dozen times at the Church of the Flagellation on the Via Dolorosa, along which it's believed Jesus hauled his cross toward his crucifixion. “No idols in the holy city of Jerusalem!” he yelled.
Armenians found hateful graffiti on the walls of their convent. Priests of all denominations say they’ve been stalked, spat on and beaten during their walks to church. In January, religious Jews knocked over and vandalized 30 graves marked with stone crosses at a historic Christian cemetery in the city. Two teenagers were arrested and charged with causing damage and insulting religion.
But Christians allege that Israeli police haven't taken most attacks seriously. In one case, 25-year-old George Kahkejian said he was the one beaten, arrested and detained for 17 hours after a mob of Jewish settlers scaled his Armenian Christian convent to tear down its flag earlier this year. The police had no immediate comment.
“We see that most incidents in our quarter have gone unpunished,” complained Father Aghan Gogchian, chancellor of the Armenian Patriarchate. He expressed disappointment with how authorities frequently insist cases of desecration and harassment hinge not on religious hatred but on mental illness.
The Israeli police said they have “thoroughly investigated (incidents) regardless of background or religion” and made “speedy arrests.” The Jerusalem municipality is boosting security at upcoming Orthodox Easter processions and creating a new police department to handle religiously motivated threats, said Jerusalem deputy mayor Fleur Hassan-Nahoum.
Most top Israeli officials have stayed quiet on the vandalism, while government moves — including the introduction of a law criminalizing Christian proselytizing and the promotion of plans to turn the Mount of Olives into a national park — have stoked outrage in the Holy Land and beyond.
Netanyahu vowed to block the bill from moving forward, following pressure from outraged evangelical Christians in the United States. Among the strongest backers of Israel, evangelicals view a Jewish state as the fulfillment of a biblical prophecy.
Meanwhile Jerusalem officials confirmed that they're pressing on with the contentious zoning plan for the Mount of Olives — a holy pilgrimage site with some dozen historic churches. Christian leaders fear the park could stem their growth and encroach on their lands. Jewish settlements home to over 200,000 Israelis already encircle the Old City.
The Israeli National Parks Authority promised buy-in from churches and said it hopes the park will “preserve valuable areas as open areas."
Pizzaballa pushed back. “It's a kind of confiscation," he said.
Simmering tensions in the community came to a head over Orthodox Easter rituals as Israeli police announced strict quotas on the thousands of pilgrims seeking to attend the rite of the “Holy Fire" at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.
Citing safety concerns over lit torches being thrust through massive crowds in the church, authorities capped Saturday's ceremony at 1,800 people. Priests who saw police open gates wide for Jews celebrating Passover, which coincided this year with Easter, alleged religious discrimination on Wednesday.
These days, Bishop Sani Ibrahim Azar of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jerusalem said he struggles for answers when his congregants ask why they should even bear the bitter price of living in the Holy Land.
“There are things that make us worry about our very existence,” he said. “But without hope, more and more of us will leave.”
___
Associated Press writer Maria Grazia Murru in Rome contributed to this report.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ho ... 35048.html
Holy Land Christians say attacks rising in far-right Israel
Since the rise of Israel's most right-wing government in history, church leaders say the 2,000-year-old Christian community in Jerusalem has come under increasing attack, with an uptick in harassment of clergy and vandalism of religious properties. Several church leaders, including the head of the Roman Catholic Church in the region, told The Associated Press they fear that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's ultranationalist coalition has empowered extremists.
Israel's foreign ministry called the attack an "immoral act" and "an affront to religion." Police officers were sent to investigate the profanation.
n Jerusalem's Old City, Thursday, Feb. 2, 2023. Israeli police on Thursday arrested an American tourist after he allegedly pulled down and and smashed a statue of Jesus in a church in Jerusalem's Old City, in what Christians condemned as an attack on their faith.
ISABEL DEBRE
Thu, April 13, 2023 at 1:40 AM CDT
JERUSALEM (AP) — The head of the Roman Catholic Church in the Holy Land has warned in an interview that the rise of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's far-right government has made life worse for Christians in the birthplace of Christianity.
The influential Vatican-appointed Latin Patriarch, Pierbattista Pizzaballa, told The Associated Press that the region’s 2,000-year-old Christian community has come under increasing attack, with the most right-wing government in Israel’s history emboldening extremists who have harassed clergy and vandalized religious property at a quickening pace.
“The frequency of these attacks, the aggressions, has become something new,” Pizzaballa said during Easter week from his office, tucked in the limestone passageways of the Old City’s Christian Quarter. “These people feel they are protected … that the cultural and political atmosphere now can justify, or tolerate, actions against Christians.”
Pizzaballa’s concerns appear to undercut Israel’s stated commitment to freedom of worship, enshrined in the declaration that marked its founding 75 years ago. The Israeli government stressed it prioritizes religious freedom and relations with the churches, which have powerful links abroad.
“Israel’s commitment to freedom of religion has been important to us forever,” said Tania Berg-Rafaeli, the director of the world religions department at the Israeli Foreign Ministry. “It's the case for all religions and all minorities that have free access to holy sites.”
But Christians say they feel authorities don't protect their sites from targeted attacks. And tensions have surged after an Israeli police raid on the holy Al-Aqsa Mosque compound set off outrage among Muslims, and a regional confrontation last week.
For Christians, Jerusalem is where Jesus was crucified and resurrected. For Jews, it’s the ancient capital, home to two biblical Jewish temples. For Muslims, it’s where the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven.
The scorn heaped upon minority Christians is nothing new in the teeming Old City, a crucible of tension that the Israeli government annexed in 1967. Many Christians feel squeezed between Jews and Muslims, Israelis and Palestinians.
But now Netanyahu’s far-right government includes settler leaders in key roles — such as Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who holds criminal convictions from 2007 for incitement of anti-Arab racism and support for a Jewish militant group.
Their influence has empowered Israeli settlers seeking to entrench Jewish control of the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem, alarming church leaders who see such efforts — including government plans to create a national park on the Mount of Olives — as a threat to the Christian presence in the holy city. Palestinians claim east Jerusalem as the capital of their hoped-for state.
“The right-wing elements are out to Judaize the Old City and the other lands, and we feel nothing is holding them back now," said Father Don Binder, a pastor at St. George's Anglican Cathedral in Jerusalem. “Churches have been the major stumbling block."
The roughly 15,000 Christians in Jerusalem today, the majority of them Palestinians, were once 27,000 — before hardships that followed the 1967 Mideast war spurred many in the traditionally prosperous group to emigrate.
Now, 2023 is shaping up to be the worst year for Christians in a decade, according to Yusef Daher from the Inter-Church Center, a group that coordinates between the denominations.
Physical assaults and harassment of clergy often go unreported, the center said. It has documented at least seven serious cases of vandalism of church properties from January to mid-March — a sharp increase from six anti-Christian cases recorded in all of 2022. Church leaders blame Israeli extremists for most of the incidents, and say they fear an even greater surge.
“This escalation will bring more and more violence,” Pizzaballa said. “It will create a situation that will be very difficult to correct.”
In March, a pair of Israelis burst into the basilica beside the Garden of Gethsemane, where the Virgin Mary is said to have been buried. They pounced on a priest with a metal rod before being arrested.
In February, a religious American Jew yanked a 10-foot rendering of Christ from its pedestal and smashed it onto the floor, striking its face with a hammer a dozen times at the Church of the Flagellation on the Via Dolorosa, along which it's believed Jesus hauled his cross toward his crucifixion. “No idols in the holy city of Jerusalem!” he yelled.
Armenians found hateful graffiti on the walls of their convent. Priests of all denominations say they’ve been stalked, spat on and beaten during their walks to church. In January, religious Jews knocked over and vandalized 30 graves marked with stone crosses at a historic Christian cemetery in the city. Two teenagers were arrested and charged with causing damage and insulting religion.
But Christians allege that Israeli police haven't taken most attacks seriously. In one case, 25-year-old George Kahkejian said he was the one beaten, arrested and detained for 17 hours after a mob of Jewish settlers scaled his Armenian Christian convent to tear down its flag earlier this year. The police had no immediate comment.
“We see that most incidents in our quarter have gone unpunished,” complained Father Aghan Gogchian, chancellor of the Armenian Patriarchate. He expressed disappointment with how authorities frequently insist cases of desecration and harassment hinge not on religious hatred but on mental illness.
The Israeli police said they have “thoroughly investigated (incidents) regardless of background or religion” and made “speedy arrests.” The Jerusalem municipality is boosting security at upcoming Orthodox Easter processions and creating a new police department to handle religiously motivated threats, said Jerusalem deputy mayor Fleur Hassan-Nahoum.
Most top Israeli officials have stayed quiet on the vandalism, while government moves — including the introduction of a law criminalizing Christian proselytizing and the promotion of plans to turn the Mount of Olives into a national park — have stoked outrage in the Holy Land and beyond.
Netanyahu vowed to block the bill from moving forward, following pressure from outraged evangelical Christians in the United States. Among the strongest backers of Israel, evangelicals view a Jewish state as the fulfillment of a biblical prophecy.
Meanwhile Jerusalem officials confirmed that they're pressing on with the contentious zoning plan for the Mount of Olives — a holy pilgrimage site with some dozen historic churches. Christian leaders fear the park could stem their growth and encroach on their lands. Jewish settlements home to over 200,000 Israelis already encircle the Old City.
The Israeli National Parks Authority promised buy-in from churches and said it hopes the park will “preserve valuable areas as open areas."
Pizzaballa pushed back. “It's a kind of confiscation," he said.
Simmering tensions in the community came to a head over Orthodox Easter rituals as Israeli police announced strict quotas on the thousands of pilgrims seeking to attend the rite of the “Holy Fire" at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.
Citing safety concerns over lit torches being thrust through massive crowds in the church, authorities capped Saturday's ceremony at 1,800 people. Priests who saw police open gates wide for Jews celebrating Passover, which coincided this year with Easter, alleged religious discrimination on Wednesday.
These days, Bishop Sani Ibrahim Azar of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jerusalem said he struggles for answers when his congregants ask why they should even bear the bitter price of living in the Holy Land.
“There are things that make us worry about our very existence,” he said. “But without hope, more and more of us will leave.”
___
Associated Press writer Maria Grazia Murru in Rome contributed to this report.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ho ... 35048.html
The State of Evangelical America
There are few evangelical Christians who have gotten as much media coverage or criticism in the last decade as Russell Moore. He previously served as the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the policy wing of the Southern Baptist Convention, and became a prominent evangelical voice opposing a Trump presidency. Moore is currently the editor in chief of Christianity Today, which The Times’s Jane Coaston called “arguably the most influential Christian publication” in the United States. I asked Moore if he would speak to me about the evangelical movement and his new book, “Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America.” This interview has been edited and condensed.
Tish Harrison Warren: The subtitle of your newest book is “An Altar Call for Evangelical America.” What do you mean by “evangelical America”?
Russell Moore: What I mean by “evangelical” is people who believe in the personal aspect of what it means to be a follower of Christ. That includes the way that we understand the Bible, the way that we understand the need to be born again.
In your book, you discuss how increasing secularization isn’t going to end the culture wars. In fact, you say it may heighten them. Why do you think that?
I was in a session several years ago in which a researcher had done a survey about religious people’s reactions to immigrants and refugees. And she was stunned to find that the more active evangelistic work a church did, the more welcoming they were to refugees in their communities. I was not surprised at all, because evangelism presupposes the possibility of conversation and persuasion. And not the coercion of raw power.
When churches have given up on evangelism, this means they’ve given up on actually engaging with and loving their neighbors. That’s bad news for everybody. You end up in a situation where these warring groups in American life are seeking some kind of total victory, where somebody is the final, ultimate winner and somebody is the final, ultimate loser. That ratchets up the stakes of culture wars dramatically.
Your book delves into Christian nationalism as a component of the evangelical movement. How would you define Christian nationalism? And how has it affected evangelicalism in the United States?
Christian nationalism is the use of Christian symbols or teachings in order to prop up a nation-state or an ethnic identity. It’s dangerous for the nation because it’s fundamentally antidemocratic. Christian nationalism takes a political claim and seeks to make it ultimate. It says: If a person disagrees with me, that person is disagreeing with God. No democratic nation can survive that, which is why the founders of this country built in all kinds of protections from it.
Christian nationalism is also dangerous for the witness of the church, because Christian nationalism is fundamentally, at its core, anti-evangelical. If what the Gospel means is for people to come before God, person by person, not nation by nation or village by village or tribe by tribe, then Christian nationalism is heretical.
Christian nationalism assumes outward conformity enforced by social or political power. It transforms the way that we see reality with the assumption that the really important things are political and cultural, as opposed to personal and spiritual and theological.
It’s been hard for me to evaluate how widespread this is. Anecdotally, I know a lot of Christians, including a lot of evangelicals, and they would not be considered Christian nationalists. So I often wonder: Is this fringe?
It is affecting almost every sector of American Christianity in varying ways. It’s similar to the prosperity gospel of the last generation. Most American Christians wouldn’t identify themselves as prosperity gospel adherents. Yet many of them were adopting key pieces of that understanding of the world.
Studies have shown the way that Christian language is being used in Europe and in other places to prop up populist authoritarian movements. You can see this in the way that survey data show how white evangelicals in America are becoming much friendlier to outright authoritarianism — as seen in the Jan. 6 insurrection. I don’t think that it is merely fringe at all.
We can’t talk about the rise of Christian nationalism without bringing up Donald Trump. You said that he was morally unfit to be president and received intense backlash — even from Trump himself. Were you surprised by the severe criticism from certain Christians for your denunciation of Trump?
It didn’t surprise me that there would be overwhelming buy-in once Trump became the Republican nominee. One of the things I was worried about is that people would say: I’m not supporting him; I’m just voting for him because I think the alternative is worse. I feared, at the time, that the way that American politics works right now is inherently totalizing, so there would not be people after Trump was elected who would, for instance, support him on some judicial appointments and oppose him on a Muslim ban or whatever the issue is. And I think that has proved to be the case. Trump has transformed evangelicalism far more than evangelism has influenced Trump.
I was surprised by the aftermath of the “Access Hollywood” tape. When the “Access Hollywood” tape was released, I was saying to people around me: “Don’t say, ‘I told you so.’ We need to have empathy for Trump-supporting evangelicals who are really hurting at this revelation.” But what ended up happening is that white evangelicals made peace with “Access Hollywood,” if anything, quicker than the rest of America did.
I received a castigating email from a sweet Christian lady who had taught me Sunday school when I was a kid. And none of it argued: “You’re wrong about Trump’s moral character.” The argument was: “Get real. This is what we have to have in order to fight the enemy.” That was surprising to me. And disorienting.
In your book, you tell a story about how an evangelical person said to their pastor: “We’ve tried to turn the other cheek. It doesn’t work. We have to fight now.” Why do certain evangelicals feel so embattled now?
Some of it is a response to legitimate fears. There are many people in American life who assume that religion itself is oppressive and should be done away with. And there is a general sense of crisis and decline in American life, and it’s translated into religious terms. In many cases, I would not disagree with the diagnosis about some of the things that are wrong. What I would disagree with is the sense of futility and giving up on what it means to live in a pluralistic democracy.
I would also point to the decline in personal evangelism. When you have people who are trained to share the Gospel with their neighbors, they have an understanding from the very beginning that people in my community aren’t my enemies; they’re my mission field. This changes the way that you see people.
When that starts to diminish, there’s a lack of confidence and a frantic looking about for whatever tool is at hand. Ideological zealotry becomes the tool at hand.
I mentioned in the book about how many pastors talk about referencing Jesus’ call to “turn the other cheek,” only to have blowback from people in their congregation because they say that that doesn’t work in times like these. The assumption is that we’re in a hostile culture as opposed to a neutral culture — as though the Sermon on the Mount is delivered in Mayberry, not ancient Rome. And the assumption also shows a lack of confidence in the means that God has given us to advance the church through proclamation and demonstration.
A moving part of your book is when you write about your father, who had a complicated relationship with the church.
He never lost his faith. But he was always very suspicious of church structures and found it hard to go to church for long periods at a time. When I was younger, I judged him for it. I thought that this was a spiritual defect. Now that I have more perspective and can see his life, I understand it.
You write about how his experience has given you compassion for folks who have left the church. And you often say that people don’t always leave the church because of what Christians believe but instead because they don’t think Christians actually believe what they claim to believe. What do you mean by that?
When I first started in ministry, if someone came and said, “I’m losing my faith. I’m walking away from the church,” the cause was almost always one of two things. Either the person started to find the supernatural incredible, or the person thought that the morality of the church was too strict in some way, usually having to do with sex. I almost never hear that anymore. Instead, the people that I talk to often have a sense that for the church, the Gospel is a means to an end — whether that end is politics or cultural control or cultural influence or something else. And in many cases they’re starting to question not whether the church is too strict but whether the church actually holds to a morality at all. What is alarming to me is that some of the people I find who are despairing are actually those who are the most committed to the teachings of Christianity.
So with all this dysfunction that you are speaking about in evangelicalism, why are you still an evangelical Christian?
I think the fragmentation that’s happening to the evangelical movement right now is actually a necessary precondition for renewal.
I won’t give up on the word “evangelical.” There was a time when I did. I wrote an op-ed in 2016 in The Washington Post called “Why This Election Makes Me Hate the Word ‘Evangelical’” — but I’ve come around. I can’t find a good alternative shorthand to describe the kind of Christian that I am. But also because Tim Keller came with me to a class I was teaching at the University of Chicago and one of the students asked why we would use the word “evangelical” when it’s become so politicized and toxic and Tim responded, “Well, it’s because most of us evangelicals are in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and the North Americans don’t get to just choose what we’re called because we’ve wrecked the brand.” The student said, “Fair enough.”
What do you think a healthy political engagement from evangelicals would look like?
It would mean a reordering of priorities. The church could see ultimate things as ultimate and other things as falling in line behind those ultimate things. That’s the fundamental shift.
I do think that we need to have the right ordering of our priorities and our loves and also the right understanding of what it means to follow Christ. The figure of Jesus in the New Testament Gospels is not a frantic, angry culture warrior. He is remarkably tranquil about the situation around him. I think we need more of that. If our neighbors saw us loving one another and forgiving one another, even if they find our theological beliefs to be strange or even dangerous, that would be a good start.
An Announcement
I have some news. The past two years of writing this newsletter for The Times have been a profound joy and privilege, so it is bittersweet to announce that I will be leaving this post in early August, first for a brief sabbatical and then to work on longer-form book projects. I am very grateful for my editors and colleagues at The Times. And for you, my readers, who have generously shared your lives, thoughts and prayers with me through thousands of weekly notes and emails. You have stuck with me through controversial pieces and lighthearted ones. You’ve walked with me as I’ve written my way through grief, doubt and joy. I cannot thank you enough. For fans of my work, I intend to keep writing. And I hope you will see my work in The Times, too, in the future.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/30/opin ... erica.html
Tish Harrison Warren: The subtitle of your newest book is “An Altar Call for Evangelical America.” What do you mean by “evangelical America”?
Russell Moore: What I mean by “evangelical” is people who believe in the personal aspect of what it means to be a follower of Christ. That includes the way that we understand the Bible, the way that we understand the need to be born again.
In your book, you discuss how increasing secularization isn’t going to end the culture wars. In fact, you say it may heighten them. Why do you think that?
I was in a session several years ago in which a researcher had done a survey about religious people’s reactions to immigrants and refugees. And she was stunned to find that the more active evangelistic work a church did, the more welcoming they were to refugees in their communities. I was not surprised at all, because evangelism presupposes the possibility of conversation and persuasion. And not the coercion of raw power.
When churches have given up on evangelism, this means they’ve given up on actually engaging with and loving their neighbors. That’s bad news for everybody. You end up in a situation where these warring groups in American life are seeking some kind of total victory, where somebody is the final, ultimate winner and somebody is the final, ultimate loser. That ratchets up the stakes of culture wars dramatically.
Your book delves into Christian nationalism as a component of the evangelical movement. How would you define Christian nationalism? And how has it affected evangelicalism in the United States?
Christian nationalism is the use of Christian symbols or teachings in order to prop up a nation-state or an ethnic identity. It’s dangerous for the nation because it’s fundamentally antidemocratic. Christian nationalism takes a political claim and seeks to make it ultimate. It says: If a person disagrees with me, that person is disagreeing with God. No democratic nation can survive that, which is why the founders of this country built in all kinds of protections from it.
Christian nationalism is also dangerous for the witness of the church, because Christian nationalism is fundamentally, at its core, anti-evangelical. If what the Gospel means is for people to come before God, person by person, not nation by nation or village by village or tribe by tribe, then Christian nationalism is heretical.
Christian nationalism assumes outward conformity enforced by social or political power. It transforms the way that we see reality with the assumption that the really important things are political and cultural, as opposed to personal and spiritual and theological.
It’s been hard for me to evaluate how widespread this is. Anecdotally, I know a lot of Christians, including a lot of evangelicals, and they would not be considered Christian nationalists. So I often wonder: Is this fringe?
It is affecting almost every sector of American Christianity in varying ways. It’s similar to the prosperity gospel of the last generation. Most American Christians wouldn’t identify themselves as prosperity gospel adherents. Yet many of them were adopting key pieces of that understanding of the world.
Studies have shown the way that Christian language is being used in Europe and in other places to prop up populist authoritarian movements. You can see this in the way that survey data show how white evangelicals in America are becoming much friendlier to outright authoritarianism — as seen in the Jan. 6 insurrection. I don’t think that it is merely fringe at all.
We can’t talk about the rise of Christian nationalism without bringing up Donald Trump. You said that he was morally unfit to be president and received intense backlash — even from Trump himself. Were you surprised by the severe criticism from certain Christians for your denunciation of Trump?
It didn’t surprise me that there would be overwhelming buy-in once Trump became the Republican nominee. One of the things I was worried about is that people would say: I’m not supporting him; I’m just voting for him because I think the alternative is worse. I feared, at the time, that the way that American politics works right now is inherently totalizing, so there would not be people after Trump was elected who would, for instance, support him on some judicial appointments and oppose him on a Muslim ban or whatever the issue is. And I think that has proved to be the case. Trump has transformed evangelicalism far more than evangelism has influenced Trump.
I was surprised by the aftermath of the “Access Hollywood” tape. When the “Access Hollywood” tape was released, I was saying to people around me: “Don’t say, ‘I told you so.’ We need to have empathy for Trump-supporting evangelicals who are really hurting at this revelation.” But what ended up happening is that white evangelicals made peace with “Access Hollywood,” if anything, quicker than the rest of America did.
I received a castigating email from a sweet Christian lady who had taught me Sunday school when I was a kid. And none of it argued: “You’re wrong about Trump’s moral character.” The argument was: “Get real. This is what we have to have in order to fight the enemy.” That was surprising to me. And disorienting.
In your book, you tell a story about how an evangelical person said to their pastor: “We’ve tried to turn the other cheek. It doesn’t work. We have to fight now.” Why do certain evangelicals feel so embattled now?
Some of it is a response to legitimate fears. There are many people in American life who assume that religion itself is oppressive and should be done away with. And there is a general sense of crisis and decline in American life, and it’s translated into religious terms. In many cases, I would not disagree with the diagnosis about some of the things that are wrong. What I would disagree with is the sense of futility and giving up on what it means to live in a pluralistic democracy.
I would also point to the decline in personal evangelism. When you have people who are trained to share the Gospel with their neighbors, they have an understanding from the very beginning that people in my community aren’t my enemies; they’re my mission field. This changes the way that you see people.
When that starts to diminish, there’s a lack of confidence and a frantic looking about for whatever tool is at hand. Ideological zealotry becomes the tool at hand.
I mentioned in the book about how many pastors talk about referencing Jesus’ call to “turn the other cheek,” only to have blowback from people in their congregation because they say that that doesn’t work in times like these. The assumption is that we’re in a hostile culture as opposed to a neutral culture — as though the Sermon on the Mount is delivered in Mayberry, not ancient Rome. And the assumption also shows a lack of confidence in the means that God has given us to advance the church through proclamation and demonstration.
A moving part of your book is when you write about your father, who had a complicated relationship with the church.
He never lost his faith. But he was always very suspicious of church structures and found it hard to go to church for long periods at a time. When I was younger, I judged him for it. I thought that this was a spiritual defect. Now that I have more perspective and can see his life, I understand it.
You write about how his experience has given you compassion for folks who have left the church. And you often say that people don’t always leave the church because of what Christians believe but instead because they don’t think Christians actually believe what they claim to believe. What do you mean by that?
When I first started in ministry, if someone came and said, “I’m losing my faith. I’m walking away from the church,” the cause was almost always one of two things. Either the person started to find the supernatural incredible, or the person thought that the morality of the church was too strict in some way, usually having to do with sex. I almost never hear that anymore. Instead, the people that I talk to often have a sense that for the church, the Gospel is a means to an end — whether that end is politics or cultural control or cultural influence or something else. And in many cases they’re starting to question not whether the church is too strict but whether the church actually holds to a morality at all. What is alarming to me is that some of the people I find who are despairing are actually those who are the most committed to the teachings of Christianity.
So with all this dysfunction that you are speaking about in evangelicalism, why are you still an evangelical Christian?
I think the fragmentation that’s happening to the evangelical movement right now is actually a necessary precondition for renewal.
I won’t give up on the word “evangelical.” There was a time when I did. I wrote an op-ed in 2016 in The Washington Post called “Why This Election Makes Me Hate the Word ‘Evangelical’” — but I’ve come around. I can’t find a good alternative shorthand to describe the kind of Christian that I am. But also because Tim Keller came with me to a class I was teaching at the University of Chicago and one of the students asked why we would use the word “evangelical” when it’s become so politicized and toxic and Tim responded, “Well, it’s because most of us evangelicals are in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and the North Americans don’t get to just choose what we’re called because we’ve wrecked the brand.” The student said, “Fair enough.”
What do you think a healthy political engagement from evangelicals would look like?
It would mean a reordering of priorities. The church could see ultimate things as ultimate and other things as falling in line behind those ultimate things. That’s the fundamental shift.
I do think that we need to have the right ordering of our priorities and our loves and also the right understanding of what it means to follow Christ. The figure of Jesus in the New Testament Gospels is not a frantic, angry culture warrior. He is remarkably tranquil about the situation around him. I think we need more of that. If our neighbors saw us loving one another and forgiving one another, even if they find our theological beliefs to be strange or even dangerous, that would be a good start.
An Announcement
I have some news. The past two years of writing this newsletter for The Times have been a profound joy and privilege, so it is bittersweet to announce that I will be leaving this post in early August, first for a brief sabbatical and then to work on longer-form book projects. I am very grateful for my editors and colleagues at The Times. And for you, my readers, who have generously shared your lives, thoughts and prayers with me through thousands of weekly notes and emails. You have stuck with me through controversial pieces and lighthearted ones. You’ve walked with me as I’ve written my way through grief, doubt and joy. I cannot thank you enough. For fans of my work, I intend to keep writing. And I hope you will see my work in The Times, too, in the future.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/30/opin ... erica.html