A Slight Delay

I received an email a couple of days ago. The message in this disturbing missive: “Only YOU can save Christmas!”

Dammit. It was bad enough when only I could prevent forest fires.

The email comes courtesy of an outfit calling itself Heading to Heaven. They’ve nicked a page out of the Bill O’Reilly playbook and decided that Christmas is under attack by secularists, or progressives, or JC Penney or someone. And how do you save Christmas? By spending a buck ninety-eight on a cheap pin that says, “Keeping Christ in Christmas.” This is a rare opportunity since, according to their website, “Unfortunately, we only ordered a limited print of 1 million buttons.” So, only a million buttons at $1.98 a pop. Only two million bucks. They apparently asked themselves, “WWJD?” and come back with the answer that Jesus would’ve turned the situation into an opportunity for monetary gain, camels and needles’ eyes be damned.

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We’ve never suffered from a dearth of books on Christianity. Even leaving aside the Bible, books on all things Christian–apologetics, fiction, inspirational tracts, and even books that take on Christianity from an atheistic viewpoint–have never been in short supply. The Christian publishing industry takes in revenues in excess of billions of dollars per year, much of it spent preaching to the converted, and much of the rest attempting to convert the rest.

What we don’t see nearly as often are books that unearth the other Christianities, those that have existed side-by-side with orthodox Christianity, or that show us the Christianities that might have been. Sure, The DaVinci Code created a flurry of interest in all things Gnostic, but there are a plethora of other possibilities that blossomed in the early years of the religion, many of them never to come to full flower. One such “alternate” Christianity is outlined in Martin Palmer’s The Jesus Sutras.

As we’re still reminded on a nearly daily basis, cultures and religions seem more likely to clash than collaborate. Palmer’s great gift in this book is to show us that it wasn’t always, and need not always, be so. (more…)

Robert McElvaine is one pissed-off individual. It’s hard to escape the conclusion, all the way from the cover to the very last page of his Grand Theft Jesus: The Hijacking of Religion in America. On the other hand, all the old saws about not judging a book by its cover aside, once you get to the contents, it’s easy to see why he might be–ahem–slightly perturbed.

The author’s interest is in those who’ve read the New Testament so closely that they can’t see the forest–in this case, Jesus’ teachings and central message–for the trees (i.e. the individual, highly legalized, very specific and often very specious focus on certain bits that make the more difficult bits of Jesus go down easy). To say that he’s disturbed by the shape of the religious landscape in this country would be putting it mildly. Writing of those he calls “Lite Christians,” he says:

They’re all about having fun, spending money, and seeking pleasure, but when it comes to the fundamental teachings of Jesus, they take a pass. Turn the other cheek? Self-sacrifice? Help the poor? Nonviolence? That shit’s too hard!

And, as it turns out, McElvaine’s in a target-rich environment. (more…)

My brain hurts. Here’s why: Yesterday, I received an email that told of a Dutch creationist named Johan Huibers, who got it in his head to build Noah’s Ark to the same specs that God gave Noah in the Bible. Of course, when I see something like this, I start asking questions. Here’s a sampling:

1. The email clearly states that Huibers is a Creationist. From this, I’d think it should be relatively safe to say that Mr. Huibers believes in the Bible as the literal, revealed, and perfect word of God, that ought not to be altered by one jot or tittle. I don’t begrudge him that belief, but if you’re going to approach the Bible in this way, then why alter God’s plan(s)? Huibers’ ark is, the email states, 150×30x20 (cubits). The King James and New International versions, on the other hand, pretty clearly state that God told Noah to build the Ark at 300×50x30.  What gives? (more…)

So when, exactly, is tolerance a bad, or at the very least counterproductive, thing? Former New York Times religion writer (and current Syracuse professor) Gustav Niebuhr sets out to answer that question in Beyond Tolerance: Searching for Interfaith Understanding in America , a far-ranging overview of the work that’s gone on in our recent past toward fostering religious understanding and cooperation.

At some point early in our education, we’re told that the United States was founded in no small part by religious dissidents, and on the basis of religious freedom. What this manages to overlook–though Niebuhr, thankfully, does not–is that this freedom was most likely to be extended to one’s own, but not as much to those who believed and worshipped in a way that was different from the rest of the community. As with other freedoms we cherish (see last week’s reviews of Commager and Lewis on the First Amendment), our religious freedom has long been a work in progress.

Somewhere amid all this research and development, among all the intramural squabbles among the various Christianities that flourished in the new soil of the New World, and between the fits and starts of schisms within schisms, a Christian consensus of sorts started to emerge. That consensus didn’t often–well, to be honest, didn’t usually–take in other religions. Beyond Tolerance is driven by the efforts, from America’s earliest days, to rectify that error. (more…)

One of the many arguments over Prop 8 comes down to theology. Many who oppose same-sex marriage, or even just homosexuality in general, argue that it’s not only against nature, but against God. By now, anyone with a television has seen Fred Phelps and company marching with their “God Hates Fags” signs, or has heard from other, less hysterical, quarters that homosexuality and Christianity are inherently at odds. While I’ll throw in (yet another) disclaimer, this time that I’m not a theologian, I’d have to say that this is one scriptural analysis with which I’d have to disagree.

Let’s start from the assumption–a relatively uncontentious one, I’d hope–that if one is a Christian, the New Testament has a primacy of sorts over the Old Testament. With that as our starting point, then, there are four passages in the New Testament that are widely taken as evidence that homosexuality is anti-Christian. I’ve quoted those passages at length after the jump.

It should be noted that the passages below are all from epistolatory writings. The Pauline epistolatory material, it should be noted, was just that: a pile of letters. A wide spectrum of Biblical scholars (that is to say, we’re not just talking about the Jesus Seminar here) would readily concede that these weren’t written, or intended to be taken, as scripture. Each of them was written to address specific issues faced by some of the many churches the apostle Paul set up during his wanderings in Asia Minor and North Africa; one suspects that if he were writing scripture, or knew that his writings would later be construed as such, they would have had a much different tone. Additionally, some of the later epistolatory material—like Timothy, which is quoted below, and 2 Corinthians, which isn’t—is now widely regarded to have been forged.*

On the other hand, you’ve got the Gospels, and Acts, which I lump in with the Gospels, since they were probably penned by the same person who wrote the Gospel of Luke. The Gospels, which purport to tell what is known of Jesus’ life and ministry, do not mention homosexuality. At all. (more…)

As with so much else, Rumi had it right:

When light returns to its source
it takes nothing
of what it has illuminated.

It may have shone on a garbage dump, or a garden,
or in the center of a human eye. No matter.

It goes, and when it does,
the open plain becomes passionately desolate
wanting it back.

Remember that old song, “Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places”? Okay, usually I picture Eddie Murphy as Buckwheat singing it–but I digress. What about the places in which we look for God?

We think of God, generally, as some vast, exalted being. So we’re used to looking for God in vast, or at least seemingly exalted places. Westminster Abbey, the Taj Mahal (the original, not Trump’s abomination), St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Angkor Wat, the Wailing Wall and the Dome of the Rock would probably make most people’s short list; the Hudson River, juke joints, the Chicken Shack, or the local pound, probably not so much. And more’s the pity. (more…)

So says Cicero: Extreme justice is extreme injustice. In his blog Confessions of a Small Church Pastor, Chuck Warnock writes about the recent execution of Christopher Scott Emmett:

While I realize there is a lot of disagreement on the issue of capital punishment, it seems to me that followers of Christ would oppose capital punishment on the grounds that Jesus himself was an innocent victim of the Roman Empire’s capital punishment system. When we think of Jesus’ death, not as a theological doctrine, but as capital punishment gone wrong, it casts a different light on the subject. […] I can’t help thinking of Jesus’ short stay on death row. Is this the best solution we have to society’s problems? What do you think?

Not wanting to clog Pastor Chuck’s comment section, I’ll reply here.

The litany of problems with capital punishment seems endless and ever-growing. It disproportionately targets those with less money, less education, and more melanin. Its value as a deterrent has always been questionable, at best. And, as has been documented on countless occasions, the innocent are as likely to go to their graves as the guilty. Any of these issues, taken by themselves, would be disturbing enough; taken in tandem, they serve as an indictment of an idea and attendant practice that need sorely to be rethought, if not disassembled altogether. (more…)

I don’t remember quite how I came across this. As with so much else, I was probably looking for something else and came across it by accident. Oh, in case you were wondering what “it” is, it’s Jefferson’s Bible.

A bit of backstory: legend had it that one night, Jefferson took a razor blade to the Bible, excising the bits with which he didn’t agree. Those bits consisted mainly of the stuff referring to the geneology and divinity of Jesus. What’s left reads like a synopsis of the synoptic Gospels, a Cliff’s Notes version of the Good News. (more…)

I’m not sure what it is about me that everyone thinks I need to be converted to something else. Catholics, Muslims, Jehova’s Witnesses, and Protestants of practically every stripe think that I need to join their crowd. It’s like PBS with loaves and fishes; a perfectly innocent everyday conversation is chugging along nicely, only to be brought to a screeching halt by some kind of churchy pledge drive.

This has happened so often that I’ve come up with some coping strategies in case anyone decides that there’s something religiously or theologically wrong with you. Use as many of the following as are necessary ‘til your interlocutor has had enough/sobs with frustration. (more…)