Archive for the 'Culture & Society' Category
Posted by Eric (May 9, 2006 at 1:18 pm)
You’ve heard it a thousand times before: the Church demands that you “check your mind at the door.”
The first thing that’s wrong with this phrase, and which reveals the mind set of those who employ it, is the very idea that going in or out a door has anything to do with religious faith.
Yes, I realize this is a metaphorical door, but even so it must be a metaphor for something—for the line between the religious aspect of one’s life and all the rest, all that which hasn’t anything to do with religious faith.
If you’re drawing lines like that, you’ve already checked your mind at some other door, possibly your bedroom door—you were already handicapped before you made it to the kitchen.
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Posted by Eric (May 3, 2006 at 12:08 pm)
Yesterday I dropped by the Borders in Champaign, IL after a special Divine Liturgy there to pick up Rod Dreher’s book Crunchy Cons (more on that in a future post). While roaming around the store looking for Dreher’s book I saw no fewer than three editions of The Da Vinci Code, including a thick, new “Illustrated Edition.” There were also several books on the so-called Gospel of Judas, and a number of other books purporting to tell us the “true story” of Jesus.
What all these books have in common, of course, is the consoling news that Jesus is not who the canonical gospels say he is, the Son of God who is one with God the Father, through whom the Father sends forth his Holy Spirit to transform the world. I suppose nothing so capsulizes the hubris of this age than such books, which claim to have discovered the “truth” about Jesus that was somehow hidden from his disciples and their closest friends, those who wrote the first “True Story of Jesus” books—the ones you’ll find in the New Testament.
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Posted by Eric (April 17, 2006 at 2:24 pm)
I tuned into Scrappleface this morning, right after Bright Monday Matins and Divine Liturgy, to discover a lamentable (and somewhat ambiguous) satire of Pope Benedict XVI. Scrappleface author Scott Ott described a scene in which Benedict XVI took off his golden vestments and, in the style of a Protestant pastor, offered a sort of “heart felt” sermon in which he called himself a sinner and “regular Joe,” while the crowds in St. Peter’s Square rapidly dispersed, apparently interested only in “pomp and circumstance,” not the person of Christ.
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Posted by Eric (April 4, 2006 at 3:54 pm)
Twice this past weekend I caught the end of a segment on the public radio program This American Life which was apparently some kind of retelling of the story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden. I happened to tune in right at “the Fall”—an appropriate moment here in the thick of Great Lent.
The piece, what I heard of it, sounded irreverent, even somewhat mocking, but it was interesting nonetheless, especially lines like this one, where Adam is reminiscing about the Garden long after the banishment:
“When you ate the fruit in Eden, it was like eating God,” he would say, “and God was delicious. When you wanted him, you just grabbed him.” Now when he ate fruit, he could only taste what was not there.
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Posted by Eric (April 3, 2006 at 1:40 pm)
Looks like all the clever Da Vinci Code puns are taken—”Decoding Da Vinci,” “The Da Vinci Con,” “The Duh Vinci Code,” etc.
No, I haven’t read it. Life’s too short. I tend to agree with Barbara Nicolosi that “we should all just agree to ignore it, and put our efforts into praying for the people who hate Jesus and us, His disciples, so much that they would make this film.”
My entire commentary on the Da Vinci phenomenon is this: that having failed to “prove” that Jesus never existed, that the Gospels are a fraud, that Christianity is a plague upon mankind, and all the rest, the enemies of the Church have resorted not just to making stuff up out of thin air, but to declaring that, really, this whole “truth” business, this slavish submission to “facts” and “historical data” is just so narrow and, let’s face it, intolerant of “alternate views” and “new ways of understanding.”
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