Tag Archives: Christianity

A fall from a height

I am in Colorado Springs today, where famous evangelical pastor Ted Haggard’s fall dominates the news.

Frankly, to borrow the name of a better-known blog, I just don’t “get” his kind of religion. A 14,000-member megachurch? Why? So you can sit on your butt and be preached at and sung at among a huge crowd of strangers?

My dislike for Haggard’s approach is more than theological. It is partly aesthetic–the whole megamall megachurch entertainment thing. And it’s partly because of the way that New Lifers regarded the most interesting parts of Colorado Springs (such as the Old North End and Tejon Street) as controlled by Satan or something. I wrote elsewhere that they do not understand the gods of the city, only the gods of the suburban shopping mall.

One excerpt: “[Jeff] Sharlet makes a good case for New Lifers as exurban parasites, taking the services that the city provides but being unwilling to pay for them, either financially or psychically.”

Anyway, he is toast now, although there will probably be some sort of public-repentence-as-career move. From a Christian perspective, LaShawn Barber’s coverage is about the best.

And that’s the news from “Fort God.”

Leaving the meat uncovered

Sheik Taj Din al-Hilaly, Australia’s senior Islamic cleric, explains rape and how women serve Satan:

“If you take uncovered meat and put it on the street, on the pavement, in a garden, in a park, or in the backyard, without a cover and the cats eat it, then whose fault will it be, the cats, or the uncovered meat’s? The uncovered meat is the disaster.

I just felt that I needed to share that. Pagan cat-owners, please don’t be offended.

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Who’s a Celt now? – 3

“Celtic Spirituality” as religious outbidding.

During the recent Spanish Peaks Celtic Music Festival, St. Benedict Episcopal Church in La Veta, Colorado, took out a small ad in the program for their Celtic Spirituality weekend.

Yes, before the contemporary Pagan movement was underway, various Anglicans were pushing “Celtic spirituality” as a way to make an end run around the Roman Catholics. Their claim that the Church of England was rooted in the so-called Celtic church permitted claims such as this:

[The Church of England] preserved a tradition of [Celtic and Anglo-Saxon] scholarship which Rome had lost, together with a love of discipline which the Celt never had. The result was a vigorous, dignified, and self-reliant national Church.

Arthur G. Willis and Ernest H. Hayes, Yarns on Wessex Pioneers (1954)

Best of both worlds, you see. It’s all about Celtic special-ness.

Whereas the Vatican may claim the keys of St. Peter, Celtic spirituality lets one claim a link to the ancient, noble Druids (one of several interpretations of Druids, as will be neatly enumerated in Ronald Hutton’s upcoming book on them). See, for instance, this “Christ as Druid” prayer, attributed to St. Columba, but I wonder.

By claiming that Druids were peacefully converted and led their Pagan peoples into Christianity, the “Celtic church” casts itself as the irenic alternative to “convert-or-die” monotheisms.

Celtic Christians want to be like Druids, because one interpretation of Druids is as proto-monotheists. That interpretation came from writers who never met a Druid, as Stuart Piggott explained forty years ago.

Some Episcopal clergy became a little too enthusiastic about Druidry and learned the hard way where the borders were.

I do not want to be too hard on the American Episcopalians. That church has been slowly self-destructing since the 1960s, when it became infected with a bad case of Vatican II-envy.

More to come.

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One Druid Down

Fr. William Melnyk, the Episcopal priest in Pennsylvania who was also an active Druid, has resigned.. His wife, Glyn Ruppe-Melnyk, also a Druid and Episcopal priest (no “-ess” allowed), faces disciplinary action.

My last post on this issue is here. Notice that the man must suffer more; women lead us into temptation, but a man is more morally culpable. Thus says the patriarchy.

Aphrodite Bats Last

A New York Times report by a Columbia University sociologist on the virginity pledges promoted by some Christian groups such as True Love Waits finds that pledge-takers do delay the onset of sexual activity, yet tend to contract sexually transmitted diseases at about the same rate as their peers, suggesting that they do not get additional education on STDs.

Key paragraphs:

By age 23, half the teenagers who had made virginity pledges were married, compared with 25 percent of those who had not pledged, the study found. Dr. Bearman said he did not know whether the teenagers who had broken their pledges did so initially with their fianc?s or with others, because the data had not yet been analyzed.

But he said, “After they break their pledge, the gates are open, and they catch up,” having more partners in a shorter time.

Link courtesy of Religion News Blog.

Aphrodite Bats Last

A New York Times report by a Columbia University sociologist on the virginity pledges promoted by some Christian groups such as True Love Waits finds that pledge-takers do delay the onset of sexual activity, yet tend to contract sexually transmitted diseases at about the same rate as their peers, suggesting that they do not get additional education on STDs.

Key paragraphs:

By age 23, half the teenagers who had made virginity pledges were married, compared with 25 percent of those who had not pledged, the study found. Dr. Bearman said he did not know whether the teenagers who had broken their pledges did so initially with their fianc?s or with others, because the data had not yet been analyzed.

But he said, “After they break their pledge, the gates are open, and they catch up,” having more partners in a shorter time.

Link courtesy of Religion News Blog.

Aphrodite Bats Last

A New York Times report by a Columbia University sociologist on the virginity pledges promoted by some Christian groups such as True Love Waits finds that pledge-takers do delay the onset of sexual activity, yet tend to contract sexually transmitted diseases at about the same rate as their peers, suggesting that they do not get additional education on STDs.

Key paragraphs:

By age 23, half the teenagers who had made virginity pledges were married, compared with 25 percent of those who had not pledged, the study found. Dr. Bearman said he did not know whether the teenagers who had broken their pledges did so initially with their fianc?s or with others, because the data had not yet been analyzed.

But he said, “After they break their pledge, the gates are open, and they catch up,” having more partners in a shorter time.

Link courtesy of Religion News Blog.

Aphrodite Bats Last

A New York Times report by a Columbia University sociologist on the virginity pledges promoted by some Christian groups such as True Love Waits finds that pledge-takers do delay the onset of sexual activity, yet tend to contract sexually transmitted diseases at about the same rate as their peers, suggesting that they do not get additional education on STDs.

Key paragraphs:

By age 23, half the teenagers who had made virginity pledges were married, compared with 25 percent of those who had not pledged, the study found. Dr. Bearman said he did not know whether the teenagers who had broken their pledges did so initially with their fianc?s or with others, because the data had not yet been analyzed.

But he said, “After they break their pledge, the gates are open, and they catch up,” having more partners in a shorter time.

Link courtesy of Religion News Blog.

Drat that Mary Magdalene

More attempted damage control from the Christian right to the fuss raised by The Da Vinci Code, about which I blogged earlier on Dec. 9, 2003.

Here, AP writer Richard N. Ostling writes a fairly snide review of Karen L. King’s The Gospel of Mary Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle.

(Credit to Religion News Blog, which has the dirt on all kinds of religious groups, so long as they are not “Christian apologists [or] countercult professionals.”)

Of Course Jesus Was Married

I did not want to be one of the 50 people in the English-speaking world who had not read The Da Vinci Code, especially after one of my students wrote a flattering review of it in which I recognized all the elements of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, so I got a copy. Think of it as “Tom Clancy meets Holy Blood, Holy Grail.”

It’s a remarkably Pagan-friendly book, in a generic sort of way.

Apparently, the book’s success has led more Catholics to take a hard look at the Opus Dei organization.

Meanwhile, the book’s success has Christian apologists scrambling! No, he wasn’t married, no no no! All wrong! Evil obscene pagan propaganda!

Here is another attempt.. But all these Christian apologists can do is endlessly quote their four gospels. They do not deal with the notion that 1st-century Jews did not promote celibacy as a religious option. Temple priests, rabbis, kings and shoemakers were all expected to marry and produce children. How would a healthy 30-year-old carpenter/building contractor have evaded that social responsibilty?