Religion Dispatches
Georgetown founder John Carroll wouldn’t be surprised to find his university in a controversy concerning the appropriate place of religious groups in civil affairs… but he might be surprised that this time an attack came from within the Church.
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In Yiddish, Jews reacted to the stories wafting out of Holy Week churches with a mixture of fear and derision. The Christian savior was regularly referred to by playful nicknames like Yoizel, Getzel, and most creatively Yoshke Pandre. The layers of meaning in this last name are astonishing: Using the diminutive suffix “–ke,” Yoshke translates as “Little Joe.”
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Recently, a controversial megachurch minister Eddie Long was crowned a Davidic king “on behalf of the Jewish people”; but he’s far from the first non-Jew to make use of a so-called rabbi to bolster his spiritual authority.
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“There are some among you,” the pope wrote, “who conceive of and desire a Church in America different from that which is in the rest of the world.” Apparently unconcerned that on this side of the ocean the word might have a more positive ring than he intended, he used the name by which this heresy had become known in Europe: Americanism.
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Throughout his 32-minute set, Mangum returned more than once to the sad fate of the teenage diarist, and in doing so he created a moment that seemed at once a communal high point of the movement and a peculiarly ominous sing-along, Kumbaya mashed up with catastrophe.
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What do Pope Benedict XVI and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain have in common? They both have a thing for Krampus.
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Reeling from the death of Steve Jobs earlier this month, the world might now mourn another visionary who made technology an intimate part of our lives.
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When Michael Landon died, many Christians thought they’d lost one of their own. Knowing that he was defined at least in part by language, when Landon finally told a Jewish story in a Little House episode, he used Yiddish as a marker of identity.
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A History Channel documentary purports to reveal “the real face of Jesus” through the same technology that brought us Avatar’s big blue aliens. But the 3D rendering of the Shroud of Turin is only the latest big-ticket appearance of one of history’s most famous relics.
Read More1925, 1955, 2005 and now, Ben Stein; It refuses to die because “the debate about evolution is not about evolution at all.”
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