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Christmas Candy Jesus, Black Magi, Jewish Xmas

By Michael J. Altman

…research group finds that only 37% of Americans include Jesus in their Christmas festivities. One small group of Christians think this enough to warrant executing Santa. Jolly ole St. Nicholas’ home town was in Turkey and the town of Demre is cashing in on their favorite son. The story of the nativity through social networks. Jamaicans are using the first patois version of the Gospel of Luke in this year’s Christmas celebrations. Under continued t…

Capitalism and the Anti-Modern Pope

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…mporary world seems hell-bent on giving the papacy ammunition. The capitalist system seems as morally bankrupt as its financial institutions currently are. Wars are declared unilaterally, despite the ineffectual condemnation of the world community (and the Vatican), then drag on endlessly without respite or a clear sense of the purpose. The Terror You Shall Always Have With You… Catholic anti-Modernism, at its best, seems grounded in a poignant se…

Putting the “Protest” Back in Protestant: Reclaiming the Spirit of Resistance

By Peter Laarman

…ficiently developed, the Protestant spirit also infused early insurrectionist stirrings among the Africans enslaved on these shores. Read David Walker’s powerful Appeal (1829) and then tell me if you can find anything in it that a John Milton or a Thomas Hooker or a John Adams could not have written. The same Protestant spirit of righteous resistance imbues every word spoken or written by freedom fighters Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and H…

The Christian Roots of the New Age: The Aquarian Gospel

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…Luke adds a few poignant tales from Jesus’ childhood, most notably the Christmas story with the shepherds, and the story of a precocious twelve year old arguing circles around the Temple priesthood in Jerusalem (Dowling likes that one, naturally, and expands on it in chapter 19 of The Aquarian Gospel). John sets the whole thing in a cosmic framework, telling us first that “the Logos was with God and the Logos was God,” then showing us how Jesus wa…

Pope Warns of “Christianophobia”

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…away from long-suffering EuroAmerica, and focuses his gaze on the Middle East instead, a very different picture comes into view. In a year where religious tolerance and peaceful pluralism have been major papal themes, the Pope now declares that “Christians are the most oppressed and tormented minority” in present circumstances, worldwide. This is a stunning conclusion, and we have not one word about what metric Benedict has used to draw it. He con…

Why Obama for the Nobel? A Nudge? A Reminder?

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ne. So if the political aim of the Prize was to weigh in on Iraq or Afghanistan, as Limbaugh suggests, then it will likely have as little impact as the previous awards I mentioned. But what else might it be? The Nobel Peace Prize has also gone to other persons and other organizations—like Martin Luther King Jr. (1964), Mother Theresa (1979), “Doctors Without Borders” (1999). In these cases, and in many others, the Nobel Committee presumably wished…

Tucson, Like All Tragedy, is for Adults

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…so was Dorwin Stoddard. Phyllis Scheck was 79. Bill Badger, the man who first wrestled Jared Lee Loughner to the ground even after he had been shot himself, was 74. Even Gifford’s assistant, Gabriel “Gabe” Zimmermann, was 30. This was not a young crowd. But Christina Taylor Green was young—just nine years old. And she bears additional symbolic significance for us, because she was born on September 11, 2001 (curiously, Loughner’s birthday is Septem…

Adult Realism and the State of This Union

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…es. This was the very sort of thing that led Chief Justice Roberts to suggest last year in Alabama that Supreme Court justices had little place at such partisan affairs; his decision to attend the State of the Union address may have been, in part, a response to this most welcome gesture toward bipartsanship. It was telling, too, that the most partisan of our current justices (Alito, Scalia, and Thomas) chose to stay away. Still, this decision did…

Eulogy, Corrected: Father Matthew Came Out as Gay 30 Years Earlier

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…t was to let Matthew’s words be heard as they deserve to be. I tried, as best I could, to stay out of the way. A very dear friend and former student, Dr. Michael Bever, to whom I owe my own introduction to Father Matthew some years ago, has reminded me of some things I either failed to say about him, or else said wrongly. Matthew’s, as I think he and I both agree, is a life worth trying to get just right. So this corrective is an important one, as…

Islamophobia by PowerPoint

By Julie Ingersoll

…stead tells him to “read,” to which he replies: “I cannot read.” Perhaps most startling was Federer’s extensive focus on the prurient. Apart from predictable allusions to virgins in paradise, he also repeatedly referenced polygamy (he must have mentioned Muhammad’s wives ten times), sex slaves, castration, pedophilia, honor killings, and gang rape. He even alleged that the Qur’an contains “all these verses on how to rape women.” His concern for wo…