Mystery photo. Where am (was) I?
Month: April 2006
Easter Bunny Arrested!
I really, really do not want to make light of the actual human events involved here, but this story is surreal (and –I would speculate–the basis of the Easter Bunny Hates You video):
In what would seem to be nothing more than a holiday prank, a newspaper in Florida reports that the Easter Bunny was arrested for attacking a woman. Unfortunately, however, it turns out that the truth can indeed be stranger than fiction.
Naplesnews.com reports that a 6-foot tall 280 pound Easter Bunny and his assistant were arrested by Fort Myers Police for an altercation Saturday night at the Edison Mall.
According to the victim’s husband Robert Johansson, "It was something like you would see in a movie."
Johansson says the incident started because the Easter Bunny decided to close shop 15 minutes early on Saturday night with a line of children and families still waiting. Robert says his wife, Erin, approached the manager to complain when she was knocked to the ground.
According to Johansson, "The next thing you know my wife is sucker punched by the manager, she is pulled to the ground by her hair and then the Easter Bunny jumps on top and starts punching my wife in the head."
Arthur McLure, who listed his occupation as the Easter Bunny, and 25-year-old Crystal Frechette were charged by the Forth Myers Police with battery and disturbing the peace [SOURCE].
Weigel on The Truce of 1968
Hey, Tim Jones, here.
1968 was the year that I “got saved” in the Baptist church and was baptized. I was seven, and at the time I’m certain that I thought everyone was a Baptist.
Even if I had been a Catholic at the time, though, I would have been too young to take note of the portentious “Truce of 1968”. Like the Kennedy assassination and Vietnam, it was one of those historic events of which I was blissfully unaware, but the effects of which would resonate through the rest of my life.
In THIS ARTICLE over at Catholic Exchange, George Weigel explains The Truce;
“In 1968, Cardinal Patrick O’Boyle of Washington, D.C., disciplined nineteen priests who had publicly dissented from Pope Paul VI’s teaching in the encyclical Humanae Vitae. Three years later, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Clergy decreed that Cardinal O’Boyle should lift canonical penalties against those priests who informed the cardinal privately that they agreed that the Church’s teaching on “the objective evil of contraception” was “an authentic expression of (the) magisterium.”
The Congregation explicitly avoided requiring that the priests, who had dissented publicly, retract their dissent publicly. A new biography of O’Boyle, Steadfast in the Faith (Catholic University of America Press), suggests that the decision not to require a public retraction was made by Paul VI himself.”
To many who were adult Catholics at the time, the “Truce” was a watershed moment, in a decade of watershed moments.
At the time, it was one of a number signs that the Church hierarchy lacked the will or the courage to discipline dissident priests and bishops. It appeared to be almost paralyzed with fear of schism.
They appeared to be intensely concerned with keeping the modernists in the Church, with the result that we now have a Church full of modernists, each worshipping his own conscience.
Weigel’s opinion is always worth reading, and for me, learning about The Truce was a valuable history lesson.
United 93
Is it "too soon"?
I don’t think so.
FWIW, here’s my take.
And here’s David Beamer’s take (father of United 93 passenger Todd Beamer).
Also, some some discussion — and interview excerpts with the director — from Rush Limbaugh.
Charles Krauthammer & Mr. Monk
SEPARATED AT BIRTH?
Jewish Gospel Dynamics
Jewish rabbi and New Testament specialist Michael Cook offers an intriguing example of modern Jewish apologetics on the claims of Christianity:
"The New Testament has been the greatest single external determinant of Jewish history, and a deleterious one to say the least. It has caused Jews grievous problems and even innumerable deaths, not to mention generating antisemitism and anti-Jewish stereotyping. Today, it remains the cause of societal pressures during Christian holy day seasons and a source of confusion for Jews targeted by Christian missionaries and millennialists.
"Engaging the New Testament, therefore, can be both therapeutic and empowering for Jews. At the same time, a willingness by Jews to tackle Christian texts may help enlighten Christians about the role the New Testament has played in violating some of their own values. Jews who are able to articulate to Christians the Gospels’ evolution from a Jewish perspective may be in a better position to curb the reckless abandon with which New Testament texts are often so cavalierly cited, bandied about and misconstrued in modern society."
(Nod to Religion & Society for the link.)
I have posted this article not because I intend to interact with it on an apologetics level — that exercise would require far more space than the blogging medium allows
— but because I want to highlight a renaissance in modern Jewish apologetics, which I think can only be positive for Christian/Jewish interreligious dialogue. If such dialogue is to be more than self-affirming chitchat, then both partners in the discussion need to engage in apologetics, which is to say that they need to offer each other with mutual charity and respect the reasons for their hope (1 Pet. 3:15).
For another recent example of Jewish apologetics, see David Klinghoffer’s Why the Jews Rejected Jesus.
GET THE REVIEW. (Scroll to the second review.)
A Blogger’s Parable
The blogmistress of Once Upon a Time… (aka my sister) offers an instructive parable for bloggers with a sobering moral:
"If a person starts a blog and begins revealing intimate and private details of his life, he will attract attention. No one asked him to put himself out there, but he did. Eventually, the attention and the demands of the public leave him feeling that he has nothing private left to himself. He is conflicted because he enjoyed the audience that would read his posts gratefully. Over time, there are certain readers who demand more and more, or who may judge him for the way he lives his life and write him to say so. The man doesn’t want to lose his audience, but he sees that the price he paid for giving away his privacy is that the public feels that what he has given away is no longer just his. They are entitled to it also. Eventually, he stops blogging altogether…"
GET THE POST. (Read the whole thing.)
The Easter Bunny Hates You!
Yes!
Proof!
Live footage of the Easter Bunny’s never ending war against mankind!
(Which the filmmakers take a little over the top in my opinion.)
(And there is a mildly impolite word for one’s posterior at the end of the film.)
Nevertheless,
GET THE VIDEO.
(CHT to the reader who e-mailed.)
Channeling Thomas Howard
No. Not really.
The truth is: Thomas Howard is my hero, in more ways than one.
First, as an explainer of Catholic sensibilities to the Evangelical Protestant mindset in which I was raised, he is without peer. Just as to deconstruct non-Catholic misunderstandings on justification, the papacy, the canon of scripture, and practically anything else you can think of, go to Jimmy Akin every time (Jimmy is my hero too), likewise to awaken appreciation in the most trenchant Fundamentalist heart of ritual and ceremony, of worship in liturgy and sacrament, of sacred art and architecture, of the whole sacramental and incarnational worldview, Tom Howard is your man.
As a young Evangelical yearning for something more, I discovered Howard’s Evangelical Is Not Enough at just the right moment in my life. It was like water in the desert to me. Chance or the Dance? also is wonderful, though I got even more out of Hallowed Be This House (which I see is now published under the title Splendor in the Ordinary: Your Home as a Holy Place).
Secondly, Howard is a magnificent writer, a stylist of extraordinary grace, wit, and power. He makes wonderful use of words like "precincts" and "hugger-mugger" and "surfeit," and puts sentences and paragraphs together with such elegance and music that form and function become one, and you start to absorb something of what he is trying to tell you just from the sound of the words. He is almost more a poet than an essayist; he writes with the moving energy and joy of a man who loves deeply what he is writing about, who feels it down to the marrow in his bones.
Robert Bolt said that in A Man for All Seasons that he strove to create "a bold and beautiful verbal architecture." Howard’s writing is like that, and reading it, one feels, rather than thinks: If verbal architecture can be like this, with nothing dry or functional or utilitarian about it, why not church architecture also?
Anyway, recently at Arts & Faith, a discussion board I visit more or less regularly, there was some discussion around the disconnect between, on the one hand, Catholic and Orthodox veneration of relics and icons, and Protestant discomfort with such practices on the other.
This subject triggered my Thomas Howard Response Mechanism, which sets me off and running quoting Evangelical Is Not Enough, Hallowed Be This House and whatever else comes to hand (in a pinch I’ve even been known to reach for Once Upon a Time, God…).
So, I began working on a contribution to the thread, but what with one thing leading to another, as I secretly knew from the beginning it would, I got completely carried away and ended up writing a sprawling essay touching on some of the general themes regarding which Howard had been among my earliest and most influential guides.
And, as is often the case when one tries to do the same sort of thing that one’s hero does, I did what little I could to honor Howard’s style as well as his ideas.
Of course I could never really even approximately "channel" Howard, or hope to match either the talent or the style of his inimitable prose. The man is a true original. (The first few grafs of my piece in particular are too jargony and abstract, though I think it gets better after that, about the time I get to Genesis 1.) But I think anyone familiar with Howard may notice that I am at least trying to walk in Howard’s footsteps, even if I don’t quite have his stride.
Read SDG’s "Reflections on a sacramental/incarnational worldview" at Arts & Faith
Crow’s Ears and Karma Lite Nuns
Terry Mattingly has the story.
The Vatican is known its complex rituals, rich in ancient symbols and mysterious details. Take, for example, the funeral of Pope John Paul II, as described by the International Herald Tribune.
“The 84-year-old John Paul was laid out in Clementine Hall, dressed in white and red vestments, his head covered with a white bishop’s miter and propped up on three dark gold pillows,” wrote Ian Fisher of the New York Times. “Tucked under his left arm was the silver staff, called the crow’s ear, that he had carried in public.”
Get the joke?
You see, that ornate silver shepherd’s crook is actually called a crosier (or “crozier”), not a “crow’s ear.”