Happy Easter!

I usually post a favorite work of Easter art, but this year I've decided to do something a little different and post music instead. Enjoy! 

Happy Easter 2016! Χριστός ἀνέστη!

Best wishes to all for a happy, contemplative, and restful Easter!  This year's art of the Resurrection comes from Baroque Venetian painter Sebastiano Ricci and dates around 1715-16.  Currently it resides in the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London.  Click the image to enlarge for better detail.

Usually for holiday art postings I go for something from the Renaissance, but Ricci's vision has such a wonderful sense of color and composition.  Immortal angels and all-too-human soldiers alike are stunned by the sheer power of the figure of Christ risen in sublime glory.

For more Easter art (and related items), see the archives here.

Happy Easter 2015! Christos Anesti!

Happy Easter, everybody!  This year's Easter art is a painting (c. 1511) that was only recently identified as a work by Titian, one of the artistic giants of the Italian Renaissance.

Holiday Humor: Jon Stewart vs. Easter and Passover

From the archives and still hilarious: 

The Daily Show
Daily Show Full Episodes,  More Daily Show Videos,  Comedy Central Full Episodes

Sunday Sermon: Hype, Heresy, and the Osteens

For La Parisienne and Dr. Doolittle, as we have long been saying exactly this.  Oh, sure, I'm a mean, nasty person for calling out such an inoffensive, smiling nice guy as Joel Osteen, right?  Whatever.  He and his Prosperity Gospel bandwagon are factually wrong in terms of orthodox doctrine, and no number of toothy grins and amazing hairdos is going to turn his pulpit-based motivational speaking into the actual gospel.  

It's marketing genius that tells a bunch of people exactly what they want to hear, but its popularity doesn't mean that it's not a pile of unbiblical hooey. You don't have to be a Christian to see that.  You don't have to adhere to any religion at all. You only have to be a person with neurons and a basic ability to compare one set of statements with another and see that the two don't match.

On a related note: It doesn't matter if Osteen's shallow, happy-slappy, brain-dead, self-centered, "God is my cheerleader" pablum makes you feel good.  "Feeling good about yourself" and "getting stuff" and refusing to talk honestly about sin and human failing are not the point of Christianity.  There, I said it.  

The Fleeing Christians of Iraq

It's one of the world's oldest Christian communities, and it's on the verge of extinction.  Many are fleeing to Iraqi Kurdistan, which seems to be one of the only (relatively) safe spots in the region.

A Christian Convert in Afghanistan

On the run.

Quote of the Day: Remembering the Persecuted Christians of the Middle East

OK, I've mocked Prince Charles plenty in the past (and will continue to do so in the future, I'm sure) for some of the silly things he's said. But sometimes he gets it right. Like right now, as he offers up this reminder about the ongoing persecution of Christians in the Middle East, the atrocity that almost nobody in the media ever mentions. Here's a bit of it:

“I have for some time now been deeply troubled by the growing difficulties faced by Christian communities in various parts of the Middle East.  It seems to me that we cannot ignore the fact that Christians in the Middle East are increasingly being deliberately targeted by fundamentalist Islamist militants.”

The Ongoing Persecution of Christians in the Middle East

Alas even as there is almost no voice raised in their defense by Western politicians:

" ... in a vast belt of land from Morocco to Pakistan there is scarcely a single country in which Christians can worship entirely without harassment."

Government Shutdown, Sunday Edition

Seriously?  Ugh.  

The Christian Exodus From The Middle East

It's Sunday.  Spare a thought for those being persecuted in the Middle East.  The assaults on Christians in Egypt and Syria recently have been horrific.  Here's a piece of the article in Foreign Affairs:

At the start of World War I, the Christian population of the Middle East may have been as high as 20 percent. Today, it is roughly four percent. Although it is difficult to be exact, there are perhaps 13 million Christians left in the region, and that number has likely fallen further, given the continued destabilization of Syria and Egypt, two nations with historically large Christian populations. At the present rate of decline, there may very well be no significant Christian presence in the Middle East in another generation or two.  

This would be a profoundly important loss. Christianity was born in the Middle East and had a deep, penetrating presence in the region for hundreds of years before the rise of Islam.  

. . . But it is important to note that the removal of the region’s Christians is a disaster for Muslims as well. They are the ones who will be left with the task of building decent societies in the aftermath of these atrocities. And that task will be made immeasurably harder by the removal of Christians from their midst. It is not just that the memory of these brutal actions will taint these societies -- perpetrators and victims alike -- for the indefinite future; it is also that Muslims are removing the sort of pluralism that is the foundation for any truly democratic public life. One of the refrains of the Arab Spring has been that Muslims want to put an end to tyranny. But the only lasting guarantor of political rights is the sort of social and religious diversity that Muslims in the region are in the process of extinguishing. If nothing is done to reverse the situation, the hope for peace and prosperity in the Middle East may vanish along with the region’s Christian population. 

Eradicating Syria's Christian Communities

A friend of mine who has lived in Syria suggests this article by a history professor.  Some 10-15% of the Syrian populace are Arab Christians, who are already under assault by jihadists.  Here's a sobering thought:

So here is the nightmare. If the U.S., France, and some miscellaneous allies strike at the regime, they could conceivably so weaken it that it would collapse. Out of the ruins would emerge a radically anti-Western regime, which would kill or expel several million Christians and Alawites. This would be a political, religious, and humanitarian catastrophe unparalleled since the Armenian genocide almost exactly a century ago.

I should add, though, that I do not agree with the professor's lumping Israel's military arsenal in with those of other chaotic or rogue regimes of the Middle East.  Apparently even in lamenting the dire straits of Syrian Christians, some people just can't help lobbing a shot at the Jewish state too.  But that's another blog post.

The Purple Woes of Cairo

Things are getting ugly (OK, uglier) in Egypt as the military attacks the Muslim Brotherhood, which is pushing back.  Here's another awful aspect that should not be overlooked: Morsi supporters have set fire to a number of Coptic churches.

800 New Saints in Otranto, Italy

I missed this story when it first appeared, but it's remarkable.  Do read.

Religious Freedom Around the World: the 2013 Report

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom’s annual report is out (in PDF).   I'm just going to quote part of its assessment of China:

The Chinese government continues to perpetrate particularly severe violations of the freedom of thought, conscience, and religion or belief. Religious groups and individuals considered to threaten national security or social harmony, or whose practices are deemed beyond the vague legal definition of “normal religious activities,” are illegal and face severe restrictions, harassment, detention, imprisonment, and other abuses. Religious freedom conditions for Tibetan Buddhists and Uighur Muslims remain particularly acute, as the government broadened its efforts to discredit and imprison religious leaders, control the selection of clergy, ban certain religious gatherings, and control the distribution of religious literature by members of these groups. The government also detained over a thousand unregistered Protestants in the past year, closed “illegal” meeting points, and prohibited public worship activities. Unregistered Catholic clergy remain in detention or disappeared.

Cultural Illiteracy at "the Newspaper of Record"

This is why I don't take "serious" newspapers seriously.  Besides, here is a quotable observation: "It’s difficult to take the Times' copious critiques of Catholicism and religion in general seriously when it is as illiterate as this on the most fundamental of Christian doctrines."  Well, DUH.  

Happy Easter!

Every Easter I post a work of religious art for the occasion.  Usually it's a painting, but this year it's a sculpture.  I give you one of my favorite underappreciated works of the great Michelangelo: his beautiful, triumphant Risen Christ (1519-21) in marble, now in the Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome.  By the way, Michelangelo's work is a heroic nude; the bit of drapery was added later in the Baroque period.

Oh, it's Easter.  Here's something fun from a previous celebration.

Merry Christmas: King's College, Cambridge's Annual Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols

Here is the background, and you can listen to the lovely Christmas music on BBC World Service online for a few more days.  The first carol is always "Once in Royal David's City," and it's gorgeous, simply gorgeous. Enjoy, gentle reader!

Rant: Textual Harassment

So first there was this.  How to respond?  Nope.  By "editing the Bible" these people could mean "changing an ancient text so it's more convenient for you" or maybe even worse, "bowdlerizing the text for cheap political purposes."  

Come on, the guy in HuffPo blatantly advocates excising things that he personally finds objectionable.  That's not really editing.  That's doing actual violence to the integrity of the text.  Dude's a professor of writing; you'd think he'd grasp this basic point, but noooooooooo.  And unless he's got a real command of the ancient languages in which the Bible is written and can read them in any meaningful scholarly way, then he can shut his socially superior piehole, because just mucking about with (often bad) modern English translations is a waste of time if you're really talking about editing/bowdlerizing/whatever.  

Oh, I am totally making my rant/argument from the standpoint of a student of history and language and literature.  I'm not opening the can of religious worms.  I'm also pretty darn sure that I don't have to in order to make my point about capriciously changing a historical literary document (really a collection of documents) to suit your current mood. People, even rather famous people, have tried this little tack before.  Anyway, why do I also get a nagging feeling that this current proposal is yet another a not-too-subtle potshot at the traditional Church both Catholic and Protestant and its opposition to various progressive crusades?  Christians these days make such easy targets.

Whatever.  I also have a counter-proposal: how about, in the spirit of this self-proclaimed ecumenical religious open-mindedness and desire to elide uncomfortable passages in ancient texts, you also advocate "updating" all other ancient religious texts of every other creed?  How about "editing" the Koran?  Cutting out all the bits you personally don't like?  Any takers?

Thoughts on North Carolina: "How to win a culture war and lose a generation"

Here is a pretty darn sensible blog post about the recent uproar about North Carolina's voting to amend its state constitution.  Here's a piece of it:

Despite the fact that the North Carolina law already holds that marriage in the eyes of state is only between a man and a woman, an amendment was put on the ballot to permanently ban same-sex marriage in the state constitution. The initiative doesn’t appear to change anything on a practical level, (though some are saying it may have unintended negative consequences on heterosexual relationships), but seems to serve primarily as an ideological statement. 

... an expensive, destructive, and impractical ideological statement.  

... it should be clear that amendments like these needlessly offend gays and lesbians, damage the reputation of Christians, and further alienate young adults—both Christians and non-Christian—from the Church.  

So my question for those evangelicals leading the charge in the culture wars is this: Is it worth it? 

Besides, I don't like the idea of tampering with constitutions, period.  Also a side effect of culture wars: everybody comes out looking and feeling worse, and everybody comes out more radicalized in one direction or the other - and this makes everything even worse than they were in the beginning.