Living goddesses

What are the limits of cultural relativism? In Nepal, the supreme court is asking whether girls’ rights are violated by the Hindu/Buddhist tradition of choosing one of them, selected at age four or five, to become a virgin goddess. In order to qualify, a girl must possess 32 physical “perfections,” including excellent health, a sturdy body, unblemished skin, very black hair and eyes, attractive hands and feet, small genitalia, a clear voice, no body odor and all her teeth. Oh—and her horoscope must jibe with that of the king. See Dean Peerman's exploration of the issue.

Advent in the waiting room

by Debra Bendis

This week I waited in a hospital waiting room with my mother while my dad underwent surgery to repair an aortic aneurysm (successfully). The staff was cordial and efficient, the coffee was free, and an RN came around every hour or so to give us an update on surgery progress. Still, it was a hospital, and during the eight hour wait we became lethargic, stuck in our chairs except for a few forays into the cafeteria.

A cloud of anxiety weighed on our conversation. (My dad is 83.) There are more problems ahead for my parents, who have thus far been vibrant and active in spite of stenosis, rotary cuff, arthritis, diabetes, etc. How will they find the courage for these later, chaotic years? How will I find the stamina I need to stay by their sides?

I find some clues back at home, where my husband and I read an Advent devotional. “We need to wait together to keep each other at home spiritually,” Henri Nouwen reminds us, “so that when the Word comes it can become flesh in us.” “Waiting together.” I think of the lonely hospital waiting room, where the “waiters” pass time by clinging to a cell phone conversation or staring vacantly at a TV. Yes, some greet strangers next to them, but many endure the wait alone, and try to ward off their fears and even panic.

It’s a joy to be back at church for Sunday school, where members of a small group are discussing their personal experiences of Advent and praying about them. This Sunday we’ll carol at the home of a member who is confined with an oxygen tank. With the spiritual strength we’ve garnered in the company of other Christians, we are cultivating what Nouwen calls the attitude of waiting, and hoping, as he says, “to be people who can live in a very chaotic world and survive spiritually.”

The God gap in politics

by David Heim

Despite their strong showing in the November elections, Democrats continue to be plagued by the “God gap” in electoral politics: religiously observant citizens vote overwhemingly for Republicans whereas those who never attend church vote overwhelmingly for Democrats.

John C. Green crunches the exit poll numbers in the Dec. 12 Christian Century (“Faithful voters”) and notes that Democrats didn’t pick up any ground among those who regularly attend worship services. Not only that, the Democrats’ takeover of Congress was in large part fueled by non-Christian voters. Democrats did recapture the white Catholic vote, but they made negligible inroads among white evangelicals, 73 percent of whom voted Republican.

One thing that has changed, however, is that Democrats have begun fielding some religiously literate candidates such as Ted Strickland, the Methodist minister elected governor in Ohio, and Bob Casey, the Jesuit-formed, pro-life senator from Pennsylvania. And, of course, there is Barack Obama.

Obama’s appearance at an AIDS conference Dec. 1 at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church was at the very least politically shrewd. Few Democratic politicians would think about appearing at that evangelical megachurch. Even fewer could pull it off with Obama’s ease.

Obama was able to find common ground with Senator Sam Brownback, whom he praised for his work on AIDS, the crisis in Dafur and sexual trafficking. He stressed that with AIDS there is a “moral and spiritual component to prevention.” But he also challenged his Saddleback audience on the need to distribute condoms to halt the spread of AIDS. “I know that there are those who, out of sincere religious conviction, oppose such measures. . . . I must respectfully disagree. I do not accept the notion that those who make mistakes in their lives should be given an effective death sentence.”

Warren’s decision to host Obama provoked vitriolic attacks from right-wing Christians like Phyllis Schlafly and Tim Wildmon, who like to refer to the “pro-death” Obama. One Christian pundit said Warren was turning his evangelical pulpit over to “inhumane, sick and sinister evil.” This anger suggests that these figures feel genuinely threatened by the alliances Obama is creating. Perhaps that is another sign of hope for a broader, more civil Christian conversation about political choices.

Fade of religiously liberal magazines

John Dart responds to the recent story about the closing of several high-profile liberal-leaning religious magazines. The original story suggested the Christian Century was the only exception. It overlooked Sojourners.

Biblical artifacts at the Sackler Gallery

By Jean K. Dudek

A person walking through the exhibit at the Sackler Gallery in Washington who doesn’t know about the artifacts might think: “Ragged scrap with incomprehensible squiggles.” But someone who knows what they are will be amazed, and want to shout, as I did, “I can’t believe they have that here!”

“In the Beginning: Bibles Before the Year 1000,” which ends January 7, has brought together more than 70 biblical manuscripts, many of which are as famous as biblical manuscripts get: one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Codex Sinaiticus, from the fourth century, which is the earliest extant volume collecting what we think of as the Old And New Testaments. The exhibit is partly about the history of the development of the book from scroll to utilitarian codex (a bound book) to illuminated manuscript. But it also pushes us to think about the Bible in new ways.

For one thing, it reminds us that the Bible is a collection of books. Prior to the fourth-century era of Constantine, there doesn’t seem to have been an effort to compile a complete set in one volume. The development of the canon took some time.

Even if we are accustomed to thinking of the Bible as an assortment of books, it’s a challenge to consider the textual differences between different manuscripts. Most of us are used to different wordings of the Bible in different translations. We are less aware of different wording due to the existence of different manuscripts. We may be surprised to learn that the Freer Gospels (obtained by Charles Lang Freer in 1906) include the only extant copy of a manuscript that includes dialogue between the risen Christ and his disciples. This is the page on display at the Sackler.

Even if one is familiar with the text variants as reported in the UBS textual apparatus, the Sackler exhibit brings out something more: the physicality of the manuscripts. We see the hand-made nature of the objects: people wrote these by hand, messed up, fixed them. Other scribes corrected them, and owners wrote their own notes in the margins. We see how the nature of the materials affected their production. For example, a palimpsest is a manuscript in which one text is scraped or washed off so that the parchment could be re-used for another text. A sixth-century text of 2 Kings in Greek is still visible beneath a ninth- or tenth-century overwriting of (nonbiblical) poetry in Hebrew. Apparently someone thought that was a good idea.

The Freer Gallery’s Codex of Deuteronomy and Joshua is so well preserved that one can see where the scribe dipped his pen in the ink; the letters start off dark, then gradually become lighter until suddenly the next letter is dark—the scribe reached for more ink.
And then there are the glorious illuminated manuscripts, which have an aesthetic appeal that is easy to grasp. Imagine the unspoken support all that gold leaf gave to missionary efforts: “This religion is so great our books look like this!” Plog the Barbarian didn’t need to know Latin to get the point.

I was left wondering: for each of these manuscripts, how many comparable items once existed but are now lost?

Jean Dudek is a student at Wesley Theological Seminary

Christmas: How offended should you be?

By Dennis Colby

This is traditionally the time of year when we Christians expect to be offended by the creeping assault on all things Christian by an insidious secularist conspiracy led by such arch-Leftist organizations as the American Civil Liberties Union and Macy's. Our annual hypersensitivity to all things relating to winter holidays has become as joyous a part of the season as caroling, family gatherings, and passing on awful gifts to your distant relatives.

Lately, though, it seems some Christians have lost their taste for Yule battle. A number of them have proclaimed that "the Christmas wars are over" because of things like Wal-Mart once again using the greeting "Merry Christmas" after replacing it in previous years with "Victory to World Atheism." All over the country, we're told, Americans have reached reasonable compromises on Nativity scenes, holiday pageants and the distribution of candy canes with Bible verses printed on them. The fight’s over, they say, and we can enjoy our holidays in peace.

Our Founding Fathers had a word for such people: "Appease-o-crats" (alternately, "Rhode Islanders").

The fact is, Christmas has never been more in danger. The appearance of a truce is a facade, an exercise in what Muhammad Ali called the "rope a dope,” except now the rope is Amazon.com's Christmas Store, and the dope is America.

Don't be fooled by the dearth of isolated school districts suspending eight-year-olds for wearing red and green sweaters to class. The anti-Christmas crusaders aren't defeated; like their spiritual soul mates Osama bin Laden and Walter Mondale, they're simply waiting, biding their time and waiting to strike (perhaps in caves, although in Mondale's case Minnesota is more likely). As I write this, there are people working overtime to ensure that next year it's illegal to go to Midnight Mass, and that the federal
government will rename Christmas "Global Warming Awareness Day."

Here are some more, seemingly benign elements of the new, secularist holiday. Be prepared to respond.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS: What "Workers of the World, Unite" was to the Reds, "Happy Holidays" is to the Christmasophobes. This is their insane battle cry, their bloodthirsty pledge to destroy all you hold dear. When someone says this to you this month, the only proper way to respond is with a lawsuit.

SEASON'S GREETINGS: Really, comrade? And just what "season" are you using as a pretext to extend your oh-so-inclusive "greetings" to me? Winter Solstice? Kwanzaa? Or is it perhaps - Mao-Tse Tung's birthday (Dec. 26)?

HAPPY CHANUKAH: The people using this want to convince Christians that the letter "C" is pronounced like the letter "H." It's not clear how this fits into the gradual secularist plot to overthrow Christmas.

SANTA CLAUS: Otherwise known as the New Deal in human form. Just like that freedom-strangling program, Santa wants to give you something for nothing: instead of pumping crucial consumer dollars into our economy, this foreign-born spendthrift will give you gifts free of charge, hurting retailers and making people more dependent on the government. Oh, and here's the best part: he's going to trespass on private property to do it. It's time to put this creep where he belongs: in prison.

WINTER WONDERLAND: The New Jersey Supreme Court would love this song: An unmarried couple, probably direct from fornicating, decide they want to get "married," so they build a snowman, pretend he's a clergyman, and have the sick parody of a wedding ceremony out in the wilderness. True fact the mainstream media doesn't want you to know: Human-snowpeople marriages have already surpassed heterosexual unions in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

CHRISTMAS TREES: It's a little-known fact that Christmas trees were first introduced into the United States by Jimmy Carter in the mid-1970s in a feverish bid to shift the focus of the holiday from God to vegetation. Despite such sinister beginnings, every year millions of supposed Christians actually invite this pagan idol into their homes and drape it with colorful lights and sugary morsels (the tree, not Jimmy Carter).

MANGER SCENES: The Christmas haters would like nothing more than for us to believe the preposterous story that Jesus was born in a manger. Does that sound like something God would do? Sure it does—if you learned theology from a hippie strumming an acoustic guitar and telling you the real meaning of the Ten Commandments is "be yourself." Jesus was actually born in a luxury hotel with a heated pool and HBO, according to scholars cited on the Internet's most reliable news source (Crackpotwiki).

THE NATIVITY STORY: Now that I think about it, the whole Nativity story is full of problems. The whole thing sends dangerously mixed messages about illegal immigration. Jesus' family weren't the only ones hopping borders; what about the Magi? These Persian elitists waltz into the country and buy their way out of trouble with a little gold, frankincense and myrrh? Maybe we should keep this story from our children until we get the country fenced in. Otherwise they might get the wrong idea.

Dennis Colby is a freelance writer in Connecticut.

Century streetcorner ministry

by Richard A. Kauffman

When I was a pastor I learned to ask people in pastoral care situations how they’d like me to pray for them. I asked this for two reasons: so as not to presume what their felt needs were; and because sometimes they would share with me fears and hopes that they wouldn’t otherwise express.

I think about that approach whenever I pass the street preacher near the Christian Century office . . .

. . . the guy who, with a portable PA system, warns sinners (especially gays, smokers and drinkers) of the perdition they are to face on the other side of the veil. I‘m tempted to go up to him and suggest a different tactic: Hold up a placard that says, “How might I pray for you?” My suspicion is that he’d get more responses from passersby and have a more effective street ministry.

Of course if I were really brave, I’d make that placard myself and go hang out on a street corner in downtown Chicago.

America go home?

by Richard A. Kauffman

Many Americans are hoping that the Iraq Study Group will come up with a magic elixir that will help us find a way through the Iraq mess. But as one pundit put it, the assumption behind looking to the Baker-Hamilton group for a way forward on Iraq is that there is something the U. S. can still do to get the situation under control—when we lost control over the war nearly three years ago.

How will we choose between the options before us? Do we go big? This doesn’t seem feasible, as the U.S. military is already stretched to the breaking point. Going long will only perpetuate an impossible situation reminiscent of the Vietnam War, and there isn’t the American will for either of these two options. Going home is like walking away from the scene of an accident we helped cause.

There was a time when the Powell analogy to breaking pottery was compelling: if you break it, you fix it. Yet increasingly America’s presence may be making the cessation of conflict impossible, not to mention reconstruction of the country. Going home may be the best option—with this proviso: that in due time, if called upon, the United States will offer assistance to help put things back together again—especially the infrastructure, with assurances that we don’t want to be in charge, that we’ll only serve in a supportive role at the wish and command of the Iraqi government, and that we don’t want a longer-term occupation of the country. No strings tied (no special dibs on oil, for example) and, for sure, no military bases on Iraqi soil.

Perhaps here is a better analogy than Powell’s: a relative and I went to a Chinese restaurant for takeout food, and while paying the bill, my relative knocked over a bowl of fortune cookies on the counter. Embarrassed, he stooped down to pick them up, but the irritated Chinese hostess swooped in and said to get out of the way, she’d clean up the mess herself. Maybe that is the point we’ve come to in Iraq. The Iraqis should say to the Americans: “Get out of the way, we’ll clean up this mess ourselves. You took care of Saddam for us. Thank you very much. Now we must find a way of living together, in spite of our differences and hostilities, without the iron fist of Saddam!”

Gender and the academy

by Jason Byassee

When we white male academic professionals get together, and no one else is around, we occasionally pity ourselves along these lines: “Boy, it sure would be easy to get job x if I were minority y.” Every school has too many white guys and needs minorities or women, so we figure our minority or women colleagues have a leg up for jobs. I’ve never attended an academic conference where I haven’t been in on this conversation several times.

To listen to us, you’d think women would find religious academia a breeze: hiring, tenure and professional achievement all come easily and smoothly. But now that several of my graduate school friends are well into their first jobs, I can see that life as a non-white-guy-academic is hardly easy.

One of my female colleagues was lecturing on perichoresis at an evangelical college when a student raised his hand. “Where are your children right now?” She knows that students openly discuss whether it is right for her, as a wife and mother, to have left the domestic sphere. “I spend most of my time trying to convince them God is not a big white guy in the sky,” she laments. As an evangelical, she is tired of having her Jesus-believing credentials challenged.

Another friend is an evangelical-turned-Episcopalian at a liberal Catholic institution. She’s been told she couldn’t be hired at a certain school because she’s too conservative. “If you’re a woman you’re supposed to act like their kind of woman—you can’t be an evangelical or an orthodox or a catholic-leaning theologian.” She tells me of cases in which women faculty actually boycott speeches by visiting women theologians because they’re not the right kind of woman—not feminist enough, activist enough, liberal enough, whatever enough. My friend, a sympathetic reader of Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth, apparently failed to get the memo that women aren’t allowed to read their work.

A Catholic woman teaching at another liberal Catholic college says, “It’s hard to be a woman in the academy.” I expressed incredulity—this institution’s liberal pedigree is hardly in doubt—and she roared back: “Right, you can be a woman here if you’re not uppity or successful, and if you don’t raise any questions threatening to the old boys.” She considers staying until she has enough power to hire people who’re genuinely comfortable with women colleagues—it may take a decade or two—and then considers getting out of the academy entirely. “It’s just not worth the hassle.”

The institutions in these conservations vary considerably—one evangelical, one mainline, two Catholic—but each has defined molds in which to place their women theologians. Perhaps, I think, our white-guy-whining about perceived oppression is contributing to their discomfort. . .