A Personal Note

I was previewing the following TED concert when I learned that Rhoda Keehnel had died last Wednesday. It was only on the occasion of her death that friends learned her age. She was 87. She was loved by everyone who knew her, in spite of the fact that she never admitted that she a needed hearing aid—those of us in the Bible study group just needed to speak a little louder and more clearly. She was an impassioned liberal when it came to church doctrine, and bridled at narrow-mindedness and intolerance. Rhoda was always a little overdressed, even at Wednesday night Bible study group. Her bright fashion statements were seriously out-of-date, and her wigs were meticulously quaffed.

I stayed with her in the hospital when her husband collapsed one afternoon at the end of Grace Connection. We discussed politics, serious SDA doctrinal issues, and a few of the humorous situations life had tossed our way in the ER waiting room until the wee hours of Sunday morning when it became clear that Harold was going to be OK.

Rhoda and I danced at Nicki’s wedding. I had just learned to waltz for the occasion, and when Rhoda looked longingly at the dance floor, I offered to lead. When I put my arm around her, she was not shy in snuggling up. When I demonstrated the box step, she actually led me around the floor in short order. I, a formerly shy adolescent, and she, an Adventist preacher’s wife, moved pretty well. I was her last dance partner.

There is more to say, of course. Rhoda was a more than competent church pianist and organist, and I am confident that she played in every Saturday or Sunday church that asked her. She shared fruit from their trees with everyone—even supplied bags. She was generous and kindhearted; one of the most energetic people I have ever known. She claimed that she only needed four hours of sleep a night. I guess she finally needed a bit more.

The following choir piece is my way of saying goodbye with love.
Andy

Virtual Choir Live

Composer and conductor Eric Whitacre has inspired millions by bringing together "virtual choirs," singers from many countries spliced together on video. Now, for the first time ever, he creates the experience in real time, as 32 singers from around the world Skype in to join an onstage choir (assembled from three local colleges) for an epic performance of Whitacre's "Cloudburst," based on a poem by Octavio Composer and conductor Eric Whitacre has inspired millions by bringing together "virtual choirs," singers from many countries spliced together on video. Now, for the first time ever, he creates the experience in real time, as 32 singers from around the world Skype in to join an onstage choir (assembled from three local colleges) for an epic performance of Whitacre's "Cloudburst," based on a poem by Octavio Paz.

A Pope is Chosen – Hopes Rise for Change

by John Shelby Spong
http://johnshelbyspong.com/

His name is Jorge Mario Bergoglio, but the world will know him as Pope Francis I. He was a surprise selection by the Conclave of Cardinals voting in the Sistine Chapel and he received the required majority of 77 votes on the third ballot cast, a unifying fact. He is from the “Third World,” that is, he is from the southern hemisphere, where growth in adherence to the Roman Catholic faith is still being experienced, but he was not one of those third world cardinals around which rumors of a papal possibility had circulated. He is largely an outsider to Vatican affairs and to Vatican politics. That suggests, I believe and hope, that the College of Cardinals is no longer willing to place the governance of their church into the hands of those who appear to be either tolerant of or complicit in the scandals that have marked the Vatican in recent years, both in the area of finances and in the practice of morality. He is known as a champion of the poor, but he is cool to what has been called “Liberation Theology.” Nonetheless, Leonardo Boff, the Catholic theologian most identified with liberation theology, has expressed both hope and some degree of pleasure at his election. He comes to the papacy at a time when the credibility of religious institutions, in general and of the Roman Catholic Church in particular, is at an all time low. Will he be up to the challenges he faces? Only time will tell.

People say of this ancient institution that the Roman Church moves by centuries not by decades, years or months. Historically that has been true. In an age of instant communications, jet travel and an interdependent world, however, that pace may be a luxury no longer available to this Church. Certainly the world has lost patience with its reticence to confront, purge and overcome the systemic abuse of children and young people the world over. I use the word “systemic” quite deliberately. Priestly abuse is not the isolated behavior of a few bad priests. It is far too deep and widespread to be dismissed on that basis. It reveals something systemically wrong, something systemically sick about the very culture that permeates this Church.

This sickness expresses itself not only in the abuse, but also in the widespread ecclesiastical cover up of that abuse. The cover up is as revealing as the abuse itself and it reaches now into the highest levels of that Church’s life. Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, at the invitation and with the approval of both John Paul II and Benedict XVI, was allowed to find sanctuary in the Vatican from criminal prosecution in Massachusetts. He was given a timely and propitious “promotion” to a top Vatican position, where he lives today in honor and dignity, when he should be an inmate in jail and facing the public humiliation his deeds have earned for him. As long as Bernard Law remains in this position, the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church, at its very highest level, cannot pretend that it is not still engaging in a massive cover up.

Prior to Benedict’s retirement, both the episodes of sex abuse and its facilitating cover up had broken into the ranks of the cardinals and these charges were actually nipping at the heels of the former Archbishop of Munich, who is now known to the world as Benedict XVI. The Cardinal of Los Angeles, Roger Mahoney, has been revealed as an active participant in deception, lies and cover up. The Archbishop of Scotland, Keith O’Brien, has resigned amid admitted acts of sexual impropriety with other priests or former priests. The Australian bishop, Geoffrey Robinson, who headed up that country’s investigation of the crimes of child abuse by Catholic clergy, was so thorough in his report that it shook the security of the Catholic hierarchy.

Instead of acting on his far ranging recommendations, the hierarchy marginalized this bishop and proceeded to appoint as the Cardinal Archbishop of Sydney, a man so close to those scandals that Bishop Robinson resigned, saying that he could not in honesty pledge his obedience to the Vatican’s appointment. Pope Francis I will not be given the luxury of centuries of time to confront this cancer infecting every part of this Church’s life. He has only days or weeks to signal that he will move to clear up the tragedy that is killing the life of his Church. That cancer surely requires that he also look at the other vital subjects in the life of the Church: issues like the requirement of priestly celibacy, the way women are defined and treated and this Church’s stated public attitude toward gay and lesbian people, which places into a context of rank hypocrisy the widespread presence of gay men, not only in the priesthood, but in this Church’s hierarchy itself.

Does the requirement of celibacy, a twelfth century addition to Christian practice, serve to invite sexually unhealthy and repressed people into the ranks of the ordained? Does that fact not mean that while the abuse issue is tragic, it should not be surprising? Do we not reap what we have sown? Does the ban on birth control and the refusal to consider women as fit candidates for ordination rise out of a misogynist fear of women that has resulted in the putdown of women through the ages? Can this Church with credibility still make a virtue out of this patriarchal sin? Does the continued attitude in this Church, expressed in the publicly stated definition of homosexual people as “deviant,” have any credibility in the world of science and medicine? Does that definition not rise out of the great anxiety that the world will someday discover that through the ages, the celibate priesthood of this Church has provided the largest closet in the developed world in which gay men could hide from both marriage and persecution?

Homosexuality, we now know, is no more a choice than is skin color, gender, blue eyes or left-handedness; yet the prejudice against homosexuality, now largely gone in the secular world, continues to linger in this Church, encouraged by the condemnation that continues to emanate from the hierarchy. Dare we hope that this new knowledge might somehow permeate the structures of the Catholic Church and find expression in this new Pope? It took 400 years for the Vatican to admit that Galileo was right! In this day of instant communications waiting for centuries to address a public problem is no longer an option. The perpetuation of sexual ignorance, revealed in dated sexual prejudices, can no longer be tolerated by the thinking world.

Hopes burn brightly at the beginning of every new administration, whether it be religious or political, and Cardinal Bergoglio appears to bring many things to his new position. Because prior to his election he was an outsider, he comes to this position with little baggage and thus he has the freedom to act. Because he is from outside of Europe, he brings a new inclusiveness to Catholic Christianity. Because he is a “Latino,” he represents the largest concentration of Catholic worshipers in the world today. Forty percent of all Catholics today are “Latinos.” One third of the Catholics in the United States are “Latinos.” Because he is a Jesuit, he brings to his office the Jesuit commitment to intellectual rigor and honesty. Because he has demonstrated a commitment to the poor, he brings a radical critique to the kind of capitalism that does not see or understand that a capitalism that is unfettered by human concerns and needs, will always and inevitably produce an economic system where wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few and poverty is increasingly the destiny of the masses. Political instability and revolutions are the price the world will pay for such insensitivity.

In America today, for example, right wing politicians oppose with vehemence a fair taxation policy, preferring rather a policy that protects the wealthy with tax loopholes that the wealthy had the power to adopt and now refuse to surrender. They seek to balance the American deficit by cutting education, welfare and Medicare resources for the poor to frightening levels, failing to remember that the primary causes of the present deficit are two unfunded wars, which these same people chose to fight and for which they refused to pay. The deficit was then expanded by an enormous economic collapse driven by the greed of the wealthy. Because the advocates of these fiscal policies also tend to be the supporters of such social issues as opposition to equality for women, minimizing both birth control and abortion and supporting the continued oppression and injustice toward gay and lesbian people, their moral culpability is also in question.

This Pope will have a choice to make. Will his commitment to the poor transcend his commitment to these outdated cultural prejudices? In a complex world, ethical decisions are not always clear and neat, and uninformed ethical decisions can never be sustained. Cardinal Bergoglio chose the name Francis. Is that a hint of things to come? Francis was an iconic saint whose life embraced two distinct foci. He was, first, uncompromisingly dedicated to the poor and the oppressed. Second, he was a lover of nature. He talked of the sun, the moon, the animals and nature itself as his brothers, his sisters. Does this presage the commitment on the part of this Pope to address the issue of climate change and the incessant rape of the earth in search of more corporate profits? Will he lend his voice and his influence to the saving of this planet Earth, “our island home?”

Pope Francis is not known as a theologian as was his predecessor, but as a Jesuit will he give his still considerable intellect to the modern task of rethinking the basic theological symbols through which the Christian faith presents itself to the modern world? The concepts of “Original Sin” and the fall from perfection, for example, make little sense in a world that knows that we have evolved from single cells to self-conscious humanity over billions of years? How can modern Christianity escape the religion of control, which focuses ultimately on reward, punishment and the final judgment, when we recognize human interdependence and the survival instincts that are part of our being and our biology, not part of our doing and our moral choices?

The tasks confronting the Christian faith in our time are massive. We welcome this new leader on the world’s stage as a partner in addressing these issues. We remind him, however, that he will not be measured by the beauty of his words. As the Bible says, it is by the fruit it produces that the tree is judged.

I thought readers might like to view a few more of the “pope” cartoons that are appearing worldwide.

(click to enlarge cartoons)

Hyeonseo Lee: Activist

Hyeonseo Lee grew up in North Korea but escaped to China in 1997. In 2008, after more than 10 years there, she came to Seoul, South Korea, where she struggled to adjust to life in the bustling city. North Korean defectors often have a hard time in South Korea, she noted in the Wall Street Journal: "We defectors have to start from scratch. Prejudice against North Koreans and icy stares were other obstacles that were hard to cope with."

Now a student at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, she has become an advocate for fellow refugees, even helping close relatives leave North Korea after they were targeted. Her dream? As she told the Korea Times, she'd like to work at the UN or an NGO that advocates for the human rights of North Koreans, including their right to be treated as political refugees.

The Dawn of De-extinction. Are You Ready?

Throughout humankind's history, we've driven species after species extinct: the passenger pigeon, the Eastern cougar, the dodo ... But now, says Stewart Brand, we have the technology (and the biology) to bring back species that humanity wiped out. So -- should we? Which ones? He asks a big question whose answer is closer than you may think.

A New Plan for Good Friday

by John Shelby Spong
http://johnshelbyspong.com/

Reclaiming Good Friday as a major focus of both Lent and the Christian story will be at the center of my life this year, when I spend that day in Richmond, Virginia, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. This is the church I served as Rector from 1969-1976 and it is a church to which I am still deeply and emotionally connected, even some thirty four years after leaving that position. St. Paul’s is a downtown, business center church located literally in the heart of Richmond, the capitol of the state of Virginia. It is surrounded by financial institutions, utility companies, insurance companies, hotels and a sports and convention center. It is literally across the street from the state capitol building, the Governor’s mansion and a statue of America’s first president, a Virginian named George Washington. Underneath St. Paul’s Greek revival building is a three-level parking garage that serves the city commercially from Monday to Friday, while serving the needs and convenience of St. Paul’s members on evenings and weekends.

Richmond’s history includes the time when this city served as the capitol of the Confederate States of America and along Richmond’s Monument Avenue are statues of Confederate heroes. St. Paul’s also played a major role in that moment of American history and was deeply identified with the Confederacy. It preserves that part of its history today by noting with appropriate markers the pews in which Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis once sat as worshipers. After the Civil War and the imprisonment of Jefferson Davis, the Rector of St. Paul’s, Dr. Charles Minnigerode, was one of the few people allowed to visit the former president. Dr. Minnigerode thus became “the voice of Jefferson Davis” to the wider public during Davis’ years of incarceration and was thrust into being a figure of significant importance in the city and throughout the South. The rector of St. Paul’s became, thereby, a voice to which people listened in the city by dint of his office alone. Of the thirteen rectors that have served St. Paul’s since its birth, five have been elected bishops in such varied places as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Arkansas, New Jersey and Arizona.

On an average day in the work week, within a six block radius of St. Paul’s an estimated 100,000 people will be at work in their offices. So through the years, St. Paul’s has offered noonday services, concerts and forums, to which many in this working population have been drawn. This ministry is uniquely focused during the season of Lent, when a noontime half-hour preaching service is held during the forty days of that season. A luncheon is served in St. Paul’s before and after the service, which requires more than 300 volunteers a week, to enable people to attend worship and have lunch within the span of an hour. People from a wide range of Christian traditions come to these services and the daily attendance will range from 100 to 700 people. This noontime pattern is still replicated in a few other downtown churches in cities across America, but it is a shrinking number.

Despite this midday Lenten preaching tradition, however, the observance of Good Friday, the climax of the Lenten season, has recently fallen into general neglect, even at St. Paul’s. The traditional pattern of the past was a three hour service scheduled from noon to 3:00 p.m., designed to mark the time when Jesus was believed to be dying on the cross. In recent years, this service has declined to the place where it has almost disappeared, being replaced by a much less demanding and shorter liturgy. With the fading of Good Friday, the climax of the season of Lent has disappeared, leaving most American Christians with a much more shallow celebration of Easter as one of the inevitable results.

This year, St. Paul’s in Richmond decided to try to reverse that trend. A church in the heart of a vibrant downtown filled with people at work might be able to revive this tradition and thus serve all of the suburban churches, where fewer and fewer people are present during the hours of the working day. If successful, a church in the heart of every city in America might follow suit. So these are St. Paul’s plans.

First, the three-hour service is planned as a series of six thirty minute self-contained units, making it possible and convenient for people to come and go from work on the hour or half hour. While some will attend the entire three hours, most will fit their Good Friday observance into their workday schedules.

Second, each of the thirty minute services will include concert level Passiontide music. The magnificent adult choir of St. Paul’s and its gifted organist and choir master, David Sinden, will present a series of chorales or motets from the St. John Passion by J. S. Bach, as well as the work of other composers like Thomas Tallis and Felix Mendelssohn. Soloists will be featured in these musical presentations. To attend a significant Good Friday concert in the heart of the city will be one of this service’s primary attractions.

Third, the Bishop of Virginia, the Rt. Rev. Shannon Johnston, will preside over the entire service, assisted by the Rev. Wallace Adams-Riley, the current rector of St. Paul’s. The presence of the Bishop gives the service a larger appeal beyond the boundaries of St. Paul’s congregation.

Fourth, the people reading the lessons in each of the six segments will be drawn from the public life of both Richmond and Virginia. The first reader will be a former governor of Virginia, who guided the state away from “massive resistance to the law of the land,” which was Virginia’s original response to the desegregation order by the Supreme Court in the case of Brown vs. the Board of Education in 1954. He led this state beyond the attitudes that had produced slavery, segregation and the racism of the Old South into a new day of social harmony and racial cooperation. He and his family made their witness in a deeply personal and public way. Interestingly enough, in the light of today’s politics, he was and is a Republican.

The second reader will be an African-American woman who served on the City Council in those difficult days of transition and whose leadership locally was instrumental in enabling the new and modern city of Richmond to be born. The third reader will be the wife of the last governor (a Democrat) and thus was the First Lady of Virginia from 2005-2009. In her own life, she embodies the transitions through which both Richmond and Virginia went and she helped to develop a new consciousness.

The fourth and fifth readers will be two women who represent careers which were not open to women in previous generations. One is a priest and spiritual director. The other is a Senior Vice President at Wells Fargo Bank, working in the area of philanthropic services.

The final reader will be the current Senior Warden of St. Paul’s. He is the CEO of a major hospital in Richmond. He is also an African-American, the first African-American to be the lay head of this church, once known as the “Cathedral of the Confederacy.” Each of these readers will be an expression of hope and a symbol of the new America that is being born.

My role in this service will be to deliver six meditations, one in each of the six thirty minute services. As we live through these three hours, I will seek to invite people into the meaning of the Passion story as it was told by the author of the Fourth Gospel that we call John. Specifically, I will try to move the Christian Church away from that threadbare Good Friday format of the past that focused on what was called “The Seven Last Words from the Cross.” Those “Words” were never anything more than an attempt to force the gospels into a blended narrative, which makes a mockery out of current biblical scholarship. The overwhelming probability is that the dying Jesus never uttered any one of these “seven last words.” The absolute certainty is that he never uttered all of them.

Mark, the first gospel to be written (70-72), has Jesus speak only one “word” from the cross, that is: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Matthew, the second gospel (82-85), followed Mark’s lead and recorded only that same “word” from the cross, nothing more. We know that this “word” is the first verse of Psalm 22, a psalm which the early Christians used to narrate the story of the cross. Even the earliest story of the crucifixion we now know was not an eye witness account, but was rather an interpretive piecing together of a series of Old Testament texts of which Psalm 22 was a major contributor. By the time Luke wrote the third gospel (88-93), the idea that Jesus felt forsaken by God was offensive and so Luke replaced it with a much more positive and confident final saying: “Father into thy hands I commend my spirit.” That is a far cry from “My God, why have you forsaken me.” Luke also added two other sayings, one supposedly spoken to the soldiers: “Father forgive them for they know not what they do” and one supposedly addressed to the penitent thief: “Today you will be with me in Paradise.”

When John, the final gospel, was written (95-100), he dismissed all of the previous “words” recorded in the earlier gospels and added three new ones never heard of before: “Woman, behold your son; son, behold your mother;” “I thirst,” and “It is finished.”

“The Seven Last Words” thus represent a forced unity that the gospels never had and they are, we now know, quite inauthentic. My hope will be that in future Good Friday services the Passion story will be developed according to Mark one year, Matthew the next year, Luke the third year, John the fourth year and then continue the rotation. The authenticity of the individual gospel accounts will thus be restored to Good Friday.

I hope this service sets an example that brings a new biblical understanding of the Passion of Jesus and that it restores Good Friday to a central place in the Church’s life. Above all, I hope it will drive us away from Easter bunnies and Easter Parades down 5th Avenue as the meaning of Easter and into the experience of the resurrected life itself.

Your Brain is More Than a Bag of Chemicals.

Modern psychiatric drugs treat the chemistry of the whole brain, but neurobiologist David Anderson believes in a more nuanced view of how the brain functions. He illuminates new research that could lead to targeted psychiatric medications -- that work better and avoid side effects. How's he doing it? For a start, by making a bunch of fruit flies angry. Through his lab at the California Institute of Technology, David Anderson seeks to find the neural underpinnings of emotions like fear, anxiety and anger.

Movie Review: Seventh-Gay Adventists (2012)

David loves Jesus and wants to go to heaven, but he also wants Colin. Marcos was fired for being gay, but wants to be a pastor again. And Sherri wants her kids to grow up to be good Seventh-day Adventists even though the church teaches that her same-sex marriage is sinful. All three are caught in the middle between the church they know and love and their desire to be fully accepted for who they are. 'Seventh-Gay Adventists' offers a revealing look at the inner spiritual world of three LGBT church members struggling to reconcile their faith and sexuality and explores what it means to belong when you find yourself on the margins. (IMDB summary)

A very gentle, highly accessible exploration of three gay/lesbian couples who are living on the edges of their respective Seventh-day Adventist communities. Seventh-day Adventism is a conservative, Christian denomination which has an official stance that homosexuality is not acceptable but that those who identify as homosexual should be loved and accepted without accepting their homosexuality or a homosexual lifestyle.

Of course, this is easy to say and, as these three couples share their stories, some of the pain and heartbreak they have experienced becomes real to us as viewers. Without doubt, the three stories we share are on the more "positive" end of the spectrum - surely many lesbian and gay people would suffer a great deal more than these three couples. But, as the filmmakers express it, they wanted to make a movie that would allow people whose immediate reaction to homosexual people would be to run and hide - to reject them - to put up barriers between them - to allow those viewers to be gently led into the world that these couples experience and begin to understand what it means to them to be living on the edge of a community they so desperately want to be part of. And this documentary most definitely succeeds at that aim.

This is not an "issue" film. It doesn't take sides. It doesn't engage in theological debate. Instead, we are gradually introduced to who these people are, their varied journeys as they come out to their communities, the responses that people have to them, and the way they choose to relate to their families (and vice versa). It's a very moving journey and we can't help but empathise with these couples as they engagingly communicate with us about their joys, their pain, their loves, and their fears.

It's a truly inspirational film, demonstrating the potential that religious communities could have in genuinely welcoming gay and lesbian people who can enrich and be enriched by their presence - and the way in which those who are forced to leave their spiritual homes can make a difference somewhere else.

Apart from being a little too long (for me) its a sensitive, beautiful portrayal and has genuine surprises at the end (I won't tell you what they are!). After its official premiere at the Melbourne Queer Film Festival in the near future, it will hopefully be released more widely. If it comes to a place near  you, make sure to go along and see it. You'll be glad you did.

"TO THIS DAY" ... FOR THE BULLIED AND BEAUTIFUL

By turn hilarious and haunting, poet Shane Koyczan puts his finger on the pulse of what it's like to be young and … different. "To This Day," his spoken-word poem about bullying, captivated millions as a viral video (created, crowd-source style, by 80 animators). Here, he gives a glorious, live reprise with backstory and violin accompaniment by Hannah Epperson.

A Look at Benedict XVI’s Book on the Infancy Narratives of Jesus

by John Shelby Spong
http://johnshelbyspong.com/

A few months before the startling announcement of his resignation, Pope Benedict XVI published a book on the birth narratives of Jesus as found in the New Testament. It was a book promised in the publication of a previous book by this Pope, entitled Jesus of Nazareth, which I reviewed in this column more than a year ago. In this previous book, Benedict XVI had scrupulously danced around any and every opportunity to discuss the Virgin Birth. He wanted, he said, to address that subject later, devoting an entire volume to it. I was intrigued by how he would manage this subject as so much of the Roman Catholic doctrine and piety is related to the figure of the Virgin Mother of Jesus.

The primary New Testament portrait of Mary is in the birth narratives, yet the overwhelming consensus of modern biblical scholarship dismisses the literalization of these narratives, so the Pope would have to compromise either Marian piety or biblical scholarship. When I finished reading Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives just a few weeks ago his choice was clear. The Pope made a decision not to engage the scholarship of the last 200 years in order that he might continue to cling to the core teachings of his Church. The result was a book that the scholarly world will simply ignore and, as a result, a new sense of dis-ease will settle across the hierarchy of Roman Catholicism. I now understand why this Church has not been able to relate to its scholars and why the hierarchy keeps trying to suppress critical thought.

Benedict XVI’s book reveals an inner devotion that will be attractive to many. He also employs a homiletical style as many of his pages “preach” the lessons he draws from the birth narratives. Frequently in his prose, he seeks to reveal connections between the birth narratives and the later gospel portrait of the adult Jesus and ultimately to link both to the development of the creeds. The birth narratives are made the servants of the church’s doctrinal understanding. Yet, he does acknowledge and recognize the fact that the birth narratives, which appear only in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, reveal a clear dependency on Jewish tradition.

This is typically the first step one takes out of literalism as critical scholarship begins to be embraced. For example, he says, “the Song of Mary,” known in the Church as “the Magnificat,” reflects its origin in the “Song of Hannah” found in the book of I Samuel. The “three days” in which the boy Jesus was apparently lost when his parents took him up to Jerusalem at the age of 12, presages the three days the crucified Jesus was lost to the world. The echo of the slaying of innocent boy babies in the story of Moses and the Pharaoh appears to be present in Matthew’s story of King Herod slaying the boy babies in Bethlehem. Yet the idea never seems to occur to the Pope that the infancy narratives were not history, that they are little more than Jewish haggadic Midrash and were never intended by their authors to be looked at or read as literal narratives.

This lack of informed scholarship was also absent from his original book, Jesus of Nazareth. In that volume, he gave no evidence that he has ever read or even recognized Roman Catholic scholars. In this earlier book he even asserted that the “Farewell Discourses” in John (14-16) were actually delivered by Jesus in Jerusalem during the final week before his arrest and crucifixion, a point of view that no Johannine scholar would affirm. A study of these discourses will reveal that they actually talk about the persecution, which the Johannine community was experiencing when the Fourth Gospel was written, some seventy years after the crucifixion.

There are many Roman Catholic biblical scholars with whom he might have consulted. One thinks immediately of Edward Schillebeeckx, probably the outstanding Catholic scripture scholar of the 20th century; John Dominic Crossan, one of the three founders of the Jesus Seminar, or Raymond Brown, who taught New Testament at Union Seminary in New York for decades and whose work was chronicled on two occasions in cover stories in Time magazine. I suggest, given the combination of his own biblical naïveté and the current challenges to some of his Church’s dogmatic traditions, that he might not have felt comfortable with either Schillebeeckx or Crossan, both of whom found little support in the Catholic hierarchy for their work, because neither was willing to live inside the doctrinal boundaries that their church seems to require even though both authors are regarded in the academic world as brilliant.

Raymond Brown, however, was thought of in Catholic circles as one who was vigorously defending the teachings of this Church and who bent his scholarship regularly to conform to that teaching. Brown, who died a few years ago, however, was not an “opus dei” devotee, and his work on the birth narratives, published under the title The Birth of the Messiah, is today still regarded among biblical scholars as the definitive study on this subject. Yet there is no mention even of Raymond Brown’s work in Benedict XVI’s bibliography and no indication in the pages of his book that Brown’s thought has ever been read or engaged. Instead the Pope quotes second tier “Catholic” propagandists like Jean Danielou, Rene Laurentin and Rudolf Pesch, who spend their time seeking to make a case for a literal star of Bethlehem, a literal journey following that star by the wise men and the literal accuracy of the Virgin Birth understood biologically.

The Pope goes so far as to seek to establish that the major source for the material contained in Luke’s birth narrative came from the mother of Jesus herself. Luke does state, he reminds his readers that “she kept all these things in her heart and pondered them.” There is, of course, no speck of historical data that points to such a conclusion and the time frame of Luke’s gospel would suggest that the mother of Jesus would have been well past one hundred years of age before that gospel was written. Where these memories of the Virgin were stored after her death or who translated them from Mary’s original Aramaic into Greek for Luke to have them available to him are issues not addressed. Neither is there an explanation for the fact that there is a total absence of birth narrative material in the writings of Paul, Mark, the document known as Q or the Gospel of Thomas, all of which scholars believe predate Matthew and Luke.

If the magi were really Persian astronomers seeking salvation, as the Pope suggests, then one does not have to answer the inconvenient historical questions that he avoids. For example, what kind of person would it be, who sees a peculiar star formation in the sky, such as the one the Pope mentions that astronomers have noted as having occurred in 7-6 BCE, when there was a conjunction of the planets of Jupiter and Saturn in the constellation Pisces, and who then decided to follow that “star’s” guidance in search of a newborn “King of the Jews?” Surely following stars to the birth place of a king is the stuff of fairy tales, not history. What kind of person is it who would assume that this mysterious star was able to travel through the sky so slowly that these magi, presumably on camel-back, could keep up with it? What kind of mentality would it take for one to assume that this star mistakenly led them to the palace of King Herod, where they had to get additional directions, this time from the Jewish Scriptures? What kind of magical story would it be that these gift-bearing persons brought to this child in the home of his parents in Bethlehem, gold, to signal his kingship; frankincense, to signal his divine nature, and myrrh, a symbol of death, to signal the story of his passion and crucifixion?

What kind of person would assume he or she is reading history when it is learned in the story that Herod, a first century head of state, had actually deputized these magi, whom he has never before seen, to be agents of his central intelligence agency in order to bring back to him a report on this newborn king, who presumably would constitute a threat to his throne? When these magi did not do Herod’s bidding, what kind of king would it be who would then go to Bethlehem and slaughter all the baby boys in an attempt to remove this infant threat to his throne, especially when that same gospel will tell us in chapter 13 that this child was raised in the home of a carpenter father?

It is as if Benedict XVI never considered any other possibility than that the birth narratives are the recording of historical events incorporated into the gospel narratives. That was a popular assumption in the pre-critical days of the 18th century. It is not credible today. Benedict suggests that the prophetic text of Isaiah 7:14 (“Behold a Virgin will conceive”) and the passages of the Suffering Servant in II Isaiah (40-55) were written as prophetic words, waiting for their completion in the person of Jesus. He seems to ignore the obvious probability that the memory of Jesus was altered to conform to these biblical expectations and that the texts were even changed to make the points of connection seem more complete.

To him the angels, who sing to hillside shepherds, are real. These shepherds then go on a successful search to find the child armed only with two clues; he is wrapped in swaddling cloths and is lying in a manger. The miraculous nature of these stories is then dramatically affirmed by the fact that they find him immediately.

The primary difference between Christian education and Christian propaganda is that Christian education searches for new ways to understand the biblical texts. Christian propaganda assumes that the literal, traditional understanding of the scriptures is the only correct and true one, and so research is not to discover truth, but to validate the truth that the propagandists already believe they possess. Dogmatic Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, employs this technique. This is the mentality that produces both fundamentalism and the claims of institutional infallibility. This mentality can admit no challenge, denies the relativity of all formulas of human truth and then seeks to impose its understandings with authority claims. It is a pity that even a world-wide figure like the Pope who seeks to enter the public debate by means of a book does not understand this.

A GIRL WHO DEMANDED SCHOOL

Kakenya Ntaiya made a deal with her father: She would undergo the traditional Maasai rite of passage of female circumcision if he would let her go to high school. Ntaiya tells the fearless story of continuing on to college, and of working with her village elders to build a school for girls in her community. It’s the educational journey of one that altered the destiny of 125 young women. (Filmed at TEDxMidAtlantic.)

Ken Robinson Says Schools Kill Creativity

Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.

Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we're educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence.

The Pope Resigns: A New Opportunity for the Christian World is Born

by John Shelby Spong
http://johnshelbyspong.com/

The world in general and members of the Roman Catholic Church in particular were shocked at the recent announcement that Pope Benedict XVI was resigning the papal office at the end of February. A moment of transition for this church has arrived. The stated reason for this unusual resignation was age and infirmity, but as is the case with every public figure, the world began to look for and wonder if the stated reason was actually the real reason. Time, of course, will reveal all things.

Those of us who remember the last years of the papacy of John Paul II wonder why age and infirmity has become an issue all of a sudden, since it was obviously not an issue in John Paul II’s final years. The traditional, hierarchical voices of Roman Catholicism grieve for this pope who was their bulwark against the changing forces of the modern world, holding those forces down with great power. This was not, however, the response of those Catholics who saw in the reforms of Vatican II the hope of the future, nor was it the response of the ecumenical world.

This was the Pope who visited Africa with its AIDS epidemic, its poverty, its high rate of starvation and infant mortality, its tribal and civil wars and yet the only moral issue he chose to address was the use of condoms specifically, and birth control generally. This was the pope who, serving as the head of the “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith” or the “Cardinal Inquisitor” under John Paul II, began the systematic suppression of any and all creative thinking. He undercut the work of those young Vatican II theologians who were the stars of that life-giving council, called by the much beloved Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, when he became Pope John XXIII. Among those who were either removed from their posts as “catholic theologians,” silenced or harassed were such giants of the church as Hans Kung, probably the best known and most widely read Catholic theologian of the 20th century; Edward Schillebeeckx, probably the best known Roman Catholic biblical scholar in the 20th century; Leonardo Boff, the father of the Latin-American version of liberation theology; Charles Curran, probably the best known Catholic ethicist in the 20th century, and Matthew Fox, the popular and much published advocate of what came to be called “Creation Spirituality.”

The only progressive Catholics escaping suppression by this pope were Catholic lay women, who were theologians. Theologically trained Catholic women are not subject to vows of obedience to the church’s hierarchy, so they were simply marginalized, indexed or refused both appointments and honors by those institutions under Catholic hierarchical control. I refer to great thinkers like Elizabeth Schussler-Fiorenza, Rosemary Reuther, Margaret Farley, Sister Joan Chittister, Jeannette Rodriguez, Jane Schaberg, Pheme Perkins and countless others. This was also the pope who presided over the tragic violence of child abuse and its subsequent criminal cover up that has engulfed the entire Catholic world.

At first, when these cases began to come to light, we were told that this was just the work of a few bad priests. As the crisis grew, however, the priestly abuse of children became evident in Ireland, the Philippines, Australia, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Scandinavia, France, Spain, the United States and many more nations. This widespread abuse clearly revealed a pattern pointing to a systemic sickness that infected the entire ecclesiastical structure. This is why the cover up, which today is undoubted, became so necessary. The cover up was a strategy of survival that revealed just how deep the scandal was. In the United States it reached the level of the cardinals. In Massachusetts Cardinal Bernard Law is so obviously guilty of a massive cover up. His hands were not only on the records of priests guilty of massive abuse, but he was also responsible for the choosing of many bishops appointed throughout the United States, who were also subsequently revealed as guilty of both abuse and cover up.

Instead of dealing with that issue and letting Cardinal Law face his accusers in court, the Vatican, near the end of the pontificate of John Paul II, moved to extricate Cardinal Law from any criminal investigation and probable imprisonment by “promoting” him to a senior Vatican position where he will remain for the balance of his life, thus removing him from the possibility of ever having to testify under oath or of responding to a subpoena. The “second in command” in the Vatican when this decision was made was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI. No Vatican action could have announced more publicly that a cover up was the official policy of the Catholic Church than this. Cardinal Law was thus placed into a position of high honor instead of going to jail and he was present to say one of the official masses at the death of John Paul II. He has remained in this senior prestigious position during the entirety of the pontificate of Benedict XVI. So Benedict XVI was touched by and involved in this scandal from the very beginning of his papacy.

In the midst of Benedict’s pontificate, stories emerged out of Germany, which revealed that while he was the Archbishop of Munich, he failed to take the necessary steps to address the child abuse scandal and, as the investigation got closer and closer to his office, the hierarchy of that church went into its most protective, defensive posture, seeking to remove him from any responsibility. A closed investigation, however, never does that, so the Munich odor is still abroad, still waiting to be dispelled by truth. The truth will eventually be made clear.

Just before the time of the Benedict XVI’s resignation, hundreds of subpoenaed letters and documents revealed beyond the shadow of a doubt that the Cardinal Archbishop of Los Angeles had been literally directing the cover up activities, while all the time publicly proclaiming just how thoroughly he was prosecuting those guilty of molesting children. Since child molestation is a crime, then protecting a person guilty of child molestation is also a crime. Cardinal Roger Mahoney of Los Angeles is thus now charged with criminal behavior and ought to be prosecuted under the law. His successor in office in Los Angeles, Archbishop Jose Gomez, has forbidden him to function publicly. Cardinal Mahoney, in a recent blog to his friends, however, asked for their prayers as he flies to Rome to participate in the papal election. Does not everyone understand why there is public disillusionment both within the Catholic Church and beyond it?

This was the Pope who would rather close churches, which has been done by the thousands across the world, than open ordination to allow priests who resigned to get married to function as priests. He would rather have no priests than to break the 12th century celibacy requirement or to allow women to be ordained. This was the Pope who continued to call homosexuals “deviant,” a definition almost universally rejected in the scientific and medical community. This was the Pope who spoke out against any politician who supported same sex marriage and then sat back to watch a majority of Catholics in the United States vote for the election of Barack Obama, who endorsed this position. This was the pope who must have seen our nation marching irrevocably toward a Supreme Court ruling on the constitutionality of gay marriage.

Today on that court of nine judges sit six Roman Catholic and three Jewish justices. Few people doubt the ultimate outcome of this debate or the ultimate outcome of the Supreme Court decision. The only question is how long will it take for the prejudice against gay and lesbian people, so deeply supported by institutional Christianity through the centuries, to come to its inevitable death? If not from the Supreme Court as presently constituted, then which Supreme Court in which year will deliver the inevitable coup de grace to our nation’s church supported homophobia?

There is always hope in transition. Hope is dampened, however, by the realization that all of the 117 cardinals who will cast their votes for the next pope were appointed by John Paul II or Benedict XVI, and even those appointed by John Paul II were influenced by Cardinal Ratzinger, in the number two position in the Vatican under John Paul II. So there is, people say, little realistic hope for change. That is not a certainty. Many an American president has appointed justices to the Supreme Court whose voting record has been surprisingly different from what the appointing president anticipated. One recalls Dwight Eisenhower’s appointment of Chief Justice Earl Warren, John F. Kennedy’s appointment of Justice Byron (Whizzer) White and George H. W. Bush’s appointment of Justice David H. Souter.

No one can finally control the thought processes of another and, as the poet James Russell Lowell once noted, “Time makes ancient good uncouth.” So no one should despair until the choice is made and the white smoke appears. Remember that John XXIII was chosen as a compromise candidate who, because of his advanced age, was thought to merely be a “seat warmer” until a consensus leader emerged. John Paul XXIII proved to be far more than that as he lit the fires for a new reformation, for the modernization of his church, for new ecumenical and interfaith initiatives, and he opened the door to a new spirit. Every pope since, clearly frightened by change, has expended enormous energy in trying to restore Catholicism to its controlling pre-Vatican II lifestyle.

Truth, however, cannot finally be suppressed simply because it is ecclesiastically inconvenient. So hope still burns brightly in the hearts and minds of millions of Catholics the world over. That hope just might turn out to be nothing less than a manifestation of the Holy Spirit. Will this Spirit be seen, felt and responded to by the Sacred Concave? Only time will tell. The odds appear to be long, but the future of the Roman Catholic Church and maybe of Christianity itself, may well hang on the choice made by these 117 generally old men.

Use Data To Build Better Schools

How can we measure what makes a school system work? Andreas Schleicher walks us through the PISA test, a global measurement that ranks countries against one another -- then uses that same data to help schools improve. Watch to find out where your country stacks up, and learn the single factor that makes some systems outperform others.