I was talking with my partner in crime, Jonathon Miles, about this week’s blog and he mentioned a quote that C.S. Lewis had made about having first things first. In my trolling the Internet in search of the quote I stumbled across something that combined the quote with issues of social justice at, of all places, First Things.

Over on Catholic World News, a fellow who goes by the name of Uncle Di reflects on the way that clerics in recent decades have abandoned revealed truth and saving souls in favor of sundry causes of social justice. He recalls a 1942 essay by C.S. Lewis, “First and Second Things.” Lewis wrote: “To sacrifice the greater good for the less and then not to get the lesser good after all–that is the surprising folly. . . Every preference of a small good to a great, or a partial good to a total good, involves the loss of the small or partial good for which the sacrifice was made. Apparently the world is made that way. If Esau really got his pottage in return for his birthright, then Esau was a lucky exception. You can’t get second things by putting them first; you can get second things only by putting first things first.”

Ultimately, that is the dilemma Continue reading …

Just for fun, let’s put Crossan’s method to work on Mark Twain’s book, Huckleberry Finn. If we merely read the book at face value, we will easily understand that it is the story of a boy that floats down the Mississippi River on a raft with a runaway slave named Jim. But once Crossan illumines Twain’s book with his postmodernist “searchlights,” Huckleberry Finn becomes the tale of a Japanese automaker who goes on an African Safari. Which story line would you think the author intended? The one that comes by a plain reading, or the convoluted, deconstructed one that comes out of an overactive imagination? If you believe the “Safari tale,” it certainly wouldn’t be Mark Twain’s fault, but your own, for putting some other person’s interpretation above the book itself. We might shorten it up a bit and call it a “fari tale.” “Fari tales” are for children . . . adults should just read the book for themselves.

The above quote comes from our 1998 MCOI Journal article The Hysterical Search for the Historical Jesus and is a tongue-in-cheek attempt at demonstrating the need to read literature in its historical grammatical context. John Dominic Crossan Continue reading …

I used to think Jesus was controversial to the modern world. I was wrong. Paul is way more vilified. If you do a search for Jesus the Rabbi, you will still get a smattering of the Jesus-was-a-good-moral-teacher-but-not-God kind of sites. But Paul, wow. Go do a google search on Paul and Christianity and pretty soon you will find that way more people hate Paul than Jesus. He was a homophobe. He was a iconoclast (and not the cool kind either). He invented modern Christianity and co-opted the Jesus movement for his own purposes etc. Here’s the incredibly badly named LGBT bible quote:

Christianity owes its evil homophobia to the closet homosexual known as the Apostle Paul, the father of all homophobic bigotry. The Apostle Paul was a devoted Pharisee who persecuted and murdered countless of Jewish Christians for a period of 20 years before he defected from the Pharisaic Law and became a Christian. The reason behind the Apostle Paul’s defection to Christianity is quite simple. The Pharisees were a family obsessed ultra conservative religious cult of Jewish homophobes. The Pharisaic Law required all Jewish men to marry and raise children. The Apostle Paul was a closet homosexual with no interest in women. For many years the Apostle Paul had concealed his homosexuality from the Pharisees by promoting homophobia as a means to conceal his own homosexuality.

Continue reading …

One of my favorite words to teach my students when I taught high school English was “neologism.” Its a word that means something like “newly made up word.” I would tell my students that the purpose of new vocabulary was to annoy and confuse your friends. After all, if your vocabulary was sufficiently erudite, you could insult someone and they wouldn’t even know it. Neologisms are everywhere. Four times a year, that bastion of all that is correct in the English language, The Oxford English Dictionary or the OED, adds a few precious words to the canon of English vocabulary. This year? For the Military minded, we have “field-strip.” For the techno-geek, the OED added “auto-complete” and the snarky are now able to add “wienie” officially to their repertoire of insults.

In theology, a neologism has a slightly nuanced meaning. Continue reading …