Last week I commented on President Obama’s use of Psalm 46 at the memorial at ground zero. But sitting presidents aren’t the only ones who want to use scripture and theology. Wanna Be presidents do as well. So this week we look at two different quotes by Rick Perry, the GOP saint or a cross between a knuckle-dragging ape and the prince of darkness depending on who you ask. Perry has caused a bit of a stir when he proffered a of C.S. Lewis’ “Lord-Liar-Lunatic” argument when he said:

Many want to recognize Jesus as a good teacher, but nothing more. But why call him ‘good’ if he has lied about his claims of deity?”

Well, this got all the blogs atwitter (pardon the pun). Would Perry alienate Continue reading …

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 …

Many of us are somewhat disconnected from history. The recently released Report: Student don’t know much about U.S. history is but one example.

“Just 13 percent of high school seniors who took the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress, called the Nation’s Report Card, showed a solid grasp of the subject.”

The study revealed that most students couldn’t identify Martin Luther King Jr or Abraham Lincoln and couldn’t say why they are important. Being somewhat a student of history I can say, I am not overly surprised. Since the 1930s Continue reading …

Ah, spring is in full swing. Flowers are in bloom, the trees have leaves, lawns are in full growth and, the dreaded mosquito is on the scene. Even as I thought about this last week, Joy and I were listening to an audio book while on our route to and from California. The book, A Rule Against Murder: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel by Louise Penny . It is a well done murder mystery set in Canada, at a large log built resort building in the woods by a lake with no internet. What does that have to do with mosquitoes? Well, everything. With the wonderful setting also comes Continue reading …

The early 20th century’s Social Gospel was a cocktail of ideas achieved through the blending of Enlightenment philosophy and Socinian theology. The Enlightenment had promised an egalitarian society founded on human reason. The post-Reformation heresy known as Socinianism had proclaimed a human-centered salvation, also founded on reason. Together they proved to be a potent tonic for the relief of liberal anxiety over society’s huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

But not everyone was drinking it. Continue reading …