Sheilaism

Robert Bellah's book on modern man has a part about the religion of Sheilaism, where a woman named shiela talks about her own private religion.

So this is the guide to the latest "sheilaism" vocabulary, (from Ignatius blog)

Since many Catholics—and perhaps a few non-Catholics—aren't familiar with "un-churches" and their lingo, I thought I'd provide a short, but hopefully helpful, lexicon of "un-church-ese." Here we go….

"A sign from God" I have a good feeling about this un-church. Plus, the refreshments after the worship service were tasty.

"Anointing" I cried during the worship service for no reason.

"Communion" Crackers or pizza. Add soda or juice. Read John 6:63. Celebrate at the end of the service, taking no more than seven minutes.

"Contemporary" Lots of lights, loud music, t-shirts, and a sixteen-year-old pastor

"Dynamic" Killer bass and guitar riffs during the "Mosh With the Messiah!" worship service.

"Freedom" The pastor doesn't wear a tie, and he doesn't use notes or a pulpit when he shares the special word that God has laid on his heart.

"Authentic" I don't feel compelled to wear nice clothes.

"God told me…" I'm more spiritual than you.

"No structure" Nobody appears to be in charge or know what's going on. Ain't that great!?

"Non-conventional" My parents don't attend with me. Ain't that even greater?!

"Non-denominational" My un-church was established three years ago. We're just like the first Christians.

"Minister" (n.) The sixteen-year-old up front.

"minister" (v.) I talk one-on-one about myself, my feelings, my needs, etc.

"Personal lord and savior" You know, Jesus. Sheez, are you Catholic?

"Religion" The evil attempt of man to reach God. Invented by the Vatican in 325 A.D.

"Spiritual" Good. I'm very spiritual, by the way.

"Testimony" I talk in front of the entire group about myself, my feelings, my needs, etc.

"Theology" Boring. Invented by sadistic monks during the Dark Ages, which was a long time ago, even before MTV.

"Tradition" Very, very bad. Invented by a Pope in 666 A.D.

"Word of God The Bible. I read it and the Left Behind books every day.

"Worship" Jesus meets rock n' roll.

Quote of the day

comes from the anchoress

God has all the essential characteristics of what we mean by a “person,” in particular conscious awareness, the ability to recognize and the ability to love. In that sense he is someone who can speak and who can listen. That, I think, is what is essential about God. Nature can be marvelous. The starry heaven is stupendous. But my reaction to that remains no more than an impersonal wonder, because that, in the end, means that I am myself no more than a tiny part of an enormous machine. The real God, however, is more than that. He is not just nature, but the One who came before it and who sustains it. And the whole of God, so faith tells us, is the act of relating. That is what we mean when we say that he is a Trinity, that he is threefold. Because he is in himself a complex of relationships, he can also make other beings who are grounded in relationships and who may relate to him, because he has related them to himself.
– Pope Benedict XVI, (from God and the World)

she then goes on to quote someone writing boring things abhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifout "we baby boomers"...

when I read stuff like that I am reminded of the old joke: What do you mean "we", white man?

and then they quote Merton.

Yeah, make a hero of a pacifist who wouldn't get his hands dirty fighting Hitler.

True, maybe he wouldn't want to shoot anyone, but he didn't even bother to work with refugees or other civilian jobs like other pacifists did.
and to make it worse, his Merton quote (about fearing heaven)might be meaningful to the upper west side elites he ran around with, but not with the working class who were actually fighting Hitler.

discernment

good essay about discernment, when even the wise disagree

:LINK

the Black Nazarene

they are closing the streets in central Manila tomorrow for the Black Nazarene procession.

Here is one reporter's essay on his experience there LINK

a photo from the Manila Bulletin: (Photo by JACQUELINE HERNDANDEZ)

wikipedia article HERE

The religious veneration of the Black Nazarene is rooted among Filipinos for the Passion of Jesus Christ. Many devotees of the Black Nazarene identify their poverty and daily struggles to the wounds and tribulations experienced by Jesus, as represented by the image. Although the patron saint of the basilica itself is Saint John the Baptist, the Black Nazarene ranks first in popularity due to its mass appeal.

the devotion is a way to identify with the suffering Christ, and to invoke his help in our sorrows.
and here in the Philippines, there are constant sorrows, but also faith and hope.

Quick: Who do you believe?

The new bishop of Mostar defends his predecessor against charges of collaboration with the communist secret police.

bishop ratko peric mostar medjugorje

Ratko Peric, Bishop of Mostar

Bishop Peric’s article comes in response to the book “Medjugorje Misterij”, published in June 2011, and later coverage by Vatican journalist Andrea Tornielli. In the book, four Croatian journalists documented how the Yugoslav secret police (UDBA) repressed Medjugorje in the 1980s, through papers unearthed from UDBA’s archives.

Leaving the issue open to interpretation, the authors left a collaboration between Bishop Zanic and UDBA as one possible way of understanding a certain document. In his article Bishop Ratko Peric denies this option, and further points to factual errors in UDBA documents. Early on, the Bishop clarifies his motives for writing:

“Since the late Bishop Pavao Zanic is mentioned in numerous pages of the book, and not in a complimentary way, it is our duty, for the love of truth and out of respect for Bishop Pavao, who was a bishop in Herzegovina for 23 years, to respond to such arbitrary claims and insinuations” Bishop Ratko Peric writes.

It says a lot about the sad state of bishops that I would believe the now released secret police archives over a bishop trying to whitewash his predecessor's actions.

Of course, I'm prejudiced: When the Croats were bombing the secular Muslims in Mostar, and many churches had been ruined or desecrated by communist Serbs, thousands had been killed, and hundreds of thousands fled the country, one reporter asked one of the Yugoslavian bishops what was the main problem the church in the then war torn country, and he answered Medjugorje.

more from another journalist who reviewed the book making the accusations:

Vatican journalist/commentator Andrea Tornielli took up the issue in Vatican Insider. From the original documents translated into Italian, Tornielli derived four conclusions:

1) The secret police used Bishop Zanic as a “main tool” in compromising Franciscan priests associated with Medjugorje.
2) Bishop Zanic’s hostility to Medjugorje was “fed by a series of documents put together ​​by the men of the secret police, which were circulated among Mostar, the Vatican and some European countries.”
3) As “the second part” of the secret police plan, Tornielli cites “using the ancient conflict that exists in Herzegovina between the secular clergy and Franciscans, foreseen to create chaos in the local Church by turning everyone against everyone.”
4) A secret police report of November 17th 1987 “shows how Bishop Zanic was willing to accept any document against the Franciscans and against the apparitions, even if of dubious origin.”

The "Hell Freezes over" post of the day

a positive article about Rick Santorum....in the NYTimes.

copied for later readings

A lot of the "wominpriest" stuff is by those rejecting any difference between the sexes, ignoring of course the nasty reality that women carry and nurture babies.

Ignatius press has this on Mary Daly

The decisive impulse to theological feminism's critique of Mariology came in 1973, from Mary Daly's Beyond God the Father. Already in 1968, Daly published a book on the theme of women, its title and basic content closely tied to Simone de Beauvoir: The Church and the Second Sex. For Daly, too, one does not arrive in the world as a woman, but one becomes a woman. In view of the theory of evolution, we can no longer speak of an "essence" of man or of woman or, likewise, of an immutable God who grounds immutable orders of things. Hence, there are no longer any creation-imposed presuppositions to serve as standards for the transformation of society and the Church, but only the ideal of "equality."

In her 1973 critique, Daly has been inspired once again by Simone de Beauvoir, who had pointed out the contrast between the ancient goddesses and Mary as early as 1949; whereas the goddesses commanded autonomous power and utilized men for their own purposes, Mary is wholly the servant of God: "'I am the handmaid of the Lord.' For the first time in the history of mankind," writes Beauvoir, "a mother kneels before her son and acknowledges, of her own free will, her inferiority. The supreme victory of masculinity is consummated in Mariolatry: it signifies the rehabilitation of woman through the completeness of her defeat."

Daly now sharpens this critique and puts it in a wider systematic context: Mary is "a remnant of the ancient image of the Mother Goddess, enchained and subordinated in Christianity, as the 'Mother of God'." To this attempt to "domesticate" the mother goddess, Daly opposes a striving to bring together the divine and the feminine.

In the later work Gyn/Ecology (1978), Daly abandons the ideal of "androgyny" that she had previously still advocated and becomes the most important representative of the gynocentric "goddess feminism." Mary is a "pale derivative symbol disguising the conquered Goddess," a "flaunting of the tamed Goddess." Her role as servant in the Incarnation of God amounts to nothing other than a "rape." For Daly, the subordination of man to God is something negative, especially when this state of affairs is expressed in a feminine symbol such as Mary.

Belief in nothing is a religious, not a scientific idea

Uncle Orson writes:

The problem with Greenblatt's book is that he is a true believer in the non-existence of God. It is one thing to say that Lucretius's attitude opened the door to serious scientific endeavor, and quite another to say that Lucretius's godless worldview is true.

Yet that is what Greenblatt says. This immediately transforms The Swerve from a book of historical biography (or biographical history) into hagiography, a life of a saint: a book written by a true believer to celebrate those who contributed to the triumph of the faith.

In fact, The Swerve, while it celebrates Lucretius, is the opposite of On the Nature of Things, in that it purports to know -- by faith alone, since science cannot address the question -- that there is no possibility of divine purpose in creation.

And you know, I had to read the stupid book that Greenblatt's book is rewriting, in college, but the only thing I remembered from it was that it "proved" that no god was needed because after all, because life appeared by scientific "spontaneous creation": Mud produced frogs, and bad food produced flies.

This last thing was why Pasteur's experiment proving that fly eggs produced maggots was a defense of religion...