April 6, 2010 | 11:15 pm

Spider-Man is Jewish?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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Spider-Man at the Western Wall on Purim. From Israellycool, via Holy Weblog!

April 6, 2010 | 9:16 am

At Easter prayer breakfast, Obama urges life of truth

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

For some reason, the White House holds an Easter prayer breakfast after Easter. it’s like resurrecting the resurrection. Here’s an excerpt of what President Obama, who knows something about being a messiah, said:

For even after the passage of 2,000 years, we can still picture the moment in our mind’s eye.  The young man from Nazareth marched through Jerusalem; object of scorn and derision and abuse and torture by an empire.  The agony of crucifixion amid the cries of thieves.  The discovery, just three days later, that would forever alter our world—that the Son of Man was not to be found in His tomb and that Jesus Christ had risen.

We are awed by the grace He showed even to those who would have killed Him.  We are thankful for the sacrifice He gave for the sins of humanity.  And we glory in the promise of redemption in the resurrection.

And such a promise is one of life’s great blessings, because, as I am continually learning, we are, each of us, imperfect.  Each of us errs—by accident or by design.  Each of us falls short of how we ought to live.  And selfishness and pride are vices that afflict us all.

It’s not easy to purge these afflictions, to achieve redemption.  But as Christians, we believe that redemption can be delivered—by faith in Jesus Christ.  And the possibility of redemption can make straight the crookedness of a character; make whole the incompleteness of a soul.  Redemption makes life, however fleeting here on Earth, resound with eternal hope.

(skip)

So, on this day, let us commit our spirit to the pursuit of a life that is true, to act justly and to love mercy and walk humbly with the Lord.  And when we falter, as we will, let redemption—through commitment and through perseverance and through faith—be our abiding hope and fervent prayer.

Not bad. Not bad at all.

The full text, courtesy of the White House press office, is after the jump:

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April 6, 2010 | 9:02 am

Pope selects replacement for LA’s Cardinal Mahony

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Archbishop Jose Gomez

The big LA news today, covered in more detail by the AP than the Los Angeles Times, is that the pope has selected a successor for Pope Benedicat XVI. Here’s the hometown story, posted online this morning:

The pontiff appointed Jose Gomez as co-adjutor archbishop of Los Angeles, an assisting position that essentially puts him first in line to succeed Mahony, who reaches the mandatory retirement age of 75 for bishops in February.

Gomez is archbishop of San Antonio, a post he took up five years ago, during the last few months of John Paul II’s papacy. Gomez, 58, is also a member of Opus Dei, the controversial order favored by John Paul II for its conservative teachings.

The selection of Gomez was apparently a nod to the demographics of Los Angeles, where Latinos form a large part of the overall population and especially of the region’s Roman Catholics. Gomez was born in Monterrey, Mexico, and speaks fluent Spanish.

His appointment comes as the Vatican struggles to contain the biggest crisis so far of Benedict’s papacy, an upwelling of complaints of physical and sexual abuse by priests across Europe.

The scandal mirrors an earlier one in the U.S., which has roiled the L.A. archdiocese and Mahony’s tenure as archbishop. Three years ago, Mahony agreed to a record $660-million legal settlement with more than 500 alleged victims of clerical abuse.

The archdiocese’s handling of abuse cases is also the subject of an ongoing investigation by a federal grand jury.

Interesting. And big, important news. I assume the LAT will have a bigger story about Gomez’s selection in tomorrow’s paper—though, with history as our guide, there are no guarantees.

What continues to drive me nuts, though, is news outlets referring to the fact that next year Mahony “reaches the mandatory retirement age of 75.” While this is true, the “retirement” is a pro forma event in which bishops submit their resignation and, in most cases, they stay on the job at the pope’s desire. That Mahony isn’t going to be around suggests that, finally, he’s persona non grata in Vatican City.

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April 5, 2010 | 10:39 pm

Duke wins; where is God?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I don’t want to question God, but I’ve got to wonder what his logic was tonight.

Of course, by tonight I mean the NCAA men’s basketball championship. Right down to the wire there were two possible outcomes. One beautiful, the other terrible.

And instead of the little mid-western Christian school win, the title went to the pompous punks from the south. Devils, no less.

As the Sports Guy pointed out:

Thank God for the Saints. We almost had Lakers-Yanks-Colts-Duke consecutive titles. Or as it’s also known, the apocalypse.

Four years ago I had to stomach UCLA getting stomped on in the championship game by Florida. I feel at least as ill now. I can’t imagine what Gordon Hayward is going through—a few inches from immortality. He’ll have to settle for being a first-round draft pick and making a cool million or so next season.

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April 5, 2010 | 2:23 pm

If God had a funny blog

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Flipping through the March 9 issue of The New Yorker—I’m a bit behind—I came across this gem. Well, as loyal readers of The God Blog know, the Lord tried having a witty blog and it wasn’t as easy as it would seem—even for Him.

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April 5, 2010 | 10:09 am

Making time to rest

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

It feels a bit cruel to be mentioning the day of rest on a Monday. But Jason DeRose just turned my attention to an excellent discussion on “Fresh Air” with writer Judith Shulevitz, whose new book is “The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time.”

You can listen to Shulevitz’s interview with Terry Gross here, on continue on for an excerpt:

I know without looking, though, that the room where the candles would be burning is having its last golden moment of the day, the sun having sunk low enough to gild the walls. The sun sets shortly thereafter and plunges the world inside my time zone into what Jewish tradition regards as a kind of temporal no-man’s-land. It’s neither the end of the sixth day nor the beginning of the seventh (the Jewish day beginning and ending at nightfall). It’s twilight. The rabbis, who mixed their prescriptions and proscriptions with legend, defined twilight as “from sunset as long as the face of the east has a reddish glow.” They also called the twilight before the Sabbath a witching hour. The story is told that on the very first Sabbath twilight God created ten magical objects that he would later use to make miracles: the rainbow that came after the flood to assure mankind that God wouldn’t destroy the world again; the staff with which Moses wrought the ten plagues; the mouth of the earth that opened up to swallow an Israelite who tried to launch a coup against Moses; and so on.

By the time I’m ready to enter the kitchen and start my Sabbath, the moment for miracles will have passed. So will my chance to cheat time. The rabbis were inflexible about punctuality. The Romans having leveled the Temple more than a century before the rabbis became the Jews’ highest religious authorities, the sages inherited an inoperative religion of space, and set about turning it into a religion of time. It’s no accident that in the very first passage of the Talmud, they try to determine the exact instant in the evening after which a Jew may say the Shema, the most important prayer in Judaism. To the rabbis, time is irreversible. Generally speaking, either you do things at the appointed time or you don’t do them at all.

Such is the magic of the twilight before the Sabbath, though, that for that moment the march of time pauses in mid-step.

Much more about the book here or watch Shulevitz on “Colbert” above.

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April 4, 2010 | 10:44 am

Catholic apologies abound on Easter Sunday

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

He is risen—and so is the Catholic clergy sex abuse scandal.

The scandal’s resurrection has been dogging the pope for a few weeks, resulting in another misstep Friday when the pope’s priest compared the attacks to anti-Semitism.

At Easter services today, while the Catholic hierarchy rallied around Pope Benedict XVI, mea culpas abounded:

Easter became a festival of apology across the Christian world today as church leaders issued mea culpas for grievous sins committed against children and God.

The Pope was one of the few who failed to refer at all to the crisis that is tarnishing the image of the Church worldwide ...

Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster and leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, admitted that “serious sins” had been committed within the Catholic community. Preaching at Westminster Cathedral, he said: “Talk of sin is not always popular - unless we are talking about other people’s sins. In recent weeks the serious sins committed within the Catholic community have been much talked about.

“For our part, we have been reflecting on them deeply, acknowledging our guilt and our need for forgiveness.

“This is the journey of Holy Week. Indeed, to appreciate the message of this great Christian feast we have to begin with our own sin and shame.”

The sermons reflected one of the most dramatic Easters in living memory for Church leaders and the congregations, more used to listening to age-old and often anodyne messages from the pulpit about the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ.

Read the rest from Ruth Gledhill here.

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April 4, 2010 | 7:33 am

Megachurch to give away mega gifts on Easter Sunday

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Everything really is bigger in Texas, but someone please tell me this is a joke:

Easter at a megachurch in Corpus Christi, Texas, will look like the popular TV game show “The Price Is Right.”

Sixteen cars, 15 flat-screen televisions, furniture sets and other prizes are lined up at Bay Area Fellowship Church and ready to be claimed by anyone who attends the church’s Easter services on Sunday.

Though the church of some 7,000 weekly attendees has regularly flexed its creative muscles to draw the unchurched, the upcoming “Ultimate Giveaway” is like no other outreach it has ever attempted.

Pastor Bil Cornelius, who made the game show analogy, admits it’s a bit “outrageous.”

But he sees it as “an opportunity to share Christ with people who may never go to a church for any reason,” he told The Christian Post.

The prizes are worth over $2 million and are all donated items or sponsored by members of the church.

No, the Christian Post is not the baptized version of The Onion, which isn’t that surprisingly. Outrageous? Yes. But funny? Sadly, no.

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April 2, 2010 | 4:37 pm

Pope’s priest compares sex abuse reports to persecution of Jews

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Give me a break:

A senior Vatican priest speaking at a Good Friday service compared the uproar over sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church — which have included reports about Pope Benedict XVI’s oversight role in two cases — to the persecution of the Jews, sharply raising the volume in the Vatican’s counterattack. ...

In recent weeks, Vatican officials and many bishops have angrily denounced news reports that Benedict failed to act strongly enough against pedophile priests, once as archbishop of Munich and Freising in 1980 and once as a leader of a powerful Vatican congregation in the 1990s.

Benedict sat looking downward when the Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa, who holds the office of preacher of the papal household, delivered his remarks in the traditional prayer service in St. Peter’s Basilica. Wearing the brown cassock of a Franciscan, Father Cantalamessa took note that Easter and Passover were falling during the same week this year, saying he was led to think of the Jews. “They know from experience what it means to be victims of collective violence and also because of this they are quick to recognize the recurring symptoms,” he said.

Father Cantalamessa quoted from what he said was a letter from an unnamed Jewish friend. “I am following the violent and concentric attacks against the church, the pope and all the faithful by the whole world,” he said the friend wrote. “The use of stereotypes, the passing from personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt, remind me of the more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism.”

You can read the rest from The New York Times here.

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April 2, 2010 | 12:09 pm

Fiorina fails matzah challenge

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

They’re calling it Carly Fiorina’s Passover faux pas, which is a lot better than Passovergate:

The candidate for the GOP nomination in California sent out a Passover message early Tuesday to supporters, trying to show Jewish voters she cares. “Passover is a time of remembrance and thanks,” the message started. After a few sentences, it got to this one: “This week, as we break bread and spend time with our families and friends, I hope we also take a moment to say a word of thanks for our freedom and for those who have given their lives in freedom’s name.”

Except, obviously, during Passover you don’t break bread. You burn chometz; you break matzo, which, being dry and flavorless, breaks pretty easily.

So Fiorina’s campaign tried to undo the damage. “We meant all bread, leavened and unleavened, and matzoh is just unleavened bread so that’s what we meant by that,” a spokeswoman told the Sacramento Bee.

Maybe.

Fiorina’s flub is no Tommy Thompson line about Jews loving money. But it’s certainly a misstep, a la when the Bush White House sent out Chanukah cards with a Christmas tree on the front.

Would have been funnier, though, had the comment been made by Fiorina’s opponent, Sen. Barbara Boxer. She’s Jewish.

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April 2, 2010 | 9:47 am

This Friday is good

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

What makes this Friday different from all other Fridays?

Well, not only is it Good Friday, but, as happens on occasion, it’s being celebrated on the same day by all Christians. And many converged on Jerusalem’s Old City:

The cobblestone alleyways of Jerusalem’s Old City became moving forests of wooden crosses as Christian pilgrims and clergymen commemorated the day of Jesus’ crucifixion, Good Friday.

Black-robed nuns filed past metal barriers erected by police as dozens of tourists in matching red baseball hats held up digital cameras. Some pilgrims carried elaborately carved crucifixes, while others had crude crosses made of two planks held together with tape.

Good Friday rituals center on the ancient Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where Christian tradition says Jesus was crucified and buried before his resurrection on Easter Sunday.

The rage last year was tweeting the Passion Play on Good Friday. But this year, Roy Rivenburg of Not the LA Times and What Would God Tweet?, is turning the dial up to 11. In his humorous manner, Rivenburg plans to live-tweet the whole holy weekend.

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April 1, 2010 | 9:47 am

The Vatican, sex abuse and Kentucky Fried Chicken

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

“South Park” is no stranger to religion. The list of references goes on and on and on and on and on and ... well, you get the point. How else could I have managed to mention the show in at least 51 posts since The God Blog’s creation?

Last night, in another excellent episode, this time medical marijuana and the KFC black market, Cartman offered some timely attacks on the Vatican. At three different times in the episode, including the above clip, Cartman answered a question in the affirmative by dragging in Pope Benedict the XVI. Here were his answers, in order of appearance:

“Does the pope help pedophiles get away with their crime?”

“Is the pope Catholic—and making the world safe for pedophiles?”

“Does a bear crap in the woods? And does the pope crap on the broken lives of 200 deaf boys?”

That last line really showed me the writers of this episode were up on their current events, or have at least been reading The New York Times. It also seems a bit unfair.

Funny? Yes. But Pope Benedict has been the first pope to come out strongly against pedophile priests, even if he didn’t help protect altar boys before he was pope. To say that he’s making the world safe for pedophiles isn’t even hyperbole. I hope, at least, that it’s just wrong.

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