November 14, 2011 | 12:30 pm

‘Ironic’ as what was wrong with the ‘90s

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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And now a personal indulgence (as if most of what appears on this blog is something else): The 1990s represent my formative years, elementary school through high school. And I remember a lot of great music from those years—at least, I thought it was great.

But Alanis Morrissette was never on that list. And being even mildly skilled with words and literary techniques, I, like so many others, was always annoyed by the lack of irony in Morrissette’s breakthrough song. Moreover, I blamed “Ironic” for increasing the incidence of people saying, “That’s ironic,” when really they meant, “What a coincidence.”

This morning, Ben Westhoff of LA Weekly wrote a great line-by-line takedown of the lack of irony in “Ironic.”

Alanis Morrissette is the ‘90s in a nutshell, a time when the good economy had us thinking we no longer needed to be clever to get by. “Ironic” does in fact lack even the smallest shred of irony, and were it not for the “Stay (I Missed You),” it would indeed be the worst song of the ‘90s.

Westhoff’s approach actually reminds me a bit of legal textual interpretation. Anyway, here’s an example:

It’s like rain on your wedding day
Is this ironic? This is the line Morissette haters often cite when criticizing “Ironic.” Indeed, rain on one’s wedding day is not ironic. It’s just, like, unfortunate, if you’re a girl or whatever.

You can read the rest here. Actual religion news to follow ...

November 13, 2011 | 4:43 pm

What did Jesus really look like?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Nothing like the dozens of images you would find at the Wikipedia page for Jesus. No one knows for sure, and I suspect that most of us picture Jesus having shoulder-length brown hair, a beard covering lightly tanned cheeks and piercing brown eyes. (Either that or Jim Caviezel.) But what if Jesus looked more like this guy?

Richard Neave, a medical artist utilizing techniques in the field of forensic anthropology, told Popular Mechanics that Jesus’ skull would have been similar to that of a Galilean Semite. No surprise there. His skin would have been darker than the Westernized version of Jesus. Also not a surprise. But his hair would have been short.

An excerpt of the story from Mike Fillon:

The historic record also resolved the issue of Jesus’s height. From an analysis of skeletal remains, archeologists had firmly established that the average build of a Semite male at the time of Jesus was 5 ft. 1 in., with an average weight of about 110 pounds. Since Jesus worked outdoors as a carpenter until he was about 30 years old, it is reasonable to assume he was more muscular and physically fit than westernized portraits suggest. His face was probably weather-beaten, which would have made him appear older, as well.

Read the rest here.

(h/t: Torch)

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November 13, 2011 | 10:30 am

Tebow’s religious revolution

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

If you don’t know the name Tim Tebow—actually, it’s difficult to believe that anyone reading this blog hasn’t heard that name, but, just in case, the New York Times opens this story by explaining that Tebow is two things: a football player and a Christian. It’s a well-written article that revisits the social phenomenon of the Denver Broncos starting quarterback in the context of religion’s place in football.

An excerpt from Greg Bishop’s article:

While Tebow is not the first openly religious athlete, the circumstances surrounding his performance this season are so unusual, the N.F.L. is experiencing a rare, if not unprecedented, religious feud. The latest chapter in the Book of Tebow played out Sunday, when he threw two touchdown passes in the Broncos’ upset of the Oakland Raiders, perhaps saving his status as the starter, but not ending the larger debate.

“The role religion plays here is enormous,” said Kurt Warner, the former N.F.L. quarterback and a similarly outspoken Christian athlete. “When somebody professes their faith, and I was that guy for a long time, people automatically think when you praise God it’s because He makes passes go straighter or helps win games. When you lose, they say, your faith doesn’t belong here. Your God’s not helping you win.”

To his most fervent supporters—and there are many—Tebow was never just a quarterback. He was a champion of Christianity in shoulder pads, a wholesome, fearsome football player who loved God and touchdowns, in that order. If detractors found Tebow preachy, if he seemed too good to be true, he still won two national championships and a Heisman Trophy at the University of Florida, securing his legend as one of the greatest college players ever.

All correct, particularly the quote from Warner. If you watch people point to the sky after a cross the goal line or get a good win, then you can see that religion is prominent in football. It also seems a bit insincere.

Not with Tebow. And that has been surprising. More surprising, though, has been the animosity directed at Tebow’s outward religiosity. He has to be the least controversial and egotistical polarizing figure that American society has seen in a long, long time.

But football is it’s own religion, and maybe this is a case of not being able to worship two gods.

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November 11, 2011 | 3:41 pm

LAT surprised that church collects meal for a sick member

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I’m going to have to channel the former GetReligionista in me and complain that the LA Times just doesn’t get religion. This has been a regular problem since Bill Lobdell moved on, and it got really bad last year before making some improvements.

Religion reporting coming out of Spring Street, however, remains spotty. This post at the LA Times L.A. Now blog, which operates as more of an online news briefs section than a blog, is an example of that. It’s by the reporter who has been covering the Crystal Cathedral bankruptcy, leadership fight and sale, and the headline is an immediate tip to what’s wrong: “Crystal Cathedral email asks for food donations for Arvella Schuller.”

Arvella is the wife of founder Robert H. Schuller, and she is recovering from pneumonia.

What is bizarre about this story? Well, that’s what most religious communities do for members who are sick or just gave birth or are on tough times. It’s not unusual; it’s more common than dog bites man, and certainly is not man bites dog.

What is unusual is this detail from the fifth paragraph:

The email asks that the food be delivered to the Tower Lobby of the church, and said that the food would be delivered by a limo driver.

So a church that is in bankruptcy and had to sell its famed campus to deal with creditors has a limo driver? At this point, the post mentions that some congregants were upset about the limo delivery.

But if this was a story at all, that is the story. Previously, the paper mentioned briefly that the church was looking to hire a CFO whose compensation would be capped at $300,000. It seems like financial excess at Crystal Cathedral keeps knocking on the LAT’s door.

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November 11, 2011 | 12:28 pm

‘All-American Muslims’ coming to TLC Sunday

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

TLC debuts a new show Sunday called “All-American Muslim.” Frankly, I’m not sure what took so long. I’m also not sure how episodes producers will be able to find content for.

The show follows five families in Dearborn, Mich. If it had been filmed in Southern California, I would have like to have seen the Elsherif family on it. I’ve mentioned before one of the sons, Hytham, whom I profiled in 2005. The focus of that story was on one challenge of high school kid in Southern California growing up as an American Muslim: playing football while fasting for Ramadan.

“If he wants to play, it’s up to him,” says his mother, Naglaa Elsherif. “But he has to follow God’s rules—he has to fast. If he doesn’t have the energy to fast, don’t play.”

Hytham’s is a common dilemma of Muslim-American youths, many of whom find themselves attending class, studying and competing athletically on an empty stomach one month a year.

A first-generation Egyptian-American, Hytham has sculpted an identity as an American youth who happens to be a devout Muslim. He is one of an estimated 10 Muslims in a sea of 3,307 students. But his classmates do not consider him particularly different—except during that one month each year when they only see him eat at night.

The rest of that story is still here.

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November 9, 2011 | 4:20 pm

UBS Investment CEO: time to cut costs like a ‘Jewish shopkeeper’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Carsten Kengeter, the CEO of UBS Investment Bank, might have chosen the wrong analogy when he dined in New York a few weeks ago with some of this top bankers. He wanted them to know it was time to tighten belts—you know, because people aren’t too happy with Wall Street largesse and UBS just got caught in a $2.3 billion trading scandal. But he chose a rather anti-Semitic stereotype to get his point across.

According to the New York Post:

Kengeter, 44, implored the bankers to make a more concerted effort to streamline the firm and likened the strategy to slashing expenses like a “Jewish shopkeeper,” according to one attendee.

Well, that must have been a fun meal. The story states that instead of pumping up the troops, Kengeter’s comment “deflated morale.” I wonder what that looked like.

And where to start with the substance of the comment ... I don’t know if it’s more racist or more dated. I think it’s the latter, but I’ll just leave you with the NY Post headline: “Some of his best friends are shopkeepers.”

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November 9, 2011 | 12:39 pm

Jordan Farmar’s experience playing basketball in Israel

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Jordan Farmar, who for a while was the NBA’s lone Jew, has taken his talents to the south beaches of Tel Aviv.

Farmar has long been an interesting story. And now that he’s playing for Maccabi Tel Aviv during the NBA lockout and applying for Israeli citizenship, it’s getting more interesting. PRI’s The World produced the above video report and this story:

“I guess it started with the NBA lockout,” he says. “Basketball is how I make my living and support my family. And with the NBA being locked out and us not being able to go to work, I had to find other means.”

“The other option was to sit at home and kind of wait around. So, I figured I would try to play at a high level and stay sharp, and get a different life experience in the meantime.”

But this isn’t exactly a returning home for Farmar. His mother is Jewish; his stepfather is Israeli. But Farmar grew up in LA and doesn’t consider himself a religious Jew.

Actually ... it sounds like he should be right at home in Israel.

(h/t: LAObserved)

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November 9, 2011 | 9:59 am

Personhood amendment fails in Mississippi

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Passage of Mississippi’s personhood amendment was far from certain. The amendment would have defined life “to include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning, or the equivalent thereof.” This likely would have resulted in a ban on abortion (and opponents said birth control too). A legal fight over whether the ban violated the U.S. Constitution inevitably would have followed.

But Constitutional Initiative 26, as it was known on the ballot, failed to pass.. Here’s what Jacques Berlinerblau, a religion professor at Georgetown, says this means for the personhood amendment movement in a criticism of the motivations of the “hard Christian right”:

Secular believers and nonbelievers had better understand their antics and resolve. Expect one thousand Amendment 26s in the future. And that’s because this type of over-the-top activism is, currently, a win-win proposition for social conservatives.

Let’s be clear: the endeavor to define a fertilized egg as a human being endowed with all of the rights of what we would normally consider a citizen was a preposterous proposition from the start. It was simply insane from a variety of ethical, theological, libertarian, medical, metaphysical and even practical perspectives.

Leave aside all of that. The greatest absurdity consisted of the “compliance” component of this amendment. For how exactly could the state of Mississippi prevent and subsequently prosecute zygote homicide?

At this point, I feel like the focus of this blog post should change for the fate of Mississippi’s personhood amendment to the state of the Washington Post’s Georgetown/On Faith blog. But I’ll leave that to my friends at GetReligion.

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November 8, 2011 | 3:29 pm

Penn State football and the Catholic clergy sex abuse scandal

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

More and more disturbing news seems to be coming out of Happy Valley every day. First we heard this weekend that the Penn State athletic director had been indicted for allegedly covering up accusations of sexual abuse by a former defensive coordinator. Then details of the alleged abuse, as told to the grand jury, were released. In all of this, it’s been difficult not to think of the Catholic Church and its sexual abuse scandal.

While there clearly are differences—E.D. Kain focuses on fact that “Penn State is not some extreme religious order”—there are a lot of similarities. Failure to report allegations to police is one. A potential cover up is another.

Some of these go to the idea of football as religion.

Mark Silk explains the effect of the Church of Happy Valley:

As anyone who has ever visited State College, Pa. knows, Penn State football is a cult, a pilgrimage site complete with shrines and devotees and rituals. You can find similar ones in other university towns, be the institution of higher learning public or private. Among the hierarchs, to be sure, few have ever reached the power and status of the Nittany Lions’ Joe Paterno—the closest thing to a permanent icon in American sports history.

The scandals that regularly arise in such cults tend to be about money—usually having to do with the recruitment and care of the athletes—with sex thrown in when the athletes misbehave. That this one involves protection of an important assistant coach who reportedly liked to rape boys is incidental. ... [A]t bottom, it is the religious character of these institutions that, again and again, impels them so determinedly to cover up their sins.

Read the rest here.

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November 8, 2011 | 2:14 pm

NYT discovers hipster Christians

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Paging Brett McCracken ...

Hipster Christians are nothing new. Here’s how you spot them. And McCracken wrote a book about the fad.

But The New York Times seems to find something fascinating about tattooed Christians who wear skinny jeans and find value in referencing Woody Allen in a sermon.

The focus is on Resurrection Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn and its pastor, Thomas Vito Aiuto:

Mr. Aiuto, 39, bristles when his church is singled out as particularly cool. “I don’t want this church to be special,” he said over chicken mole at a Williamsburg taqueria. “I don’t want us to be a church for artists. I want it to be a garden-variety church. What we have to offer people is God.” He paused for a moment. “And I think our music is really good.”

While only one-quarter of the so-called millennial generation, those born after 1980, attend weekly religious services (according to a study by the Pew Research Center), young pastors like Mr. Aiuto and Jay Bakker, the son of the televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye, as well as groups like the Buddhist-inspired Dharma Punx, are tailoring their messages to young worshipers.

In Mr. Aiuto’s case, this can involve a certain irreverence (he made a rude gesture while illustrating a point about the parable of the prodigal son during a theological question-and-answer session after one recent service) and a dash of self-deprecation.

Beyond feeling totally stale, this story is all milk and no meat. No detail does more than graze the surface. I’m not sure if much interesting is still happening with Christian hipsters, but, if so, you won’t find it here.

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November 7, 2011 | 9:31 am

Florida dispute to proceed under Islamic law

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Speaking of Shariah and it’s place in American society, a Florida appellate court has ruled that a trial court may use Islamic law to decide a key issue in a case involving a mosque.

In Mansour v. Islamic Education Center, Judge Richard Nielsen had said he was going to apply “Islamic ecclesiastical law,” which I suspect is Shariah. As the St. Petersburg Times reports:

Nielsen limited his use of Islamic law to deciding whether arbitration by an Islamic scholar mediating a dispute between the mosque and ousted trustees followed the teachings of the Koran.

The arbitration itself is in dispute, with mosque officials saying it never took place.

The arbitrator ruled in favor of several men ousted as mosque trustees, a decision that, if upheld, could wrest control of $2.2 million in mosque coffers.

The judge’s ruling seems odd. But I could see how Nielsen could have interpreted a contract to require that arbitration follow Islamic law. And though he agrees that it’s OK to have binding arbitration be performed by religious authorities applying religious laws, First Amendment scholar Eugene Volokh thinks that the court got this one wrong. (Full disclosure: Professor Volokh has been for me an occasional sounding board for legal academic writing issues. He’s also one of the most-heavily quoted legal scholars in the world.) Here’s why Volokh thinks the court erred:

If there is a contract that provides, in secular terms, for certain procedures — that this particular person is to be the arbitrator, or that the proceeding is to happen at a particular time in a particular place — or for certain preconditions (e.g., as one side says, that “Dr. Bahraini had to agree to Mr. Shabiri serving as the arbitrator and second, the other side in the dispute had to dismiss their lawsuit”), then a court may decide if those terms can be met. But a secular court may not resolve terms that can only be interpreted by determining what “Islamic law” calls for, since that would involve taking sides as to the proper meaning of Islamic law.

After discussing this, Volokh makes a comparison to how Jewish law regarding marriage and divorce is applied by American courts.

Whether the Mansour decision will have consequences only for the parties involved here or will be applied in other cases remains to be seen.

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November 6, 2011 | 9:07 pm

Herman Cain’s church

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Since I last mentioned Herman Cain on this blog, the Republican presidential candidate has gone from complete unknown to surprising frontrunner with some voters. I find his ads bizarre and his rhetoric unconvincing, and the whole sexual harassment settlement certainly hasn’t been playing well. But, at this point, Cain certainly needs to be taken seriously.

So who is Herman Cain? Or, more to the heart to the heart of this blog, what does Herman Cain believe about God?

It turns out that Cain is an ordained minister of the National Baptist Convention. And he’s been open about God’s role in his battle against cancer. Now the Wall Street Journal has shed some light on Cain’s church, where he is an assistant pastor:

Mr. Cain’s church, Antioch Baptist Church North in Atlanta, Ga., is theologically conservative, affirming the inerrancy of scripture and historic Christian creeds as literally true. It was founded in 1877 as eight freed slaves banded together in prayer. During its 134 years, it has hosted many civil-rights activists, and today it has 14,000 members.

(skip)

While Mr. Cain’s economic views are likely more conservative than those of many of his fellow congregants, his views on social issues are consistent with his denomination—the National Baptist Convention—and with the majority of black Americans. Mr. Cain, like most black Americans, believes life begins at conception and that marriage is a sacred covenant between one man and one woman.

Read the rest here, where op-ed writer Harry Jackson compares Cain’s church’s views to those of Obama’s former church and his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

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