Goodbye, Norwegian Jesus

As part of my worldwide book tour (which thus far hasn’t left Connecticut), I spoke last night at Hartford Seminary, my alma mater. I enrolled in a New Testament class at the seminary some 10 years ago in an attempt to try to figure out all the Bible I’d learned as a fundamentalist Christian.

See, I learned plenty of Bible but absolutely no context — nothing about authorship or audience or cultural norms of the day.

(Can I just say that I figured the seminary would give me an easy degree, and that I thought a New Testament would be a breeze, given all the Bible I know by heart. And within 15 minutes, the teacher, Efrain Agosto — now the dean — had me looking for the exits. It was not easy, but I stuck it out and I’m glad I did.)

Last night was the book’s coming out party, and the program started with two songs from the choir at Hartford’s Citadel of Love, a north end Pentecostal church led by the incredible Pastor Marichal Monts, a friend of mine. They tore the roof off.

(Note to self: Never ever ever follow the Citadel’s choir. You just aren’t good enough.)

Anyway, maybe it was the fabulous music, but as much as I talked, I forgot to say three things, and those things woke me up in the wee hours of the morning, so I’ll say them here:

1. My Jesus — the one I met later in life, not the one in my “Children’s Bible” – is not Norwegian. He is distinctly swarthy and

2. He doesn’t fit into stained glass windows, either, all sanitized and saint-like because

3. He was a radical, pure and simple. He came to shake up the paradigm. He fraternized with the disenfranchised, brought women to the table, touched the lepers, and spent his short time on earth looking out for the little people. So the Jesus I dated in high school was a human construct — maybe a well-meant one, but hardly the historic Jesus, the one I met again for the first time as an adult.

4. (I lied when I said I’d only add three things) This Jesus, the historic Jesus, is far more to my liking, because this Jesus sounds like the one I read about in the Bible. And we fundamentalists are all about scriptural reference.

There. I feel better now. Thank you for listening.

Eat the rich

Or, at the very least, tax them.

I don’t imagine everyone who reads this blog shares my politics, which skew left (very left, and for that, I am heartily sorry but I can back up my political choices with scripture).

(I have always liked James 1:27, because it clears away all the muddle of hot-button issues such as marriage equality and the like. If you’re keeping your eye on the theological ball, you can certainly argue these things, but if you do you’re taking valuable energy away from the important stuff, the stuff that Jesus talked about, like taking care of the disadvantaged.)

As for you heathens who disagree, I will pray for you, but I like Pres. Obama’s idea of ending tax breaks for the top two percent of America’s wage-eargers, while leaving alone families who earn less $250,000. He presented this in his speech before Congress last night and it caught in my net.

Of course, this is easy for me to embrace as my family earns surpringly less than $250,000 a year. But if you want to take the long view, my Sunday school lessons taught me that riches on earth spell danger for your prospects after death. So if the government wants to step in and ease rich families’ burden a little, rock on.

As I said, I bet not all Dating Jesus blog readers agree. Oddly, this is an issue in a class war where the disadvantaged too often make the arguments for the advantaged, leaving them to count their money, I guess. (Joe Bageant addreses this far better than I ever could.) So let the arguments begin.

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A perfectly lovely secular hymn

Good morning, from the fabulous Chrissie Hynde.

And yes, we take requests, unless it’s “Turn that music down, fer cryin’ out loud!” That request, we ignore, as we’ve always ignored it and tradition can be a good thing.

We are not quitters

Ty’Sheoma Bethea is an eighth-grade student at J.V. Martin Junior High School in Dillon, S.C. And she helped write Pres. Obama’s speech tonight.

A few weeks ago, Ty’Sheoma went to her local library, sat down in front of a public computer, and typed a single-spaced letter to Congress.

Her school is a decrepit facility. The roof leaks, the heating’s faulty. Some classes meet in a rusty mobile classroom — a trailer. Schools of its type are featured in the documentary, “Corridor of Shame.”

“People are starting to see my school as an hopeless, uneducated school which we are not,” she wrote. She asked for help to “prove to the world that we have an chance in life just like other schools and we can feel good about what we are doing because of the conditions we are in now we can not succeed in anything.”

“We are not quitters,” she wrote.

The next morning, her principal scanned the letter and emailed it.

Pres. Barack Obama visited the school as a candidate, and he mentioned it again during a recent  press conference. Ty’Sheoma’s letter landed on his desk, and last night, the girl  – in a lovely lavendar dress – and her mother, Dina Leach, sat with the Obama family during the President’s speech.

Ty’Sheoma in ’36. Rock on.

These are my people

Well, not technically, but still.

This photo was taken last week  in Lousiana by the member of a Connecticut church youth group traveling down south to help people get back into their homes after Hurricane Katrina.

Yes. That Hurricane Katrina, from 2005. And yet, despite the devastation and the four years of deprivation, these folks are still able to put up a sign that says “God is good all the time.”

Domestic violence knows no creed

The terrible beheading of Aasiya Z. Hassan, a Buffalo television executive, whose husband Muzzammil is charged with the crime, opens the door for an important discussion about domestic violence within faith communities, as can be heard by Joe Palca, at NPR’s “Talk of the Nation,” here.

If you think domestic violence afflicts only people of certain faiths, think again.

Yoga for Facebook addicts

That, or you can just step away from the keyboard, loser.

(I say that with love. Did you hear the love?)

Size matters

At least, it does when it comes to how much of the brain is used in appreciating beauty, says a report from University of California-Irvine’s Francisco J. Ayala and others.

When it comes to how the genders appreciate a painting, for example, the differences are measurable.

Let’s not reduce this to a girls-rule-boys-drool conversation, but it is just a little bit interesting. Then, too, the publication in which the study ran also says that men control their appetite better than women. So it’s a trade-off. Sort of.

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The gospel according to Dolly Parton

Say what you want about Dolly Parton.

Here. I’ll start: She has wigs that look combed by an egg beater, and she freely admits to indulging — big time — in plastic surgery.

Yet she comes off as one of the more authentic people out there.

As for her looks, my theory on this is if you grow up dirt-poor (aka Tammy Faye Baker Messner), you get to choose your own aesthetic. People like that get a pass, because they are — at their cores — real.

In addition, Dolly has never been afraid to laugh at herself, but on CNN’s  Larry King Live recently, she did an unusual thing and stood up for her Southern sister, Jessica Simpson, whose every misstep sets off the chattering class. Says Sister Dolly: “People always treat her bad…I’ve been fat and I’ve been skinny and I’m not about to say anything about anybody else. I know that Jessica is a good girl. She’s beautiful to me.”

Sisterhood is not dead. The ambassador of the Smoky Mountains also had words of wisdom for the rest of us: “We’re all God’s children and God should be the one to judge — not other people.”

My favorite part? King complimented her on her plastic surgery, and she laughed and complimented King on his, but King insisted he’s too scared to go under the knife.

And here we take a page from Sister Dolly and we leave that for God to judge.

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Just lil’ ol’ Church Lady me…

…wondering what this list means.

We find this, from the Best Christian Workplaces Institute: The results come from a survey of more than 80,000 employees across North America. 

I’m guessing they don’t allow cussin’? And no stealing of office supplies. And the offices are really small, as many are called but few are chosen.

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