The Sheepcat

Temple Prostitution: A New Way to Be Inclusive

From the nephew of the late Fr Richard John Neuhaus comes this brilliant piece of satire.

The Slippery Slope from Fetal Rights

First we social conservatives recognize the fetal right to life. All well and good, indeed vitally important. But just look where you get if you keep going down the same slippery slope: obviously the fetal right to bear firearms. This can only lead to dire consequences.

Born in the Caucasian spa town of Kislovodsk in 1918 just a year-and-a-month after the Bolshevik revolution, Solzhenitsyn’s father was a wealthy self-made man who died in a hunting accident shortly before his birth.

I rest my case.

On a more serious note, as most of my readers will know, Edmonton Conservative MP Ken Epp has sponsored C-484, a private member's bill which would make it a criminal offence to "directly or indirectly, (cause) the death of a child during birth or at any stage of development before birth while committing or attempting to commit an offence against the mother of the child, who the person knows or ought to know is pregnant." The bill is now before the Commons committee on justice and human rights.

Epp has explained that, contrary to some of the misrepresentations being circulated, C-484 does not declare fetuses to be "persons" under Canadian law. It doesn't grant or recognize "fetal rights" and explicitly excludes being applied against anyone who performs an elective abortion. But when a woman chooses to keep her baby, you'd think pro-choice advocates would want the Canadian legal system to protect her as much as possible, if they were to be consistent.

First It Was Clinton's Bosnian Snipers

... and now it looks as if there will have been some high drama during the still-to-come papal tour, according to this CBS story.

Pope Benedict XVI will visit a synagogue led by a rabbi who survived the Holocaust during his first papal trip to the United States, the nation's bishops said Thursday.

I suppose journalists have it drummed into them to get to the verb speedily, so moving "During his first papal trip" to the beginning of the sentence might make some readers fall asleep, but still, that's one badly misplaced modifier.

Annunciation Anagram

In honour of the Feast of the Annunciation (moved from 25 March this year because the Easter Octave takes precedence), I offer this anagram, which I wrote several years ago, based on Luke 1:28 (NRSV).

And he came to her and said, “Greetings, favored one. The Lord is with you.”
=
The Virgin Mary to the angel: “The Son arose of His Dad? A wonder, I deduce!”

I do hope this formulation adheres adequately to Nicene orthodoxy in terms of the Son's eternal relationship to the Father and historical conception in human form by the Holy Spirit, but I hope too that I may be allowed a little artistic licence here--these things aren't easy to come up with.

If you like this, my other site has additional anagrams on religious, musical, and other themes. One anagram is bilingual (Latin-English).

Gawker's Delight

Have a gander at the Rube Goldberg-esque graphics on the home page of HEMA,  which a friend describes as a big store with anything and everything you could possibly want to buy. You don't have to read a word of Dutch to enjoy this.

Link via superversive.

If the Rest of Wilson's Book Is This Good, I Can Hardly Wait

How can we tell that Easter is coming? Because yet another modernist scholar has come out with a radical reinterpretation of the historical roots of Christianity. This time it's from a York University professor, one Barrie Wilson, and it's called How Jesus Became Christian. According to the Publishers Weekly blurb,

Wilson calls his argument the Jesus Cover-Up Thesis and claims that the religion of Paul displaced the teachings of Jesus so that Paul's preaching about a divine gentile Christ covered up the human Jewish Jesus.

Blah blah cover-up yadda yadda, Jesus not really divine, blah blah blah. Boy, those Christians who endured torture rather than deny the divinity of Jesus, they must've been real maroons, the lot of 'em.

And a gentile Christ. Right. I guess that would be why Paul writes, regarding his own kinsmen,

They are Israelites, and to them belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ. (Romans 9:4-5 RSV, emphases added)

PW goes on, "Wilson's instructive book introduces important questions about early Christianity for those unfamiliar with the debates about the historical Jesus." No kidding. Because for those familiar with the debates about the historical Jesus, such as that B16 fellow, it seems unlikely there's anything terribly new here.

Finally, as a proofreader I know that even well-produced books can still contain embarrassing glitches that somehow no one noticed, but I had to chortle when I was told that p. 16 of the book ends with this line:

Through participation in his life and death through the rituals of the religion, members of this cult were promised immorality.

Books such as this call for one response:

Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world,
    Spare us, O Lord.
Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world,
    Graciously hear us, O Lord.
Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world,
    Have mercy on us.

As Long as They Don't Offer Me the "Real" Presence...

... but from the architecture and the unoccupied "cross" I'd guess they're too low-church to try. Anyhow The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks brings us an amusing pic.

Hmm, but what if the cross were only a symbol? What if, as any number of modernist scholars suggest, this crucifixion and resurrection business were only a story? "Bummer," eh?

Conjugate Well Today

Knowing that March 4 is National Grammar Day, all sentences should be purged of participles, that dangle, and thereby cause confusion. A box of Smarties to the first reader to identify all three errors in this post. Members of the Editors' Association of Canada are not eligible.

An Unimportant Meme

StatGuy tagged me to reveal six unimportant facts/quirks/habits about myself, so here goes.

1. I'm a late adopter when it comes to technology: I got my first VCR in 1999 and my first standalone DVD player a few months ago.
2. The first three books I got paid to index each had an entry for the International Monetary Fund.
3. There is a plush moose on my desk.
4. I tried watching Seinfeld. Really, I did.
5. I once asked Boris Spassky for his autograph after he'd already given it to me.
6. Why would anyone want to play a video game more advanced than Blockout (circa 1989)?

I'll tag BroAJK, Deborah Gyapong, Bear-i-Tone, Mephibosheth, Denyse O'Leary, and Disputed Mutability.

How Not to Put Inclusive Language in the Creed

Most of the kids did pretty well in the quiz I gave my Confirmation class today. There was one pretty funny error, though, in the section where they had to fill in the blanks with words missing from the Nicene Creed. One boy wrote,

For us men and for our   women    ,
he came down from     heaven      .