Joe Miller's Jests

A lady being asked how she liked a Gentleman’s Singing, who had a very stinking Breath, the Words are good, said she, but the Air is intolerable.

This wheezer is from Joe Miller's Jests; or, the Wit's Vade-Mecum. Published in 1739, it is among the very first anthologies of one-liners in the English language. Although it remains an excellent source of ammunition if one wants to insult Colley Cibber, most of the jokes -- or perhaps we mean "jokes" -- were bad when first written and have aged poorly. And yet such was the little book's popularity that it went through many subsequent editions and and amplifications, and in time a "Joe Miller" became a a slang term for any tired old joke.

Which brings us to the senatorial elections in Alaska.

One of the surprises of the season was the defeat, in the Republican primary, of incumbent Barbara Murkowski by a candidate associated with the Tea Party movement and named, ahem, Joe Miller. Because Murkowski will now run as in independent, it is now a tight 3-way race, which will probably be won with as little as 35% of the votes cast. (And please, no jokes about tight 3-ways. This is a family blog).

This Miller fellow seems like a feasible candidate: raised in Kansas, educated at West Point and Yale Law. Although he lost his only prior bid for elective office, he has done a variety of jobs at different levels of government. Sounds good, right?

So why has he recently announced that he will no longer answer questions from the press -- at least when those questions concern his "background"? For that matter, why have his security guards starting shoving matches with local reporters who try to ask questions about this "background"?

Well, aside from Yale, what is Joe Miller's background? Consider those government jobs we mentioned. They include his work as part-time attorney for the Fairbanks North Star Borough. (In Alaska, as in New York City, "boroughs" are essentially counties.) This job doesn't appear on his campaign bio, and for good reason: according to his ex-boss, he was forced to quit because of an insubordination incident. This incident followed the discovery that he had been, unethically, using the borough's computers (and paid time) to manage his failed House campaign.

Bad enough, but possibly not the worst. Miller is running as a typical small-government candidate, eager to balance the budget and opposed to health care reform and most other social programs designed to assist poor people. Fair enough, we suppose. Except for two problems.

First, there is the revelation that Miller and his wife have received a variety of public benefits, ranging from low-income fishing licenses to unemployment insurance to federal farming subsidies. Murkowski accuses him of hypocrisy; Miller responds that he "wasn't born with a silver spoon in his mouth." This makes no sense at all, of course. Oughtn't he have rejected on principle the silver spoon offered him by a Constitutionally dubious government program? But far be it from the Egg to condemn Miller, or any other Ivy League lawyers who are living easy on the public dole.

Second, and to our mind far more damning, is the fact that Miller was six months late in filing his financial disclosure forms as required by law, and may now be liable for a fine of as much as $50,000. Shouldn't a lawyer be eager to comply with the law? And more to the point, shouldn't a debtor be eager to avoid paying out extra money?

And Miller is in deep debt. First off, he earned about $94,000 in 2009. That's a fine income, and one we'd be thrilled to report, and we're sure it is adequate to pay his mortgage on some undeveloped farmland. But we're not sure it was wise financial management for him to loan his campaign nearly $104,000 -- more than a year's salary (unless one gets elected to the Senate, and earns a good bit more). We're concerned that he is still paying off student loans of $15-50,000, although those at least carry a modest interest rate. We are much more worried by his credit card debt, which is somewhere between $35-80,000 on three cards. Doesn't this guy watch Suzie Orman?

We find it very difficult to take seriously the fiscal-conservative credentials of a candidate who is this deeply in debt. Physician, heal thyself and so forth.

All told, this Joe Miller seems like one more joke played on America by those latter-day Merry pranksters, the Tea Party people. He is man of no evident distinction, running for an important national office. He opposes programs from which he has benefited, and which offer daily benefit to people in much greater need. He has a history of ethical rule-breaking, which has already cost him a job and may now cost him substantial penalties. And worst of all, he wants to manage the finances of an enormous government, when he is himself sunk in debt.

On the whole, we have to go with the lady in the one-liner: even if you think the words are good, the air is clearly bad.

China Censors Its Own Leader

At least when he talks about free speech.

It seems that Chinese premier Wen Jiabao has made a number of recent speeches, at home and abroad, in which he calls for greater political freedom in the country he leads. Few Chinese people know this, though, because Wen's remarks are routinely censored, just like everybody else's, by the time they hit the media. Got it? They censor their own head of state.

Seems that censorship in China isn't done by the government, per se, but by the Communist Party. And just to keep journalists on their toes, the rules for censorship change all the time -- and are never written down. Instead, you get an anonymous call explaining the new rules. No paper trail, no accountability. And no arguments.

Recently, a group of Chinese elder statesmen have signed and circulated an open letter, calling for the Party to relax its rules. These are heavy hitters, including Chairman Mao's former secretary, and a former editor of the Party newspaper. Here's a sample:

When our country was founded in 1949, our people cried out that they had been liberated, that they were now their own masters," the letter states. ... But even today, 61 years after the founding of our nation, after 30 years of opening and reform, we have not yet attained the freedom of speech and press to the degree enjoyed by the people of Hong Kong under colonial rule. ... Not only the average citizen, but even the most senior leaders of the Communist Party, have no freedom of speech.

Of course, very few people in China know about this letter. It's being censored. (Although, fortunately, the censors aren't geniuses).

But the rest of us know. So when the Nobel Prize goes to an imprisoned dissident, and China huffs and puffs that this will be bad for its relations with Norway, we respond pretty much the way we do when enraged Islamofascists burn down churches in response to the possible exercise of free speech halfway around the globe. I.e., with contempt.

Wow. Straight Men Really Like"Band of Brothers"?

Yup. That much. Along with poker, cars and "my boat."

Father Anonymous is suddenly a wee bit anxious about his masculinity. But he did like Private Ryan, which is next on the list. Said list is one of the many gay-straight cultural analyses blogged yesterday by OKTrends. This is the research arm of dating site OKCupid, and apparently combed through what is called the "data exhaust," such as the number of times a word is used in a profile, produced by its gazillions of users.

According to OKT, for the veracity or even existence of which we cannot vouch in the slightest, the results basically show that all the stereotypes are true.* Gay men like Drop Dead Gorgeous and The Devil Wears Prada; lesbians like The L-Word to the near exclusion of everything else on earth. straight women actually do like lip gloss and Nicholas Sparks, which -- when compared to the list of things straight men like -- makes one wonder where babies actually come from, since it can't be these mismatched weirdoes.

A few revelations may interest Egg readers in particular, such as this one:

Religion is the opiate of the masses, so long as the masses are straight. However, amass a bunch of lesbians and you're going to need actual drugs.

And we should all be troubled by a chart showing that, in almost equal numbers, women are twice as likely as men to believe that the Earth is larger than the Sun.

Can this be true? We genuinely don't know. The blog post is very funny, and written for a popular audience. It could be nothing more than a hoax to garner publicity and click-throughs. If so, it has succeeded spectacularly well, since we read it through this morning three times: laughing, wincing, and laughing again.

_________________________________________

*All save one. There is no mention of gay men and opera, which makes us question the validity of the whole exercise. And we speak both as an opera lover and a realist.

Thirteen Letters, Sounds Like "Trouble"

The word is restructuring, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is doing it. Again.

The bottom line is that giving -- what used to be called "benevolence," and is now called "mission support" -- is down dramatically over the past few years. Many or even most of the ELCA's 65 synods are in serious financial trouble, and so is the national church.

Why? Everybody has a theory. Maybe it's the result of decades of debilitating internal warfare over Episcopalians and gay people. Maybe it's the cost of a topheavy administrative structure. Maybe it is all those old people who won't listen to the young people, or vice-versa. Maybe it was the CNLC's captivity to ultra-liberal Protestantism. Maybe it's the effect of a worldwide economic crisis, which features 10% unemployment and pension plans in dire jeopardy. Or maybe it's mainline decline, the undiagnosable black box of modern church history. (We at the Egg blame the AELC, just on principle. At this point, we may as well put our cards on the table and admit what readers have already guessed: we also think the AELC killed Kennedy and is hiding the truth about UFOs).

Whatever the cause, the result is clear. Painful as it is, we are glad that the church had the guts to take action, further streamlining its structure. We may tease Bishop Hanson about his albs, but we admire his willingness to face reality. You might be surprised by how rare that is in church leadership. And we are very sad that he's had to do it twice.

We don't know all the details of the bloodletting. Here's a press release, but it only hints at what the result will look like. As 16 "units" and "sections" are condensed into three units, will there be some functions that are no longer given proper attention, or attended to at all? Will there be some gains, in coherence and missional focus? We hope so, but only time will tell.

What concerns us most right now is the human cost. A national staff of 358 will be reduced by 65 or so. That's nearly a 20% layoff, on top of the cuts earlier this year -- and in a virtually stagnant labor market. How will those people pay the rent and buy groceries? Five foreign missionaries on active duty will be called home, almost immediately. Who knows how disruptive that will be, not only to the missionaries and their families, but to the ministries they have be building up?

Please pray for the church, and in particular for those who are facing the end of ministries they had cherished and cultivated.

"A Little Midnight Picnic"

Halloween is coming. The toddler has announced that he will sally forth as Cowboy Woody and Mother A. will be Cowgirl Jessie. Your correspondent is reliably informed that his choices are to dress as Buzz Lightyear or Stinky Pete the Prospector. Oh joy.

All of which makes us think of Christine O'Donnell.

As you surely know, Ms. O'Donnell is a gubernatorial candidate in Delaware. We are unsure of her qualifications. Although she has never held any government office, she has lost two previous Senate bids, which we suppose bespeaks at least some familiarity with the world of politics. Her chief public notoriety apparently comes from appearances on Bill Maher's show and something on MTV called Sex in the 90s. She has been teased a great deal in the press because of her objections to extramarital sex and, um, masturbation. And her fudged academic credentials. And her claims to have classified information detailing a Chinese plot to conquer America. (Oooh, big secret. They own our debt.)

Oh, and she used to be a witch. Or rather, she "dabbled in witchcraft." Or, really, she went on a few dates with people who dabbled, back in high school. In a droll clip from the Maher program (watch it here), a preposterously young O'Donnell describes her first date with a dabbler, "on a Satanic altar." Apparently, she was not put off by the traces of blood. After a movie, they went home to his house for "a little midnight picnic."

Well, imagine the howls of outrage. But if you weren't watching closely, you might miss one nuance: that many of the said howls came from witches. Practitioners of Wicca don't want to be associated in the public mind with Christine O'Donnell. Who could blame them?

What especially sets of Selene Fox (High Priestess of the Circle Sanctuary) and Diotima Manitineia (spokesperson for "The Witches Voice") is the conflation of witchcraft with Satanism. Fox says, "Any political candidate that is going to equate witchcraft with Satanism is ill informed and is not likely to get the support of people involved in nature religion," which we doubt is all that dire a threat. Mantineia says, even more forcefully, that

witchcraft and Satanism are two different things... witches or Wiccans do not believe in Satan. We don't even believe that Satan exists. Satan is a Christian deity of some kind. He is part of the Christian religion not ours. We worship nature; we work very closely with nature. We do not have blood on our altar and we have little to do with Satan. So I don't know what Ms. O'Donnell is talking about. I wonder if she knows what she was talking about.

Sure, it's a only a tempest in a cauldron. But for the sake of clarity, let's take a moment to unpack some of this.

We'll begin by saying that we do not for one moment doubt Ms. Fox or Ms. Mantineia when they describe their own religious communities. If they say that they worship nature or the moon or anything else, we believe them. What we want to pick out here are the varying definitions of "witchcraft" in play.

The modern "witchcraft" movement, of which Wicca is one part, is described by Margot Adler's classic Drawing Down the Moon. Practitioners do indeed present themselves as part of a nature-religion, often claiming continuity with the pagan religions of northern and western Europe. The problem, as we mentioned the other day with reference to neodruidism, is that precious little is known about about those religions. Any claims of continuity are dubious at best.

Sometimes, the modern witches also claim continuity with the victims of the Renaissance witch-craze, which swept through northern Europe during the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. This claim rests principally on the identification of those victims -- largely women, often older and lacking in strong family connections -- as practitioners of an ancient European nature religion. This is, in essence, the thesis put forward i the 1920s by an anthropologist named Margaret Murray. The problem is that the Murray thesis has been discredited by most subsequent scholarship.

But let's be clear about what a "witch" means in the technical vocabulary of early modern Christianity, because this definition is also alive today. It does not refer to somebody skilled with herbs, for example -- monasteries often kept such a person around as their physician. Nor does it refer to an astrologer or soothsayer, as such. A witch, as understood by church documents, was a person who entered into a contract with the Devil, typically for the purpose of helping herself (or, more rarely, himself) at the expense of others. A witch was both a heretic and a criminal. And yes, in modern language, witches were Satanists. (So Christine O'Donnell is ... right. We guess.)

Now, this position reversed the traditional teaching of the Church, which was that "witchcraft" was a delusion, and that the real heresy was not its practice, but the belief that it could be practiced -- the belief, in other words, that God permitted the Devil to create such pacts or award supernatural powers to human beings:

Whoever therefore believes that anything can be made, or that any creature can be changed to better or worse, or transformed into another species or likeness, except by God Himself who made everything and through whom all things were made, is beyond a doubt an infidel.

This is the position of the famous Canon Episcopi, the governing authority from the 10th century until about 1486. So why did that change? Blame the Dominicans. They had been created to preach against the Albigensian heresy, which certainly did exist, and over time their portfolio had expanded to the extirpation of all heresy, not necessarily by homiletical means. They were often put in charge of the Inquisition, for example. And it was a pair of Dominican friars from Germany who offered to the Church the dubious gift of the Malleus Maleficarum, which -- after some sharp criticism in the beginning -- eventually came to serve as a treasured reference book or people who did believe that women could in fact have sex with the Devil, turn their husbands' penes to glass, and concoct an ointment that would let them fly.

The underlying reality, we should say clearly, is almost certainly that "witchcraft" as the Church defined it after 1486 didn't exist, except in the imaginations of some very strange people. (This despite the credulity of, say, Montague Summers. We adore Summers for his batshit-crazy books and crazier prose, but come on). On the other hand, while it wouldn't shock us to find some remnants of folk-religion in the German backwoods, it seems pretty evident that this was (with rare exceptions) not what was actually prosecuted. Two different things.

So what was really going on here? These days, the witch-craze is generally explained by a combination of factors. Europe during the Renaissance and Reformation was in the midst of a destabilizing cultural shift. Humanism, nationalism, Protestantism and capitalism were all taking off, and every one of them was a threat to somebody's sense of order. The Crusades having spent their force, a new enemy was needed, emotionally at least, to rally the troops and stave off anarchy. In Germany, at least if memory serves, the average age of first marriage was on the rise, and the unmarried adult woman -- the "spinster" or, in sociological language, "surplus female," was an easy target. And so, flying in the face of an ancient (and comparatively reasonable) doctrine, the practice of hunting and executing "witches" was begun.

Those unacquainted with the details sometimes assume that the witch-hunts were a medieval and Papist aberration. Sadly, this is not the case; they were largely a Renaissance phenomenon, in which Roman Catholics and Protestants both displayed homicidal paranoiac zealotry. We could go on in tedious detail about the demographics -- some countries killed many "witches," others killed almost none. But back to Ms. O'Donnell.

Since Trevor-Roper drew an analogy between the witch-craze and the Red Scare of the 1950s, the "witch hunt" has become jargon for the way a fearful society worries about the Enemy Within, the invisible Fifth Column in its midst, seeking to undermine its institutions and destroy it. These days, the real "witches" in American society are, depending upon the week, Mexican immigrants (presumed to be illegal) or Muslims (presumed to be terrorists). Or, of course, the political party one does not favor.

So when Christine O'Donnell says that she dabbled in witchcraft, the issue isn't whether she was in her youth (a) a Devil-worshiper or (b) a typical middle-class kid from Jersey looking for nookie with a pretentious bad boy. The issue is whether she, or any other candidate, can manage to stop inventing threats ("China!" "Taxes!" "Spanish!") in order to stir the base emotions of the voters, and then sit down to make the intelligent compromises among people with different ideologies and interests that actually constitute good government.

Collars, Again

Sorry to belabor a point, most of all about something as mundane as haberdashery. But we just stumbled over this, and wanted to share. It's from a piece by Fr. Edward Lewis, writing in the parish newsletter of St. John's, Watford (linked above):

Wearing the clerical collar (a sign which says to others, available for you) an outward sign of the Sacrament of Ordination, gives the priest privileges beyond description. People will allow us to enter into the most precious and deep moments of their lives. They will tell us things they would never share with another. They will expect our prayers and support. Yet it is not the person, but the office which people are using. Of course it is helpful if the general demeanour is a friendly and open one; but let us never forget that it is Christ at work in the ministry of the priest.

Not quite how we would have put it, but we do like the part in parentheses.

The Church at Ground Zero

Nice Times piece linked above about St. Peter's, a Roman Catholic parish church that stands a couple of blocks from the site of the Word Trade Center. About as many blocks, in fact, as Park51, the proposed Muslim community center.

The point to the story is that, when St. Peter's was built in 1785, Roman Catholics were considered a dangerous new addition to the Big Apple. After all, they were bound to obey a foreign ruler, had an uneasy relationship to democracy, and -- what with the Index and all that -- were generally inimical to the American way of life. Not to mention that the building was funded by yet another furriner, the king of Spain. So they were forced to move their building away from the downtown area, to a spot outside the city limits. Which is pretty funny, if you know the present-day geography, but was a big deal at the time.

Needless to say, things have changed, which is the other point to the story. But we especially like this reminder of just who the "real" New Yorkers were in those days:

On Christmas Eve 1806, two decades after the church was built, the building was surrounded by Protestants incensed at a celebration going on inside — a religious observance then viewed by some in the United States as an exercise in “popish superstition,” more commonly referred to as Christmas. Protesters tried to disrupt the service. In the melee that ensued, dozens were injured, and a policeman was killed.

Wait, incensed? That sounds promising. Oh, no, our mistake. Angered. And probably scared. Because -- and this is the part worth remembering -- there was a time when some people thought it was un-American and even seditious to celebrate Christmas Eve.

(Details about the riot are here).

No, Not "Choler"

(Although, heaven knows, that's where Father A.'s expertise really lies.)

Our dear friend Gillian, with whom we studied theology ages ago but who has only just recently been ordained to the diaconate, doubtless en route to the priesthood, asks about collars. Where, when and how often does one wear them these days? A good question, and one that shouldn't lie stuck in the "comments" section.

Audrey's answer is straightforward: "When you are at work, wear your collar. When you are not, do not." She says that this has served her well, but adds (and do we detect a rueful tone?), "This means I wear it a lot."

That advice serves extremely well, depending on one's definition of "work." Alone at the typewriter on a Saturday night? We're working, but probably in sweats.

Our own answer is a bit more nuanced. The principle of a distinctive dress for the clergy is medieval, although of course everybody wore distinctive dress in those days. (And damn all those modern lawyers who want to look like bankers! Put your wigs on, people!) But unlike, say, the cassock, the modern strip-of-cloth-or-plastic clerical collar is a fairly recent innovation, dating only to the 19th century. Unlike, say, the alb, it is clearly not a sacred vestment, but a piece of street attire. (And yes, all this depends upon a sharp distinction between sacred and profane which may not stand up to rigorous theological analysis. But it's how these things are organized, so go with it.) So the customs are new and the rules, such as they are, are flexible.

Some people don't wear them at all. And not just Baptists. Our late and cherished grandfather wore collars (made by Brooks Brothers!) in his youth, but quickly abandoned them. His argument was that the collar created an emotional distance between the clergy and those they were called to serve. He considered this a bad thing; experience has made us think it can sometimes be a very useful one indeed. A little distance can prevent a lot of misunderstanding.

More to the point, it can be very useful indeed to be recognized at glance. After 9/11, our bishop urged pastors in New York to wear their collars, saying, "People need to see you." He was preaching to the choir, since we were a multitude already clad in black.

Still, there was a time when Father A. thought he might himself go collarless, out of deference to the old man. Then came CPE, during which all student-chaplains were required to wear "professional dress," which our director defined as "jacket and tie, or clerical collar." Father A., then known formally as Impoverished Seminarian A., owned only a single blue blazer, which was locked in a trunk, stored in a dormitory basement, in another state. The math was simple: three black shirts were cheaper than one new jacket.

The turning point came when he was dining alone in the hospital cafeteria, enjoying a flattened ham-and-cheese sandwich on a stale kaiser bun along with an underripe banana.

"Pardon me. Are you one of the chaplains?" The woman standing across the table had a frantic look in her eyes. And no wonder. Her younger brother was in the emergency room. He was a thirty-something man who for some years had been struggling with a chronic disease, and it looked as though he was going to lose the struggle shortly. For most of his life, he had been estranged from his family and from the Church, but lying on his gurney waiting to be admitted, he had wept on his sister's shoulder and whispered that he wanted to see a chaplain.

So I went. And did the things you do in that situation. It was a privilege. And it would not have happened had I been wearing a necktie and nametag, because the sister would never have spotted me across the room.

Since then, Father A. has been passionate in his affection for the clerical collar. As our favorite OT prof once remarked, "It opens more doors than it closes." So we wear it whenever we think that it may serve to open a door to pastoral conversation. That means always when visiting, always when traveling to and from church events, and usually at the office. This, at least, is our rule when playing on familiar turf.

Because location does play a big part in this. In New York and its environs, clerical collars are very common, and send a clear cultural message. Here in Romania, they are quite rare, and we now wear ours only in the churchiest situations. It felt strange for a while, but we have adjusted. No, that's a lie: it still feels strange. And, because we have capitulated to local custom, who knows how many doors have remained shut?

Bishop Hanson Enters the Monastery

We do feel guilty about picking on the Episcopal bishop. It's not as though she's the only one who has misplaced her amice.

Consider this gentleman, recently accepted into the Order of Friendless Brothers (known by tradition as the Chicken-Necks).

How Many Lepers Does It Take to Write a Sermon?

If you are preaching this week, you may have stumbled across any number of sermons and homiletical helps which say, typically in so many words, that "Martin Luther was once asked to define true worship. His answer: true worship is the tenth leper turning back."

It's an interesting remark, more so if Luther actually said it. But did he? We don't know, and we are hoping that some reader may be able to help a poor book-deprived missionary.

Given the surplus of spurious illustrations floating about the ether, as well as those which are genuine but torn savagely from their context, we won't use this remark unless it can be verified. Nor should any of our readers!

Does anybody know the answer?

To Divinity ... and Beyond!

(Yes, our toddler is a big Buzz Lightyear fan).

As many Egg readers already know, Susan Hogan has discontinued her fine blog, Pretty Good Lutherans. While we still nourish the hope that she will bring it back to life someday (hint, hint, Susan), we have finally and sadly deleted it from our sidebar.

The good news is that Susan has started another site: Divinity and Beyond. It is dedicated to religious news from the state of Minnesota. This means that, although it is by no means exclusively Lutheran, there is a great deal of news that will interest Lutherans. And, obviously, other people.

Every Pastor's Dream

No, not a parish with no vestry meetings. Better. Way better.

A researcher at Temple University has discovered a way to dramatically improve the brain's ability to recall names.

Good news: it really works, no baloney. Bad news: it involves electrical stimulation to the brain's anterior temporal lobes. We're not sure, but this doesn't sound like the sort of thing one does at home. Still, get us a transcranial direct current stimulation machine, maybe with a decent bottle of merlot, and we'll give it a shot.

The Amice is Your Friend

Literally, that is, since the word comes from amicus.

But there's more to it than that. Its existence, even as that existence becomes endangered, is a reminder of something worthwhile: that your alb is supposed to cover your street clothes, not show them off. Collars included.

In one of his reader Q&As today, Fr. Zuhlsdorf is asked about laypeople serving at the altar, and whether they should have their ties and turtlenecks and what-all sticking up from their cassocks. The obvious answer is no, and neither should the clergy. Both Fr. Z. and his reader refer to the appropriate section of the General Instruction on the Roman Missal. Case closed, Roman-style.

But for those of us who do not answer to the authority of the GIRM, the question may require an answer from first principles. So, briefly:

• Vestments, by their nature, are designed to tell a story -- not about the wearer's individuality, but about his or her place in the assembly. Far from being an opportunity for personal display, they are a guide to the task that each person will fulfill in the service. These are all baptized; this one is ordained, either to the priesthood or the diaconate; that one will celebrate Holy Communion. Ah, say the faithful, reading the day's living bulletin; we understand.
• By the same logic, various bits of personal haberdashery -- notably wristwatches and bracelets -- are customarily removed when leading worship. The last thing anybody wants is to solemnly elevate a chalice, and yet have the faithful in the pews distracted by one's butt-ugly G-Shock.
• The traditional base garment for the minister of Holy Communion is the alb, a simple white robe. To fulfill its purpose of covering up the secular clothing, the alb is designed with close-fitting sleeves and a hem that falls just above the tops of the shoes. The neck (along with shirt collars and other neckwear) is covered by the amice, which while not part of the alb as such was for many generations inseparable from it in use. The net effect is that the celebrant's head, hands and feet are revealed, and the rest is covered up by pure baptismal whiteness. Other vestments are added to this foundation, which is the immersion of the individual into the fundamental reality of the Church, the Resurrection of Christ.

Several recent developments have changed the way that the alb is used:

• The alb has spread beyond the celebrant, and is now frequently used by other ministers as well. This means that where, once, the alb was nearly always worn under a chasuble, now it is often worn without any other vestment.
• The cassock-alb, introduced (we believe) by C.M. Almy and now available from every supplier on earth, has virtually eliminated the use of the amice.

Neither of these is objectionable by itself. Although cassocks and surplices offer a much neater appearance on most people than albs, because they don't bunch up as much, they are not magical. One plain white robe delivers the message as well as another. And the cassock-alb is eminently practical.

However, as albs have come to be used more widely, marketing forces have led to a greater diversity of styles than existed in the past. Some of these styles defeat the basic purpose of an alb. Excessively wide sleeves simulate a surplice, and cowl necks proudly reveal whatever may be underneath -- typically, a clerical collar and a flash of one's shirt. Better that than chest hair, we suppose -- but still.

It makes you want to stand up and say, "Dude, just buy an amice."

We hate to pick on an easy target, but this brings us to (D&FMS of the) PECUSA PB Katherine Jefferts Schori. Schori's vestment choices are so predictably wretched that they seem to deliberately mock the customary good taste of her peers. And in fact, we have come to believe that she is, deliberately and savagely, mocking much of the rest of the Anglican clergy and especially its episcopate, with many of whom she is upon notoriously poor terms.

Consider the picture to your right.

Cowl neck? Check. Flapping sleeves? Ditto. And chasuble? Could be worse, but it ain't pretty. Under normal circumstances, we would consider this an example of extremely bad judgment. Under normal circumstances.

But as most readers know, this photo was snapped in the midst of what the Anglican world calls "Mitregate." Bishop Schori, on a recent visit to Britain, was asked by Lambeth Palace to forgo the use of her mitre in procession when she celebrated the Eucharist. The official basis of the request was that CofE canon law does not recognize the existence of female bishops; the underlying reality is that this was clearly read, and surely meant, as a snub to Schori.

Her revenge? According to our theory, it was to proceed wearing attire that clearly revealed her ordination both to the priesthood (note the collar) and to the episcopate (note the flash of purple shirt). It was just the sort of telling of one's personal story that the tradition discourages and vestments, traditionally designed and worn, discourage. But there are times when one's personal story is a n important and timely witness to the Gospel. Perhaps this was one of them.

The moral of the story is twofold. First, buy an amice. By which we really mean, let us all wear our vestments as they were meant to be worn, not merely for the sake of decency and order, but for the sake of the Gospel we are called to proclaim. And second, sometimes decency order may get in the way of the proclamation. So then you skip the amice.

Al Qaeda and the Orgasm Gap

File this under Department of Say What?

A special 130-page issue of the Journal of Sexual Medicine will be devoted to the results of a large survey by the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University. It promises juicy details to effect that men have more orgasms than women, and some people wear condoms while others don't. Biggest thing of its kind since 1994, and no doubt very interesting if this is the sort of thing that interests you.

What interests us is this unfortunate encomium:

Dr. Dennis Fortenberry, a pediatrics professor who was lead author of the study's section about teen sex, said the overall findings of such a huge survey should provide reassurance to Americans who are curious about how their sex lives compare with others.

"Unless, like al-Qaida, you feel there's something abnormal about the American people, what these data say is, 'This is normal – everything in there is normal.'"

Huh? Did he really say that? "Unless you're a bloodthirsty anti-American Jihadi, you'll like this survey." Or, to put it more simply, "Wear a condom, or the terrorists win."

Just Gotta Vent

Some days, ministry is more fun than others.

So there's this couple: fiftysomething, married about five years, they seem nice but what do I know? Started coming to church a couple three weeks ago, so I don't really know them yet. They did tell me up front that they were having some financial trouble. His new job as a press photographer is already behind on the paychecks -- thank you, Death of Print. Then they lost their apartment, crashed with a friend. Then, Friday night, they were out on the street. Slept at the train station.

Saturday, they called me.

Now, I'm a foreigner with poor language skills and virtually no local connections. Not your go-to guy for emergencies. But Mother A., God bless her, has spent the last year networking like a crazy woman. So she made a couple of calls, and found them a place to stay for a few nights. It was a vacant apartment, and a nice one. I know it was nice, because I met them at church with a backpack full of blankets, picked up some groceries at the store, and took them over. You could say I helped them move in, although "moving in" meant putting their daypacks down on the floor and saying "Here we are."

That was a good day. I was glad to help.

Then, for two days, the owners worried. Who were these strangers they had let into their property? Were they drug addicts? Boozers? Would they wreck the place? Would they overdose and die and be found weeks later because of the smell? It is easy to chuckle during the daytime, but at night, these things can keep you awake. And they aren't irrational fears; we live in a bad old world, where things really do happen.

So they called me.

Politely but firmly, they said that two nights would be quite enough, and could I hand them the keys sometime tomorrow. So I went to bed, tossing and turning, knowing that I would have to wake up in the morning and change from Lord Bountiful into the moustache-twirling bad guy. Which I did, this morning. Called the guy at work, asked him to come home quickly. Walked over to the apartment, and explained things. Tears were shed, fears expressed. Rightly so. We took some time to clean house -- basically, this just meant wiping the kitchen counter.

The woman had washed some clothes, so we waited for them to dry, speeding it up a little by holding them near the burners of the gas stove.

It took about two hours. Then we left, locking the door and stepping out onto a brisk, windy autumn day. The sort of day that is pleasant to walk around in, until the sun goes down and it gets cold. I gave them some money for lunch, and walked over to the owner's house to drop off the keys.

I reassured the owner that the apartment was in good shape, that the people were grateful, and that even if her fears were misplaced, they weren't unreasonable. I thanked her, and started home.

It was noon, and it had already been a lousy day to be a pastor.

No Druids is Good Druids

As of this week, Druids are a recognized religion in Britain, entitled to whatever tax benefits might accrue to an Anglican, Methodist or Zoroastrian. There are apparently 10,000 of them in Britain. (For comparison, there are said to be about three times as many Jains, and, of course, 40 times as many Jedi).

On one hand, there is a certain irony in giving official recognition to a religious community that was old when Caesar invaded Gaul. Next thing, we'll read that Utah has decided to recognize the Mormons.

On the other hand, let's be clear: these guys are completely bogus.

Oh, they're real enough -- unlike, say, many voters in Chicago or Kabul. And their religion is real enough, too, in the sense that it exists and is practiced. It's as real as Scientology, and a lot less bizarre. The modern-day druids (or, really, neo-druids) seem to be yet another amorphous nature religion, which claims for itself much the same territory marked out by Wicca. Fair enough. More than fair enough to get them some tax benefits, in our view.

What the neo-druids are not is druids. By which we mean that they do not stand in continuity with the authentic druidic traditions of antiquity - or that if they do, it is by accident.

Simply put, nobody knows jack-diddley about the genuine druids. Caesar came, saw and conquered some in Gaul, and wrote 'em up in Book 6, chapters 13-14. He made them out to be a caste of wise men who taught the transmigration of souls, judged legal cases, and offered sacrifices (including the human kind).

But Caesar, and the various other classical writers, aren't trustworthy witnesses. They rarely are with cultures other than their own. It is likely that the propaganda machine painted the druids to seem barbaric enough to need Roman civilization, and noble enough to be worth the effort. Modern historians seem to throw up their hands in despair, pointing out that we have close to zero archaeological or documentary evidence that can be definitively described as "druidic."

What we do have, to be sure, is a long history of Romantic myth-making, by 18th and 19th-century British writers, most of them minor and best forgotten. These are the guys who created, more or less from whole cloth, the sort of "druidry" that is now practiced in, and recognized by, Britain.

To put it in perspective, imagine that Christianity's deal with Constantine had not worked out. As a result, the great churches and monasteries were never built; the handful of Christian documents already in circulation were largely lost. No Epistles, no Gospels, and certainly no Eusebius. All that remained as a record of this obscure Asiatic cult were Pliny's letters to Trajan, a passage in the Annals of Tacitus about the Neronian persecution, a paragraph in Josephus. Heck, throw in the Alexamenos graffito, 2 John, and any one document from Nag Hammadi. (That's already more than we have on the druids.) Then try to imagine re-creating Christianity from those sources.

Here's what it might look like: a bunch of death-obsessed Jews with a "general hatred of humanity" worshiping Bottom from Midsummer Night's Dream. While praising the archons.

Still, it could get you a tax break in Britain.

More Data Points, ET Edition

Last post, we connected some dots in the world of religion. But how about the world of an imminent extraterrestrial invasion?

Consider, if you will, these recent developments:

• Last week, the Times of London wrote about the United Nations' first Ambassador to Extraterrestrials. Oh, the UN denies it. They say she watches the skies ... for asteroids. Right.
• This week, group of retired Air Force personnel spoke to the National Press Club with remarkable frankness about UFO sightings in the 1960s. Apparently, the flying saucers kept buzzing our nukes.
• The Keck Observatory and astronomer Steve Vogt have discovered the first Earth-like planet outside our solar system. It's called Gliese581g, and given the vastness of space, they found it pretty darn quickly, huh? Almost as if they had been ... told where to look.

Hmm. Add it all up, and what do you have?

Now, we're not saying that the secret One World Government, having known about the existence of alien visitors to Earth for decades, has recently been told that these visitors are ready to reveal themselves publicly. We're not saying that, because it would be crazy. But if, let's say, Zork of the Interstellar Abyss had recently sent Ban Kee Moon a memo to that effect, what would Ban have done? Obviously, begged for a few weeks to get Earthlings ready for the greatest shock in human history.

And we're not saying that the OWG (or Trilateral Commission, or Knights Templar, or Skull and Bones) has started a slow release of "new" facts to the media, slowly preparing us to reconsider the very the claims it has spent half a century discrediting. That would make us sound like the sort of paranoid crackpot who holes up for days on end in a cramped basement, talking to himself and running off mimeographed newsletters that he sends to PO boxes without names attached. (Which, come to think of it, is exactly what blogging amounts to).

Nope. We're not saying that. All we're saying is what a wise newscaster has already said:

"I, for one, welcome our new alien overlords."

Pire Qu'un Crime

Pope Benedict's state visit to Britain has given us much to think about, very little of which has made it onto the Egg. We mentioned the beatification of Cardinal Newman, but never said a thing about the astonishing hostility toward the pope (and Roman Catholicism in general) unleashed in the British press. And then last night, over a jolly supper with a pair of expat Brits, we found ourselves connecting the two data points.

Remember the background, here. Christianity in general is having a tough time of it in western Europe these days, and Roman Catholicism especially so. Rightly or wrongly, and often a bit of both, the Vatican and its leaders are being blamed for decades of child abuse, misogyny, homophobia, AIDS, and -- ludicrously, but often -- the Holocaust. Many complained about the cost of providing security, although, given the active assassination scheme broken up by the police, such complaints seem misguided. Still, Richard Dawkins (to whom we will get one of these days, promise) proposed that the Benedict should be arrested, as Pinochet was in Spain.

Our contention here at the Egg has been that the response from Benedict and his advisors has been tone-deaf. (Remember Regensburg, where he gave a clever and provocative lecture to graduate students, but seemed to forget that he was not a professor anymore, but the pope? Not wrong, never stupid -- but utterly tone deaf.) In response to the current public outcry, the team has circled its wagons and defended itself, admitting even partial responsibility only as an afterthought. This is a perfectly natural thing to do when falsely accused, and even when the accusations have some justice, it is the sort of defense one offers in court. But in the unreasoning arena of the media and publicity, something more is needed. The times call for big symbolic gestures.

And who was the master of the sweeping symbolic gesture, often accompanied by a rigid adherence to the administrative status quo? Or, in other words, what would John Paul II have done? We don't know for sure, but we imagine he would have (a) fallen to his knees before an abused child and begged forgiveness, making sure he was photographed doing so; (b) laicized one or two bishops, and sent them to monasteries; and (c) censured Hans Kung. (Kung has nothing to do with any of this, but it seems to us that JPII spent half his time censuring liberal theologians).

Now consider the state visit to Britain. Benedict was invited by the Queen, and we presume that Vatican intermediaries requested the invitation. He did indeed meet with a few abuse victims (four women and one man, a demographic which may miss the point a bit). He did indeed apologize, not personally but on behalf of 'the authority of the Church." And yet both events, coming late in the life of the scandal, seemed to have little effect upon an already enraged public opinion.

And then he performed what was, in many ways, the main order of business. Despite having previously declared that he would not preside over beatifications, but only canonizations, Benedict broke his own rule to beatify John Henry Newman. This, we believe, is the hinge upon which the whole story turns.

We at the Egg admire Newman tremendously. But we aren't Brits. This means that, in addition to having had reasonably good dental care as children, we lack a national memory of Papist plotting, a la Guy Fawkes, to overthrow our government. Neither are we Anglicans, which means that we haven't recently been slapped in the face by the pope's proposal of "Anglican" ordinariates as a refuge for our malcontents. In other words, we haven't had 400 years, right down to the present, in which to nurture the belief that the pope was our national enemy.

Newman, of course, was famous in his own lifetime for two things: (1) dramatically re-shaping the Church of England, and (2) subsequently abandoning it. Both of these things won him enemies, and those enmities still linger. He was called a liar and worse. He was in his time a symbol of Romish treachery, a treachery which might at any moment turn treasonous. Nor was his time all that long ago.

So do you see where this is going? Tone-deafness. In an historic visit to a country with a long history of nationalist anti-Catholicism, made at a delicate time in the history of western Christanity, he went out of the way to offend his hosts, both secular and religious. No wonder the crowd went a little nuts.

As they said when Napoleon executed the Duc d'Enghien on bogus charges, "It was worse than a crime; it was a blunder."

So, yes, we do think that much of the criticism aimed at Rome and at Benedict is mistaken or disproportionate. We do not for a moment believe that they are treated fairly in the press. But it becomes more clear to us with each passing screwup, both in public relations and internal administration, that they are their own worst enemies. They will either learn, quickly, how best to present themselves to a hostile but easily-swayed public, or they will lose what influence they still retain.

The problem, of course, is that whether anybody likes it or not, Roman Catholicism, especially as represented by its pope, is the public face of all Christianity, or at least all traditional Christianity in the western world. Our credibility, and hence our fates, are all connected. The idea of Peter's bark sinking wouldn't bother us half so much if we didn't believe that it could take the rest of us down with it.

Biting Our Tongue. Until It Bleeds.

As Egg readers know, Get Religion is a website we enjoy very much, even when we disagree with some of its perspectives. The one thing that consistently irks us is the tendency of commenters to focus upon the theological or political issues raised by a story, rather than the journalistic ones to which the site is dedicated.

That's why we didn't leave a comment today.

Terry posted an interesting story, based on a WSJ op-ed, proposing that the press has missed a big Obama-related story. The president has asked religious leaders to "spread the word" and become "validators" of health-care reform, which -- while natural enough at first glance -- certainly does raise some church-state issues. Father Anonymous lives in a region where that line is blurry on a good day, and sees firsthand the difficulties that come when the government gives it marching orders to the church, and/or vice-versa.

So good catch on that. And yet our hearts are troubled.

The op-ed in question, quoted on GR, is by Jim Towey, who writes:

I was George W. Bush’s director of faith-based initiatives. Imagine what would have happened had I proposed that he use that office to urge thousands of religious leaders to become “validators” of the Iraq War?

I can tell you two things that would have happened immediately. First, President Bush would have fired me — and rightly so — for trying to politicize his faith-based office. Second, the American media would have chased me into the foxhole Saddam Hussein had vacated.

Really, Jim? Are you sure of that? Because President Bush certainly didn't object to the wholesale politicization of the Justice Department. Or have you forgotten his frequent and spirited defenses of Alberto Gonzales?

And even allowing for good intentions (which were many and genuine) the faith-based intiatives office was political from its conception, and couldn't have been otherwise. It emerged from the [political] conviction that churches can provide social services more efficiently and more ... properly, for lack of a better word, itself an ideological judgment ... than the government. From that came the proposition that government is therefore wise to outsource to religious organizations its social services, just as it outsources to Blackwater the protection of State Department officials visiting war zones. This may be true, although if so the office itself never made a compelling case.

So, sure, the press ought to be up in Obama's face for trying to enlist religious leaders in support of his plan to get poor people to the doctor. But not because of laughable claims by a flunky in the kind of administration that, given half a chance, would have politicized Wednesday.

UPDATE: As we expected, the GR comments aren't excessively concerned with journalism. But a reader named Jerry writes that 30 seconds on Google found him a comparable story about Bush recruiting religious leaders in support of his policies:

President George W. Bush met privately with Focus on the Family Founder and Chairman James Dobson and approximately a dozen Christian right leaders last week to rally support for his policies on Iraq, Iran and the so-called "war on terror."

Did the media chase anybody into a foxhole over this at the time? We don't recall.

"Separation of Church and Sunday School"

St. Paul's Lutheran Church, in Springfield Ohio, has recently closed its doors, another victim of declining attendance. This makes us very sad, of course. What pleases us very much, however, is that a newspaper reporter has taken time to spin a tale, not of St. Paul's death but of its birth. It is an interesting story, and a reminder of the gulf which separates many American churches today from the circumstances of even a few decades ago.

You can read the story here, and you should. Basically, St. Paul's was created by a 1919 split in an older congregation, Rockway Lutheran. The split was occasioned by tension between two models of church polity. Rockway's Sunday School director felt that the Sunday School ought to be not merely lay-led, but wholly independent of the pastor's authority. The pastor felt otherwise.

Yes, we all know that Sunday School was originally a lay movement, which sometimes took on an anticlerical tone. But in the story by Tom Stafford, which is drawn principally from a 1989 historical paper by a former pastor, we see the movement in a transitional phase. The Rockway Sunday School was, at least officially, an organ of its congregation. And yet since 1890 -- that is, for thirty years -- it had insisted upon administration independent of pastor and vestry. It was, in other words, an independent entity, sharing facilities and members with the congregation.

Clearly, this was not the position that would eventually prevail. Within a few decades, "Sunday School" had come to be thought of as one of the most basic ministries of a parish, but clearly one belonging to the parish, and for which the parish's usual leaders had ultimate responsibility. Although we have seen several power-struggles waged between congregation councils and their parochial or preschools, often where substantial sums of money were involved, we have a hard time even placing Sunday School into the same category. It has long since become something quite different than it was.

Parenthetically, we note this slightly-funny bit: as late as World War I, these German-Americans could still publicize their church organizations as, for example, "the Rockway S.S." You wouldn't see that a few years later.

And this one: The split may have been an accident. After an especially difficult congregational meeting, one participant got up to go to work. His departure was apparently misinterpreted as a "walk-out." (Would history be different if everybody had realized that a bunch of professor at Concordia, St. Louis, were just late for class?)

Pure Evil

Two weeks ago, an ELCA pastor in Michigan was arrested for attempting to "sexually train" an 11-year-old girl. He believed himself to be in contact with her mother, but -- thank God -- the girl did not exist, and her "mother" was an FBI agent.

This guy's name is William Bendert, and he is, technically, the pastor of King of Kings, in Lake Orion, Michigan. Please pray for his congregation, which is surely going through hell right now.

We are grateful beyond words for the existence of law-enforcement agents willing and able to carry out investigations like this one.

Famous Last Words

Our favorites: "What bus?"

Also, "Had I served God as diligently as I have served the king," et cetera.

Okay, seriously now. A common, but ill-advised, sermon illustration is to quote somebody's last words. Preferably, these should be the last words of a prominent atheist, and ideally somebody who locked horns with Christian orthodoxy often and in public: Voltaire, Tom Paine, or eventually poor Christopher Hitches. And, of course, the last words quoted should reveal that in the end, the dying person turned to God.

If you open up some old-timey preachers' cheat-books, or any number of modern web pages (like this one), you will find a gazillion of these stories. The problem is that many, if not most of them, are bogus.

Paine is an especially good example. He was a famous skeptic, of course. So as his end drew near, he was visited by a seemingly endless stream of clergymen, all fishing for a deathbed conversion. And sure enough, one is widely reported, albeit in different versions. He is said to have told a servant girl:

"I would give worlds if I had them, that The Age of Reason had never been published. O Lord, help me! Christ, help me! . . No, don't leave; stay with me! Send even a child to stay with me; for I am on the edge of Hell here alone. If ever the Devil had an agent, I have been that one."

Wow. Powerful story, huh? Except that it never happened. Here's a page on Paine's religious views, which excerpts the radical pamphleteer William Cobbett's effort to track down the source of the story. Bottom line: it was invented by a couple of Quakers, who when challenged to substantiate it, referred Cobbett to a mendacious opium addict. (And one who still wouldn't stand by the story.) Illustration -- FAIL.

Looking into similar stories today, we stumbled over an old thread on something called SciForums, which is apparently devoted principally to discussions of science. This brief 2007 thread includes many purported last words, in which both doubters and believers seem to reverse their positions. The anecdotes are either false or irrelevant. Gibbon saying "My prospect of futurity is dark and doubtful" certainly doesn't qualify as a deathbed conversion.

Here's what interests us: a quotation attributed to Martin Luther. It goes like this:

Ich hatte an Gott, ich hatte geglaubt an meinen Lord Jesus, jetzt ich glaube geglaubt, daß es ein vergeudetes Leben gewesen wird.

Translated as:

I had believed in God, I had believed in my Lord Jesus, now I believe it's been a wasted life.

Now, a remark like this can be interpreted variously. Does he mean that his life has been wasted because of his faith? Or because, despite his faith, he did so many stupid and arrogant things? Or for some other reason? Or does it have some other meaning, of which we are unaware because of our bad German and the lack of context?

Luther's last written words are pretty well known. He talks about understanding the works of Virgil and Cicero, as well as Scripture and concludes, famously, "We are beggars, this is true." As for his last spoken words, various accounts on the web suggest either Ps. 68:20 ("God is the Lord, by whom we escape death") or 31:5 ("into thy hands I commend my spirit"). Perfectly reasonable prayers under the circumstances. Lacking as we do a decent library, we can't track down actual sources for any of them.

But is there another account in circulation, of these other words? We'd appreciate any respectable references.

And Another Scandal

This time it's a Protestant. Or, really, what here in Central Europe people call a "Neo-Protestant," meaning somebody whose church life bears a family resemblance to those of the Reformation, but didn't take part in it. Useful phrase, about which we will write much, much more some other time.

But you didn't click for a discursus on ecclesiastical terminology, did you? So on to the scandal.

Bishop Eddie Long is the pastor of a big church in Georgia. And we mean big-big, as in 30,000 members. If he were a Lutheran, that wouldn't be a parish, it would be a denomination. (And Long himself says, "We're not just a church, we're an international corporation.")

He's been touched by controversy once or twice before. In 2005, a newspaper article accused him of mishandling charitable donations, basically by using them to pay for his salary, house and Bentley, rather than actually helping people who needed charity. (Mind you, Long preaches the so-called "prosperity gospel," so we're not sure that in his mind stealing money from poor people is even unethical. It may be a sign of divine favor.) In addition, there's the gay thing. As blogger Rod 2.0 puts it:

Long is among the most vocal critics of gay rights and same-sex marriage in the black church. In December 2004, a month after voters approved an amendment to the Georgia state Constitution that banned gay marriage, Long led a 25,000 person march against gay rights and marriage equality. [Note: He led the march after he'd won. Isn't that just poor sportsmanship?]

But then, yesterday, anti-gay crusader Eddie Long was accused of coercing sex from teen-aged "men" in his congregation. (Here's a CNN rundown.) Needless to say, his lawyers have already accused the two young people of a "shakedown for money." And who knows, at this early stage of the game?

Still, the story raises a couple of points worth talking about. One is the relative intolerance of homosexuality in African-American churches compared to those of European Americans. This is easy to exaggerate, but in our own experience it does seem to be true, at least to some degree. So even if these stories do prove to be false, they will also be exceptionally destructive.

The other point, though, is more interesting. Scanning the intertubes, we learned that in 2008, Long met with some of the SoulForce people. It was a long meeting, and we don't know much about it, but afterward, one of the SoulForce reps said:

Not only was [Long] open with regards to talks about homosexuality, he was able to say that there are some things that he does not know, and some things that he has to learn,

Huh. That invites some jokes, we suppose, but never mind. (Okay, fine: "A lot to learn," and he's studying hard. Sorry.) What interests us is that, if you dig into the really vile stuff -- and we did -- you can find several anti-gay sites attacking Long for this display of charity and diplomacy. And when the wing-nut sites attack, they really attack:

If you are a member of Eddie Lee Long’s assembly, a member of any assembly that claims him as your leader, associate with Eddie Lee Long in any manner, watch his TV broadcasts, or listen to his radio broadcasts, NOW IS THE TIME TO TOTALLY SEPARATE YOURSELF FROM EDDIE LEE LONG AND NOT LOOK BACK!!!

He has not only gone against scripture in meeting with promoters of abomination, who teach of a false jesus that endorses sin. ... He’s led teachers of homosexual doctrines to feel they have something valuable to help him with and his people are considering allowing homosexuals to teach classes in their doctrine of abomination to his assembly members.

(We like the lower-case "scripture" and "jesus." Adds a kind of E.E. Cummings spin, dunnit?)

Another attack, though, is even more interesting. A blog called Gay Christian Movement Watch led with the curious header "Looks like Eddie Long just got pregnant. Only nine months to go and we know who the baby's daddy is." We're not at all sure what this is supposed to mean, and the related links are now dead, but we suspect it is a veiled suggestion that a meeting with SoulForce was meant to presage a major re-orientation of Long's discourse about sexuality. If so, a commenter called "EnochWalked" caught the ball and went deep:

I have a hunch that there is someone(s) in leadership at New Birth that is on the downlow or in the closet–or Soulforce is BLACKMAILING New Birth because they have some strong incriminating evidence against New Birth leadership that they threaten to expose?

Sure, it's crazy paranoid wingnut stuff. The thing is, he may have been right.

Why We Love the Post

Three words: Nude fashion show.

It actually makes perfect sense, if you're a milliner. What better way to draw attention to your product than to march a bunch of supermodels down the catwalk, naked except for some hats. Big, silly-looking hats.

Click up top for a slideshow.

Worst Pun of the Day

On a topic of the utmost seriousness.

The Keep--A-Breast Foundation is devoted to something that can get mighty grim -- raising awareness about breast cancer. And yet, as its name suggests, the foundation is not averse to a little wordplay.

Comes today this report, that the foundation is distributing wrist bracelets that say "I [Heart] Boobies." Kind of juvenile, even when true, but inoffensive enough -- except that they are giving the bracelets to high school students. Egg readers, of course, may have belonged to the rare cohort of teens who were able to have a sustained and serious discussion of life-or-death matters, all inspired by a whimsical piece of art. But probably not, and neither do most kids.

Still, whether you think the bracelets are bit of clever provocation or a guarantee of bawdy jokes and unkind teasing, you have to admire the foundation's moxie:

Keep A Breast defended its decision to include the word "boobies," saying that the bracelets are intended to provoke conversations on touchy subjects.

Of course, they also tried this one:

"We fully understand that the 'I Love Boobies' campaign is not for everyone, but we also feel that the word 'boobies' is not a four letter word."

Not as successful, but still, points for the attempt.

On to the Next Scandal

An Italian money-laundering investigation has frozen about $30 million in transfers made by the Institute for Religious Works (IOR), better known as the Vatican Bank.

We have no idea what the facts are, but the whole thing makes us a little suspicious. Why, you ask? Here's why:

1. Because Italy is a tricky place. It has never been famous for transparency or honesty, and these days -- well, Berlusconi is in charge. At the very end of her Times article, after reporting such facts as are available, Rachel Donadio leaves us with this bit of innuendo: The [current] investigation appeared to show a more aggressive stance by the Bank of Italy, a player in the complex power dynamics of contemporary Italy. What is she hinting at? That the BoI is trying to clean up the world of Italian finance? Or that it is doing the bidding of its nation's power-mad leader? We don't know. But we'd like to.

2. Because all readers of a certain age will remember the genuine scandal of the 1980s, involving IOR and Banco Ambrosiano. It was pretty ugly, and ended with BA chair Roberto Calvi ("God's Banker") fleeing Italy on a false passport, and being found dead under a bridge in London. Twenty-five years later, a group of men with both Mafia and Masonic connections were acquitted of his murder. Icky-poo, right? So today, if you want to slander the Vatican, all you need to do is hint at a banking scandal, and many people will say, "Ah, yes, the same as in those days."

3. The popes and curia are not stupid people. Quite the reverse. It seems that, after the 1980s scandal, they did what you would expect smart and basically decent people to do: clean house. We gather that the current IOR head, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, is respected within his profession, and runs a tight ship. Under his watch, the bank was working toward a place on the OECD's "white list," which certifies the the highest level of banking transparency.

Add these things together, and it looks possible -- possible, although far from certain -- that what we have here is a maneuver by somebody in power to draw attention toward the IOR and a Roman Catholic church already suffering a scandal-induced p.r. crisis. If so, it is not impossible that the goal is to draw attention away from, or give plausible cover to, some other impropriety elsewhere in Italian banking.

On the other hand, there's already been a serious crisis-management goof from the Vatican's side of the table. At this early stage of the story, officials of the Holy See are quite right to declare its "perplexity and amazement" at the investigation, since the investigation may well prove to be completely specious. And Gotti Tedeschi is not wrong, exactly, to admit to a "procedural error." But he is completely wrong, from the perspective of crisis management, to claim that this error "is being used as an excuse to attack the institute, its president and the Vatican in general."

It may be true; it may even be dead-on. But this isn't the sort of thing you can just say out loud, because it looks like another too-familiar phenomenon: the Roman Catholic church whining. You know, the whole "of course the child abuse was bad, but the real problem is a hostile media environment" thing. We aren't saying that such an environment doesn't exist, exactly. But we have said many times that blaming the press for reporting, even sometimes exaggerating, your own mistakes is a terrible strategy for the church. Better to just confess and amend your life. Or, if you really are innocent (as IOR and Gotti Tedeschi may be) to produce facts, fast and furious and in public, so that people can take your side with a good conscience.

Pizza Update

We have scanned these interwebs a bit, searching for more info on the Home of the Mother (see below). We haven't got much, mostly because we are lazy, lazy people currently nursing a head cold.

But two related things have come to our attention, one about HoM and the other about Ave Maria University. Or maybe its just one thing, which happens to be true of both organizations independently. Either way, we have learned this: both of these seemingly ultra-Papist institutions have been subjected to some pretty scathing criticism from conservative Roman Catholics.

Please bear in mind that this post is the result of some quick surfing through the underbelly of the Net, the sort of sites run by people so passionate that they may look (or be) crazy, and who live in a world so completely self-referential that they can take for granted not only that red is blue, but that a massive conspiracy of Freemasons and Illuminati has spent hundreds of years covering up the basic facts of the prism. (Here or, here, especially the sidebar notes.) We're edging into Lone Gunmen territory here. So read this with a grain of salt.

That said:

1. The Home of the Mother is sometimes praised for its evangelical fervor, but just as often accused of "cult-like" behavior. But what does this mean? Probably something milder than old-style Jim Jones/David Koresh stuff. We have seen exactly zero reports of weapons caches or poisoned Kool-Aid. If there are any details floating around out there, we haven't seen them yet.

Our own brief exposure to the Focolare movement reminds us of an instructive fact: there is a fine line between "charismatic movement" and "cult," a line which can be extremely difficult to discern. To this day, we aren't sure which one Focolare is. Perhaps more to the point, it is unlikely that anybody knew what to make of the Franciscans in 1220 or the Jesuits in 1540; it has taken time to separate them from the Joachimites and Fifth Monarchy Men.

Still, it does seem that the Bishop Frank Dewane of Venice (Florida), where Ave Maria is located, has kept some distance between himself and the HoM people. This suggests that he may have had some reservations about them.

2. Just as interesting to us are the criticisms of Ave Maria University and its pizza-baron chancellor. The harshest of these, by far, surround Maine-based Jackson Laboratory, which wants to set up a facility near AMU. Jackson is a genetics lab, which claims not to experiment with embryonic stem cells, but admits that its seminars and meetings will inevitably include the discussion of such research. AMU considers this position to be compatible with its vision of Catholic ethics, but a few hard-liners disagree.

Perhaps just as much to the point, Tom Monaghan is a partner in the real estate company negotiating to sell some swampland to Jackson, and stands to make a pretty penny if the deal goes through. So, to the hard-liners, it appears that despite their great show of "conservative" Roman Catholicism, neither Monaghan nor AMU is conservative enough.

Coming as we do from a different school of theological ethics, we aren't especially moved by, or even interested in, the moral debate here. Nor are we surprised that the soi-disant "conservatives" always have somebody attacking them from the right. That's how purity codes work: Obama may be a socialist to Fox News, but you just know that when Ralph and Dennis and Noam get together for coffee, they call him a corporate sellout.

What interests us, really, is the Carl Hiaasen vibe of the whole story. We love that Carl Hiaasen.