Ash Wednesday Foot in Mouth
You may have read my essay about anti-intellectualism. Well, here is the flip side: religious ignorance. Or rather, ignorance about religious traditions. UK broadcasters pondering over that nasty looking smudge on Joe Biden’s head.
Hello! It’s called Ash Wednesday! Hello! Joe’s a Roman Catholic. Pretty good chance he’s gonna get some ashes.
But here’s where there may be some excuse: Since they were in the UK they may have been dealing with the time zone difference. Yes? Maybe? Or just clueless?
It gets “worse”. Fully story here.
Oy.
Oprah gets schooled
I awoke this afternoon just in time to see the Oprah show on Tues. Geishas and Dominican nuns. The list of what Oprah claimed she didn’t know makes me wonder, no, makes me worried about the general religious knowledge Americans have (or don’t have). For instance, the notion of being a “bride of Christ” and the habit as a kind of wedding gown was news.
I don’t mention this to bash Oprah. I only mention it because if Oprah doesn’t have a basic conceptual grasp of the life of Christian religious, i.e., the life of Christian nuns and monks, sisters and brothers, one can barely expect more “ordinary” lay persons to have half a clue. Why? Read more
Jewish roots remain in Los Angeles neighborhood
This story from the LA Times is calling out for a sociologist or anthropologist to study.
The old man with the Santa Claus beard pulled a black yarmulke from the trunk of his Cadillac and limped across the street.
Hundreds of people had gathered outside an old synagogue in Boyle Heights for a program that looked back at the days when the neighborhood — now overwhelmingly Latino and Catholic — was the center of Jewish life in Los Angeles.
Religion and the impulse for ritual
This article from ABC News, discusses the findings of Oxford anthropoligist Harvey Whitehouse’s study of religion. He was drawn to a puzzle when comparing different religious rituals. On the one hand there are the extreme cases such as
sacred fire dances performed in New Guinea, where in order to commune with their ancestors men enter a trance state wearing masks decorated with blood drawn agonisingly from their own tongues.
By contrast, the most extreme ritual a Christian is likely to engage in is being dunked during baptism. Why do some religions have rituals that are so much more traumatic than others?