Jesus and the Martian

"A sad time for all people"

Imagine the world becoming obsessed with the survival of one person. Can you imagine anyone who would actually deserve it?

For Christians, the answer should be easy, especially in this season after Holy Week and Easter Sunday. During those precious few days, our ritual and liturgy focused like a laser on the person of Jesus of Nazareth. We rejoiced while remembering his entry into Jerusalem and deplored his followers’ neglectfulness in the garden and his delivery into his tormentors’ hands. Especially if we re-watched Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” we winced as the whip tore the flesh from his back and the nails pierced his hands and feet. Finally, inevitably, all Christians shouted, “Alleluia, Christ is risen!”

For us modern people, divided by language, creed, race, and station, by borders and ancient resentments and suspicions, it’s hard to imagine one person drawing the world together as Christ does his followers. Sometimes it does seem to happen, if only for a moment and almost always as the residue of tragedy. Those of a certain age remember the events of Nov. 22, 1963 as an outrage against all humanity. President Kennedy’s successor certainly did. During a recent visit to the LBJ Library in Austin, I saw the typescript of the brief remarks a staff member prepared for President Johnson to use when his plane arrived in Washington from Dallas with Kennedy’s body aboard. The aide wrote, “This is a sad time for every American.” Johnson crossed out the last two words so it would read, “[F]or all people.”

And so it was, although our species’ sadness didn’t ameliorate our Cold War rivalries. It makes me wonder what we could accomplish if the fragile bubble of unity never burst, if two billion Christians acted together in the spirit of our common alleluia, if people could just agree on how to achieve peace, justice, and freedom for all. After all, writes novelist Andy Weir, “[E]very human being has a basic instinct to help each other out. It might not seem that way sometimes, but it’s true….This is so fundamentally human that it’s found in every culture without exception.”

Left behind

Actually, that’s not Andy talking but astronaut Mark Watney, a character in Weir’s book, The Martian. Mark is one of six NASA astronauts who land on Mars. When the mission is aborted because of a sandstorm, his colleagues leave without him because they mistakenly think he’s been killed. He has to survive using only the food, air, water, shelter, and transportation (two four wheel-drive rovers) left behind with him.

The novel, which features no extraterrestrials, is a space geek’s dream. At first, no one knows Mark’s alive. Then a NASA staffer studying satellite photos of the landing site notices that someone has moved one of the rovers. Within hours, everyone realizes that Mark is puttering around on Mars, and it turns out that almost all seven billion people on the novel’s fictional but highly realistic planet Earth want him to make it home. The U.S. invests hundreds of millions of dollars in desperate rescue missions. Even our geostrategic rivals the Chinese decide to help.

The Martian deftly invokes a unity of purpose that reminds me of Christians’ Easter acclamations, that laser-like fixation of ours on the miracle of Resurrection. We are prone to lose our unity all too soon, falling back on our enervating squabbles with one another at home, work, and church. By the same token, reading Andy Weir’s book, I had no trouble accepting that people would become fixated on an astronaut stranded 140 million miles away while overlooking the victims of injustice and circumstance on their own planet and even their own doorsteps. If God’s people ever gave full expression to the instinct to help each other out that Weir correctly identifies, then (pace Matt. 11:5) the blind would surely see, the deaf hear, and the lame walk, and good news would be continually proclaimed to the poor. Alleluia! 

This post first appeared in the Vaya Con Dios, the newsletter of St. John Chrysostom Episcopal Church.

Flyin' Shoes

In their book On Grief and Grieving, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler make an observation that is easy to accept in principle: “God gives us a life cycle that includes death.” But when our beloved dies, Kübler-Ross and Kessler write, “We can’t believe what has happened, because we actually can’t believe what has happened.” Denial, which Kübler-Ross made famous, is our psyche’s way of obscuring an unfathomable horror until we recover enough for her next stages: Bargaining, anger, depression, and acceptance.

No one chooses to experience such loss – except us Christians, who revisit the birth, life, suffering, and death of Jesus Christ every year between Christmas and Easter.

Most of the time, of course, we’re retelling familiar Bible stories that aren’t especially traumatic, even when they’re sad. Otherwise people wouldn’t read sad novels or go to the movies. In worship, the stories can be so familiar or stylized that they lose their punch. The prayers in our Holy Eucharist liturgy encompass the whole history of God’s people, from creation through our alienation from God to reconciliation through Jesus Christ and his betrayal and Resurrection. The story is swirling, actually cinematic, and yet we’ve heard it in church so often that our attention is sometimes won by our worries and troubles and even grumbling stomachs (been to the new In-N-Out yet?).

Lent is supposed to bring the great epic back into frame and focus. We repent, fast, and prepare. We work harder at reconnecting with God and each other, trying to make more time for reflection and prayer. And we remember that soon we’ll pass from daylight into the gloaming and on to the midnight of Holy Week and humanity’s greatest loss.

When comparing terrible losses, a person mourning a parent, spouse, child, sibling, or friend is likely to feel that Christ has some competition. A comforting aspect of Christian doctrine is that Jesus Christ experienced suffering and death to give meaning to ours, to demonstrate that God had endured and transcended the worst life could offer. Might suffering even be our duty? “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” (Mark 8:34). The secular mind replies, “Since I don’t want to be your follower, I’d rather not take up my cross.” The secular mind would say that faith is denial – humanity’s way of obscuring the uncomfortable truth that life is loss and pain.

But the mature Christian doesn’t deny loss and pain but meets them head on, accepting humanity’s complicity in Christ’s death and the inevitability of our own. During our Sunday morning Grief and Grieving discussions this Lent, St. John’s members shared moving personal stories of loss and recovery – in Christian terms, death and resurrection. We may be so conscious of Christ’s divinity that we feel reluctant to appropriate his experience, afraid to compare our suffering to his or accept that we have the right and capacity to enjoy resurrection after the searing trauma of loss. But the very purpose of the Incarnation is to bring God close enough to touch, envelop, and comfort us. God indeed gives us a life cycle that includes death, and life’s seasons as well. Among many other things, Lent and Easter are seasons when we practice – literally practice, as in “get ready for and used to” -- both grief and hope.

This Lent, I watched a poignant documentary about a brilliant Texas songwriter, Townes Van Zandt, who died in 1997 at the age of 52. He suffered from alcoholism and bipolar disorder. His story made me think about my father, a talented writer and musician who died too young because of his drinking. It made me think about being in late middle age. It made me think of the imminence of loss and preciousness of life, especially in the St. John’s community. The life of our church and especially the implacable church calendar are great blessings, because I do sometimes deny the swiftly passing seasons. But as Townes wrote and sang:

Days full of rain
Sky’s comin’ down again
I get so tired
Of these same old blues
Same old song
Baby, it won’t be long
‘fore I be tyin’ on
My flyin’ shoes 

This post was first published in the Lent 2013 issue of the parish newsletter of St. John's Church, the Vaya Con Dios. 

Justice And Blood

In Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained,” Jamie Foxx portrays a slave named Django (“The D is silent,” he tells another character) who frees his wife from a sadistic plantation owner. (Spoiler alert!)  In the process he kills every white person on the farm, including the owner’s unarmed sister. Among Django’s victims is Tarantino himself, appearing as a minor character so debased and irredeemably stupid that I’m sure even the Pope would say he deserved to die.

I can’t account for everyone’s reaction to the half-hour of airborne intestines at the end of “Django Unchained.” Priest of God and follower of the Prince of Peace, I was rooting for Django all the way. You know the feeling when the bad guys are getting what they deserve. If filmmakers have done their jobs, few in the audience are hoping the suspects will be read their Miranda rights and given the opportunity to reflect on their poor decisions. Something deep in us aches for instant justice. We want to see righteous vengeance in the flash of steel and gunpowder. We want blood.

If you really want to see a bloody mess, ask screenwriter and director Tarantino to justify Django’s mayhem in the context of the Newtown massacre. In one TV interview in early January, he refused to answer. But a few weeks before, on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” he made a useful distinction. The worst moments in “Django Unchained” are depictions of savagery against slaves. They’re not stylized, and Tarantino doesn’t dwell on them. It’s this documentary violence, the vicious reality of slavery, which provokes Django and his friend, played by Christoph Waltz, into an orgy of what Tarantino called “the fun violence.”

Fun violence is the concept I’ve been wrestling with since seeing Tarantino’s entertaining movie (not suitable, in my perhaps too conservative view, for most under 15 or 16). Some think that his movies could inspire real-life attacks by sick people. Others just believe they’re in poor taste. But most critics miss the point, which is that the blood lust is in us already, an integral aspect of our nature. Tarantino is showing us exactly what we’ve come to see, which is also what we came to see when Bruce Willis battled terrorists in "Die Hard" and Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star. Fictional violence against the unquestionably evil gives our animal instincts a chance to bubble deliciously to the surface under carefully controlled conditions.

Owning our instincts, including our taste for violence, is vital to our formation as Christians. Especially as we prepare for Lent and Good Friday, it helps us understand how we might have been persuaded to add our voices to those who shouted “Crucify him!” Jesus’s antagonists concocted a narrative about his blasphemy and pretensions to kingship that triggered the audience’s craving for a spectacle of torture and death. During the long era of public executions in the U.S., people also gave themselves permission to enjoy watching someone die.

It’s up to the experts to say what came first, our hunger for righteous payback or for sheer blood, and how they’re intrinsically bound. But understanding how deeply we want vengeance can help us make better decisions about dilemmas in the world and our lives. Do we ever catch ourselves rushing to judgment, deciding too quickly who’s right and wrong so some sentence can be speedily pronounced? We leave behind the vivid colors and moral clarity of a Tarantino movie and rediscover gray areas and stubborn facts. In a complicated world, give me “Django Discerning” on the judicial bench and in corridors of power, hungry for justice but with a lust for due process.

Movie violence can also deepen our understanding of biblical violence – the massacre of the priests of Baal by God’s prophet Elijah on Mt. Carmel as depicted in 1 Kings or, as described in Exodus, God’s killing of the Egyptian firstborn to free his people from slavery. In their time, these events were portrayed not as fun but as good violence, leading to righteous worship in 1 Kings and freedom in Exodus. God’s role in bloody biblical acts is a question for another time. But God does say this much to his violence-prone people: “Promote justice. Strive to walk in peace. Vengeance is mine, and never yours.”

This post was first published in the parish newsletter of St. John's Church, the Vaya Con Dios.

Jesus Is Not A Macroeconomist

Erika Christakis commits poor exegesis:

As near as we can tell, Jesus would advocate a tax rate somewhere between 50% (in the vein of “If you have two coats, give one to the man who has none”) and 100% (if you want to get into heaven, be poor). Mostly, he suggested giving all your money up for the benefit of others. And Jesus made no distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor; his love and generosity applied to all.

Jesus promoted generosity and radical self-sacrifice as individual virtues that would have been meaningless if not freely offered, as his sacrifice of himself was. He never endorsed and probably never imagined government agents and leaders seizing 30-45% of people's income and using the proceeds to pay their salaries and expenses while spending the rest, often discerningly but sometimes not, on the public's behalf. Jesus actually lumped tax collectors with prostitutes as exemplars of sin. Unlike our decent, diligent IRS agents, they were notoriously corrupt in first-century Palestine, Still, I'll bet they came away from most transactions with less than 30-45% of their victims' worldly goods.

I'm for a government that's generous toward those in need because it's good for the strength and stability of our society. I hope Christians, Jews, Muslims, and atheists agree that a decent and wise state is also a compassionate one. While I don't resent paying taxes, it's not because I think confiscation of my property has anything to do with Christian ethics but because I believe in representative democracy and count on our leaders to make smart decisions about national security and those who need help while discerning the tipping point where taxation and the size of government impede a free-market economy's capacity to grow and produce wealth and jobs. It may be 27%, 39%, or 55%, but it's definitely not 100%. Let's please leave our LORD out of that strictly technical calculation. Anyway, he's actually concerned with what each of us does for those who suffer by using our remaining resources and free will. We can't outsource our consciences to Congress.

"Be The Bread"

Jesus saying he's the bread of life ("They who come to me never will hunger") always strikes me as a riddle. Do we ever feel permanently fed by our spiritual experiences? If we have to come back each week for a Eucharistic or doctrinal tuneup (and the church definitely hopes we will), where's the permanence in that? How's what God's serving any different from In-N-Out Burger? Fr. Tom Herbts and his brother Franciscans suggested one answer. In what St. Bonaventure called "the furnace of love," we become the bread and make of our lives and world what Fr. Tom called the very substance of heaven. My sermon for the 11th Sunday after Pentecost is here.

Did Jesus Live Here?

Visited mostly by pilgrims and other guests of the retreat house of the Religious Sisters of Nazareth, which shelters them, these ruins are known to include a Herodian grave complete with rolling stone (not Jesus's, of course; that was in Jerusalem), first-century as well as Byzantine and Crusader-era streets and floors, and remains of a first-century hillside residence (that's a cave to you and me, kids).

In Jesus's time, perhaps 200 people lived in Nazareth. So Jesus, Mary and Joseph and other members of their family probably at least walked through the portal into the front room behind pilgrim Brenna. Did they live here? There's not much on the web or even in guide books about this place. But there's evidence that people considered it holy for centuries.

More later. To follow our pilgrims' progress in the meantime, friend me on Facebook and check out the photos here.

That He Should See No More Evil

My St. John's friend Andy Guilford took this photograph of a disconsolate savior in Oklahoma City, where the statue stands in a churchyard, its back to the memorial to victims of the 1995 terrorist bombing.

Face Of Agony

This olive tree in the Garden of Gesthemane is hundreds of years old; its roots may have fed the trees that sheltered Jesus as he awaited his betrayal. I took the photo in January 2011.

Turin Jesus On His Face

Historian Thomas de Wesselow says that the Shroud of Turin (thought by many to be a medieval forgery) actually was Jesus's burial cloth and that its ghostly imprint tricked the disciples into thinking he'd been raised from the dead. At least in the Huffington Post article, de Wesselow doesn't say why the shroud's Jesus, who may well have had Semitic features and was probably in his early thirties when he died, looks like the English knight who guards the Holy Grail in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade."

The article concludes with a predictable question:

What remains to be seen is how Christians around the world, who are about to celebrate Holy Week and Easter, will respond to de Wesselow's assertion that the bodily resurrection never happened.

Same way we do every year: Proclaim "He is Risen!" and go forth in the name of the risen Christ.

Five Freedoms

During the Sundays in Lent at St. John's, we've considered the healing that comes from acceptance and the resulting freedom from idealization; the healing of faith and the freedom to relinquish control; the healing of revaluing and the freedom of free-flowing grace; the healing of our impatience and the freedom to wait; and finally the healing of death in Christ and the freedom to thrive. If only George Zimmerman had heeded Jesus Christ's teaching in John 12: "Those who love their life lose it." My sermon for the fifth Sunday in Lent is here.

We're Natural-Born Killers

As Christians prepare for Holy Week, which among other things is about our complicity in the killing of Jesus Christ, David Brooks suggests that most of us are theoretically capable of crimes such as the massacre Robert Bales allegedly committed in Afghanistan:

[E]ven people who contain reservoirs of compassion and neighborliness also possess a latent potential to commit murder.

David Buss of the University of Texas asked his students if they had ever thought seriously about killing someone, and if so, to write out their homicidal fantasies in an essay. He was astonished to find that 91 percent of the men and 84 percent of the women had detailed, vivid homicidal fantasies. He was even more astonished to learn how many steps some of his students had taken toward carrying them out.

One woman invited an abusive ex-boyfriend to dinner with thoughts of stabbing him in the chest. A young man in a fit of road rage pulled a baseball bat out of his trunk and would have pummeled his opponent if he hadn’t run away. Another young man planned the progression of his murder — crushing a former friend’s fingers, puncturing his lungs, then killing him.

These thoughts do not arise from playing violent video games, Buss argues. They occur because we are descended from creatures who killed to thrive and survive. We’re natural-born killers and the real question is not what makes people kill but what prevents them from doing so.

Photo by Andy Guilford

Fearless Obedience To Jesus

Jamie Arpin-Ricci on the quiet radicalism of St. Francis of Assisi:

What made his life so appealing to so many? Among other things, Francis's love for Jesus was so explicit that he was naive enough to believe that Jesus actually meant for us to do the things he taught us. And while such a radical devotion often led him to extremes -- like when he interpreted Jesus' command to "preach the gospel to every creature" and so began to proclaim the good news to the birds -- it also produced in him a commitment to love God through loving others, especially those who lived on the margins of society, such as the poor and the lepers. He managed to draw to his movement both the simpleton and the academic, the lawyer and butcher, because his was a faith of actively imitating Christ.

Francis lived in a time when the church had taken for granted its position in the culture. Often compromised by wealth and political power, the church had lost credibility among the people. Many would worship Jesus at Mass, but few truly followed his teaching or example. Francis became a reformer, not through angry protests and recriminations against the corrupted clergy, but through his life of humble yet fearless obedience to Jesus. In other words, he knew that the best rebuke of the bad was the embodiment of the better.

Annals Of Jewish Christology

Chabad rabbis call an Orthodox rabbi a heretic for saying Jesus was a nice Jewish boy.

Both Child And Crucified

"The Conversion of St. Paul" by Italian renaissance master Caravaggio is well known to those who have attended St. John's continuing Christian education (and seventh grade New Testament) classes. Here's how it was described by Caravaggio biographer Andrew Graham-Dixon in a Dec. 1 podcast interview with one of the most cogent interviewers in the country, Sam Tanenhaus:

He's just painted St. Paul by his horse, lying on the ground. But the horse makes the scene feel like a manger, so St. Paul at the moment of his conversion is Christ the child, Christ the infant, and yet his pose, with his arms outspread, is that of the Crucifixion. What Caravaggio has brilliantly telescoped into this image is the idea that at the moment of conversion Paul experiences...mystically the entire life of Christ in his mind's eye as he's blinded by the divine light of revelation. He's both Christ the child and Christ the crucified.

Our Heaven, God's Heaven, And Hell

Ross Douthat is worried that while Americans' belief in God and heaven is strong, our fear of hell is waning:

As Anthony Esolen writes, in the introduction to his translation of Dante’s “Inferno,” the idea of hell is crucial to Western humanism. It’s a way of asserting that “things have meaning” — that earthly life is more than just a series of unimportant events, and that “the use of one man’s free will, at one moment, can mean life or death ... salvation or damnation.”

If there’s a modern-day analogue to the “Inferno,” a work of art that illustrates the humanist case for hell, it’s David Chase’s “The Sopranos.” The HBO hit is a portrait of damnation freely chosen: Chase made audiences love Tony Soprano, and then made us watch as the mob boss traveled so deep into iniquity — refusing every opportunity to turn back — that it was hard to imagine him ever coming out. “The Sopranos” never suggested that Tony was beyond forgiveness. But, by the end, it suggested that he was beyond ever genuinely asking for it.

Is Gandhi in hell? It’s a question that should puncture religious chauvinism and unsettle fundamentalists of every stripe. But there’s a question that should be asked in turn: Is Tony Soprano really in heaven?

Douthat blames our hellessiousness on two factors. The first is our big-hearted pluralism, or what I call the interfaith dilemma: How dare Christians (or Muslims) say that faithful adherents of other faiths will be consigned to perdition just because they were born and raised in the wrong cultural and religious milieu? What disturbs him far more is pastors' and theologians' falling back on the notion of an infinitely benevolent God as they try to explain why bad things continually happen to good people:

[I]f it’s hard for the modern mind to understand why a good God would allow such misery on a temporal scale, imagining one who allows eternal suffering seems not only offensive but absurd.

Douthat worries that insisting that God redeems and saves everyone devalues human life by reducing the significance of human choices. Put another way, why waste all that effort being good if you'll get into heaven anywho? St. Paul grappled with the same dilemma in Romans 6:1:

Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? [NRSV]

On the contrary. Being joined to Christ in baptism, Paul continues, enables grace to lead us from sin to righteousness. Putting it in interfaith terms, the closer the spiritual searcher hews to the mind and heart of God, the more likely she is to please God. She won't be able to help it. Christians understand that the Incarnation gives them a leg up on proximity to the divine. When we seek to imitate God, we have the advantage of a teacher and savior who uses our language, argues through everyday analogies (as in the parables), and even suffers and weeps as we do.

When closeness to God becomes a habit, a way of being, we understand that we're experiencing a foretaste of heaven. Hell would be the opposite, the ultimate isolation from God, a loneliness so terrible that the sufferer might prefer the distraction of demons with pitchforks. Someone to talk to, at least. So I don't share Douthat's concerns about the church's underemphasis of the underworld. Actually, I'm surprised that anyone who believes in God's omnipotence worries very much about the church. It's up to God to figure out how to draw his creatures closer to him, and God evidently believes that our hunger for relationship with him and one another is ultimately more compelling than fear of fiery perdition. Maybe it's because, at least in the west, we're living in societies where family and social relationships people once took for granted are fraying and even disappearing. If you want to see what hell looks like, visit a nursing home where someone's mother spends 20 hours a day lying in bed, rarely if ever visited by someone she loves.

Lurking behind the theological consensus that hell as humans usually portray it isn't logical is a third factor Douthat doesn't mention, namely the sovereignty of God. How could any soul, no matter how blighted, lie outside the saving power of a creator who repeatedly promises to lose or give up none that he has made? I've had conversations with evangelically inclined friends who say that, if it were up to them, gays could marry and Jews could be saved, but the Bible insists otherwise. But by their very nature, God's creatures can't be more compassionate than God.

This Easter Monday, I proclaim my faith in the saving power of the risen Christ and yet find that I am humble enough to accept that God's imagination mightily transcends mine and even that embodied by the church's doctrines. Douthat argues that evil people should have the right to make their choices in the world and receive the corresponding recompense in the hereafter. If I were running the universe, that's probably the rate card I'd come up with, too. There are people, the all-too-numerous real Tony Sopranos of the world included, that I would never let into my heaven. But you spotted what was wrong with that sentence right away.

Gospels In Conflict

Jesus Christ and Ayn Rand? Not so much.

Two-Inch Nails

Holy relics, hoax, or wishful thinking?

Adjust This

In "The Adjustment Bureau," the better angels of our nature are a bunch of busybodies who are so overworked that they're not always thinking straight. Starring the winning Matt Damon and Emily Blunt as a meant-for-each-other politician and choreographer, the movie proposes that a Godhead called the Chairman has decided he can't trust us with free will, since look what he gets whenever he tries -- the dark ages, world wars, and "Jersey Shore." So waxing Calvinist, the Chairman sends men in hats to follow us around.

They monitor our step-by-step life plans on their version 3475.0 Kindles and nudge us back on course when we stray, whereupon the story briefly though not fatally swerves into a narrative ditch. The Chairman, who has high hopes for the principled young congressman from Brooklyn, doesn't want Damon's character to marry Blunt's, because true love will stifle his ambition by filling the hole in his heart left by the deaths of his parents and brother. And yet you'd think that if the Chairman wanted a better world, he'd put well-balanced people in power.

There's a hint of an earlier presidential project. According to the story, which opens on the night in November 2006 when Damon's character loses his first senatorial race, the cherubim cum chapeaux had last revealed their existence to someone code-named Taurus 40 years before. The politician beginning his fabled comeback in 1966 was Richard Nixon. While my wife, Kathy, his last chief of staff, asked him about UFOs once, we never saw any middle-aged angels in suits lurking around -- unless they were impersonating Secret Service agents. No hats, but they did wear earplugs and talk into their sleeves. So much for the inevitable Nixon angle, but what about the placeholder for Jesus Christ? Easy, since a ranking deputy angel reveals that the Chairman had decided to trust humanity with free will "at the height of the Roman Empire."

Written (based on a Philip K. Dick short story) and directed by George Nolfi, the movie's delightfully watchable and suspenseful from its first moments. An affable, intelligent script, well-executed cameos by Jon Stewart, Carville-Matalin, and Michael Bloomberg, and Damon's believability as an up-from-the-streets politician lend the story just enough credibility to withstand the sci-fi preposterousness. Damon himself poses the key theodical question when he taunts one of the angels for not doing a better job easing the world's injustice and suffering. "You're still here, aren't you?" the seraph says sullenly.

Damon has better chemistry with his charming co-star, who must've been practicing modern dance at the same time Natalie Portman was strapping on her toe shoes. All their scenes are spot on. I hope someone casts them together again. Only near the end, after Damon had to put on one of those goofy hats and he and Blunt were getting the big reveal, did I have the impression that she was having trouble keeping a straight face.

Jesus And The Other Jews

Benedict XVI is getting high marks for reinforcing the Roman Catholic Church's post-Holocaust and therefore all-too-recent corrective about Jews and the death of Jesus:

While the Catholic Church has for five decades taught that Jews weren't collectively responsible, Jewish scholars said Wednesday the argument laid out by the German-born pontiff, who has had his share of mishaps with Jews, was a landmark statement from a pope that would help fight anti-Semitism today.

"Holocaust survivors know only too well how the centuries-long charge of 'Christ killer' against the Jews created a poisonous climate of hate that was the foundation of anti-Semitic persecution whose ultimate expression was realized in the Holocaust," said Elan Steinberg of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants.

The pope's book, he said, not only confirms church teaching refuting the deicide charge "but seals it for a new generation of Catholics."

Fixing First Texts

It's called textual criticism when Bible scholars examine how the earliest Christian texts -- St. Paul's authentic letters and the four gospels -- could have been altered by scribes, either because of copying errors or for substantive reasons. Experts think a ban on women speaking in church was added to the 14th chapter of 1 Corinthians after Paul wrote it, for instance.

Now Scientologists are saying much the same thing about their holy writ. A church spokesman blames unnamed persons for adding anti-gay references to L. Ron Hubbard's writings after his death (Hubbard is shown here). The LDS received new revelation in the late 1970s about the status of African-American people and, just last year, softened its teachings about homosexuality.

Cynics are are probably inclined to think that officials of both churches manufactured latter-day insights about first principles so that their doctrines would better conform to current social mores. So-called orthodox Christians accuse so-called progressives of the same thing when they accord full sacramental status to women and gay and lesbian people.

And yet modern biblical criticism does help expose the astonishing social egalitarianism in the Christ moment and early church, especially in the context of patriarchal Palestinian culture and the hyper-status conscious Greco-Roman world of the first century. Our scholarship aims to recover the true gospel and help us better appreciate Jesus Christ's teachings about how people should behave toward one another despite differences in condition and circumstance. Whether the same can be said about the founders of Mormonism and Scientology is for others to say -- though it's hard to criticize any institution that's bending in the direction of justice and righteousness.