One of the striking things about the Easter and post-Easter narratives in the New Testament is that they are largely about incomprehension: which is to say that, in the canonical Gospels, the early Church admitted that it took some time for the first Christian believers to understand what had happened in the Resurrection, and how what had happened changed everything. Continue Reading »
Easter Sunday is a hard act to follow. “The strife is o’er, the battle done/Now is the Victor’s triumph won/He closed the gates of yawning hell/The bars from heaven’s high portals fell.” Continue Reading »
Although the resurrection of Christ is unique and unrepeatable, there are analogies for it in the lives of Christians. Jesus says as much when he makes his raising of Lazarus to be an icon of the greater resurrection that’s to come. Continue Reading »
One spring, a few years before I converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, my wife and I vacationed in Greece. On the plane we became friendly with a happy elderly Greek-American gentleman who told us excitedly that he was on a pilgrimage to the Holy Mountain (the monastic polity of Mount Athos) for Pascha. “Pascha?” I asked. “What’s Pascha?” . . . Continue Reading »
This coming August 3 will mark the golden anniversary of Flannery O’Connor’s “Passover,” to adopt the biblical image John Paul II used to describe the Christian journey through death to eternal life. In the fifty years since lupus erythematosus claimed her at age thirty-nine, . . . . Continue Reading »
My friend Nathaniel comments that he’d like to see a “Jael With Her Tent Peg,” but I think that’s expecting a level of biblical literalism, to coin a phrase which was already in existence and didn’t really need coining . . . Anyway, you tell me. Barbie: Sarah, from the . . . . Continue Reading »
. . . ways of not playing out in quite the way you’d envisioned sometimes. At least, that’s one way to put it. A friend once told me the story of a play he’d been in, or seen, or heard about, or had a friend who had a friend who had heard this story from someone who was in it, or . . . . Continue Reading »
Years ago a friend of mine took her little daughter to a Chinese restaurant and asked how she liked the fortune cookie at the end of the meal. “Well . . . ,” her daughter said, “it doesn’t taste like much. And the paper inside it is kind of strange, too.” Growing up in . . . . Continue Reading »
Okay, so you can’t actually buy this. But it is kind of neat, in a Scando-innovative way.Hello? Lego?(via Strange Herring) . . . . Continue Reading »
This display spotted at my local Bi-Lo grocery store:Easter Pretty BarbieJesus, God’s Son. My teenager reports that when you press a button, He intones the Our Father, among other things, in what she describes as a “hunky” voice. Hear Him speak John 3:16! Mary Messenger of Faith. . . . . Continue Reading »
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