IS RESURRECTION UNIVERSAL?

The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints has always been very careful to make clear whether somebody explaining her belief-system is speaking in her name or is just giving his ("her" can be omitted in that case for reasons of priesthood-holdership) personal opinion of what LDS faith is about, it seems to me. Reminds me of the noble tradition of "Imprimatur" in the Roman Catholic Church (not to be confused with the not so noble traditions of inquisition and indexes).

In this vein, the reader of Bruce R. Mc Conkie's (to the left) Mormon Doctrine's 2nd edition, SLC, 1979, (however revised, because "experience has shown the wisdom of making some changes, clarifications, and additions") is informed in a lengthy passage I will not quote in its entirety that the book "is a valuable tool but should not be considered an official statement of doctrine".
So what?
I guess it would make a fine subject for a MA-thesis to compare that book's content to the official LDS "Encyclopedia of Mormonism". Whatever the result of that may be, I stumbled upon McConkie's rendering of the topic of resurrection. Without going into detail, I find similarities and slight differences - the details of which would be worthwile to explore - between his approach & the EoM article on the same topic written by Douglas L. Callister (to the right).
Why did I look up EoM? Because of that rather surprising statement of Elder Mc. Conkie: "Nothing is more absolutely universal than resurrection. Every living being will be resurrected" (his italics). It raises (at least) 2 questions: a) please define "living being" - will all the plants, bees, ants, moths, tse-tse-flies, worms, parasites, protozoans, HIV-Viruses and the like be resurrected? b) as resurrection presupposes death, death has to be (at least) equally universal as the former.
Wisely enough, Elder Callister does not say anything about the amount of creatures to be resurrected and mainly focusses on the human being's resurrection, going into limited discussions with western religious and philosophical traditions on the issue at stake. I have not had the nerve to do an in-depth comparison of his article with Elder McConkie's, but my overall impression is that Callister relied to the framework established by McConkie, adjusting it and adding some new aspects. Be that as it may, at least, he added some logic too, when writing: "Resurrection is as universal as death".
Solves problem b), I would say, but does not solve problem a), methinks. But is there anybody who could know?

GET PORTRAYED WITH JESUS

Finally, the true believers can have themselves pictured in the arms of their saviour; the bad news about it is, that you will have to travel all the way to SLC to get that done:

http://www.cityweekly.net/utah/blog-3740-get-your-picture-with-jesus.html

reminds of a song by mojo nixon:

Father Cantalamessa, Victims and Perpetrators

I could not believe my eyes yesterday, when I was reading. what the pious Father Cantalamessa had said about the accusations brought forth against the Roman Catholic Church in connection with the way church leaders used to deal with severe cases of sexual abuse by some members of the clergy. Father Cantalamessa, quoting a letter from a Jewish friend, compared these accusations to Anti-Semitism, even to some of its worst features. Let us believe the Padre: there is a Jewish friend of him, who really has written that. What does it tell us, then? That there are some people in the world, that claim to be Jews or are in fact Jews that do not have the slightest idea about what Anti-Semitism means.
Anti-Semitism is a kind of racism. We will not waste our time reflecting the strangeness of the word, rooted in the biblical story, that has all the ethnic groups of the world stemming from the sons of Noah: Sem, Ham or Japhet. This story in itself has been used by pious Christians in a racist way, declaring black-skinned people to be the offspring of Ham, and therefore , according to Gen 9, 24-25, cursed, their black skin being the outer sign of that inward curse - and a sign of their destiny as slaves by divine command. Nowadays, we call Semites those people that are native-speakers of one of the languages of the Semitic subgroup of the Afro-Asiatic languages. The word Anti-Semitism is a relict from the past, when it was used to designate people that share a racist attitude towards Jews. A racist attitude, to be short, consists in judging persons because of their belonging to a certain group, without taking into account his or her personal conduct of life, merits, virtues and vices. This can just be a judgement without any further implications than a general hostility towards members of that group. In its more severe sense - as it is the case in radical Anti-Semitism - it can mean to hold that group responsible for all the evils in the world, to build a conspiracy theory, according to which this group wants to rule or actually rules the world by evil means and, finally, to call for extinction of this group.
There are examples galore, that members of the catholic church have shared in the attitudes so described to a certain degree, most prominently, with respect to Jews. This clearly does not mean, that all Catholics would be Anti-Semites. Be that as it may, where could the parallel drawn by the Padre possibly have its “Sitz im Leben”? What could be the sense of it? One argument we are used to hear from racists goes like that: I knew a man who treated me/my relatives a.s.o. in a very bad manner. He was a Jew, a Chinese, a Japanese a.s.o. Therefore all Jews, Chinese, Japanese a.s.o. are bad people. This could be dealt with on the grounds of the rules for sound reasoning alone. In my humble opinion, this is also the only sound reasoning I can take out of Father Cantalamessa utterings: "Some Catholic priests have acted in a wrong way. This does not mean, that all Catholics are acting like that. People who argue, that all Catholics are like that on the grounds of some Catholics acting that way, are reasoning in an unsound way". This is so obvious, that he would not need to draw the parallel to Anti-Semitism to prove that. Everybody (but some stubborn racists) would understand. But he needs to draw that parallel in order to foster his conviction - held for some strange reasons - that the whole world is attacking the Roman Catholic Church because of a neglectable amount of "black sheep" we find within its precincts. In that respect, he is simply wrong. Some of the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church are accused by some people - mostly victims of sexual abuse by representatives of this church. They accuse church-leaders of not having reacted in a proper way to those violations of human rights when they got informed about them. These very church officials seem to have protected the abusers instead of the abused. After all, we know, that this accusation is not unfounded (to put it in a modest way), in contradistinction to global accusations brought forth by Anti-Semites against Jews simply for the reason of being of Jewish origin. Furthermore, an Anti-Semite is hostile to any person of Jewish descent because of belonging to an ethnic group (with the exception of the notorious “good Jewish friend” that every Anti-Semite is eager to call “his own”). This is not the case with respect to the accusations in question brought forth against some Roman Catholics. Roman Catholics are not an ethnic group in any sense of the word. As a rule (there are rare exceptions to be found, that can be interpreted as an introjection of outward prejudices) the victims of racism belong to another group than their offenders. In our case, many among those who accuse church authorities belong to the Roman Catholic Church or have at least belonged to it, before (more or less) deliberately havíng chosen to leave that church. No Jew subjected to Anti-Semitism can freely choose to change her or his "ethnic identity". Furthermore, victims and perpetrators have been members of that church, whose authorities have chosen, in order to uphold their image – or out of whatever reason –, to rather protect the perpetrators than their victims. In doing that, they seem to have shown some characteristic preferences held among church-leadership (at least of those having succeeded in internal negotiations).
Apparently, during his time as the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the present pope has discharged some priests (mostly from so called third-world countries), solely on the grounds of perceived doctrinal dissenting, whilst keeping some known (!) child-abusers in their office, neglecting the rights of the victims of the latter. Instead of apologising and starting to change structures surpressing human rights within an institution that acts as an outspoken defender of human rights, these very structures are defended in public and the victims of sexual abuse and those who speak out on their behalf are held to be the perpetrators attacking the holy structures of the church and its officials.
For me, this is the saddening plot of Padre Cantalamessa’s sermon. I would not make much of it, if a local clergyman had argued like that over a bottle of wine in a pub in my home town. But I can in no way approve of a public sermon given by the official preacher of the papal household during Good Friday’s service, in the central church of Roman Catholicism in the very core of the church year following that train of thought and to have some representative of the Vatican say the next day: "this is not our official opinion". Hopefully, it is not!!!!. Please, SHOW, by acting in an adequate manner, that it is not!!!!Speechless am I, in this respect, not unlike the pope, but for other reasons, I guess.

WHY DO WE STUDY (AFRICAN) RELIGIONS?

Religion 20 [1990] contains some articles on the study of African Religions that are worth reading. Rosalind J. Hackett as a guest-editor has been responsible for those pages. My favourite piece is by Rosalind Shaw: “The Invention of African Traditional Religion”, a thorough analysis of the categories used for lumping together religious traditions and one of the best critiques of the concept of „World Religions“ I have ever read. Arguments she brings forth range from comparing the classification systems used in typologies of religions with a mixture of categories that could be used by a butterfly collector – historical and geographical criteria interspersed by categories taken from classifying languages and the like – to a critique of the criteria given for a religion to be rendered as a „world religion“, for example:

„A religion is sometimes described as ‚universal’ if its membership is not restricted to a singkle ethnicity (in which case Judaism after the Christianizing of the Roman Empire would be excluded and the cult of Mwali in southern Africa included), and/or it may also be so described if it has an all-encompassing cosmology (in which case much of Christianity and Hinduism as actually practised […] would be excluded, while many cults and ritual forms within Africa would be included)” [p.340].

Her main point is, that this concept brings forth the need for a residual category in which to put the rest (from Amerindian through Aborigines and African to Siberian and the like). She clearly shows, that the very category is used to construct the „other“. In the course of her essay, she shows, how „Western“ scholars have shaped the image of African Religions even in the eyes of their adherents: missionaries, scholars more or less engaged in the colonial enterprise and last, not least, African Christian scholars that have eagerly tried to prove that Africans have been „monotheists“ before contact with Christianity or Islam. She deconstructs these claims using the arguments widely known, and goes on to show, how the classical rendering of „Igbo Traditional Religion“ has been shaped after the model supplied by E. Bolaji Idowu’s seminal work on Yorùbá Religion, Olódumàrè – God in Yorùbá Belief. She goes on to interpret the underlying data in a totally different manner.

This comes close to Robin Horton’s critique of the „devout school“ (see: his, Judaeo-Christian Spectacles: Boon or Bane to the Study of African Religions? In his: Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West. Essays on Magic, Religion and Science. Cambridge 1997, 161-193; 409-420, and him on the right side), albeit on other grounds and more universally. And it comes close to what I have been teaching before getting to know the fine essay of R. Shaw.

Other essays deal with the image of „African Religions“ as given in text books on so called „World-Religions“, that one would use in the introductory course on a General History of Religions. In this context, James R. Lewis gives an instructing quotation from Lewis M. Hopfe’s „Religions of the World“ (from 1983):

„African Nations have become a vocal and active segment of the so-called Third World. Many of them control raw materials that are essential to the industrialized nations of the world. The leaders of today and of the future must learn to deal with Africans on both political and business levels if there is to be peace and prosperity in the world. Essential to understanding the leaders of black Africa is a knowledge of their culture. A major step in understanding customs and values is a basic knowledge of religion“ [taken from Lewis, p. 313].

At first sight, this sounds like the author would try to convince General Motors to supply grants for field-work in Africa. It is even worse: the first opposition we find in the text is between „raw materials“ (the other) and „industrialised nations“ (we). The way control of these others over those raw materials is rendered suggests, that they are not the proprietors, but we are. Furthermore, their control over the raw materials in question endangers „peace and prosperity in the world“. In order to cope with this dangerous situation successfully we have to understand, what I would call „the savage mind“ of the other. This is blunt colonialism, and it sounds like it had been written 100 years earlier than 1983.

But, sadly enough, to some degree, it also reflects the economic reality of Study of Religions: since some radical Muslims have begun to try to destabilise the economic order of the "West" by acts of a more or less terrorist character, Islam (erroneously conceived as a unity – the reasons for that are partly reflected by Rosalind Shaw - and even more falsely thought of as being a „radical“ or „extremist“ movement in its entirety) has become the other in control of raw materials we need to prosper further. This danger to "peace and prosperity in the world" cannot be confronted solely by military means, as the good ones among us think, but only by understanding how the other ticks. This way, a more "humanist" attitude in sharing a commonly held prejudice leads to a situation in which those who want to get research funds for studying religions should at least include some hint of Islam-relatedness in the application, more useful: put it on the cover. May I ask the simple question, whether this is what we need the Study of Religions for? If it was that way, the best strategy to foster our field of study would be to incite as many religious groups as possible to become militant.

AND HERE'S TO YOU, MRS. ROBINSON ...

... Jesus loves you more than you will know .... I know, that "The Graduate" and Paul Simon's song is something that comes to almost everybody's mind these days when it comes to Northern Ireland, nothing of great originality:

Mrs. Iris Robinson

At first sight, I did wonder, why Bill Clinton could stay after not having had sex with Monica Levinsky and Mrs. Robinson had to go after her "toy-boy"-affair became known to the public? Then I realised, that there was also some financial affair linked to that, as she had helped her boyfriend out with larger amounts of money in dubious ways, if I understood it rightly. But the most delicious thing about that all goes far beyond the meek associations we could have to a movie shot in 1967 and featuring Dustin Hoffmann (born in 1937) in the role of a teenager. Mrs. Robinson, being an outspoken Born-Again-Christian, has often publicly commented on the rules of sexual behaviour as commanded by God in the bible and has given her Christianity-based comments on homosexuality in the context of a violent attack on a homosexual man by a gang of youngsters. Needless to say, her point of view has not been very much appreciated by pink politics.
I really like her words about the redemption we can find in the blood of Christ (see her interviewed by BBC HERE): "Just like a murderer can be redeemed by the blood of Christ, so can a homosexual". Before that, she also states, that the Lord tells her "to love the sinner and not the sin" (in the clip on BBC' 0 : 40 - 0 : 49) This is what she actually has done, isn't it? (I like her accent, especially the way she pronounces "Christians speaking out" (0 : 25)). Wonder if she rescued her "boy-toy"-friend from homosexuality with the help of that psychiatrist that has a strong background in Christianity? So this all would turn out to be a work of true Christian love???? Be that as it may, she will be redeemed, I'm sure.

Now, for everybody's idea, here is a straightforward punk version of Paul Simon's classic done by the Lemonheads: