Jesus now has a football jersey, and it is a tribute to Tim Tebow.
Some believers think that’s getting it backwards: “Sports is one thing, and Jesus is another thing,” said Traci Yown, a mom Christmas shopping for her son.
Others say it honors both Jesus and Tebow, the Denver Broncos QB who is famous, and controversial, for combining his evangelical faith with his on-field witness: “It’s not saying that he is Christ, it’s saying he’s trying to demonstrate and live that out and as Christians that’s what were supposed to do,” said Baptist pastor Marcus Buckley.
As if that’s not enough, Pamela Anderson is going to be the Virgin Mary.
At least it’ll be tongue-in-cheeky, in a comedy sketch on the Canadian TV show “A Russell Peters Christmas Special.” Bing Crosby, we miss you.
Can the People of the Book also be the People of the Byte? That was the question raised by a recent two-day conference at the Center for Jewish History.
“How will these streams of data flow into the individual and collective processes of creating a historical memory with texture and feeling?” wonders Alex Joffe.
Hate crime numbers are holding steady, according to the FBI, though that will be little consolation to Jews in Brooklyn, where three vehicles in a Jewish neighborhood were set ablaze and anti-Semitic graffiti was scrawled across park benches.
Speaking of hate, the backlash against the backlash against Penn State’s sex scandal dramatis personae seems to be continuing.
At First Things, Rodney Howsare says everyone is forgetting the “love the sinner, hate the sin” maxim. The New York Times’ Ross Douthat says now-disgraced football coach Joe Paterno was a victim of his own goodness, as many Catholic churchmen in similar circumstances were. His colleague David Brooks says we should be like the Puritans and recognize original sin for what it is, and stop criticizing Paterno to make us feel better about ourselves.
Mark Silk pushes back, and notes that Puritanism didn’t actually work that way.
Folks don’t like atheists so much, polls show, and now we know why: “People use cues of religiosity as a signal for trustworthiness,” researchers write in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
The Catholic bishops want a “modern-day Marshall Plan” to rebuild Iraq, and two bishops who recently visited the country that U.S. forces are set to leave say it is our moral obligation to do something.
Bishop George V. Murry of Youngstown, Ohio, and Bishop Gerald F. Kicanas of Tucson, Arizona, noted that Christians in America have to realize how much Christians in Iraq have suffered, disproportionately even to other groups in the country.
The most eye-popping stat: There were about 100,000 Christians in Baghdad before the U.S. invasion, and there are only 4,000 today.
The Catholic bishops also announced Tuesday, at the end of the public sessions of their meeting in Baltimore (the private confab continues today) that a new “ordinariate,” like a special diocese, for disaffected Anglicans will be up and running on January 1.
The ordinariate allows Anglicans to swim the Tiber while keeping their own rites and traditions. One tradition that the Anglican clergy will be able to keep is their wives, if they are already married and receive approval from Rome.
Vaticanista Sandro Magister notes that almost unnoticed, there are at least 2,000 married Catholic priests now, both in the Eastern rite churches that allow married clergy and among convert Protestant clergy who come in under a special dispensation.
But he says they are treated like “a minor league team.”
I’m familiar with the poker-playing dogs – I mean, who isn’t?
But black jack playing evangelical Christians? You betcha, and they’re darned good, an entire team of them, working casinos, according to a new film: “At least we can liberate the money from the clutches of those who would use it for ill purposes,” says one. “I mean, that’s a start.”
— David Gibson
