Few people realize our educational system in the United States began as a direct result of religion. One of the main reasons many of the pilgrims came here was for religious freedom. Upon arriving, the early settlers taught the Bible at home. Soon they began to develop an educational system for schools and community. The local minister was usually the teacher and the Bible was the center of all the education. Within eighteen years after…
“The New Testament and Psalms: An Inclusive Version” (Oxford University Press) was the PC biblical makeover of the year. Note these changes: The Lord’s Prayer now begins, “Our Father-Mother in Heaven.” The 63rd Psalm’s “Thy right hand upholds me” made lefthanders feel bad and is now “your strong hand upholds me.” “Kingdom,” an overly male word, is now “dominion.” And the word “Darkness” when referring to evil or ignorance has been removed out of deference…
Unfortunately, Moyers’ 10 part series reveals more about the participants than it does about Genesis. With a little nudging from the host, we hear about this rabbi’s divorce, that minister’s bout with surgery, this scholar’s near suicide, that ex-nun’s rejection of hell. And Oprah is nowhere in sight. Feminist rage against patriarchal religion is on full display. So are the strategies of feminist Biblical retrieval. In almost every segment there is an effort to imagine…
“Who is Jesus?” says Jennifer Kondak, a Presbyterian from Royal Oak, Michigan, “That’s one of the burning questions in my life. I think it’s wonderful that scholars are still studying this. The people who make me angry are the folks who take every word of the Bible as true.” At the liberal end of the spectrum, Rev. Suzanne Paul of the Universalist-Unitarian Church of Farmington, Michigan, tells her congregation that Jesus was an important teacher…
Because the Gospel of Judas portrays Judas as a hero rather than a villain, some people have given the impression that it is somehow an antidote to historic Christian anti-Semitism. This response is ironic, since much of early Gnosticism was deeply anti-Jewish. Gnostics believed that there were actually two Gods, and that the God of the Jews was an evil or ignorant creator who deceived people. One Gnostic text calls the Hebrew patriarchs a “joke!”…
