Religion: June 2003 Archive Page

"We need to take a minute to consider how anomalous a genre weepies really are. Most movies—especially American movies—are essentially dramatic, as opposed to lyrical (concerned with mood or the inner self) or conceptual (concerned with ideas). The weepie's the exception. It creates an interesting aesthetic problem for the people making it: How do you explore characters, in an essentially visual medium, who are not constantly externalizing their conflicts in action? Babette's Feast takes that problem and turns it right around, making it work for the movie." Jim Shepard --Babette's Feast and the Reclamation of Melodrama (Believer Magazine)

"The Vatican has revealed it has taken on a team of experts to protect the Pope's website which is attacked by some 10,000 viruses a month and at least 30 mainly American hackers every day." --Pope Moves against Hackers (ABC - Austrailia)

"When I was studying at York, reading the plays was part of the curriculum, and then, in the summer, there were a selection of the plays performed in the street (perhaps 15?), conveniently available to watch. Now that I am at Toronto, there are still medieval play recreations regularly available to watch, since the PLS is alive and well. The scholarly study of medieval drama has improved substantially since those early days, as Prof. Klausner made particularly clear in the Vagantes talk." S. Worthen --York Mystery Plays: Update (Owlfish)

Owlfish's blog post is a good overview of what's happening in medieval drama re-creation these days. I haven't exactly been following the field since I left Toronto, though I do tend to my PSim website, and occasionally field e-mails from students and researchers.

The ancient ossuary ("bone box") marked with an inscription identifying the occupant as "James, brother of Jesus" has been officially declared a fake:

"The varnish covered large areas of the ossuary surface and the patina had burst through the varnish in many places. Both varnish and patina coated a rosette inscribed on the other side of the ossuary. But Goren and Ayalon's meticulous microscopic analysis showed that the letters of the entire Aramaic inscription "James, Son of Joseph, Brother of Jesus" were cut through the varnish, indicating that they were carved long--perhaps centuries after--the varnish-covered rosette."

Also declared fake was a reputed record of repairs made to the Temple in Jerusalem nearly 3,000 years ago. --Gold Dust and James Bond (Archaeology)

Note to self: If ever planning forgery of important document likely to draw the attention of scholars from around the world, try to get the grammar right.

I previously blogged the Temple record as an example of ancient technical writing, so I'd better set the record straight.

The Corpus Christi Play was an annual outdoor event, involving hundreds of actors; it was already a long-established tradition by the end of the 14th century, and continued until suppressed by the Protestant Reformation in the late 16th century." --Medieval 'Body of Christ' PlayLiteracy Weblog)

Today is the day the medieval church would have celebrated the Feast of Corpus Christi ("Body of Christ). This website is one of my oldest online resources. I created the first version in C++, and it ran only on Windows. When I demonstrated it as a poster paper at my very first academic conference (almost 10 years ago), I learned just how many medievalists are also mac users. That led me to learn Java.

"Norma McCorvey, the woman whose 1973 U.S. Supreme Court case helped make abortion legal in the United States, today petitioned to overturn the historic Roe v. Wade decision. Known for years as just Jane Roe, McCorvey (pictured right) filed the below affidavit in support of a motion in U.S. District Court in Dallas. McCorvey, 55, stated that the landmark case 'was built upon false assumptions' and had 'caused great harm to the women and children of our nation.' McCorvey, who has been stridently pro-life for nearly 10 years, noted that when she filed her original lawsuit 30 years ago, she was unsure of what the term 'abortion' even meant..." --Roe of Roe v. Wade Files to Overturn U.S. Abortion Case (The Smoking Gun)

Just now, I searched Planned Parenthood's website for "McCorvey," but found nothing. While it's understandable that there might not yet be an official response to this breaking news, I find it strange that her name appears nowhere on the site. "Roe" appears 88 times, however, and there is a link to "www.saveroe.com". But here is an intriguing snippet from McCorvey's website, "www.roenonore.org", which may explain why Planned Parenthood would prefer to act as if the real woman behind Roe didn't exist:

In 1995, Norma was baptized and gave her life to God. She literally moved next door from the abortion clinic at which she was working to the national offices of the prominent pro-life organization, Operation Rescue. Later, feeling a need to share her personal message, Norma founded Roe No More Ministry in 1997 with the mission of exposing the lie that is Roe v. Wade.

See older blurbs about abortion language in journalism and abortion on the NOW web site. Pro-choice groups have been fairly successful at promoting language that decreases the gradient between the statements "I am pro-life" and "I am an evil bomber of women's health centers". But now that terrorism is much more a part of the daily lives of Americans, I wonder whether the same rhetoric will work, especially when building an argument against a former clinic worker.

Update, 20 May: Federal court to Roe: No.