Saint Athanasius: May 2

Athanasius of Alexandria died on May 2 in the year 373 and his feast day is celebrated on May 2 in the Catholic and Coptic churches (his feast day in the Orthodox calendar is January 18). Here is a modern icon of Athanasius from St. Athanasius Greek Orthodox Chapel in Alabama:



Athanasius is best known for his opposition to the ideas of Arius.

Arius asserted that God was single and absolute, existing as one being, one person, for all of time. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was not himself God. Christ was a created being, like God, but not equal to God.

Athanasius was bitterly opposed to the doctrine of Arius, and taught instead that Jesus Christ was an incarnation of God. Athanasius's writings helped to establish the doctrine of the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who are three persons, but one in substance (the doctrine of "homoousia").

Eventually this belief would defeat Arianism, but Arius was profoundly influential during the fourth century and won many followers.

In his steadfast rejection of Arian's teachings, Athanasius became the subject of a famous saying: Athanasius contra mundum, "Athanasius against the world."

Finally, the views of Athanasius and his allies prevailed, and are enshrined in the Nicene Creed. Here is what the Nicene Creed says about the relationship of God and his Son: "We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father."

The Nicene Creed is used in many Christian churches, but the more simple Apostles' Creed is also widely used. Here is what it says about the begetting of Jesus Christ: "We believe... in Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit."

There is also a creed called the Athanasian Creed. Although it bears his name, this creed was not written by Athanasius, yet it does express many of the beliefs he fought for. This creed is not used widely in any church liturgy. Here is just a part of what it says about the relationship among the persons of Trinity: "The Father is uncreated, the Son uncreated, and the Holy Spirit uncreated; The Father is eternal, the Son eternal, and the Holy Spirit eternal. And yet they are not three who are eternal, but there is one who is eternal, just as they are not three who are uncreated, nor three who are infinite, but there is one who is uncreated and one who is infinite."

Both for Christians within the faith, and for people who look at Christianity from the outside, the Trinity is a very difficult doctrine to understand. To explore it further, you might check out a very basic and helpful page at the BBC's Religion and Ethics website.

One group of Christians who reject the doctrine of the Trinity are the Unitarians. For more information about the Unitarians, you can visit the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations website. Unitarianism has played an important role in the religious history of America and as you can discover on this page there are some very famous Americans who were Unitarians or Unitarian sympathizers, including one of my own personal heroes, the educational reformer and political philosopher John Dewey.

Somehow, I don't think Athanasius and John Dewey would have gotten along very well...

Film: Joyeux Noël (Merry Christmas)

Although it is not the Christmas season by any means, we decided to watch this amazing film Joyeux Noël - and I can recommend it unreservedly. It is certainly one of the best World War I films that I have seen, and I am posting about it here because religion plays a pivotal role in the film.

The film is set on Christmas Eve in 1914, and shows the German soldiers of one trench making their private peace with the French and Scottish soldiers in the opposing trench. Each of the characters - a Scottish priest and a young boy from his parish, a French lieutenant and his orderly, a German lieutenant and an opera singer in his unit - are carefully and quickly sketched as the film opens. Each character is unmistakably familiar right from the start, so that you are able to follow their stories right through till the end.

The priest is played by Gary Lewis (so marvelous as the father in Billy Elliott back in 2000). He stands at the center of what happens on the Christmas Eve. He is the one who begins playing the bagpipes which starts the music in the trenches. At first, he plays a song and the Scottish soldiers join in, and then when the German begins singing "Silent Night," he is the one who accompanies the German on the bagpipes. Then, he plays the melody of "Adeste Fideles" on the pipes, and the German tenor continues. The rapprochement between the two sides carries on from there, with extraordinary, unexpected and unintended consequences.

I definitely should note that the German soldier sings Adeste Fideles in Latin, and the Scottish priest conducts the midnight mass in Latin (with all the French, Scottish and German soldiers who are Catholics saying the Latin responses), and when funerals are conducted the next day, he says the "De profundis" over the bodies. Given all the controversy over the return of Tridentine Mass, I thought it was very striking to see Latin used here to call attention to the intercultural role of Latin on that Christmas night in 1914. As the priest later says, "Tonight, these men were drawn to that altar like it was a fire in the middle of winter. Even those who aren't devout came to warm themselves."

Indeed, not all of the soldiers are Christian. The German lieutenant, as it turns out, is Jewish. With a French wife. And of the three officers, it is the German who comes across as the most complex and heroic, although you would not expect that from his first scenes in the movie. The development of his character was one of the most wonderful aspects of the movie, I thought.

It's a beautiful film. We plan to watch it again at Christmas.

St. Joseph the Worker: May 1

May Day has had many holiday values over time (see Beltane, for example), but it is definitely best known in the 20th century as International Workers' Day.

Well, in 1955, Pope Pius XII declared a feast of "Saint Joseph the Worker," as a Catholic alternative to the Communist holiday. Saint Joseph has a traditional feast day as the "Husband of the Blessed Virgin Mary," on March 19, but the May Day holiday is instead focused on Joseph the worker, the carpenter, with an emphasis on his role as a father-figure for the young Jesus.

Recently, Joseph, the patron saint of carpenters who build houses, has also taken on a special meaning for people selling houses. Yes, real estate agents. The story goes that if you bury a Saint Joseph statue in the yard, you will be able to sell the house quickly. "Saint Joseph Statue Home Sales Kits" are available from StJosephStatue.com for just $9.95.

Here is a picture of the kit, which includes a statue, a protective plastic burial bag along with a cloth storage bag:

NYTimes: Touring the Spirit World

Another article from the New York Times today, this time from the Travel Section.

Touring the Spirit World
By ETHAN TODRAS-WHITEHILL
Published: April 29, 2007

Here are some quotes from the article:

The demographics of New Age travelers: "New Age-style sacred travel, or metaphysical touring, is a growing branch of tourism, particularly in countries like Egypt with strong ancient-civilization pedigrees. Tourists with an adventuresome spiritual focus — predominantly middle-aged, upper middle class and female — come together to improve themselves and the world, as Ms. Billger’s group intended. Their ideas are best understood as an extreme on the continuum that includes yoga, tarot and astrology, and the rituals they perform at sites deemed sacred can vary widely."

The destinations are mysterious locations, and syncretistic sites: "Other popular destinations also tend to be places of mystery. Sites built by ancient civilizations whose construction techniques are not settled fact — like Stonehenge and the perfectly fitting but mortarless walls of the Inca at Machu Picchu, as well as the pyramids — are embraced as evidence that those civilizations had mystical powers. Places with a Christian focus but an overlay of competing spiritual and religious claims — like the sites of the so-called Black Madonnas of France and Italy or the Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, which took on mystical meaning in “The Da Vinci Code” — are also attractive to spiritual tourists."

Role-playing meets the red tape of keeping accounts: "MR. KHATTAB, the guide, was apparently not exaggerating when he called Ms. Billger’s tour tame. He recalled a Dutch group — touring in the early ’90s, he said — whose members each incarnated as a different Egyptian deity each day. This extended to sleeping arrangements, so if one tourist was possessed by the god Osiris, and another by the goddess Isis, Osiris’s wife, those two tourists would spend the night together. The only problems Mr. Khattab had with this were logistical. “You had bills signed with ‘Seth’ and ‘Osiris’ and ‘Horus,’ ” he said. “You had to sort out which person was who on which day. It was a hassle.”"

My thoughts...: I have to confess to feeling an enormous amount of ambivalence about this. On the one hand, I am obviously very interested in exploring ancient traditions and trying to trace the cultural paths that lead from the past to the present, and I am extremely interested in syncretism and shared traditions... and I encourage my students to do role-playing of all kinds in their writings for class - but at the same time, the kind of pseuodo-knowledge that so much of this enterprise relies on is very troubling to me. If people have time to read books, the spiritual resources to engage in rituals, the money and leisure to travel, it seems to me badly misspent if all those resources are feeding something that is a transient fantasy whose authors (well-intentioned, or not) are profiting from.

Beltane and Walpurgisnacht: April 30 - May 1

Beltane is an old Gaelic holiday celebrated at the traditional beginning of summer, on May 1. It has become well-known again as a holiday adopted by Wiccans, who have made it one of their eight major holidays, based on the movement of the sun.

Why eight holidays? The movement of the sun is marked by four distinct movements: the spring and autumn equinoxes, and the summer and winter solstices - and the midpoint between each alternating equinox and solstice is also a holiday. So, Beltane is a "cross-quarter holiday," meaning that it is halfway between an equinox (the spring equinox) and a solstice (the summer solstice). As an astronomical holiday, the date can vary from year to year, but Beltane has become traditionally associated with the first day of May, with Beltane Eve celebrated on April 30.

The holiday that is paired with Beltane as a seasonal pair is Samhain, which comes between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice. Like Samhain, Beltane is a holiday traditionally associated with the other-world. One of the traditional festivities associated with Beltane is the lighting of bonfires on hilltops.

The lighting of bonfires is also associated with the festival of Walpurgisnacht, the Eve of Saint Walburga Day. The Walpurgisnacht festival has become associated with witches and witchcraft, as seen, for example, in Goethe's Faust. In more recent literature, J.K. Rowling has said that the "Death Eaters" in the Harry Potter books were originally called the "Knights of Walpurgis."

Walpurgis Night is one of the major holidays in Sweden (Valborgsmässoafton) where it is celebrated with bonfires. It is also a major holiday in Finland.

Here is a Walpurgis Night bonfire from Sweden:

NYTimes: Rewriting the Ad Rules for Muslim-Americans

There was an interesting article in the New York Times Business section today.

Rewriting the Ad Rules for Muslim-Americans
By LOUISE STORY
Published: April 28, 2007

Here are some quotes from the article:

One aspect is not so much about marketing but about product development: "Grocers and consumer product companies are considering ways to adapt their goods to Muslim rules, which forbid among other things, gelatin and pig fat, which is often used in cosmetics and cleaning products.

Another important issue is the holidays: "...the study found that Muslims were buying many standard products but that they felt excluded from mainstream advertising. In particular, she said, they wanted companies to recognize their holidays."

An interesting dilemma is the multicultural nature of the Muslim population itself: "Just what approach companies should take to reach Muslims is far from clear. The market is diverse, including African-Americans, South Asians, Caucasians and people from the Middle East, as well as people who are more or less conservative in their religious views. American Muslims disagree about whether the Muslim women in ads should wear the hijab, for instance."

It's also about how stores do business and interact with their customers: "Ikea, which recently opened a store in the suburb of Canton, Mich., that has had trouble attracting as many Muslim customers as it had hoped, has been touring local homes and talking to Muslims to figure out their needs. The store there plans to sell decorations for Ramadan next fall and is adding halal meat to its restaurant menu, or meat that is prepared according to Islamic law. Catalogs in Arabic are being planned, and female Muslim employees are expected to be given an Ikea-branded hijab, to wear over their head if they wish."

My thoughts...: Given the pervasiveness of commercial media in our lives, it's not surprising that it will reach out into the sphere of religion... as in the Ikea-branded hijab! Well, in the spirit of religious literacy, it would be good for people to know about Muslim holidays, and to understand the different forms of hijab - so I guess an Ikea-branded style of hijab can be added to the range of Muslim fashions.

Google Calendar: Religious Holidays

Using the amazing power of Google Calendar, I've created a Religious Holidays and Festival Calendar, which is being displayed at the bottom of this blog (visit the actual blog if you are reading this by RSS and you will see what I mean!).

Google Calendar is a free service that allows you to create and manage multiple calendars, share calendars, etc. - and they also offer great web services that allow you to configure an HTML version of the calendar to display dynamically on any webpage.

WOW. I am simply in awe of Google.

Now I will spend the weekend adding calendar events - and then, as I am able to write descriptions of the events as blog posts, I will add those as descriptions to the calendar entries - as I've already done for the Narasimha Jayanthi that will be on April 30 2007.

Narasimha Jayanti: April 30 2007

April 30 2007 will be the Hindu festival of Narasimha Jayanthi.

Narasimha, the man-lion (nara-simha), is one of the incarnations of the Hindu god Vishnu. A demon named Hiranyakashipu, an avowed enemy of Vishnu, had acquired great powers, and could not be killed by human, deva or animal. His son, Prahlada, however, was deeply devoted to Vishnu. Hiranyakashipu was outraged and tried to kill his own son, but Prahlada was under Vishnu's protection. Defying his father, Prahlada was not afraid and maintained that Vishnu was everywhere.

Finally, Hiranyakashipu asked his son if Vishnu was in a pillar. When Prahlada affirmed that "He was, He is and He will be," Hiranyakashipu smashed the pillar, and Vishnu emerged from the pillar in the form of the Narasimha. As a divine man-lion, Vishnu was not simply god or human or animal, and hence Hiranyakashipu was not protected against him. In his ambiguous form, at the ambiguous time of twilight, in the ambiguous space of the threshold, Narasimha put the demon Hiranyakashipu on his lap (neither on the ground nor in the air), and killed him.

You can read about Vishnu's incarnation as Narasimha at wikipedia. You can also read the story at Encyclopedia Mythica.

You can read Prayers to Lord Narasimhadeva at Stephen Knapp's website. There are photos of Narasimha worship at Photo.net, and you can see a slideshow of a 2005 Narasimha Festival and a 2006 Narasimha Festival in Bangalore.

Here is a Yoga Narasimha statue at a temple in Vijayanagara, Hampi, India (wikipedia).



Here is a beautiful image from the British Library: "This page comes from an 18th-century folding cloth book of religious and mythological oil-colour paintings, copied from originals in the Brahmanical Pagoda of Chokalingam at Madhura in Karnataka."

Calendars

Something I'd like to do here is try to keep track of information about different religious holidays as the calendar goes by. I've done a little bit of this with my daily online course announcements, but I haven't been very systematic about it - hopefully I get more organized here in exploring the dates of different religious calendars. Suggestions for more calendars to add? Let me know! It's sure a complicated topic, especially with movable holidays, non-Gregorian calendars, and so on!

Here are some calendars I found I can use online to keep up with different holidays:

• BBC Multifaith Calendar
• 2007 Belief.net Calendar
• 2007 Interfaith Calendar
• 2007 Ethnic and Religious Dates
• Holidays: Europe 2007
• Non-Gregorian Holiday Calendars
• When is...?
• Hindu Festivals Calendar
• Zen Buddhist Calendar
• Judaism 101 Calendar
• Catholic Forum Saints
• Orthodox Saints
• Coptic Calendar
• Muslim Events

FreeFind Search Engine

I've added a search engine for ReligiousReading.com, using the great FreeFind search engine service. There are lots of search engine alternatives, but I've been using FreeFind for such a long time, and I really like the amount of control they give you over the way your site is searched. It's so nice to be able to request daily re-indexing of the site!

You'll find the search engine near the top of the right-hand column! There's not much to search yet... but over time, I hope there will be!

Teaching Ideas

One of my greatest hopes for this site would be as a place to share ideas about how to teach courses that have a religious literacy component.

Although none of my online courses is a religious studies course per se, they all contain important religious literacy components:

Epics of Ancient India: This is a fully online course at the University of Oklahoma, which covers the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Although the course is taught from a literary perspective, there is necessarily a great deal of information about the religions of ancient India which is covered in class.

Mythology and Folklore: This course contains a few units with a religious focus, notably: the epic of Gilgamesh, stories of ancient Egypt, stories from the Hebrew Bible, and Sufi tales from Rumi.

World Literature: Again, this course contains several units with a religious focus, such as a unit on the Buddhist jataka tales, New Testament parables, Attar's tales of the Sufi saints, selections from the Hitopadesha, ancient visions of the underworld and afterlife, along with a unit on Dante's Inferno.

I hope very much to develop a Biblical Literature course using the same basic online course model that I use in these courses. I'll explain in more specific posts later on just how I have organized these online courses but the main principle I have adopted is a creative writing approach, where students "retell" old stories in new ways, and share those stories with one another via websites and blogs. So, by way of example, you could take a look at the student projects for the Epics of India course, all of which are available online.

Book Reviews

Another activity I hope we can promote here at the ReligiousReading.com blog is book reviews, sharing favorite books and ideas about books to use for teaching.

In particular, a big impetus for this blog is the new book by Stephen Prothero, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know--And Doesn't. I hope we will be able to provide a detailed commentary and discussion of that book here at this blog!

Film Reviews

One thing I would like to share here in this blog would be film reviews.

Partly, this is because I love movies.

Perhaps more importantly, my students love movies - and a popular movie is one of the best ways to reach out to the students in a way that speaks to them very powerfully. I know Nina also has experience teaching a class based on film, which is something I would very much enjoy doing sometime myself!

One item that I am awaiting with great eagerness is the film adaptation of Philip Pullman's Golden Compass. Pullman's books are some of the best books I have read in the past ten years, and they certainly give plenty of religious food-for-thought. I hope so much that the film(s) will be worthy of the books!

Who are we? Laura Gibbs...

My name is Laura, and I teach online courses at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma. Here are the three courses I teach each semester: Mythology-Folklore, Ancient Indian Epics and World Literature.

I've also taught Biblical Greek Online, and I keep a daily blog of Latin learning materials (especially fables and proverbs) at the Bestiaria Latina website.

Curious about why I blog? Then read this post: Why blog?

And if you're curious to learn more about me, read on:

I did both my B.A. (Classical and Slavic Languages) and Ph.D. (Comparative Literature) at the University of California at Berkeley. My dissertation was on Aesop's fables, and I continue to publish Aesop's fables galore online at Aesopica.net.

I've published two books: Aesop's Fables: A New Translation (2003) and, more recently, Latin Via Proverbs: 4000 Proverbs, Mottoes and Sayings for Students of Latin (2006). I'm hoping to publish an anthology of Aesop's fables in Latin sometime during 2007... fingers crossed!

I decided to create the ReligiousReading.com blog after reading Stephen Prothero's book, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know--And Doesn't. This blog is a way for me to increase my own religious literacy, and share what I learn with others! Although I do not agree with all of Prothero's conclusions, I do have a strong sense that there is a crisis in religious literacy in this country, with serious consequences for all of us who are teachers today.

In particular, I hope that this blog will give people an opportunity to learn and think about religious traditions in a way that fits into their daily lives. That "daily" and "weekly" approach is one that is perfect for blogging, and I've created some religious widgets that let you add a "Bible Woman of the Week," "Hindu God of the Week," etc. to your own blog or webpage. You can find out more about that at my SchoolhouseWidgets.com website.

Well, from all the websites I've listed in this post, you can tell that I am a total web geek... it's true, I'm deeply digital. I just hope that this blog will be a way to take that geekiness and use it for good!

Comments and suggestions would be very welcome!

:-)

ReligiousReading.com is born!

I've set up a Google account, religiousreading@gmail.com, and also created this blog, Religious Reading, using Blogger.com.

I set aside some space at my bestmoodle.net domain, so that we can publish the blog there, along with images and any other useful materials: religiousreading.bestmoodle.net.

I've also gotten the domain name ReligiousReading.com and pointed it to this blog!

Since Blogger.com allows group blogs, I've invited "myself" to post to this blog from my existing Blogger.com account.

I've tagged this post with the label "admin" in order to keep track of this kind of set-up information and other administrivia.