MetaCatholic

I’ve had a couple of comments recently about the Re:Greek Scripture of the Day in my sidebar. (Thanks John and Sue.) As far as I can see it looks perfectly fine typographically in my sidebar, but others are reporting problems with the look of the font. Could anyone who sees problems let me know in a comment on this post?

The problem I am aware of is the content. Today’s passage claims to be John 13:21 – 14:10, but is, as as far as I can see, a weirdly garbled version of Matt 3:1 ff with most word forms reverting to the nominative singular for nouns and the 1st person present for verbs. This also happens on their front page, so it’s not just my site.

I am trying to report the problem to the Re:Greek site, but am waiting for permission to join their collaboration group. If it doesn’t get sorted soon, I shall be obliged to take it down until the problem is fixed.

Google Zeitgeist record their search trends for 2007. “Who is God?” is the most asked who is type of question, but there were more searches for “What is love?” and “How to kiss?” in their respective categories. These are taken only form the US Google.com site, not from other Goggle sites around the world.

I have no idea what this says, since the categories are quite eclectic, except that it seems to me a bit sad that the most asked question of the year by people sitting (presumably alone) at computer screens is “What is love?”

Google appears also to be a strange resort for a game of tag with so many people asking “Who is it?” (5th in the who is listings). There also seem to have been quite a few people baffled by young people’s cultural trends with a surprising number asking “what is emo?” (Oh well, at least they’d heard of it!) Then there are the barking mad, asking “how to levitate?”. There seem to have been an awful lot of them too.

Even useless statistics are fascinating.

Michael Bird has the most baffling post up today. On the one hand, he starts it off with all the markers of a parody. On the other, as soon as he gets going, he seems to drop them all. So I want to know:

• does he really believe that in order to approve of same-sex relationships, the only view with any integrity is to adopt Marcionite views of the Old Testament, and despise the bigotry of St Paul and the ignorance of the fathers?
• and does he really believe that the Episcopal Church persecutes orthodox Christians?
• does he really believe that liberals simply ignore Jesus and promote the Millennium Development goals and the UN Charter on Human rights?
• does he think the Millennium Development goals and the UN Charter on Human Rights are patently evil things or just bad when taken as a substitute scripture?

Or, since he dresses the views expressed above up in the style of parody, does he believe the exact opposite of all of this? Are the views of Michael Vogel the same as those of Michael Bird? Or is he repudiating them?

The current Anglican shenanigans are quite bad enough without this kind of stirring of the pot. Much of the financial stirring of the pot has come from non-Anglicans on the religious right, like Howard Ahmanson, whose funds seem to find their way into a remarkable number of the soi-disant “orthodox” pressure groups. This dissing of the Millennium Development goals and the UN Charter on Human Rights plays right into the hands of typical right-wing rhetoric and the culture wars America seems happily to export to the rest of the globe. They may not be perfect, and they may not be scripture, but they’re addressing some real needs in some very poverty stricken places.

(I note that it takes less than 24 hours for an African archbishop to get comments out about gay clergy in America. It seems to be taking them considerably longer to get comments out about the threat of tribal civil war in post-”election” Kenya. Presumably the former is condemned in the Bible, and the latter merely disapproved of by the UN Charter.)

I am impatient with the demonising of the other that goes on in both sides of the sexuality argument. And I think Michael is buying into it quite unhelpfully. He is more than capable of mediating and gracious argument, and I’m sure could offer a more positive and constructive analysis. This is an area where we need patient reasoning, not confused parody. Ah, well.  Perhaps its Bird flu.

Congratulations to Chris Brady for getting the 25th Biblical Studies Carnival up more-or-less on time. He’s dug up a banquet of tasty morsels from the last month or so for your delectation.

In fact, we may as well declare January to be Brady month: he’s also featured with an interview on Biblioblogs as the blogger of the month. Some previous recipients of this award seem to stop blogging once they pass this finishing line, or only post sporadically for a while afterwards. (Is it some obscure Zwinglian curse Jim performs on them?)

He has a nice line on the obscurity of narrow academic specialisations:

[bibliobloggers include] so many who share interests that are not necessarily the undisputed Pauline epistles’ views on cross-dressing Anglicans (or other such narrow niched seminars as we are wont to create at SBL)

I think myself that it is only the disputed letters that lead to any view of Episcopalian transvestitism, and even that is obscure.