Mom & Pop forgive them:

...Not everyone agrees with that, just as many would not call the feminist cause essential to Christianity...

...But if any particular moral focus-justice towards women, nonviolence, the needs of the poor-is allowed to force the revision of Scripture or the partial censoring of literature we will lose the kind of memory that matters to poetry and to a deeper understanding of the symbols which move at levels deeper than rationality and ideology...

...Archbishop Iakovos of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America said that these versions do not "reflect the traditions and reverence of the Holy Scriptures...

...JOHN GARVEY...

...Fatherhood did not have that necessity or earthiness about it...

...Gandhi (hardly a violent sort) was inspired by the Bhagavad-Gita...

...A handshake means putting your sword hand into the hand of another, whose sword hand is held by yours: you keep one another from striking...

...Moses lifts his arms at God's command for victory, and when he lowers them in weariness his army begins to lose...

...The magician's wand is phallic, and so is the Easter candle plunged into the waters of the baptismal font, which is plainly womblike...

...Both of these rather common symbols have their roots in war...

...That single thing is that the intention was a decent one...

...4:6) For God so loved the world that God gave God's only Child, that whoever believes in that Child should not perish, but have eternal life...

...The mother was a symbol of fertility, oasis-like, and the womb and the navel were signs of our return to that source...

...The Bhagavad Gita, Tr...

...To reduce sexual symbols to tokens which we trade in crude exchanges about power and economic equality is to miss much that symbols have to tell us...

...I don't mean this to be as flippant as the above might make it seem, but some attempts to deal with real problems are so insensitive to other questions, and to the limitations of our own age's understanding, that if taken seriously they will lead us into a set of problems at least as thorny as the ones we are trying to solve...

...Without entering into the complicated question of which symbol is the better one for expressing our relationship to the divine (my feeling is that we need both, as Julian of Norwich knew when she referred to divine motherhood), it could be that God seen as Father is necessary in moving symbolically towards the idea of creation from nothing, a creation which did not need to be...

...I wouldn't for a moment claim that those symbols have nothing at all to do with power and equality, or that their evolution wasn't influenced by some very ugly factors...

...Of several minds: John Garvey MOM & POP FORGIVE THEM A FEW KIND WORDS FOR PATRIARCHY THERE ARE a number of things to be said about the new readings offered for liturgical use by the National Council of Churches, all but one of them negative...

...Symbols are not simply reduced, and they are dealt with simply only by high-school English teachers and those ideologically inclined folk-I really don't care what their causes are, how good or how bad or how silly-who think that we can make the world over with mind and force, as if we were ruled primarily by reason and that tiny part of the imagination we are aware of...

...Kneeling puts you in a physically vulnerable position before a superior who can kill you, now that you aren't on your feet and able to maneuver...

...To deny or forget that origin is dangerous...

...Bishop Crumley also worried that speaking of God as Mother and Father would not show God's asexuality so much as it might imply God's bisexuality...

...But the more which is involved where there is more to it than that is very important-even of the essence...

...Gal...

...when they are raised again, propped up by his companions, the army begins to win...

...they are revisions) offered by the committee: And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of the Child into our hearts, crying, "God...

...Battle is the metaphor which moves that poem, both literal battle-the protagonist wonders whether it is right for him to engage in it-and spiritual struggle...

...The poem begins, On the field of Truth, on the battle-field of life, what came to pass, Sanjaya, when my sons and their warriors faced those of my brother Pandu...

...Juan Mascaro, Penguin 1962) Despite my firm belief in nonviolence I am not sure that this could be better rendered...

...my Mother and Father...

...In the office of Truth, at the committee meeting of life, what came to pass (etc...

...I believe that nonviolence is essential to being Christian...

...It comes to us from the ancient history of the West, and in all its limitation is full of peaceful meaning...

...It should not be rewritten to prop up a less carnal, and therefore less historical and finally less real, picture of ourselves...

...The Lutheran Church in America will not recommend the use of the new lectionary to its churches...

...But is that all that the language of Scripture means in referring to God as Father...

...It is part of incarnation, of being flesh and having a long history...

...It is not at all a sign of peace's fullness, but is rooted in the fragility of worldly peace...

...I have learned (when arguing against usages like "If anyone wants to reserve a seat, they should see the ticket manager") that the issue of gender in Ianguage arouses passionate responses...

...This is at once a sign of peace, in its most negative and limited form, and of peace's vulnerability...

...We speak of "mother earth," and mean a recurrent fertility which happens naturally and rhythmically...

...It is also not only dangerous but foolish to see it as simply bad, bad as it may often have been...

...The weirdness involved in being human is that we are at once ape and angel...

...A religion which has become an anti-idolatrous form of monotheism (what a dreadful way to talk about the living God, but here we are, impaled on a language) does in fact have patriarchal origins...

...I kneel in churches, when kneeling is called for, and in social circumstances find myself shaking hands...

...To take one example, gutting the Old Testament of its most violent scenes, or bowdlerizing them to make them less violent, has resonances which move more deeply than the question we hope to address when we move in with the editor's pencil...

...Like the handshake, or the grin which reveals the canine tooth, the language of Scripture tells us what we have come from and points the way to what we will be...

...At its most superficial level this is an important metaphor about prayer, and it goes even deeper than that...

...No one I know imagines that God is physically male...

...Here are some of the versions (it would not be at all accurate to call them translations...

...Let me argue against what has been done in this lectionary by moving to another field, one which matters very much to me...

...John 3:16) In an article in The Lutheran, Bishop James R. Crumley, Jr., of the Lutheran Church in America, said of the above version of John'slanguage, "Attempting to avoid pronouns simply illustrates the need for them in the first place...

...According to the New York Times, members of the committee which produced the readings felt that "the use of sexually inclusive language in public worship will undergird other efforts for equality between men and women.'' This fine aim is not advanced by a tin-eared, antihistorical approach to Scripture...

...Is another primitive and complicated level of metaphor at work in symbols which involve sex...

...There are vaginal and phallic symbols all over the mythical landscape, especially the Hindu part...

...We are gifted and cursed with teeth and claws and instincts which pull at us from where we have been and push us towards what we will be...

...It would not be a human improvement to file down our canine teeth because of what they imply about what we have come from...

...The language of Scripture is in some ways comparable...