Six on Christianity and "Religious Values": Barr slams attacks on religious values, says 'moral upheaval' leading to societal ills; Paul Krugman: God Is Now Trump’s Co-Conspirator; William Barr explains how people who hate religion are ruining our co
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"But Ramanathan was also irritated by the biblical accounts of Jesus’s lineage to King David, seeing them as a needless diversion to satisfy Jewish audiences. As for Jesus’s resurrection, Ramanathan dismissed it as a “vulgar doctrine,” arguing that it must be understood symbolically, not literally. Ramanathan wrote two books about Jesus and also went on a speaking tour of the United States, where he told audiences that Christian ideas, such as the kingdom of God being within oneself or neighborly love, are not originally Christian but the “old Hindu doctrine, and it has been brought to you by your own religious teacher, Jesus Christ.”
This illustrates one of Sugirtharajah’s main points: that Asians decolonized Jesus, often by making him into an Eastern mystic whose teachings were profound but nothing special, and indeed were often inferior to Asian traditions. This was achieved not through strict academic inquiry but a selective and sometimes polemical reading of the Bible, in which useful passages were accepted and others were dismissed or ignored.
These were methods used by C.T. Alahasundram (1873–1941), who took his paternal grandfather’s name, Francis Kingsbury. Kingsbury also wrote a book about Jesus that ruthlessly omitted events he thought were useless or unconvincing to a person from the subcontinent. So out with the nativity story, the genealogical links to King David, and Jesus’s temptation. Instead, Kingsbury thought Jesus was mainly significant for his ethical views, which he equated with those of Buddha.
This drawing of equivalences between Jesus and local religious figures was also the method used by one of the book’s most striking figures, the Jain convert Manilal Parekh (1885–1967), who saw Jesus as a Tirthankara—a savior and spiritual teacher in the Jain faith. Parekh tried to cleanse Christianity of European culture and imperialism, for example by dismissing its denominational differences as having been introduced by European missionaries. As Sugirtharajah puts it, “He saw his task as making Jesus suitable and intelligible to Indian spirituality.”
Thus in Parekh’s book A Hindu’s Portrait of Jesus Christ (1953), he tossed out the virgin birth—a strange event that he saw as irrelevant to Jesus’s importance—and Jesus’s uniqueness as the only son of God, a claim he thought exaggerated. He also found much of Jesus’s life unappealing, describing him as a villager from Palestine with a narrow worldview who seemed unaware that his country was occupied by Rome. His “mental horizon,” according to Parekh, seemed “confined entirely to the Jewish world.”
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Catholicism and African identity
"Since its exact origins are unknown, so are the artistic intention behind the Jesus statue. However the figure’s blackness has made it an object of particular devotion for locals of African descent.
At the time of the arrival of Cristo Negro, the majority of the Portobelo’s population was of African descent. This cultural heritage is significant to the city’s identity and traditions.
The veneration of the statue represents one of many ways that the black residents of Portobelo and the surrounding Colón region of Panama have engendered a sense of resistance to racism and slavery.
Each year around the time of Lent, local men and women across Colón – where slavery was particularly widespread – dramatize the story of self-liberated black slaves known as the Cimarrones. This reenactment is one of a series of celebrations, or “carnivals,” observed around the time of Lent by those who identify with the cultural tradition known colloquially as “Congo.” The term Congo was originally used by the Spanish colonists for anyone of African descent. It is now is used for traditions that can be traced back to the Cimarrones.
During the carnival celebration, some local people dress up as the devil, meant to represent Spanish slave masters or complicit priests. Others don the dress of the Cimarrones.
Many of the participants in both the black Christ and carnival celebrations of Panama are Catholics as well. Together they participate to bring to light the Catholic Church’s complex relationship with Spanish colonization and slavery. Many Catholic leaders in the 16th to 18th centuries justified the enslavement of Africans and the colonization of the Americas, or at least did not object to it."
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"Only refugees who applied for and were denied asylum in a “safe third country” – in practice, Mexico – may then apply to the U.S. for protection.
As a Roman Catholic scholar, I look to the Bible for guidance in evaluating the Trump administration’s immigration policies, from the Muslim ban and the border wall to the new asylum rule.
At issue in all these policies, it seems to me, are deeper questions about what it means to welcome the stranger.
So, what does the Bible actually say?
We will all be strangers, sometime
The Bible affirms – strongly and clearly – the obligation to treat strangers with dignity and hospitality.
In “Love the Stranger,” an article written for the annual meeting of the College Theological Society, biblical scholar Alice Laffey states that in the Hebrew Bible, the words “gûr” and “gēr” are most often cited as referring to the “stranger,” though they are also translated as “newcomer” and “alien” or “resident alien,” respectively.
The Old Testament. Glenn Twiggs, CC BY-NC-NDIn the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, the word “gēr” appears almost 50 times. The fifth book, Deuteronomy, specifically sets out requirements for treating “the stranger” not just with courtesy but also with active support.
For example, Deuteronomy states that a portion of produce should be saved by farmers every third year and given to strangers, widows and orphans. In the “temple sermon” attributed to the prophet Jeremiah, the Jewish people are also exhorted to “not oppress the sojourner.”
Within the Hebrew Bible the requirements of hospitality are sometimes presented in shocking ways, as in the story from the book of Judges where a host offers his own daughter to rapists in order to protect his guest.
Of course, the Israelites themselves were “strangers” during their enslavement in Egypt and captivity in Babylon.
The Hebrew Bible recognizes that every one of us will be a stranger at some point in our lives.
The stranger is Jesus in disguise
In the New Testament, which Christians read together with the Hebrew Bible or “The Old Testament,” the most often cited passage dealing with welcoming the stranger is from Matthew 25: 31-40.
This section speaks of the Final Judgment, when the righteous will go to paradise and unrepentant sinners will be sent to eternal fire. Christ says to those at his right hand that they are “blessed” because “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”
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Christ replies, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”
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