entanglingbriars

[entanglingbriars]

Grad school is lying to you. You can indulge fixations on obscure topics on your own time. You can sit in a library color-coding notes on articles printed from JSTOR for free. You can argue with dead philosophers in essay format whenever you like. Academia is a state of mind.

#punk academia

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Watched Escaping Twin Flames last night. Highly recommended; mostly avoids the typical true crime approach to cult documentaries that I'm not really a fan of. It goes out of its way to be trans positive which may be why the terfs haven't picked up on it.

#cult #twin flames #escaping twin flames

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Submitted by @gerrysherry:

I clicked on one of the links ...

Respecting the Holocaust by Howard Zinn The Progressive magazine, November 1999 Fifteen years ago, when I was teaching at Boston University, I was asked by a Jewish group to give a talk on the Holocaust. I spoke that evening, but not about the Holocaust of World War II, the genocide of six million Jews. It was the mid-eighties, and the U.S. government was supporting death squads in Central America, so I spoke of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of peasants in Guatemala and El Salvador, victims of American policy. My point was that the memory of the Jewish Holocaust should not be circled by barbed wire, morally ghettoized, kept isolated from other atrocities in history. To remember what happened to the six million Jews, I said, served no important purpose unless it aroused indignation, anger, action against all atrocities, anywhere in the world. A few days later, in the campus newspaper, there was a letter from a faculty member who had heard me speak. He was a Jewish refugee who had left Europe for Argentina and then the United States. He objected strenuously to my extending the moral issue from Jews in Europe during the war to people in other parts of the world in our time. The Holocaust was a sacred memory, a unique event, he said. And he was outraged that, invited to speak on the Jewish Holocaust, I had chosen to speak about other matters.

Not sure what I was expecting.

(I'm sure many of you are already familiar with these names and texts, but all this is new to me).

#judaism #holocaust #shoah

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The difference between evangelicals and TradCats is that evangelicals ignore the Bible; TradCats ignore the Pope.

#humor

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It has to do with idolatry being the Worst Sin in Christianity. So if you want to emphasize that something is really really bad, the best way to do it is to say that the thing is idolatry.

I really don’t get the Christian ideology that loving something immediately means you are “worshipping” it

Like.

The the most common one they use for this is taylor swift

“Christian girls shouldn’t listen to Taylor swift”

“You’re worshipping a celebrity and that’s a sin”

Do they not understand that you can like something?

Why is everything suddenly worshipping?

#christianity #this happens in judaism too #and probably islam

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I don't think it would be a big deal for most Christians. We already have plenty of non-canonical Gospels, Epistles, and Apocalypses. They're cool and give us an insight into early Christianity, but no mainstream Christians use them for theology.

What would happen, religiously, if there are early Christian texts deciphered by the Vesuvius Project? Canonically, there is a sense that if it didn't survive to be assessed at Nycaea, God didn't want it included in the Bible.

But there would also be an argument of "God was saving this for when we were ready", as well.

And seeing the doctrinal questions resolved in real time would be fascinating. Like, obviously it would be interesting to see what happens to something genuinely challenging. But there are complicated theological questions even if it's "yet another letter from Paul". Hell, there would be some really interesting questions related to known texts entirely unfiltered by Nycaea and copy errors.

#christianity #bible #biblical studies #new testament #the noncanonical shit is way cool #the protoevangelium of james is a must-read

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Oh

My God

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And “white evangelicalism” is not a demographic category. The adjective “white” does not refer to the demography of its adherents, but to the content of its theology and of its politics. (The white politics determines the white theology. And vice versa.)

What is the difference between white and non-white evangelical Christians? It is not that the former are white and the latter are not, but that the theology of the former is white and the theology of the latter is not.

And why is that? Because:

1. Non-white evangelicals insist on the full humanity of non-white people.

2. White evangelicals do not.

- Fred Clark

#christianity #american christianity #white christianity #fred clark #slacktivist #racism #theology

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I've said it before and I'll say it again: only Pseudo-Paul is inspired.

(Also, just because something is actually Pseudo-Augustine, Pseudo-Chrysostom, or Ambrosiaster doesn't mean it's bad; just for the sake of truth it's good to remember where things are actually from)

#sarcasm

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if the church had any sense they'd make paul the patron saint of social media discourse blogs but y'all ain't ready for that

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Istanbul, Turkey

Istanbul, Turkey

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"Christianity is the one false religion."

#christianity #atheism

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I based my post off of how OOP defined zionism, which was not Jewish immigration to Palestine but the "right to national self-determination in their ancestral homeland." I'm aware there were (frankly fringe) forms of zionism that were less than that, but those weren't what OOP was talking about so I didn't see a need to address them.

obligatory “not all X”, but broadly speaking this is a fantastic explanation of why ‘zionism’ (or ‘anti-zionism’) is a term that badly needs definition whenever it is deployed.

#zionism #israel #palestine

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Okay but like... you can't have the right to national self determination in our ancestral homeland with dispossessing or marginalizing the Palestinian Arab population. Zionism as an ideal can't be separated from zionism as it has been practiced because zionism as an ideal always required some form of Palestinian dispossesion or disenfranchisement.

obligatory “not all X”, but broadly speaking this is a fantastic explanation of why ‘zionism’ (or ‘anti-zionism’) is a term that badly needs definition whenever it is deployed.

#zionism #palestine #israel #judaism #colonialism #nationalism

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Orthodox Christians also have priests rather than pastors, and some Anglican/Episcopalian Christians use the term "priest" as well, depending on how high church they are.

Protestants use "pastor" because they believe in the priesthood of all believers and therefore don't believe that ordination confers a special ontological status.

Okay so according to my grandpa a priest is withh the Catholics and a pastor is with everyone else. In case you were wondering

#christianity

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The Christianization of African-Americans

Postcolonial American culture's preoccupation with breaking away from Europe was far removed from the situation among Africans in the United States at the time. The initial tenacity with which African Americans held onto their indigenous practices and the reluctance of many Southern white slaveholders to teach Christianity to the slaves limited the Christianizing process in the early period. Even the Great Awakening of the 1740s, which swept the country like a hurricane, failed to reach the masses of slaves. Only with the Great Western Revival at the turn of the nineteenth century did the Christianizing process gain a significant foothold among black people. The central questions at this junction are: Why did large numbers of American black people become Christians? What features of Protestant Christianity persuaded them to become Christian? The Baptist separatists and the Methodists, religious dissenters in American religious culture, gained the attention of the majority of slaves in the Christianizing process. The evangelical outlook of these denominations stressed individual experience, equality before God, and institutional autonomy. Baptism by immersion, practiced by Baptists, may indeed have reminded slaves from Nigeria and Dahomey of African river cults, but fails to fully explain the success of the Christianizing process among Africans. Black people became Christians for intellectual, existential, and political reasons. Christianity is, as Friedrich Nietzsche has taught us and liberation theologians remind us, a religion especially fitted to the oppressed. It looks at the world from the perspective of those below. The African slaves' search for identity could find historical purpose in the exodus of Israel out of slavery and personal meaning in the bold identification of Jesus Christ with the lowly and downtrodden. Christianity also is first and foremost a theodicy, a triumphant account of good over evil. The intellectual life of the African slaves in the United States —like that of all oppressed peoples— consisted primarily of reckoning with the dominant form of evil in their lives. The Christian emphasis on against-the-evidence hope for triumph over evil struck deep among many of them. The existential appeal of Christianity to black people was the stress of Protestant evangelicalism on individual experience, and especially the conversion experience. The "holy dance" of Protestant evangelical conversion experience closely resembled the "ring shout" of West African novitiate rites: both are religious forms of ecstatic bodily behavior in which everyday time is infused with meaning and value through unrestrained rejoicing. The conversion experience played a central role in the Christianizing process. It not only created deep bonds of fellowship and a reference point for self-assurance during times of doubt and distress; it also democratized and equalized the status of all before God. The conversion experience initiated a profoundly personal relationship with God, which gave slaves a special self-identity and self-esteem in stark contrast with the roles imposed upon them by American society. The primary political appeal of the Methodists and especially of the Baptists for black people was their church polity and organizational form, free from hierarchical control, open and easy access to leadership roles, and relatively loose, uncomplicated requirements for membership. The adoption of the Baptist polity by a majority of Christian slave marked a turning point in the Afro-American experience [...] Independent control over their churches promoted the proliferation of African styles and manners within the black Christian tradition and liturgy. It also produced community-minded political leaders, polished orators, and activist journalists and scholars. In fact, the unique variant of American life that we call Afro-American culture germinated in the bosom of this Afro-Christianity, in the Afro-Christian church congregations.

- Cornel West ("Race and Modernity," from his Reader, pages 61-63, 63)

#christianity #american christianity #black christianity #cornel west

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[sic] is my favorite editorial notation because of its inherent bitchiness.