I, like many of my friends, greatly anticipated the restart of Cosmos by Neil DeGrasse Tyson. I like many things Tyson has done in the past, and he has a reputation for explaining sound science in language average people can understand and enjoy learning about. But he’s no historian. HisContinue Reading
A couple of months ago, I did a post about St. Valentine and how he has nothing to do with modern, secular celebrations of Valentine’s Day. I mentioned how hard it was to find good info online because so many sources mix-up folklore and urban legend with actual history. AndContinue Reading
In an amazing fluff piece on ABCnews.com, Noah (“It’s Like the Bible…with Explosions“) designer Mark Friedberg explained the effort put into creating the ark: In a featurette released by Paramount, Freidberg described the ark’s basic construction. “The ramp is meant to serve one function, for reptiles to be able to getContinue Reading
After a quick debate, I decided to file this under religion. I don’t always have to be scholarly.
My husband and I have seen the Noah trailer before. That’s why the new ending had us in tears today. I start laughing. Jerry, paying slightly less attention to the TV, asks why, and I tell him to replay the ad. He gets only that last line: “We believe theContinue Reading
Just days after I posted about the idolization of Pope Francis, Francis himself has stated: “To depict the pope as a sort of superman, a sort of star, seems offensive to me. The pope is a man who laughs, cries, sleeps tranquilly and has friends like everyone else, a normalContinue Reading
From the moment the current pope took the name Francis, which I knew had to be a nod to St. Francis of Assisi (a rich man who turned to poverty and tended to humanity for the rest of his life), I figured things were about to get interesting. That’s aContinue Reading
Oh, Valentine’s Day, how you don’t make any sense. Valentine’s Day comes from the Catholic Feast of St. Valentine, but even that holiday is problematic. There are at least three early saints with that name, and it’s not clear which one Feb. 14 was meant to celebrate. The Orthodox ChurchContinue Reading
Medieval marginalia is most known for being bizarre and offensive. It frequently is, but not always, particularly in earlier manuscripts. In the mid 12th century, Peter Lombard wrote a gloss of the psalms. That is, he created pages that displayed both the text of the Book of Psalms and hisContinue Reading
Three times a year – Easter, Halloween, and Christmas – I find myself assaulted by claims of how Christian practices and beliefs were entirely cobbled together from pagan sources. There are filters I put on certain searches in order to limit my annoyance, but I still run into them. First,Continue Reading