Month: March 2007

Greeley bombs in Jesus-land

Devastating review of Andrew Greeley’s Jesus: A Meditation on His Stories and His Relationships with Women in Sun-Times:

Was Jesus eye candy? A dreamy Messiah who could walk on water and make women swoon? Does it matter?

Andrew Greeley caves to appearance-obsessed Americans in Jesus: A Meditation on His Stories and His Relationships With Women. This Jesus heals hearts and melts them, too.

The reviewer, Susan Hogan/Albach [sic] is billed as a veteran religion writer in Dallas and Minneapolis. She gives Greeley credit for writing “many distinguished books,adding, “but this isn’t one of them.” She praises him for “extolling [she means exhorting!] Catholics to rediscover the religious imagination that distinguishes and anchors their faith.”

But she skewers this book, which she says

reads like an adolescent fantasy about manhood and priesthood (priests represent Jesus). It’s salvation through titillation. Women are portrayed as shallow — a mindless mass of bodily desires who fall all over Jesus like Brad Pitt groupies.

She quotes the book to make the point:

“Because he represented the Father-in-Heaven … Jesus had to be the most charming man who ever lived,” Greeley writes. “His eyes, his expressions, his smiles, his posture, his laughter, must have melted human hearts, male and female.”

. . . . Greeley’s Jesus is a handsome, heavenly and happy celibate.

“Handsome people charm,” writes Greeley . . .

This is Greeley the romance novelist, letting his imagination run away with him. The man needs an editor but probably wouldn’t put up with one.

=====================

From Reader Cynthia:

Clearly, Greeley didn’t bother reading the part of the Bible that states that “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.” It was all spiritual. Or, as Jesus said, the people who came to him are those whom God drew to him.

From Reader D:

This review, if accurate, makes the book repulsive to me. (Well, like most of Greeley’s books.)

If we know St. Paul was a runt of a man with a hook nose and maybe a receding hairline — and he mesmerized everyone — why did Jesus have to be a super stud to have the same effect?

We have the shroud of Turin as a guide — they figure Jesus was taller than the average man of his day — if he had arresting eyes and a muscular build (as Fr. Corapi points out, a carpenter-before-power-tools) and a voice that made the message indelible — why would he stoop to tempting women to see him as a sex object? Why would he set it up so that women would be so distracted by their hormones they wouldn’t grasp his wisdom?

Boy, I hate thinking Jesus was a self-centered metro-sexual who would have blow-dried his hair if he could have. It goes without saying, in Greeley’s Gospel, the Women of Jerusalem on the Via Dolorosa, were groupies, eh?

I’m reminded of that poem Sheen used to quote about If Jesus Went to Birmingham — at the end “He cried for Calvary…”

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Respecting nature

Here’s a late-18th-century argument against abortion from a feminist milestone book:

“Women becoming, consequently, weaker, in mind and body, than they ought to be, [if] one of the grand ends of their being [were] taken into account, that of bearing and nursing children, have not sufficient strength to discharge the first duty of a mother; and sacrificing to lasciviousness the parental affection, that ennobles instinct, either destroy the embryo in the womb, or cast it off when born. Nature in everything demands respect, and those who violate her laws seldom do so with impunity.”

That’s Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) in her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, quoted in an email from Feminists for Life.

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Left in Cuba

Chi Trib’s Gary Marx and two other reporters have to leave the island paradise, but why are others still there? asks Investor’s Business Daily. 

Earlier this week, unexpelled Reuters correspondent Marc Frank wrote about Cuba’s latest failed sugar harvest, making no effort to look up why government price-setting creates the same disastrous result over and over. Like the Soviets of old, he blamed the weather.

Not everything Frank [an ex-People’s Daily World staffer] does is bad, but [he] states in many of his reports that Cuba’s economic problems are a byproduct of the U.S. embargo rather than the failures of socialism.

Not to be outdone, Anita Snow of the Associated Press is the go-to person for every Western fringe leftist visiting Cuba and parroting Castro’s priorities.

I’d say any time one is expelled by a government, the others are to be examined.  Remember: CNN hung on in Iraq by reporting Sadaam’s election victories with a straight face and ignoring atrocities, later claiming they could not report them without endangering sources.

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Chauffeurs for everybody!

This $70G chauffeur story has legs, let me tell you.  Correction on State of Blago posted a few days ago: It’s the Dept. of HS, not HR: that’s [In]Human Services, which apparently supplies In-service training for apparent liars and (female) sexual predators:

Legislators say state official lying on drivers

SPRINGFIELD — The head of state government’s largest [!] agency denied Wednesday that she and her top aide hired taxpayer-funded chauffeurs, but that’s not what her chief of staff said under oath last year in a federal sex harassment lawsuit.

While we’re at it, kudos (singular of Greek word for hearty congratulations, not plural of kudo) to Dave McKinney, Chris Fusco, Whitney Woodward (what, no email address?), and their editors for a good, hard lede.

It’s still the state of Blago, by the way, but he’s not in the story.

Later: Oops, he’s there:

[Pajama Lady] Wertz also testified that she and Estes [the chauffeur], who didn’t have a high-school diploma, were hired after working on Gov. Blagojevich’s campaign. She said both knew Louanner Peters, who is now one of Blagojevich’s two deputy governors.

Blago, we can’t say we hardly knew ye.