on being the Easter people, and what this means for our view of Islam

Last updated on: March 28, 2016 at 11:49 am By Rebecca Bratten Weiss

During this Easter season, I implore my fellow Christians to extend hands in friendship to Muslims in our communities - geographic or virtual - who are, often, living in fear due to escalating Islamophobia. Let's remember to lay the blame for violence not on "Muslims" but on the actual groups guilty of doing the deeds. Even if this whole Christian pacifist thing sounds too hippie dippy to suit your fancy, remember: this may be our only hope to subdue the rising surge of extremist violence, so it is, unlike martyrdom, rather practical. Read more

risen, and not undead (or, why Jesus is not a zombie)

Last updated on: March 27, 2016 at 8:37 pm By Rebecca Bratten Weiss

“Dreamt that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived. Awake and find no baby. I think about the little thing all day. Not in good spirits.” This Mary Shelley wrote in her journal, a few weeks after the death of her premature daughter. A year later, in her novel Frankenstein, she would present the literary world with a very different spectacle of the... Read more

the descent to the underworld

Last updated on: March 25, 2016 at 10:54 pm By Rebecca Bratten Weiss

This nothingness, this emptiness, is sometimes worse than the passion of grief or the melancholy of mourning. It is a kind of erasure, all meaning lost, a blank beige wall looming up against the sky. God is dead. Perhaps there never was a God. Perhaps nothing ever happened, ever, and there has only been this deadness, this emptiness, the blank beige wall. Maybe four blank beige walls. Maybe you are trapped. Read more

How Can We Call this Friday Good?

Last updated on: March 30, 2018 at 11:19 am By Rebecca Bratten Weiss

Good Friday suffering happens in the moment of profound darkness when it is impossible to imagine that anything ever could be bright again Read more

Holy Thursday and the Carnivalesque

Last updated on: March 29, 2018 at 3:54 pm By Rebecca Bratten Weiss

Depictions of the life of Jesus, in film, vacillate between the sentimental and the gory. But the events of Holy Thursday would probably best be depicted in a Coen Brothers film. Absurd expectations, cocksure males, ridiculous injuries, strange banter, overturned expectations. Read more

Disturbing Nature

Last updated on: March 30, 2018 at 10:53 pm By Rebecca Bratten Weiss

Nature is violent, but innocent. And it can't be a basis for ethics. Read more

pregnant, catholic, and unmarried: unconventional families and the catholic church

Last updated on: March 27, 2016 at 9:59 pm By Rebecca Bratten Weiss

It's a shame that the veneration of Mary often is embroidered with a subtle rhetoric of shaming of other women, because Mary is not our enemy; she is our advocate. She knows our suffering. In a way, every poor, isolated, unmarried, pregnant woman is for us an image of Mary Theotokos. If we are to see the face of Christ in everyone, where else is Jesus so clearly present in the paradox of his vulnerability, even his invisibility, as in the unborn child of an unmarried woman, in a culture that despises her? Read more

on the genealogy of feminine virtue

Last updated on: March 25, 2016 at 4:30 pm By Rebecca Bratten Weiss

We are taught from early on how to be women. And then, at some point, for some earlier, others later, sometimes having read a significant book, sometimes having had an epiphany, we realize that we have been training ourselves not to be ourselves. If being a woman is so natural, so universal, so absolute, why must we be taught these many subterfuges, hiding away the natural beneath the artifice? There is in the art of presenting “a woman” a... Read more

relativism for me, but not for thee

Last updated on: March 17, 2016 at 11:21 am By Rebecca Bratten Weiss

“He was a creature of his time.” Thus we excuse past slave-owners, war criminals, and wife beaters – so long as they are notable for having contributed significantly to art, politics, civilization, or religion. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, but we are encouraged by polite history to gloss over this, or to emphasize instead his interest in gradual emancipation. Jefferson may even be presented as a hero precisely for holding less extreme supremacist views than his contemporaries. Reluctance to tarnish national... Read more

public assistance, or private charity?

Last updated on: March 16, 2016 at 3:12 pm By Rebecca Bratten Weiss

One common criticism of public assistance or government welfare programs, that they are poorly managed, should be taken not as a rationale for scrapping all such programs, but rather as incentive to reform them. Also, the same criticism could be made of various charitable organizations, many of which are run by scandalously wealthy executives, while only a fraction of what they take in goes to the supposed recipients. See Charity Navigator for information on which organizations actually give most of their proceeds... Read more