Maybe you have been struck by how extraordinarily popular Elaine Pagels’ new book on the Gospel of Thomas has become. It’s not as scholarly as her previous books, but it’s no light read. My suspicion is that a great many struggling Catholics have bought this book, in order to find some help as to how they can maintain their faith in the Gospels, in the sacraments and in the people of God, while withholding obedience to a hierarchy that has so obviously lost its way. Pagels’ book is wrenching for its own spiritual honesty; and inspiring in its search for the message of Jesus buried under layers of church politics and power for so long. If you haven’t read it, I recommend it – at least as much for the questions it helps sharpen as much as any answers it might provide. Because the quality of the teaching priesthood is now, by and large, so execrably low, Catholics have long tried to understand their faith on their own. And it’s encouraging to see some of the frustrations many of us now have going back to the earliest days of the Church. I loved the story of Tertullian who saw both sides of orthodoxy and dissent:
Not long afterward, Tertullian, already famous as a champion of orthodoxy, himself joined the new prophecy and defended its members as genuinely spirit-filled Christians. Although to this day, Tertullian stands among the “fathers of the church,” at the end of his life he turned against what, at this point, he now began to call “the church of a bunch of bishops.”
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
J-LO – VICTIM: Yes, the Observer of London espies in the popular ridicule of Jennifer Lopez yet one more reason to loathe America – she’s targeted because she’s a minority:
No one but Lopez and Gonzalez could have known what was said during their two-hour meeting, no one except every journalist in the United States and beyond. ‘Voodoo psychic adviser to J-Lo blamed for stars axing big day’ screamed the headlines, which sounded utterly ridiculous to anyone in their right mind, although perhaps not to Jennifer Lopez herself. After all, she knows better than anyone what life in America is like for a Latina actress with ambition.
If that kind of money, fame and glamor is a function of “what life in America is like for a Latina actress with ambition,” then bring it on.
WOMEN AGAINST ARNOLD: No one has yet accused Arnold Schwarzenegger of sexual harrassment of workplace underlings or rape. So where were these “women’s groups” during the Clinton administration? Shilling for the abuser. And why didn’t the reporter ask about their double standards?
The Dish 