Boston archbishop reopens occupied parish

Hallelujah! It seems you can fight the Cathedral.
A brave and united group of parishioners have been living, sleeping and praying in their church, St. Albert's in Boston, for ten months since Archbishop Sean O'Malley ordered it to close. http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2005/06/15/weymouth_parish_achieves_vigils_goal/?tr=y&auid=952563 St. Albert's was officially declared reopened as a parish in good standing with the Boston archdiocese. This is good news for the Holy Spirit, who must have been tired of hovering around vaguely above the steeple, waiting for the official mandate to reenter. What a historic event in relations between the hierarchy and the informed, devoted laypeople of Boston.

The making of a Christian sex activist

Tomorrow PBS will premiere The Education of Shelby Knox, a documentary about a young Texas woman who found an activist voice while protesting her Texas high school's abstinence-only sex ed policy. Shelby Knox, a devout Christian, ended up at odds with her pastor over what she sees as a dangerous and short-sighted educational policy. Looks like an important angle on the relationship between church and state: PBS tomorrow at ten

A modern, haunting vision of Christ

"Where would Christ appear to us today? Undoubtedly not in the elegant town centers of Vienna or Salzburg but out there in the slums of major cities, amongst the homeless and AIDS victims..." -- Bettina Rheims

A photographer who specializes in the female form collaborated with an art historian to create a cool, modern, deeply thoughtful series of images and meditations on the life of Christ. The text includes Scripture and medieval mystics (and, remarkably, that quote misattributed to Ecclesiates I've talked about here); it was clearly created in a reverential spirit, to place the unorthodox images in a meditative context. Jesus is depicted as male and female, as people of several different backgrounds; being tempted by club kids, helping the modern needy, surrounded by "saints" who sometimes emit a properly iconic glow and who sometimes perfectly corporealize the lost and broken, human quality that we tend to forget probably characterized those who followed Christ in the flesh, as it characterizes his followers of today. You can see some of Rheims' photos here, but I think they're better with the text. Check it out; you might feel angry or offended; if you walk back to the book, I believe you'll be inspired to think. It's easy to abuse religious imagery in a one-dimensional way purely to upset people, but I don't think that's what Rheims, or the text's author Serge Bramly, mean to do.