A Follow-up on TLRJ

*The Latest Real Jesus:

Of Gnostics and Religion Professors:

In September, Harvard Divinity School professor Karen King ignited an international controversy when she claimed to have found a piece of what she claims is a fourth-century papyrus that refers to Jesus’ “wife”.[1] (To be fair, she doesn’t claim that she believes that Jesus was married, only that whomever wrote the scroll believed He was. Of course, most of the media coverage didn’t make the fine distinction and played it up as evidence that orthodox Christianity was wrong and/or hiding the truth.) There’s been plenty of criticism of King and her claim and even the way she went public about it.

Read the whole thing.

(Via Bettnet.com - Musings of Domenico Bettinelli.)

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

was supposed to Mao's strategy. Is this more of the same from the new orthodoxy?

BREAKING: Conn. Bill Proposing to Restructure Catholic Church Pulled, Hearing Postponed:

By Kathleen Gilbert
HARTFORD, Connecticut, March 10, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Following widespread outrage from the Catholic community, a Connecticut bill seeking unprecedented regulation of the Catholic Church has been temporarily pulled and its public hearing postponed while legislators...

Read the whole thing.

(Via LifeSiteNews.com Headlines.)

Liberal Fascism

I had occasion to write about competing orthodoxies. There are a number of disturbing things going on that indicate that the intolerance of the new orthodoxy is be ratcheted up:

Proposition 8 Thuggery:

When eerily convenient Prop-8 directories and Google maps were released earlier this winter, accounts of threats and thuggery began accumulating. But how much of this was real intimidation from the left, and how much was the pretense of doom from the right?

Read the whole thing.

(Via First Things.)

Difficult Times Ahead

First Things is running a retrospective series of The Public Square in memory of Father Neuhaus. The current one has a lovely, Chestertonian quote:

I’ll presume to call it Neuhaus’ Law, or at least one of his several laws: Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed.

Read the whole thing, if you can.

My simpler and less eloquent explanation is that there is only orthodoxy and the periods between orthodoxies. When toleration for orthodoxy is the policy it means that the new orthodoxy is preparing to turn and seek the eradication of the old.

The new orthodoxies in politics and religion are seeking to suppress the old. Pro-lifers are arrested for peacefully protesting abortion or seeking to talk to women going into abortuaries. A new orthodoxy seeks to intimidate adherents of the old into silence. A new "orthodoxy" is fighting a rear-guard action against a re-surgent old orthodoxy. There are troubles ahead. Batten down the hatches.