Bible Characters
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What’s So Extraordinary about Mary?
I have often heard it said in church circles that the Catholic church makes too much of Mary while the Protestant arm of the body makes too little. Not until I really looked into the life and decisions of Mary did I begin to realize how subversive, brave, and significant Mary is to the church, particularly women. She contributes some incredibly important and often overlooked encouragement to the role of women within the church. 1: Mary accepts God’s call on her life without consulting the men in her life. Mary doesn’t ask Gabriel to wait while she consults Joseph on this new development. She must be well aware that becoming…
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The Danger of a Mask: The Judas Flaw
The reason nearly every horror villain wears a mask is that a mask can turn anyone into a monster. Not every mask is monstrous, of course, but the moment we begin to hide our true face, the moral slide has begun. In an American literature course I once taught, I asked the students to choose the one poem that really hit them during the class and write on it. Most of them chose We Wear the Mask by Paul Laurence Dunbar: We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes… They each wrote about the same thing; how every day they had…
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Naked and Afraid: The Genesis Episodes and Shame
Naked and Afraid: The Genesis Episodes The red squiggly lines of spell check lets me know that unshaming is not a word, and I am a disgrace for using it. Even my computer shames me. Shaming others has become something of a national pastime. Even our country, the United States is famous for baseball, apple pie, and internet humiliation. I suppose that shame’s allure is in the illusion of control. If we mortify people effectively enough, then they won’t do things that either they ought not or that we wish they wouldn’t. But how effective is it really? How safe does shame really keep us? Shame sneers at human frailty…
