I've recently returned to faith and Redeemed Zoomer (even though I'm not reformed) has been a great source of information, inspiration and fun content. I just want to say that I don't agree with everything he says, but what are your thoughts on him? Do you have any other cool channels to recommend?

Ahead of the 2025 Jubilee, the Vatican has launched a cartoon mascot unveiled Monday as the cheerful face of the Catholic Church’s upcoming holy year.
The mascot, named Luce — which means “light” in Italian — is intended to engage a younger audience and guide visitors through the holy year.

Archbishop Rino Fisichella, the Vatican’s chief organizer for the jubilee, described the mascot as part of the Vatican’s goal to engage with “the pop culture so beloved by our young people.”
The mascot will debut this week at the Lucca Comics and Games, Italy’s celebrated convention for all things comics, video games, and fantasy, where the Vatican’s Dicastery for Evangelization will host a space dedicated to “Luce and Friends.”
It will be the first time that a Vatican dicastery participates in a comics convention. Fisichella, who serves as the the pro-prefect of the Dicastery for Evangelization’s section for the new evangelization, said he hopes taking part in the convention “will allow us to speak to younger generations about the theme of hope, which is more central than ever in the evangelical message.”

Clad in a yellow raincoat, mud-stained boots, and a pilgrim’s cross, Luce’s mission is to guide young pilgrims toward hope and faith with her trusty dog Santino at her side. Shells glimmer in her eyes, recalling the scallop shell of the Camino de Santiago, an emblem of the pilgrimage journey.
Speaking at a Vatican press conference on Oct. 28 next to a plastic figurine of Luce, Fisichella described Luce’s shining eyes as “a symbol of the hope of the heart.”
Luce, he said, will also be the face of the Holy See’s pavilion at Expo 2025 in Osaka, Japan.

Simone Legno, the Italian co-founder of the pop culture brand tokidoki, designed Luce and her “pilgrim friends” — Fe, Xin, and Sky, each outfitted in brightly colored jackets.
Luce’s yellow sailor’s raincoat is a nod to both the Vatican flag and to journeying through life’s storms. The mascot’s muddy boots represent a long and difficult journey, while her staff symbolizes the pilgrimage toward eternity.

Legno, who admitted a lifelong love for Japanese pop culture, said he hopes that “Luce can represent the sentiments that resonate in the hearts of the younger generations.”

linky to bigger picture

The renowned Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez Merino, considered the father of Liberation Theology, died this October 22 at the age of 96, as confirmed by the Province of the Dominicans in Peru, a religious order to which he belonged since 2001.

linky to ap

All I'm doing is looking at videos reviewing prayer books and every time I am getting these weird gun ads.

"Oh, you're Christian? DON'T YOU WANT THESE REALLY COOL INSTRUMENTS OF VIOLENCE AND DEATH!?"

Like....no. What?

I’ll still strive to work and care for the oppressed because it’s the right thing to do, but I will strive to no longer be surprised or despair when everything fails.

Primacy of Conscience though I guess

cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4986827

[My favorite segment.]

Reb Yechiel Michel, a humble and holy rebbe, a Talmud of the Baal Shem Tov was approached by a man for a blessing. ‘Rebbe, I can’t even afford to give charity.’ The rebbe blessed him, and his fortune changed. Each year, he became wealthier and wealthier. At first, he did give charity, but the richer he became, the more his heart hardened until it closed altogether.

‘This is too much. I didn't build this house to be continually bothered. Out, out!’ So the man put a guard at the gate and turned the beggars and the poor away. When Reb Yechiel heard this, he immediately made plans to visit the man.

‘But rebbe, he has turned away from the Torah. He will never let you in.’ ‘He has a guard at the gate.’

‘Order me the suit of a rich man, and hire the finest coach and horses money can buy.’ And so they did. Arriving at the gate, he was stopped by the guard. Handing the man a gold coin, the rebbe spoke to him with authority. ‘Open up, I'm here to do business with your master.’ Taking the gold coin, the guard opened the gates.

Instantly, as the rebbe was ushered in, the wealthy man recognized him. ‘How dare you enter my house under false pretenses‽’

‘I am pleased [that] you recognize me. It is a pity [that] you have forgotten yourself.’

‘What do you want from me?’

‘What a fine mirror you have. Wrought in gold and silver.’ Turning to the wealthy man, he raised the mirror in front of him. ‘What do you see?’

‘Myself.’

The rebbe stepped to the window. Outside, knowing the rebbe was visiting the wealthy man, people had begun to gather. ‘Now what do you see?’

‘People.’

[Turning the mirror to him again.] ‘And now?’

‘Myself.’

Then turning the mirror over, the rebbe peeled away the silver backing. Lifting the silver in the palm of his hand, the rebbe asked, ‘What is the Hebrew name for this?’

‘Keseph.’

‘Silver, what is the other meaning of keseph?’

‘Money.’

‘Money misused can be like a mirror. You see only yourself.’ Stepping again to the window, the rebbe held the mirror up in front of it. ‘Now what do you see?’

‘People.’

‘Wealth well used is a blessing. The problem is, we forget it. You asked me what I want from you. The real question is, what do you truly want of yourself? You're a good man, that's why G‐d blessed you. Don't let silver make you forget it.’ With that, the rebbe left. Repentant for the rest of his life, the wealthy man became a beloved man of charity, even changing his family name to Rehe El, which means ‘the mirror that belongs to G‐d.’

I know that this video is somewhat off‐topic, but a minor goal of mine is to see more Christians learn about and cherish Judaism, not necessarily convert to it (something that Jews actually discourage!) but rather adore it as a blessing and a source of wisdom.

This was taken from a blog post written by JD Vance in 2001 btw

Like…even if you believe all the great man propaganda about him they spew in the West, the idea that you would ever think to compare someone like Churchill to Christ is so fucking borderline blasphemous to me.

“Oh, who do I believe is the second greatest man to ever live as the pious Christian I totally am? Francis of Asissi? Any Saint? No, it’s some fat alcoholic racist Warhawk.”

Fucking spare me.

Matthew records controversies between Jesus and the Pharisees that reflect serious differences over how to observe the Sabbath. Although few today believe that Matthew opposed the Jewish Sabbath, polemics and confessional biases have prevented a fair reassessment of the Pharisees’ own Sabbath praxis.

The late Uruguayan theologian Juan Luis Segundo fared better than many of his contemporaries, discerning in Matthew a clash between Jesus and the Pharisees over an ethical dilemma: What to do on the Sabbath when the obligation to love God conflicted with the command to love the neighbor?⁴¹ Segundo was right to emphasize that, like Matthew, rabbinic (used by Segundo interchangeably with “Pharisaic”) teaching places the love of God and the neighbor above “holocausts and sacrifices.”

He was mistaken though to suppose that this rabbinic prioritization could emerge from the Prophets (e.g., 1 Sam 15:22) but not the Mosaic Torah. As we saw, rabbinic exegesis turned to the Torah of Moses (e.g., Lev 18:5) to justify placing human life above the Sabbath (and most commandments).

The problem is that none of Jesus’ interventions on the Sabbath as reported in Matthew (or in any other Gospel) deal with life‐threatening matters. Matthew specifies that Jesus’ followers plucked grain on the Sabbath because they were hungry. But were they starving? Jesus healed a man with a withered hand. Yet Matthew provides no indication that this condition posed an imminent threat to the man’s life.

Feeding the hungry and healing the sick do admittedly represent acts of mercy, doing “good” (Matt 12:7, 12), which is consonant with the Sabbath’s raison d’être, a day that God “blessed” (Gen 2:3).

Nevertheless, we have speculated from a Jewish Latin‐American perspective that the Pharisees would have deemed that any effort requiring “work,” however good, trespassed the divine imperative to honor the passive, peaceful mode of Sabbatical cessation, which was instituted at creation (Gen 2:3) and designed to liberate humanity from perpetual procurement and self‐reliance.

On the Sabbath, Israel (and those who join Israel in the Sabbatical rest) is already free as it were from all worldly preoccupations, harms, and strife. This perspective certainly resonates with Latin American theologies of liberation, which, naturally so, have focused on how Jesus embodies the spirit of the Sabbath through his ministry on behalf of the poor, the sick, and the oppressed. My Jewish Latin‐American reconstruction, however, seeks to balance this evaluation by also considering the Pharisees’ point of view.

Presumably, the Pharisees did not remain aloof from the harsh realities of the imperfected world they inhabited. They knew that the sick and suffering were counted among Israel’s children and humanity at large. They too were struck with hardship and disease.

However, the test, indeed, the commandment, in the eyes of the Pharisees (and other first‐century Jews) was to remain at ease on this day despite the unfavorable circumstances, to faithfully trust in divine providence. By abiding in the Sabbath rest, they hoped to transcend human worries. The Pharisees would have agreed with the rabbinic dictum: “It is the Sabbath [when one refrains] from crying out, and healing is soon to come.”⁴²

There are a LOT of young, white leftists who canonize John Brown without internalizing a shred of what he fought & died for

Some of them are atheists or agnostics, others may be religious

I don't think it particularly matters though

Just today I saw a "John Brown stan account" on Bluesky condemning nonviolent usamerican protestors for "supporting Hamas"

When all number of people attacked him for his display of deeply ironic hypocrisy, he invoked Brown's name as a shield in a way that reminded me of how neoliberals invoke MLK Jr to argue against black power (which is no less absurd)

It's not the first time I've seen Brown's name abused this way, and it likely won't be the last

I believe that for many, John Brown serves as their non-problematic white saviour, an idol to project themselves onto

We must oppose this juvenile power fantasy, but even that is not enough

We must also recognize that even as we discard the rubbish of Great Man theory, John Brown still has an important place in our historical memory

I'm at the point today where I tend to invoke his name alongside the names of Helen Keller, Naim Ateek, Des Wilson, Malcolm X etc, all notable figures in liberation theology

We must seek not to canonize him into some secular sainthood, but rather understand and analyze his place in the extensive, often overlooked history of liberation theology

wtf..

I will never know what the solider was doing on her computer. But I suspect that she and the colleague who stood beside her Googled my name and found my articles and essays on Islam. In college, I’d published a bit on Islam and my experiences of Muslim-Christian dialogue. It wasn’t much—mostly blogging and one published piece, and nothing on Israel-Palestine—but it seems to have been significant enough to ruffle the soldier’s feathers. Dialoging with Muslims and trying to upend anti-Muslim stereotypes shouldn’t be problematic, but being Muslim or Arab, or seeming to sympathize with them, is often met with ire at [Zionism’s] border. There are a couple dynamics at play.

First, closeness with Muslims is often viewed (rightly or wrongly) as synonymous with support for the Palestinians. And second, [neocolonialism] benefits from Islamophobia; if Americans and others have negative perceptions of Muslims (including Palestinian Muslims) it makes the subjugation of the Palestinians all the more palatable. As we walked away from the window, I took a mental note: anything you write could be Googled and used as reason to deny you entry next time.

Before and after that trip, I heard lots of stories from Arabs, white Americans, and others who’d gone through much, much worse at the Allenby Crossing or at Ben Gurion airport: forced to wait for hours without their passport; searched and patted down in undignified ways; interrogated about religion, family, and other personal matters; and insulted and treated as inferior.

In some cases, travelers were turned away completely, especially those who were known to participate in activism on behalf of Palestinian rights. Knowing all of this, and having had my own suspicious experience, when I returned from the Holy Land I didn’t write anything publicly about what occurred at the border, not to mention the injustices I witnessed.

[…]

I know that, in many ways, all of this writing is too little too late. If I—and the many other Americans who have traveled to the Holy Land and have seen similar things—had shared these stories sooner, maybe things would be a bit different now.

As disappointing as it would be to not return to the Holy Land—I love that place deeply—I’ll be content with the four incredible experiences I’ve had, which outnumber what most people will get. Many Palestinians, whether they live in the West Bank, Gaza, or in the diaspora, have never been able to visit the sites I have, to walk through and become familiar with the places from which their ancestors hailed. Unlike me, they have been denied the chance to feel the spray of the sea water of the Galilee, to smell spices wafting down the stone corridors of Jerusalem’s Old City, and to touch the tombs of Jesus, Abraham, and other holy figures.

It may turn out that, one day, I will get to return. Even despite my writing, as a white Catholic woman I will undoubtedly face fewer barriers to entry than my friends who are Arab or Muslim. And perhaps the [neocolonial] guards didn’t Google me after all. Maybe the musing of a Midwestern girl are not a concern to a major world power…

Either way, I feel compelled to write, to speak about what I’ve seen and learned. So you can expect to read further stories about Israel-Palestine here on Digging Our Well. It’s beyond time for me to take advantage of the fact that I was able to cross the Jordan, even despite my name.

Here at the Church of Santa Maria Magdalena, in the heart of Rome, administering mass is very much a male affair. In fact, throughout the Roman Church, the corridors of power are full of men. Women have a rôle, but it’s as a mother; virgin; wife. The churches argued that it’s a model which extends right back to the time of Jesus himself. The four Gospels all record that he chose twelve disciples, and that they were all men. It follows, they argued, that the priestly office should be held only by men, in imitation of Jesus’s decision two thousand years ago.

But among the many remarkable discoveries in Nag Hammadi were gospels which painted women in a very different light, the way [that] they came to be portrayed within the canonical Gospels. In Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, women are barely mentioned, and certainly Jesus didn’t have any female disciples, but in the suppressed Gospels of Philip and Mary, and in the Acts of Thecla and Paul, the picture is very different.

Far from being minor characters, these gospels reveal a church where in the first centuries after Jesus’s death, women took centre stage. And even more surprising: they suggest that in the years of Jesus’s life, women were even involved at the heart of his mission. And one of these texts suggests that there was one woman in particular who played a very important rôle in Jesus’s ministry. She’s someone who’s more usually associated with prostitution and madness than teaching the word of G‐d. She’s the bad girl of Christianity: Mary Magdalene.

For centuries, in art and literature, Mary Magdalene has been depicted as the repentant sinner: the woman who washed Jesus’s feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. But with the new discoveries of Nag Hammadi, a radically different and far more controversial picture of Mary is emerging.

In these texts, Mary appears very frequently as one of Jesus’s prominent disciples, and in one of the Nag Hammadi documents, in a text attributed to another of Jesus’s apostles, there’s an even more striking revelation. In a relatively unknown work, the Gospel of Philip, Mary Magdalene plays a key rôle and it is implied within that Gospel that her relationship with Jesus wasn’t just spiritual.

…wow.

The Revelation consists of a series of visions. In the first Christ appears in the garb of a high priest, goes in the midst of seven candlesticks representing the seven churches of Asia and dictates to “John” messages to the seven “angels” of those churches. Here at the very beginning we see plainly the difference between this Christianity and Constantine’s universal religion formulated by the Council of Nicaea.

The Trinity is not only unknown, it is even impossible. Instead of the one Holy Ghost of later we here have the “seven spirits of God” construed by the Rabbis from Isaiah XI, 2. Christ is the son of God, the first and the last, the alpha and the omega, by no means God himself or equal to God, but on the contrary, “the beginning of the creation of God,” hence an emanation of God, existing from all eternity but subordinate to God, like the above-mentioned seven spirits.

In Chapter XV, 3 the martyrs in heaven sing “the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb” glorifying God. Hence Christ here appears not only as subordinate to God but even, in a certain respect, on an equal footing with Moses. Christ is crucified in Jerusalem (XI, 8) but rises again (I, 5, 18); he is “the Lamb” that has been sacrificed for the sins of the world and with whose blood the faithful of all tongues and nations have been redeemed to God.

Here we find the basic idea which enabled early Christianity to develop into a universal religion. All Semitic and European religions of that time shared the view that the gods offended by the actions of man could be propitiated by sacrifice; the first revolutionary basic idea (borrowed from the Philonic school) in Christianity was that by the one great voluntary sacrifice of a mediator the sins of all times and all men were atoned for once for all — in respect of the faithful.

Thus the necessity of any further sacrifices was removed and with it the basis for a multitude of religious rites: but freedom from rites that made difficult or forbade intercourse with people of other confessions was the first condition of a universal religion.

In spite of this the habit of sacrifice was so deeply rooted in the customs of peoples that Catholicism — which borrowed so much from paganism — found it appropriate to accommodate itself to this fact by the introduction of at least the symbolical sacrifice of the mass. On the other hand there is no trace whatever of the dogma of original sin in our book.

But the most characteristic in these messages, as in the whole book, is that it never and nowhere occurs to the author to refer to himself and his co-believers by any other name than that of Jews. He reproaches the members of the sects in Smyrna and Philadelphia against whom he fulminates with the fact that they

“say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan”;

of those in Pergamos he says: they hold the doctrine of Balaam, who taught Balac to cast a stumbling-block before the children of Israel, to eat things sacrificed unto idols, and to commit fornication. Here it is therefore not a case of conscious Christians but of people who say they are Jews. Granted, their Judaism is a new stage of development of the earlier but for that very reason it is the only true one.

Hence, when the saints appeared before the throne of God there came first 144,000 Jews, 12,000 from each tribe, and only after them the countless masses of heathens converted to this renovated Judaism. That was how little our author was aware in the year 69 of the Christian era that he represented quite a new phase in the development of a religion which was to become one of the most revolutionary elements in the history of the human mind.

We therefore see that the Christianity of that time, which was still unaware of itself, was as different as heaven from earth from the later dogmatically fixed universal religion of the Nicene Council; one cannot be recognized in the other. Here we have neither the dogma nor the morals of later Christianity but instead a feeling that one is struggling against the whole world and that the struggle will be a victorious one; an eagerness for the struggle and a certainty of victory which are totally lacking in Christians of today and which are to be found in our time only at the other pole of society, among the Socialists.

In fact, the struggle against a world that at the beginning was superior in force, and at the same time against the novators themselves, is common to the early Christians and the Socialists. Neither of these two great movements were made by leaders or prophets — although there are prophets enough among both of them — they are mass movements.

And mass movements are bound to be confused at the beginning; confused because the thinking of the masses at first moves among contradictions, lack of clarity and lack of cohesion, and also because of the role that prophets still play in them at the beginning. This confusion is to be seen in the formation of numerous sects which fight against one another with at least the same zeal as against the common external enemy.

So it was with early Christianity, so it was in the beginning of the socialist movement, no matter how much that worried the well-meaning worthies who preached unity where no unity was possible.

It was only one century ago that many would have been shocked to hear the phrase ‘Jesus was a Jew’, as it simply wasn’t something that ordinary churches enjoyed teaching. While a few premodern Christians (including the infamous Protestant pioneer Martin Luther, who responded with a massive wall of text after Jews kept telling him ‘nah, I’m good’) were aware of this knowledge, evidently nobody was really in the habit of emphasizing it either — quite the opposite of the current situation, where the phrase ‘Jesus was a Jew’ has become a cliché.

Since many churches considered anti‐Judaism part of their job, it made sense that they would have wanted to keep quiet about J.C.’s Jewish background, as it would have inevitably raised all sorts of awkward questions, e.g. ‘If Jesus was Jewish, why don’t we all convert to Judaism?’ However, since some Christians feel guilty about nearly two millennia of violent Christian anti‐Judaism, including the Shoah, and many other Christians want to show their support for Zionism, the teaching that J.C. was Jewish has switched from being an arcane detail to basic knowledge.

Now, certainly not all who repeat this trivia are directing it to Jews. In fact, a decade ago I usually saw it directed at blatantly antisemitic Christians, though I doubt that it was always persuasive (as one ‘political pastor’ painfully learned in 1939). This counterargument is also a little irksome in its own way, as J.C.’s Jewish background should not be the only, or even the main, reason why somebody should respect contemporary Jewish people. The paradox of Jews inspiring two overwhelmingly gentile faiths does fascinate me, but Jewish people have worth aside from that.

In any case, if you have been lurking Jewish communities for a while then you have likely noticed that when Jews mention this phrase, they tend to mention it unhappily. It isn’t just that the phrase has become cliché and pedantic, but mainly because the intentions behind it are almost always misguided. At best, telling Jews that J.C. was Jewish is only a quite minor, woefully inadequate way of expressing solidarity. At worst, it is an evasive rhetorical trick, basically the Christian equivalent to saying ‘I’m not racist, I have a black friend!’ or ‘I’m part Cherokee!’, hence why somebody deemed the phrase antisemitic. I find both of those authors harsh, personally, so this is my attempt at putting it more gently if anybody finds their tones too off‐putting.

While it delights me to see Christians who are sincerely interested in demonstrating solidarity with Jewish people, I suspect that all Jews would agree (for once) if I said that reminding others of J.C.’s Jewish background isn’t enough. Maybe better than nothing, but it still isn’t enough. How, then, should one go about it? Click here for my suggestions, zero of which involve supporting an antidemocratic régime! Evangelicals, take note! And if you want to discuss Christianity’s Jewish roots in a way that actually sounds sophisticated and interesting, Torah Praxis after 70 C.E.: Reading Matthew and Luke–Acts as Jewish Texts is arguably the way to get serious about understanding them. See? Christianity’s Jewish origins don’t have to sound like boring trivia!

If you tell a Jewish person that J.C. was a Jew, the politest response that you’ll get is simply ‘good for him’. Few people want to bluntly tell you ‘I don’t care’, let alone patiently and respectfully explain to a stranger why they find this knowledge irrelevant, so this my contribution for anybody who needed help. Hopefully I articulated this well!

https://apnews.com/article/israel-christians-taxes-church-palestinians-ac106bb1d49dd3d0d96613af53d4fcf7