The Ark and The Dove

Shepherd Kings

Random exegesis...

The Nativity story of the shepherds clearly is about God's love for the every-day fella, the poor, the not-royal. The angels first announce the birth to pastoral rustics, not the established political hierarchy or the wealthy.

I'm not debating that.

But it popped in my head this morning that the shepherds might also be read typologically. The Bible loves its shepherd kings. Moses did a stint as a shepherd before leading the Israelites out of Egypt. David, of course, was a shepherd boy before being anointed. And these are probably the two most successful rulers over the ancient Hebrews.

What if the shepherds are not just the poor, but Moses and David?

After all, the receive divine revelations from the angels...meet God face-to-face as it were...and then spread the word of God to everyone they meet.

Sounds to me like a kind of reverse typology, expressing how Moses and David spoke to God directly, then spread his word to the people--(traditionally through writing the Torah and the Psalms respectively).

Dude, Where's My Car?

Well, I'm finding it very unlikely that I'll be able to navigate my way to Church tomorrow...mostly because I can't actually see my car any more on account of the twenty-some inches of snow we've gotten.

I guess if I can't get out, I should try to contact Obama's religious adviser and have him send me some spiritual readings to reflect on. If it's good enough for the President to qualify as his weekly obligation to worship, it should be good enough for me, right?

Cafeteria Catholics or Spiritual Hackers?

Maybe this is just an effect of the techno-savvy books I've been reading lately, but I was thinking this morning about the nature of heresy.

A lot of modern heretics don't necessarily think of themselves as making up something entirely new...or even heretical. It would be somewhat paradoxical to think of oneself as a heretic.

Perhaps part of the reason for this is that on some subconscious-level at least, they approach religion the same way a hacker approaches a computer.

Such people read the Code of Canon Law as if it were some kind of programming code.

In a programming language, the words all translate into some kind of precise machine code. This means you can monkey with it trial and error and see what works. So long as your syntax is correct, you can cobble together all sorts of commands and variables and wait to see the results.

I imagine the results usually aren't pretty in this kind of scattershot approach to hacking, but they might occasionally produce something worth while.

The problem with the spiritual hacker would seem to be two-fold.

First, there is no monitor with which to have almost instantaneous view of output. If spiritual hackers could see the effects of their hacked codes, they would understand why they were a bad idea. But the output of heresy is either invisible to the human eye or it takes centuries to make itself manifest in material way.

Secondly, human language is not a programming code. The meanings of a given programming language are typically fixed. Unless you hack the language itself, the command will usually mean just one set of computations. Human language doesn't work that way, and our religious codes are written in human language, not computer language. A command in English can mean a host of different things--which is why it is important for us to understand the spirit of the law and not just the letter.

I suppose the bigger problem becomes how one comes to understand the spirit of the law without getting tangled up in the slippery nature of language itself. That is, to understand the meaning behind those slippery words, we have to use more slippery words.

Edumakashun Makes U Stoopid

Gallup reports that Americans with postgraduate degrees significantly favor Obama, well beyond the national average and other education levels.

This suggests a couple of things:
1.) That too much learning makes people go mad.
2.) That higher education either attracts predominantly liberal-minded people, that it indoctrinates its recipients into liberal-thinking, or that it weeds out non-liberals.
3.) That the educated liberal elite really does think it knows something that the rest of the rude mechanicals in this country simply can't understand with their inferior, primitive, monkey brains.

There were some other provocative numbers as well. For instance, education made no change in numbers of approval among those identifying themselves as black (it's pretty much 90% approval across the board). 10% more of post-graduate women approve of Obama than men. And post-graduate men have about the same approval rating as high-school educated men. It's just those with bachelor degrees or some college that don't like the president. I guess a post-graduate degree is kind of like a second childhood for these guys.