12,000 US Catholics Sign Petition to Bishops to Permit Public Masses for Easter: "The Reckoning Is Upon Us"

Kansas Gov Laura Kelly puts in place a stay-at-home order and a ban on large gatherings, like other (sane) governors.

Republicans in KS Legislature just **overturned** the ban on large gatherings because they...

want Kansans in large gatherings?

now?https://t.co/OFDx224vny

— Rachel Maddow MSNBC (@maddow) April 8, 2020

Commentary I have found worth reading, and want to pass along to all of you:

"Christ Has No Body on Earth Now But Ours": An Easter Meditation on Hands and Feet by Jessica Pegis

In her recent essay at the Women in Theology site entitled "Hands and Feet," Jessica Pegis notes that one of her favorite icons, depicting Jesus washing his disciples' feet, shows Peter touching his head. This is, as she notes, a gesture noting divine epiphany in ancient Greek culture.

POTUS Headed to Church on Easter Day: "NEED WALL!" — Deep Shame of White American Christianity As Hatred of Immigrants Normalized

‘NEED WALL!’: Trump Heads to Easter Service After Threatening Mexico, Attacking Democrats https://t.co/t1BkpKInqB pic.twitter.com/zO9OeoY5RN

— Gay Civil Rights (@gaycivilrights) April 1, 2018

In my mind as I watched the hate directed towards immigrants pour out on Easter day, from the man in the White House as he walked to church, down to his followers, many of them using bible verses to prop up their hate:

Jesus' Crucifixion and Resurrection, and His Table Open to All: Why Politics Are Unavoidable on Good Friday and Easter

Because of the very powerful slaveholder religion (and here) crafted by Southern Christian apologists for slavery, which pretends that salvation and Jesus are all about the "spiritual" realm and not this world and the muddy, sordid political realities that shape this world, many American Christians find it distasteful to talk about Jesus, or Easter, and the political at the same time.

This Is Easter for Me: Joan Baez Singing "The President Sang Amazing Grace"

This is Easter for me — Joan Baez singing "The President Sang Amazing Grace," with Jeff Scheer's beautiful animated video accompanying the song.

Easter Tweets For You: Conversations Between Trump's "Pro-Life" Supporters and Their Critics — "Aren't You the Same Guy Who Just Yesterday Was Clamoring to Kill Prisoners?"

Says the "pro-life" politician who spent her Easter weekend fighting to kill prisoners. https://t.co/iHiCxus5qJ

— Sister Helen Prejean (@helenprejean) April 17, 2017

Some Easter tweets for you, capturing important conversations about what Easter (and Jesus and the gospels) mean to different groups of American Christians at this point in time. The tweet above from Sister Helen Prejean is a response to the following tweet by Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, an evangelical Christian who was working overtime in Holy Week to see 8 human beings executed by the state in 11 days immediately after Easter:

Easter and the Longing to See Pharoah's Army Drowned: A Project in Which Atheists, Agnostics, and People of Faith Should Be Able to Collaborate

In this Easter Sunday's New York Times, philosopher William Irwin describes a strategy for people who question the notion of God who want to contribute to meaningful conversations in the public square — especially in the public square of a culture like that of the U.S., which is saturated with religion that is often downright demonic. For many of us who really want a viable alternative to demonic religion that has harmed us, and who welcome the persuasive critique of religion offered by our atheist or agnostic friends, the absolute, dogmatic certainty of those same friends places us between a rock and a hard place: it's the mirror image of the dogmatic religious demon from which we want to escape, in order to find safety. 

As Easter Nears, I'm Pondering Kaya Oakes's Question, "Is the Catholic Church in America Getting Worse for LGBTQ People and Women?" (My Answer: Yes)

An open thread for Holy Week: is the Catholic church in America getting worse for LGBTQ people and women? https://t.co/q0KR9LKpfU

— kaya oakes (@kayaoakes) March 24, 2016

I've replied to Kaya Oakes's tweet (and Facebook posting) above. Here's my reply: Yes.

An Easter Gift to Me, and Now to You: A Theological Conversation Between Ivone Gebara and Me, "Sharing Our Life as Theology"

Giles Fraser: "A Church Is at Its Best When It Fails, When It Gives Up on All the Ecclesiastical Glitter, When the Weeds Start to Break Through the Floor"

Giles Fraser in The Guardian on how Christianity is, in its most central affirmations, all about the failure of a man condemned to a humiliating death as a common criminal, who died virtually alone after his followers abandoned him. Christianity is all about empty tombs and weeds breaking through church floors:

Easter Weekend Poem: All Creatures Dream Alive

"Every Life Is Different Because You Passed This Way and Touched History": Easter Meditation Points

Good Friday sets the stage for Easter: to complete the bouquet of meditative pieces I gathered for you on Good Friday, here's an Easter offering from things I've read over the years, notes jotted in my journals (with a common thread of reflecting on the word "life" and its manifold meanings):

"The Sight of Fossilized Light in a Growing Universe": Rachel Maddow's Resurrectional Reflection on the Struggle for LGBT Human Rights

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Lent, Easter, Jesus and the Victims of History: A Meditation

Lent ends today, and it's my 63rd birthday, and I find myself in much the same place in which I was as my 60th birthday approached--and as I remembered my mother's death last year. Throughout Lent this year, I have been haunted by thoughts of the children mercilessly gunned down last Christmas. To be specific: I am haunted by the question of how one prays in the face of such tragedy. I'm haunted by the question of where God is as such tragedy occurs.

A Life Review, First Week of Easter

Some spiritual traditions (in the Catholic church, the Ignatian one; in Protestantism, Puritanism) emphasize a practice of ongoing review of life.  For Puritan strands of Protestant spirituality, this emphasis produced a strong tradition of daily journaling, in which one tallies up the good and bad one has done each day, and places it all in God's hands at the end of each day.

Charles Blow on Trayvon Martin and the "Restoration of Faith": An Easter Meditation

Michelangelo, "Risen Christ" (1532)

Charles Blow writes that the national conversation about Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman turns on the question of "restoration of faith": how to restore faith in our justice system as the perception of radically unequal treatment for a white man as opposed to a black teen eats away at the faith of many Americans in a just and honest society.

More Marilynne Robinson: Synchronicity, Synergy, and Nature as Shining Garment of Divinity

Marilynne Robinson finds science's inability to imagine the world analogically, or to speak of what it observes in analogical terms, a significant shortcoming.  The "scientific worldview" is altogether too narrow, she thinks, because it cannot fulfill its promise to explain everything that it observes, when it lacks the language of analogy to extend its definitions and observations beyond what is apparently only on the surface of "reality."

As Institutional Church Cracks Open and Tumbles Down, New Life Rises in the Cracks

And as formal structures of church life appear to be dying in many places around the world, while spiritual hunger and spiritual thirst remain keen among those for whom churches no longer seem capable of feeding that hunger and slaking that thirst, Diana Butler Bass points to tender blades of new life springing up in the cracks of tottering and collapsing church institutions:

Easter Greetings: Hope, Resurrection, and Kindness

And so this, quite simply, was Steve's and my Holy Saturday celebration: before starting on our trip back home after our Good Friday meeting with my publisher and visit to the Crystal Bridges art museum, we go to Einstein Bros. Bagels for coffee and bagels.  My cousin Bill, who is collaborating with me on the book, comes along with us, as does his mother, a remarkable, spry, full-of-vim senior lady approaching 90.

Dying, Rising: Easter Weekend

Dear Gentle Readers,

I will be slow to post here through Easter, since Steve and I have taken a small and much-needed break/retreat these days.  A longtime friend of ours turned 60 this year, and we had promised to visit him and celebrate his 60th birthday at Easter time.