Arts

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New York Times asks: Did COVID shut down live festival of content-free lessons and carols?

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For a certain kind of Christmas music lover (tmatt raises his hand high) there are few words richer and more emotional than, “Once in royal David’s city, stood a lowly cattle shed. …”

The former choirboy in me — yes, there are fine choirs in some corners of Texas — has always tried to imagine the pressure on the boy soprano chosen to sing those words at the start of the annual Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols in the gothic chapel at King’s College, Cambridge.

Whatever the word “tradition” means in Anglicanism these days, tuning into the live radio broadcast of this rite is an example of something sacred that still plays an important role in British life. I mean, everyone is listening — including the Queen.

But in 2020 ... And what about that mutant variation on COVID-19 … Isn’t choral music really dangerous? … Of course the chapel is empty … Are there masks that match robes worn by the choristers? Etc., etc.

I’m happy to report that several news organizations thought ahead and wrote stories about the Christmas Eve challenges of COVID-tide, including The New York Times: “A Choir Tries to Keep Its Christmas Tradition Alive.”

The story starts exactly how you would imagine that it would start — with a rehearsal as the choir prepared for the ritual that everyone is hoping will be allowed to proceed:

CAMBRIDGE, England — On a recent evening, the 16 boys and 14 men of the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, stood in the gothic chapel where they perform, spread out in the flickering candlelight.

A few of the choristers gazed at the vaulted ceiling about 80 feet above them. Then Daniel Hyde, the choir’s music director, signaled that he was ready to begin, and all slipped off the masks they had been wearing to sing “I Saw Three Ships,” a sprightly carol that will be heard by about 100 million people. …

Each Christmas Eve, the choir’s “Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols” is broadcast live on radio stations worldwide, including about 450 in the United States.

What are the stakes here?

In a typical year, the choir performs in religious services in the college chapel several times a week and tours worldwide. It has sung the Christmas Eve carol service every year since 1918, and the event has become a cherished holiday tradition.


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Asking CNN: When is a hijab not really a hijab? Clue: This could be a faith-based question

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There was a curious story on CNN’s web site the other day about a Somali Muslim supermodel who has been the first woman — on several platforms — to wear her hijab as she modeled some very modest clothes.

Some of us look awful wearing close-fitting scarves but Halima Aden is one of those blessed individuals with gorgeous facial features who’d stand out in a gunny sack. She exemplifies “modesty culture,” which is portrayed in mass media as repressive when it occurs in a Christian context, but becomes high fashion when a svelte Muslim takes it on.

But then this Muslim called a halt to it all for religious reasons that are never really explained by the fashion reporters who covered her story.

CNN began its piece as follows:

Muslim model Halima Aden is stepping back from fashion and quitting runway shows entirely after feeling pressured to compromise her religious beliefs, she announced Wednesday.

Aden, the first model to wear a hijab and burkini in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, posted a series of Instagram Stories describing the difficulties she has faced in the "toxic mess called fashion." In the posts, she recounted skipping prayers, wearing clothes she wasn't comfortable in and styling her hijab in ways she felt betrayed her values.

"They could call me tomorrow and not even for $10 million would I ever risk compromising my hijab ever again," she wrote. Aden also pledged to never take part in runway shows or travel for fashion months again, adding that "that's where all the bad energy came from."

As I read the rest of the CNN story, I could not figure out what “styling her hijab in ways that betrayed her values” meant.

Fortunately, this BBC story explained it some.

She says she's compromised her religion many times as part of her job — including missing prayer times set out in the Islamic faith or agreeing to model without a hijab on, using another item of clothing to cover her head.


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Lots to think about: Weiss and Sullivan on rise of illiberalism in news media and America

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If you were going to nominate the public-square “think piece” of the month, it would have to be the latest salvo from former New York Times scribe Bari Weiss. You remember, of course, her earlier letter to the Gray Lady’s Powers That Be when she hit the exit door, after lots of Slack channel pressure from colleagues?

The headline on her new Tablet piece proclaims, “Stop Being Shocked: American liberalism is in danger from a new ideology — one with dangerous implications for Jews.” Trends in American journalism get quite a bit of attention in this essay.

Reading it made me think of a problem that I’ve been having here at GetReligion for a decade or more. Here is the opening of a piece five years ago entitled, “Short test for journalists: Label the cultural point of view in this commentary.”

One of the big ideas here at GetReligion is that we live in an age in which many of our comfortable journalistic labels are becoming more and more irrelevant. They simply don't tell readers anything.

For example, there is this puzzle that I have mentioned before. What do you call people who are weak in their defense of free speech, weak in their defense of freedom of association and weak in their defense of religious liberty (in other words, basic First Amendment rights)? The answer: I don't know, but it would be totally inaccurate – considering the history of American political thought – to call these people "liberals."

You can call use the term “illiberal,” of course. A Muslim human-rights activist I interviewed a few years ago said that he is considering reaching back to the French Revolution and calling them “Jacobins.”

The key is that Weiss is suddenly being called a conservative for defending the beliefs and traditions that surrounded her as she grew up in old-school liberal Jewish circles. Now, she’s a conservative of some kind because she is saying things like this:

Did you see that the Ethical Culture Fieldston School hosted a speaker that equated Israelis with Nazis? Did you know that Brearley is now asking families to write a statement demonstrating their commitment to “anti-racism”? Did you see that Chelsea Handler tweeted a clip of Louis Farrakhan? Did you see that protesters tagged a synagogue in Kenosha with “Free Palestine” graffiti? Did you hear about the march in D.C. where they chanted “Israel, we know you, you murder children too”? Did you hear that the Biden campaign apologized to Linda Sarsour after initially disavowing her? Did you see that Twitter suspended Bret Weinstein’s civic organization but still allows the Iranian ayatollah to openly promote genocide of the Jewish people?


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Saints, heroes and one superhero: Man behind the Black Panther wasn't just another movie star

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Saints, heroes and one superhero: Man behind the Black Panther wasn't just another movie star

Early in the coronavirus crisis, and this summer's wave of chaos in American streets, Rachel Bulman began paying close attention to the faces in news reports.

She also found herself thinking about a hero -- the Black Panther.

Born in the Philippines before being adopted, the Catholic writer has -- as a daughter, wife and mother -- lived her life in White America. As a child, she didn't look like her family. Now, her children are growing up "knowing that they just don't look like everyone else. … Our family has its own story," she said.

Bulman responded by hanging images of saints from Africa, Asia, Latin America and elsewhere in their home. There was St. Josephine Bakhita from the Sudan and an icon of St. Augustine with darker skin, since his mother was from North Africa's Berber tribe. There was St. Juan Diego of Mexico, who encountered Our Lady of Guadalupe, and Sister Thea Bowman of Mississippi, the granddaughter of slaves, whose cause for sainthood has been endorsed by America's bishops.

"I wanted my children to see all kinds of saints and heroes, including some with faces kind of like their own," she said.

Bulman had also become interested in the Marvel Comics universe and the symbolic role of King T'Challa -- the Black Panther -- for millions of Black Americans, especially children. She was stunned when actor Chadwick Boseman died at age 43 after a long, private fight with colon cancer. He endured years of chemotherapy and multiple surgeries while filming "The Black Panther" and related Avenger movies.

Searching through press reports, Bulman noted colleagues referring to Boseman as a "man of faith," a "beautiful soul" and someone with a "spiritual aura" about his work with others -- including children with cancer.

At a memorial rite for Boseman, his former pastor at Welfare Baptist Church in Anderson, S.C., said the actor remained the same person he knew as a young believer.

“He's still Chad," said the Rev. Samuel Neely. "He did a lot of positive things. … With him singing in the choir, with him working the youth group, he always was doing something, always helping out, always serving. That was his personality."

Digging deeper, Bulman said she "cried all the way through" a video of Boseman's 2018 commencement address at Howard University, his alma mater.


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Behind the #WhiteJesus wars: Lessons to learn from ancient Christian iconography

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Behind the #WhiteJesus wars: Lessons to learn from ancient Christian iconography

For modern skeptics, the 6th-century icon hanging in the Orthodox monastery in the shadow of Mount Sinai is simply a 33-by-18-inch board covered in bees wax and colored pigments.

For believers, this Christ Pantocrator ("ruler of all") icon is the most famous image of Jesus in the world, because the remote Sinai Peninsula location of St. Catherine's Monastery allowed it to survive the Byzantine iconoclasm era. The icon shows Jesus -- with a beard and long hair -- raising his right hand in blessing, while holding a golden book of the Gospels.

This Jesus does not have blond hair and blue eyes. "Christ of Sinai" shows the face of a wise teacher from ancient Palestine.

"When you talk about ancient icons, you are basically talking about images of Jesus with long hair, a beard and some kind of Roman toga. That's just about all you can say," said Jonathan Pageau of Quebec, an Eastern Orthodox artist and commentator on sacred symbols.

In the early church, he added, believers "didn't ask other questions -- about race and culture -- because those were not the important questions in those days. … Once you start politicizing icons there's just no way out of those arguments. You get into politics and dividing people and then you're lost."

In these troubled times, said Pageau, many analysts are "projecting valid concerns about racism and Europe's history of colonization and the plight of African-Americans back into issues of church history and art that are centuries and centuries old. It's a kind of category error and everything gets mixed up."

But that's what happened when debates about some #BlackLivesMatters activists toppling Confederate memorials -- along with attacks on Catholic statues and even insufficiently "woke" Founding Fathers -- veered into #WhiteJesus territory.

"Yes, I think the statues of the white European they claim is Jesus should also come down. They are a form of white supremacy," tweeted Shaun King, author of "Make Change: How to Fight Injustice, Dismantle Systemic Oppression, and Own Our Future."

The popular Internet scribe later added: "All murals and stained-glass windows of white Jesus, and his European mother, and their white friends should also come down. … We can debate [whether] or not Jesus was real all day long. What I do know, is that white Jesus is a lie. And is a tool of white supremacy created and advanced to help white people use the faith as a tool of oppression. Also, they never would've accepted a religion from a Brown man."


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Was Jesus white and should sacred art that depicts Him in that manner be scrapped?

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Was Jesus white and should sacred art that depicts Him in that manner be scrapped?

THE QUESTION:

Was Jesus white?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

No.

But in these racially anxious times for America, there’s more to be said.

In a biblical dream-vision, presumably not meant to be taken literally in racial terms (Revelation 1:15), the feet of the triumphal Jesus Christ are bronze in color. In terms of actual 1st Century history, it makes the most sense to think that Jesus was neither north European white nor African black. As a man of the Mideast, he’d presumably have had a light brown or olive complexion like today’s Arabs or Sephardic Jews, with a good tan from all those outdoor travels.

Megyn Kelly assured Fox News viewers in 2013 of the “verifiable fact” that “Jesus was a white man.” In recent days, similar racial uproar was generated by Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King. After tweeting that memorials to “despicable” slaveowners George Washington and Thomas Jefferson must come down, he added obliteration of statues of “the white European they claim is Jesus,” seen as “a form of white supremacy.” A further tweet extended the ban to such “racist propaganda” in murals and stained glass of Jesus.

King did not specify that paintings should likewise be removed from display or destroyed, though that seems an obvious implication. Such iconoclasm would denude the world’s museums of countless masterpieces. In one example, so treasured is Leonardo da Vinci’s “Savior of the World” portrait of a Caucasian-looking Jesus that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia paid $450 million for it in 2017.

Moving to popular art, should we still watch those movies and TV productions where Jesus looks Caucasian, and more Gentile than Jewish? On that score, Mel Gibson’s film “The Passion of the Christ” (2004) gave Jesus a modest prosthetic nose and colorized the actor’s eyes to darken them.


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Clock keeps ticking: Will Turkey dare to turn Hagia Sophia into a mosque -- again?

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Clock keeps ticking: Will Turkey dare to turn Hagia Sophia into a mosque -- again?

Art historian Andrew Gould had studied many copies of the exquisite mosaic of Jesus found high in Istanbul's 6th Century Hagia Sophia cathedral.

But that didn't prepare the architect and sacred artist for what he felt when he stood under the icon, illumined by the soaring windows in the south gallery that overlooks the main floor, under the central dome that is 184 feet high and 102 feet in diameter.

The Deesis ("supplication") icon -- at least twice the size of life -- shows the Virgin Mary and St. John the Baptist with their heads bowed, framing an image of Christ Pantocrator ("enthroned"). The glass mosaic cubes were set at angles to create a shimmering effect across the gold background and the many-colored images, whether viewed in daylight or with lamps and candles.

Much of this icon was destroyed a century ago as workers probed to find priceless mosaics under layers of plaster and paint added through the centuries after 1453, when the Ottoman armies of Mehmed II conquered Constantinople.

Now, Turkish leaders want to convert Hagia Sophia -- a museum for decades -- back into a mosque.

"There is no more refined icon of Christ anywhere," said Gould, of the New World Byzantine Studios in Charleston, S.C. "Just in terms of information, we have copies we can study. … But visiting Hagia Sophia and seeing this icon under natural light, seeing it in the context of the sanctuary, was crucial to the development of my whole understanding of Orthodox art."

If the "Deesis" is covered again, along with other icons, "this is not something that can be replaced with photographs in art books," he said. "It would hurt artists and believers around the world in so many ways."

The current controversy is rooted in politics, more than lingering tensions between Muslim leaders and Turkey's tiny Christian minority, which has little power other than through ties to Greece, Europe and the United States.

Hagia Sophia became a museum in 1934, a symbol of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's drive to build a modern, truly secular state. Now, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sent many signals that he wants Turkey to return to Islamic principles.

Debates in Turkish media have swirled around whether modern leaders retain the "right of the sword" to reclaim Hagia Sophia, noted Mustafa Akyol, a Turkish journalist and author of the book "Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty."


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Kneeling or rising: Should readers be told both sides of Emancipation Memorial debates?

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As the old saying goes, a picture is worth 1,000 words. This does not, however, mean that everyone who views an image will agree on what it is saying. The same thing is true for statues.

Americans have been arguing about the meaning of the Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C., ever since the image was created, erected and then dedicated. At the heart of the debates is a basic question: What is this statue saying? What is happening in this image?

Apparently, there are two ways of “reading” this statue. People who know the story that the artist was telling may — repeat “may” — see the statue differently than those who do not. The question for journalists is whether readers need to hear from people on both sides of this debate as it has unfolded over the decades and now, in the #BlackLivesMatter age, has reached a boiling point.

Here is the top of a recent Washington Post story that offered a summary of the speech that the great Frederick Douglass delivered when the statue was dedicated. Here is the overture:

On April 14, 1876, Frederick Douglass arrived at the unveiling ceremony for the Emancipation Memorial, the statue now under attack by some protesters in Washington’s Lincoln Park.

A crowd of 25,000, many of them African American, had gathered to hear Douglass speak on the 11th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.

By all accounts, Douglass, the great orator and abolitionist, was not pleased with the monument, which depicted Lincoln holding a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation while towering over a kneeling black man who had broken his chains.

Yes, note that the freed slave had the strength to break his own chains. Other crucial questions: Is the slave kneeling or, with one knee raised, is he rising to his feet? Also, is he rising because Lincoln has told him he should not kneel to a man? That would be the opposite of what critics see in this image.


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'Head of Christ' story ignores centuries of art depicting what Jesus looked like: A first-century Jew

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Well, this Religion News Service piece sure has an interesting premise. I am talking about a lengthy feature — seen here in the Washington Post — that implies American Christianity is racist because of one popular painting of Jesus Christ.

Never mind that many of us have grown up disliking the painting for its sickly sweet religiosity. Never mind that this is not the iconic image seen in Christian traditions with ancient roots and liturgical art that reveals those roots in the Middle East. There’s a crucial word missing in this piece — “Jewish.”

Even as a child, this particular image repelled me, as it didn’t reflect the lively, infuriating and suffering Jesus I saw in the Bible. There’s an assumption that Americans adore this image.

Now, our modern-day iconoclasts want to get rid of it.

CHICAGO — The first time the Rev. Lettie Moses Carr saw Jesus depicted as black, she was in her 20s.

It felt “weird,” Carr said.

Until that moment, she had always thought Jesus was white.

At least that’s how he appeared when she was growing up. A copy of Warner E. Sallman’s “Head of Christ” painting hung in her home, depicting a gentle Jesus with blue eyes turned heavenward and dark blond hair cascading over his shoulders in waves.

The painting, which has been reproduced a billion times, came to define what the central figure of Christianity looked like for generations of Christians in the United States — and beyond.

“Some in the church,” the reporter says, are calling for the eradication of that painting because it makes Jesus look white with blue eyes.

Folks, haven’t we been here before?

Remember the dust-up in 2013 when Megyn Kelly told us all that Jesus was white?


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