re weirdness of early christians were the early christians weird yes so were their non christian contemporaries the more familiar you are with late republican rome or the pricipate the weirder those people will seem forget the creative filtering done by renaissance and eighteenth century hero worship so are modern non christians and christians you are pretty weird yourself with your rather acid dismissal of luther and of protestantism and in apparently buying into a simplistic propaganda model about catholicism not being faddish sure it s so large that global fads take longer cycles than they do in smaller denominations and local ones are not usually visible unless you do a lot of traveling to exotic lands may i recom mend as a salutary antidote to this nonsense philippe aries book the hour of our death a longitudinal study of death customs in western specifically catholic christendom and it won t help to escape into the obscurity of the first christian century paul was pretty weird too as were peter and the others in the apparently quite weird circle around jesus what i think you might find helpful is a bit more charity try to understand these weirdos and nutcases with the same respect and love you would expect others to show your notions we are commanded to love one another after all and brown s book is in fact a heroic attempt to see the groupings he talks about as motivated in love and the gospel and their social contexts if anything brown is too heroic here he manages to overstrain himself at times i don t suggest that we follow any of these old cult paths and it raises hard questions from the skeptic inside me that so much of early christianity was like the weird christian and non christian cults we see today to that extent i think you raise a serious problem and perhaps your phrasing is implicitly self deprecatory and ironic but the first principle for answering these questions is respect and love for those we do not understand and it helps to work at under standing as long as we do not get overwhelmed by revulsion and begin to withdraw our respect for them as people i would advise in other words more historical reading brown s other books are also good most especially his bio of augustine also try robin lane fox s christians and pagans maybe the paul veyne ed history of private life some of foucault s books on sexuality in the ancient world humanity is weird we have known one sane person and we killed him fortunately for us this has proved a comedy rather than a tragedy easter yes this is a tad early our vigil service here has been moved forward because so many churches in the area have taken to doing their own vigils and the seminarians must therefore worship and run if they are to do it here and there as well think of this as an anglican fad michael l siemon we must know the truth and we must mls ulysses att com love the truth we know and we must or act according to the measure of our love mls panix com thomas merton
