Ashley Baxstrom: The Devil may wear Prada, but that doesn’t mean he owns the market on being fashionably faithy.

Check out the hot new line debuting over at the Community of Compassion, a new Anglican Catholic order in Forth Worth, Texas. When Mother Mary Magdalene, founder of the order, needed help designing new habits – because foundresses are required to design unique new habits for their new orders – she turned to artist Julia Sherman for help, and the result was something new and, in a slightly discomfiting way, a little sexy.

Thanks to our friendly fellow blogger The Sensuous Curmudgeon for drawing our attention this story: a story about the quest for truth. A story about history and modernity. A story about one of the greatest stories ever told – with a children’s board game. And a story about the people who hate that game.
In a Jan. 9 article entitled “Noah’s Ark Game Misses the Boat,” Institute for Creation Research (ICR) Science Writer – I’m sorry, “science writer” – Brian Thomas, M.S. (don’t miss the M.S.) blasts toy maker Ideal for their new Noah’s Ark Game (on sale at Wal-Mart!) for contributing to what is apparently a dearth of stories, toys and other representations which “parody” and create a “misleading impression” about the biblical Ark.

By Alex Thurston

South Sudan, though less than six months old as an independent nation, already faces challenges to its political and cultural unity: rebels abound, opposition groups denounce the ruling party, and ethnic tensions simmer. Christianity has provided a powerful platform for political mobilization in the region’s past, and churches continue to represent the strongest force in Southern Sudanese civil society. As the new nation grapples with ethnic and political tensions, Christianity may help build unity – yet the power of the churches has limits.

Colonial Legacies and Christianity in South Sudan

British colonial rule did not introduce Christianity to present-day South Sudan – there were Christian kingdoms in East Africa prior to 1500, and Catholic missionaries were active in the region in the mid-nineteenth century – but colonial policies left a lasting impact on the character and social role of Southern Sudanese Christianity.

After the British pieced together the colony of Sudan from 1898-1910, colonial rulers treated the Southern provinces as a culturally and religiously distinct enclave that needed to be isolated and administered differently from the Arab Muslim North. While missionary activities were restricted in the North, missionaries had a freer hand in the South. Catholic, Presbyterian, and Anglican missionaries made limited conversions during the colonial period, but they had a lasting impact on education. When the British conjoined North and South Sudan under one administration in 1946, university-educated Northerners dominated politics and the civil service, but the few Southerners with advanced educational credentials were largely products of these mission schools.

by S. Brent Plate

Before you’ve even heard of this film, Bill Donohue has, once again, given it a ratings boost by rebuffing it on the Catholic League website. In between press releases on “Bishop Blasted over Gay Marriage” and “New York Times is Gay Crazy,” is a little piece blasting Matthew Chapman’s film The Ledge:

People of faith, especially Catholics, are used to being trashed by Hollywood, but they are not accustomed to films that promote atheism. Yes, there was “The Golden Compass,” an atheism-for-kids effort which the Catholic League successfully boycotted (in fairness, it was the book upon which the movie was based that triggered our response, not the screen adaptation). “The Ledge” is different in that its backers are selling themselves as the real pioneers: they expect it to be a ground-breaker.

The allegorical Golden Compass (2007) was derided by the Catholic League and many evangelicals who claimed it to be a pro-atheist stealth campaign. This was just two years after the allegorical Chronicles of Narnia, which upset some secular-minded people for being too heavy-handed in the Christian sub themes. Before that was Gibson’s Passion, then Scorsese’s Last Temptation, and the see-sawing controversy continues. I doubt The Ledge will make as big a splash, not because it doesn’t raise important issues, but because it lacks the big budget funding that really stirs controversy.

Yesterday Terry Jones held another rally in Dearborn, Michigan, outside the Arab International Festival, to raise awareness for the encroachment of Islam in America.  Abby Ohlheiser was there.

This was the plan: Terry Jones would speak at City Hall then march with his supporters up to the annual Arab International Festival in Dearborn, MI, a city with one of the largest Arab populations in the country. The walk is 13 blocks. He got half a block before police put him in a car.  Six protesters from the affirmative action group By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) were arrested.  The rest stood in his path, yelling, getting as close as they could without touching. Jones wore a bullet proof vest under his white t-shirt, as did his friend and fellow speaker pastor Wayne Sapp.

Last time Jones was in Dearborn, he was pelted with shoes and water bottles, something repeatedly referenced today.  But he keeps coming back.  Regardless of the angle, there’s something going on here, some importance perceived by, at least, Jones, that his message be heard in this place at this time.  He’s going to return again, he said, even after the mob.  And likewise, his presence makes Dearborn a site for others–his detractors, his supporters with side causes of their own–to get attention for their messages.

Before the rally began, Jones asked his supporters to join him for a pep talk. “If you’re taking a stand with us we’d like you up to the fence real quick,” he said. Jones told the small gathered crowd, maybe 30 people, about the size of the counter protest (and the media presence, who were pushed against the edge of the press pen trying to hear),  “What’s very important is that we will not in any way retaliate…in every sense they will see god’s love and patience.”

The Christian Century reports that China’s Minister of State Administration for Religious Affairs, Wang Zuo’an, is in Nairobi for a visit with the Archbishop of the Anglican Church of Kenya to “enhance the relationship between the Anglican Church, the Global South Anglican Communion and the Chinese church.”

Clint Rainey: Stephen Smith, at Bible Gateway, has for three years made an annual top-100 list and snazzy tag cloud with what Twitterers say they’re giving up for Lent. This year, he wrangled up 85,000 messages tweeted between March 7 and March 10. (March 9 was Ash Wednesday, the first day of the Lenten calendar for Catholics and the one Americans popularly conceive of as Day 1 of the fast.) The top vote-getter, you ask? Twitter. Followed by Facebook, with chocolate third, soda seventh, and the teenage troika of transgression—swearing, alcohol and sex—landing fourth, fifth, and sixth.

Smith does not say how many I’m-not-tweeting tweets came once fasting was underway. But to compute it misses the point anyway. Hashtag searches cannot differentiate sarcasm from sincerity, so besides depriving themselves of “Lent” (eighth), “giving up things” (12th), “stuff” (25th), “Catholicism” (26th), and “religion” writ simple (14th), Twitterers on Smith’s list also helpfully sacrificed “nothing” (46th), “school” (13th), their virginity (37th) and sobriety (44th), as well as “me” (63rd) and “you” (16th)—perhaps “You”?

As it happens, jokester posters flooded the list. For Lent to be so thoroughgoingly Americanized that a quarter of his top-100 entries seem to mock it is itself telling. Even wisecracking tweets promising 40-day renunciations of Christianity still focus discourse on the idea of redemption through self-denial, sacrifice, commitment, self-discipline, however it is we define those terms. What Christian objects to publicizing that message at Easter?

This year’s forgo-social-media push returned Twitter and Facebook, last year’s top vote-getters, as champ and runner-up, and it was again the pastoral blogosphere’s Easter meme. But as tech-savvy pastors in particular avail themselves of social media as tools of evangelism, pastor-converts, like San Francisco pastor Bruce Reyes-Chow (who’s taken his protests to NPR, SFGate.com, The Huffington Post, and of course Twitter), will speak out against conscientiously swearing them off. Instead, Web 2.0 is seen as a demystifying force that portrays the Christian walk as self-denying and sacrificial, yes, but also as approachable, normal, everyday. In a word: tweetable.

From a review by The Washington Post‘s Hank Stuever of  ”The Sunset Limited,” a new HBO show written by Cormac McCarthy:

The bigger revelation here is Jones, in total sync with McCarthy’s words, bringing an understated, heavy-sigh sadness to the role of White. His burden of disbelief feels more real than Black’s insistence on a higher power. Early on, “The Sunset Limited” faintly suggests that Black is some sort of celestial presence, as if sent by God to investigate White’s worthiness for the afterlife. White keeps asking to leave Black’s apartment, but Black won’t let him go, on the pretense that White might head back to the station to leap in front of another train.

“Now I will have to say that, if we don’t have the same daddy, we’re not brothers and sisters. So anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I’m telling you, you’re not my brother and you’re not my sister, and I want to be your brother.” — Alabama governor-elect, Robert Bentley, during a speech before his oath of office (h/t Gawker)

One quarter of all the bibles in the world were printed in China, with the government’s support.  Can we still say that Chinese Communism is atheistic?