So a straw man walks into a bar. Except he doesn’t.

The National Museum of Women in the Arts is running what appears to be a fabulous exhibit, Picturing Mary: Woman, Mother, Idea on view December 5, 2014–April 12, 2015. Terry Mattingly has a video on it and writes about a review in The Baltimore Sun that reports on how some art critics are irritated that this exhibit doesn’t shove back the faces of Christians who actually like Mary, the mother of Jesus. “In other words, this exhibit has – among a elite art critics – become controversial because it is not causing controversy among (wait for it) religious believers who are, by definition, opposed to modern art.”

Apparently controversy is what exhibit planners want to avoid on a regular basis, but not all controversy is created equal. The only way to avoid the right kind of controversy is to show that your museum is too sophisticated to show respect for anything that isn’t the latest in trendy, Ivy League expressions.

“The [Baltimore Sun] story makes it clear, for example, that this astonishingly deep exhibit could not have taken place if its planners had decided to include modern art about Mary that would have offended the very churches and museums that controlled some of these priceless masterpieces.” But the straw men these critics hate so much are anywhere to be seen.

Chicken coop, Coupeville, Island County, WA. Photo by Anne E. Kidd. Library of Congress

Today I was reminded of a man I wrote about here some years back. He’s gone now, and one of his relatives came to the library today to donate several cartons of books from his personal collection.

I think it’s all right to give his full name now. It was Marvin Rodvik, and he lived in Franklin, Minnesota. I met him a couple times in my life. The last time he gave us another gift of books. He also told me a story, which I passed along in this blog. I’ll tell it again now, because it is, in my opinion, one of the best stories I ever heard for the Christmas season.

Marvin was a pastor’s kid. The story happened when he was a teenager, probably (by my calculations) around the time of World War II.

His father paused a moment. Then he said, “You’re right. I can’t stop you. But know this. If you go to that event, you’ll be locked out of this house when you come home tonight. You’ll have to find somewhere else to sleep.”

Continue reading “You’ll have to find somewhere else to sleep” →

Gene Edward Veith points out a news story about Professor Jerry L. Walls, who teaches the idea of purgatory and has written about it in Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation. Walls apparently buys into the Catholic understanding of the purification of believers. As this article explains, followers of Christ must be purified even if they are forgiven of all their sins. Their sanctification is not fully accomplished by Christ’s work on the cross, but by some spiritual process between death and paradise. David Gibson of RNS states, “In recent years, the emphasis [for purgatory’s purpose] has swung from ‘satisfying’ the justice of God through painful reparations to one of sanctification, or becoming holy.

“’To suggest instead that Christians will enjoy a kind of express executive elevator at the time of death is to suggest that those who work hard on holiness in this life are wasting their efforts,’ John G. Stackhouse, Jr., a popular evangelical author at Canada’s Regent College wrote in an essay on Walls’ ideas in The Christian Century.”

This Catholic writer explains, “Catholic theology takes seriously the notion that ‘nothing unclean shall enter heaven.’ From this it is inferred that a less than cleansed soul, even if ‘covered,’ remains a dirty soul and isn’t fit for heaven.” But I guess Christ’s atonement does not accomplish this, so though we are fully saved by his grace, we must be fully purified by purgatory’s refining fire, which has been a big problem historically (not to mention the fact that the Protestant Bible doesn’t allow for even prayers on behalf of the dead).