Jesus as Social Engineer?

Found via the Western Confucian

Jesus as anti-family

Here’s a nibble of this article:

As the Church settled into the groove of establishment, accepting to greater and lesser degrees the realisation that Christ was not about to be returning anytime soon, the imperative of discipleship gradually waned, other priorities taking its place, and that rather than the mission of the Kingdom having a Church, the Church had a Kingdom. Ironically, the Church had become well and truly secularised, so profoundly so that cultural norms of empire, those of citizenship, stability, honour, familial obligation and ties, became the ethos of Church, and the motifs by which morality and religiosity were infused. How odd it is that many of today’s proponents of ‘orthodoxy’, and the inveighers against ‘relativism’, are perhaps the unwitting spruikers for what is actually the victory of a secularism that long ago permeated our Church.

Resplendent bodies

Cuerpos Resplandecientes: Santos Populares Argentinos by Rosa Lojo

Over the years in Latin America, the idea of the “santo pagano”, “santo popular”, or “santo informal” has been the subject of many studies and literary pursuits. From regional folklore, the figure of the folk saint has often become a figure of class resistance, the assertion of plebian pride, and a national symbol. This is due a great deal to the general secularization of Latin America in the the last fifty years, the subsequent decline of the power of the Catholic Church over cultural affairs, and the feeling of exclusion that large parts of these societies feel towards the general cultural discourse. In the face of the modernization of religion, people feel that they need to carve out a niche for their own saints, their own intercessors, who defend them from the same institutions that the mainstream Church seeks to uphold.