Word: christianized
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...dramatic tropes of the Passion cannot be cleanly divorced from the explicit Christian story the Passion tells, for religious Christians naturally continue to take the story of the Passion seriously (after all, it comes straight from the gospel of John). This becomes troublesome when, as with the Boston Cecilia's Easter-time performances of Bach's St. John Passion, the sacred Christian text contains traces of anti-Semitism...
Even James Carroll, the most outspoken Christian on the panel, was willing to criticize the book of John. He pointed out that it was composed many decades after the events it describes and was more polemical in nature (written for Hellenic audiences) than the three "synoptic" gospels. Carroll also defended John by contextualizing his text as being written before there was any clear distinction between Jewish and Christian religions or ethnicities. Thus, the Passion story cannot be categorized with modern anti-Semitic thought a la Nietzche...
...polemical swinger right to the end. The ideological imagination was hardly dead. The following Sunday, no doubt expressing the new Soviet line, chief press spokesman for the Kremlin Gennadi Gerasimov appeared with Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes. It's true, he said, that communism is evolving, but so is Christianity. Christian values and communist values--"especially early Christian values"--are the same...
...used in many contexts to fondle the difficulties John Paul II has frequently expressed about capitalism. In his long travails, Karol Wojtyla has spoken critically about Western economic arrangements, and it was this theme that caught the opportunistic eye of Gerasimov. Didn't communism, like early Christianity, seek to eliminate poverty? Was not the communist ideal an expression of Christian concern for the communal ownership of property...
...make a better widget and sell more of it is one thing; quite another if he or she goes home listlessly unconcerned with human life and human attachments having to do with respect for the elderly, a love for one's family, the capacity to take joy from Christian perspectives. Papal prose is turgid, but here the Pope did say in almost as many words that socialism was an extravagant historical failure...