Word: passionate
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...period roughly 650 years ago. The Black Death was ravaging Europe, killing upwards of 20 million people. The survivors fought in what was known as the 100 Years' War. Add grueling poverty. They called it the Middle Ages. And from it emerged ... Mel Gibson's new movie, The Passion of the Christ...
...that it is, in a stock, caricatured way. Romans do the actual torturing, and a handful of "good" Jews seem to defy cliche, but the folks controlling the mob and forcing their overlord's seemingly pliable hand are the same band of swarthy miscreants that have wandered through Passion plays for centuries...
...vision of what is most important in the Jesus story, in the relentless, near pornographic feast of flayed flesh. Gibson gives us Christ's blood, not in a Communion cup, but by the gallon. Blood spraying from Jesus' shackled body; blood sluicing to the Cross's foot. This Passion begins just before Jesus' arrest. It ends with a blink-length Resurrection. The bulk of his ministry, miracles and post-Resurrection appearances are absent, and his preaching of love flicked at in telegraphically brief flashbacks. Meanwhile, his scourging, handled in all four Gospels in a total of three sentences, takes...
...starting in the 1300s that the Passion truly bloomed. Scholars located details of Jesus' suffering in allegedly prophetic verses in the Old Testament. Mystics built devotions around his scourging after a Cardinal returned from the Holy Land bearing the pillar to which he said Christ had been chained. Flagellant lay groups clogged the streets, seeking bloody identification with the flayed Christ. So dominant grew the Passion, writes Catholic historian Gerard Sloyan, that believers felt "meditation on [it] alone could achieve unity with Christ and yield some share in the work of redemption he accomplished." It came to overshadow not just...
...plagues abated, Passion piety faded. It has never fully disappeared from Catholicism (why should it, as long as there is suffering?), and remains particularly pronounced in the Hispanic church. But observances like the Stations of the Cross and the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary settled into more balanced harmony with Easter...