Religion

Here are a couple of really intriguing responses to the “Ben Op As Bondage” post from yesterday. I took them out of the comments thread because they deserve greater attention.

Reader Simeon T. writes:

I am yet another young Christian shaped by the “fundagelical” movement. I was homeschooled, my family attended conservative churches (including leaving one that started to introduce too much of the “cool” factor), and we generally moved in circles that sound similar to those against which Libby Anne reacts.

The ancient Goddess ISIS, usually associated as being of Egyptian origins, may have actually originated in India, as several eminent scholars have discovered.   Ancient-origins.net reports: One of the great, largely untold adventure stories of late antiquity is the journey to the East, from Egypt’s Red Sea ports, across the open ocean for 40 days and 40 nights, to the legendary entrepôt of Musiris, on India’s southwestern or Malabar coast, in what is now modern state of Kerala.

In the Orthodox Church, we are preparing to commemorate the life of St. Mary of Egypt. Last night in our parish, we did as Orthodox parishes always do during matins of the Fourth Thursday of Lent: read aloud during evening services her biography, as written down by St. Sophronius, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, who lived from 560 to 638. St. Mary of Egypt died in the year 522. When Sophronius heard her story, passed down in oral tradition by the monks in the nearby monastery, he was so impressed that he wrote it down to preserve it. The story is told in Orthodox churches on the

The ex-Christian, feminist blogger Libby Anne says that she grew up in a Benedict Option, and it didn’t work. Excerpts:

Well, as a homeschooled child, I grew up with this greater degree of separation, and it didn’t work. Let me explain why it didn’t work.

My pal and sometime intellectual sparring partner Damon Linker makes some good points in his latest piece, which expresses frustration with conservative Catholics (and, I would suppose, fellow travelers like me). The title of the column — “The Retrograde Intransigence Of Conservative Catholics” — tells you where he’s coming from. Excerpts: