A Brief Glimpse of the Evening News
12th September 2010
The Ochlophobist is not impressed.
What was of interest to me was that the newsmongers interviewed a number of late middle aged to elderly women who were quite evidently of the UCC / Unitarian spectrum – they spoke using the usual liberal end of Mainline Prot rhetoric and mannerisms. And yet they were all wearing head-coverings and there was video footage of them sitting in the back of the mosque with the other women during the ceremony.It struck me that if these women are like 99.9% of the other women from the religious “traditional sphere” these women appear to come from, they would be downright pissed and beligerant if they were asked to cover their heads and sit in the back of a Christian church of any sort – especially a Christian church that does not ordain women in something of the same manner that we know this Muslim community is not going to have a woman as imam.
Thus I still can’t make up my mind which is worse – those for whom Islam is an occasion to parade adolescent sensationalist displays of fear and irrationality and divine causality schemes (like a pastor believing that a famous Imam wanting to talk to him about a mosque in New York is a “sign from God” not to burn Ko-rans on a given day), or those for whom encounters with Islam are an occasion to parade how enlightened and open-minded they are. Both groups deserve each other. Neither strikes me as having much to do with the Christian faith whatsoever.