A Religious Liberal Blog

This site hopefully can provide some vehicle by which I can comment, complain, and once in a while praise the state of religion in this country and around the world from a liberal protestant perspective.

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Protestant Images

If you click on the painting above by Lucas Cranach, you'll see the altar he made at Luther's church in Wittenburg. It represents a time period in which protestants understood and used iconography. This makes me want to hunt for protestant icons now.

This picture portrays the last supper. What's interesting is that all the disciples are in a circle. And Judas is being fed first! Talk about grace. At the bottom you get a picture of Luther preaching and of course pointing to Christ.

This Sunday we took the church kids to the Interfaith Week art show, which indicated the way that children ranging from the LDS to Judaism to the Disciples of Christ conceive of their faith. Those pictures tell a story of self identity as potent as most icons.

If one wants to see how protestant churches are seen by someone who is on the outside (doesn't it seem perverse to speak of insiders and outsiders when it comes to such a thing?) check out Oliver's posts as he visits various churches in Mississippi.

His most recent was to a presbyterian church in Oxford, which is one of the only moderate to liberal congregations I could find in Mississippi. If there are other congregations for Oliver to visit that others can recommend, feel free to post here or on his site.

3 Comments:

At 8:59 AM , Blogger Thoughts From Jeff said...

Thanks for the picture and the words. I appreciated them today.

 
At 12:02 AM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hiya Dwight :)

I am so glad I found your blog. I discovered you through the trackback to Oliver's post. I'm a Christian Progressive in South Mississippi. I breeze through Mississippi Atheists every now and then and leave comments. I don't really know any other truly moderate or liberal congregations nearby. Based on their activities, the Episcopal congregations seem to be the most liberal ones in my town.

It's tough going for liberals and Progressives down here. I don't want to tell you my life story here, but I'm doing my best to form relationships with Mississippi and Alabama bloggers and netroots folks, while at the same time getting to know politically active liberals and progressives in my local area and encouraging them to get connected and do some activism.

I don't find it difficult to be Christian and Progressive at the same time, but I do find it difficult to explain exactly how it works to people who identify with both of those groups. The religious right's long-term monopoly on social issues down here has conditioned a lot of people to assume that you can't be both Christian and of the left at the same time.

I don't have any problems with Progressive netroots people, but I often find that people who are either strongly liberal or strongly Christian in my local area view me a little suspiciously when I tell them I'm both.

Anyways, I'll be checking in here from time to time, and if you know any other bloggers in the Deep South that you think I might like to check out, feel free to drop links in the comment threads at my blog.

 
At 12:19 AM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

one more thing, Dwight, in the interest of sharing useful information:

Are you aware of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture?

The reason I ask is that I noticed the HRW torture widget on your page and thought you might like to know about the campaign. They're easy to find once you know their name. I'm not affiliated with them, but I'm on their mailing list and I try to support them by doing things like signing their petitions and letting other people know they exist. If you haven't heard of them, you should be able to google them. I originally discovered the campaign from a link on the sidebar at Slacktivist.

 

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