Constantine’s Sword
Posted by Ron Coleman on April 30, 2008
My annoying friend David Kelsey has got a great-guns discussion going about the movie version of Constantine’s Sword, a book I read and enjoyed a few years ago, with certain reservations — mainly that author James Carroll, a former Catholic priest, comes out by the end sounding so politically correct and essentially anti-Catholic that his “new” views seem to color what would otherwise have been very illuminating analysis of a critical turning point in the history of the Church, especially, yes, as it relates to Jews. I’m also a little suspicious of his little Freudian motif he weaves throughout.
This is always a hot-button topic. There is something in me that won’t let me join the chorus of otherwise nearly universal Jewish condemnation of the history of the Church, right up through more or less present times. And I am not quite sure what that something is.
Cross-posted on Dean’s World.
April 30, 2008 at 3:42 pm
“There is something in me that won’t let me join the chorus of otherwise nearly universal Jewish condemnation of the history of the Church, right up through more or less present times. And I am not quite sure what that something is.”
I suspect, the ancient past, and the coming future.
April 30, 2008 at 3:58 pm
“There is something in me that won’t let me join the chorus of otherwise nearly universal Jewish condemnation of the history of the Church, right up through more or less present times.”
That *something* could be many things.
1) You hate siding with liberal Jews against the Christian right of any denomination. Ater all, don’t the same people who rail against the Christians also rail against the frum?
2) You don’t like bashing the Catholics when we are already allied against the Muslims.
3) What about those damned Lutherans?
4) You resent that the author is a dirty hippie.
5) Ghettos are underrated.
6) Were the bloody Maccabees any better? (Oh, okay, that’s not really your issue)
7) You think Carroll is pro-Palestinian and pro-Muslim somehow.
You like Orthodox religious hierarchies, and people with glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
9) Weren’t the Romans kind of thugs before they went Christian?
10) Can’t we find anything nice to say about Pious?
April 30, 2008 at 3:58 pm
Pius. PIUS!
May 1, 2008 at 9:12 am
Perhaps he confused him with Louis the Pious.
May 6, 2008 at 11:02 am
Ron, you may have a rational motive along the lines of:
“We’re still in exile and it ill behooves us to rile them up for no practical reason.”