Meanwhile, In Another Part of the Field

If you've been missing me here, it's because I've been busy writing about the material culture of religion over at Icons and Curiosities. That's what I've decided I'm dealing with. "The material culture of religion" sounds better than "religious stuff and junk." Gradually I'm figuring out how to work things I really want to talk about into reviews of hymnals, statuary, biblically-named garden plants, Christian Barbies, rosaries, and statues of Jesus which recall nothing more than the Religious Ed curriculum in the English state schools.

When Epiphany was a little lass in her school in Cambridge, the Religious Ed lessons alternated between the themes of "Jesus, Friend and Teacher," and "The Five Pillars of Islam." This statue, which I reviewed the other day in a spirit not entirely charitable , calls to mind the former theme. It's not that I object so much to the idea of Jesus as Friend and Teacher, because as we all know, He made it clear to his disciples that they were His friends and not His slaves. Besides, everyone seems to have called him Teacher.

Who didn't call him Lord, that is. And therein really lies my problem with that statue, hanging on a wall in a Catholic church in a place called Uckfield. The whole reason why I'd be in church in the first place is that I believe Jesus to be something more than my friend and my teacher. If He's only a good man (and a good-looking one at that, in his nattily half-unbuttoned work shirt), then I really have other things to be doing on Sunday morning. Dynamic, welcoming people are a dime a dozen: my town, sleepy as it is, is full of them, and God bless them, too. I don't need to get up on Sunday to go and prostrate myself, at least mentally, before a nice guy. I could stay in bed with one.

Nope, the reason I go to church has to do, specifically, with what's in the tabernacle, and what hangs above the altar. It has to do with One who did what no one else in human history has done. It has to do -- and I know there are people who think it's negative to dwell on this -- with the Cross and the sacrifice. It has to do with being God, who could lay down His life not only for the friends at His table on a spring night in Palestine, but for the friends who are able to be His friends now only because He is God, and gave Himself. There's your relevance for you, O people of Uckfield. Closer, less expensive, and infinitely more precious than you think. If He's not God, if He's really just a windblown dude, then you've wasted roughly $50,000. Go home.

Ahem. Anyway, so I've been busy doing stuff like that. All this time, the folks at First Things, by whom I mean the people actually in the office in New York, have been all swamped with preparations for the launch of a redesigned website. The project has not been without its hitches and setbacks, but I'm assured it will be wonderful. Navigating the site should be a lot easier, too: from Icons and Curiosities to the wonderful Anchoress blog, not to mention Spengler, about whom it's hard to know what to say except that you need to read him, and back to the home page with its daily article, plus links to a newly formatted "First Thoughts" blog, to which I'll also be contributing over the next few weeks.

I get tired just thinking about it, actually, even from this safe and peaceful remove. But it'll be great. In fact, don't wait around. Go there now and read Joseph Bottum on Notre Dame and Obama. Read Wesley J. Smith on health care reform. Because things are under construction, there may be a few items you can't access right now, such as associate editor David P. Goldman's incisive and insightful "Demographics and Depression" from last month's print magazine, but you'll want to check back soon, when everything's up and running, and read that, too. And while you're waiting to read that, you shouldn't miss this.

I guess I should include a warning that any of those links are apt not to be working at any time over the weekend. But keep trying. It'll all be there.

It's beyond an honor to be included in this gifted, challenging company of intellects, which is a clunky, earthbound piece of rhetoric incapable of doing justice to my real gratitude.