Jots & Tittles
Walks on Water, Runs on Gas
A gas-guzzling SUV or minivan might seem like just the ticket for getting all your apostles from place to place. But a growing number of religious leaders are asking congregations to rethink their transportation choices—and asking automakers to make more Creation-friendly cars.
In a new series of print and TV spots, the Evangelical Environmental Network is posing the question: “What Would Jesus Drive?” “Too many of the cars, trucks and SUVs that are made—that we choose to drive—are polluting our air, increasing global warming, changing the weather, and endangering our health—especially the health of our children,” their TV ads run. The sentiment has long been expressed by environmental activists of all stripes, but what’s new is the evangelical spin: It’s a matter of loving your neighbor and cherishing God’s creation. “The Risen Lord Jesus is concerned about the kinds of cars we drive because they affect his people and his creation,” according to the WWJDrive Web site. “We believe He wants us to travel in ways that reduce pollution and consumption of gasoline.”
The Evangelical Environmental Network isn’t alone. In early November, the National Council of Churches teamed up with the Coalition for the Environment and Jewish Life to educate church- and synagogue-going Americans on environmental and energy issues. Their Interfaith Climate and Energy Campaign provided information on the environmental and social impact of driving gas-guzzling automobiles, and in some places even gave congregants the opportunity to test-drive electric-hybrid cars.
According to the Reverend Dr. Robert W. Edgar, General Secretary of the National Council of Churches, “The foreign oil that fuels our gas guzzling cars is polluting our environment … It’s time we recognized that the cars we build and drive are moral choices.”
So what would Jesus drive? Judging from the postings on the WWJDrive campaign’s online forum, a Honda seems likely: It is fuel-efficient and, as less serious discussants pointed out, Jesus himself says: “For I did not speak of my own Accord” (John 12:49). Another, even more economical suggestion was, of course, a donkey.
Next Exit—Cathedral
It’s designed to last for 500 years. By the standards of its medieval predecessors, that may not seem incredibly ambitious, but the immense new Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, in the middle of the city of angels, Los Angeles, has to survive not only the ravages of time but also natural disasters that your average Chartres or Notre Dame doesn’t face.
The Roman Catholic cathedral, which opened its doors to the public last fall, is built to withstand a magnitude eight earthquake—the big one, in other words. Its 125 million tons of concrete and steel are built on 149 elastomeric base isolators—that is, shock absorbers—that separate the building from the ground and will allow it to float as much as 27 inches in any direction should the earth shift under it. Which is bound to happen in seismically unstable Southern California.
All that is invisible, of course, to the ordinary visitor or worshiper. What is immediately striking about the new cathedral is its appearance, both inside and out. The award-winning Spanish architect José Rafael Moneo wanted to build an entirely 21st-century building to reflect the contemporary diversity of L.A.—not a building (like the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.) that would simply mimic the cathedrals of the Middle Ages. Visitors approaching the 95-foot-high structure see an irregular, adobe-colored building with virtually no right angles.
Moneo explains that in his design he was seeking that ineffable something that people are after when they go to church—a sense of journey and pilgrimage. To do this, Moneo designed the building so that visitors enter through a side entrance in the south wall (rather than the traditional western entrance of most cathedrals) and then pass through plazas, along colonnades and up staircases to the sanctuary.
Once inside the church, the second of Moneo’s architectural priorities is apparent (or transparent): light—a metaphor for the light of God—that is diffused through enormous windows of naturally translucent alabaster. The bright California sun streams in through the windows to bathe the vast interior space with a warm glow.
A huge architectural cross rises to the ceiling to the left of the altar, surrounded by alabaster windows, but the crucifix itself, below, is human scaled—to allow worshipers to kiss Jesus’ feet on Good Friday.
In at least one way, the postmodern design does reflect traditional cathedral building practices. Medieval cathedrals were located near rivers—the main arteries of transportation. The new cathedral is built beside the freeway, a modern river.
On Exhibit
Modern takes on the medieval art of stained glass are on display until March 16 at The Gallery at the American Bible Society in New York City. The exhibition, Reflections on Glass: 20th-Century Stained Glass in American Art and Architecture, presents 30 stained glass windows by Jewish, Christian and secular artists, reflecting various aesthetic movements and styles of the past century. For more information, contact the American Bible Society, 1865 Broadway, New York, NY; phone: 212-408-1500, or visit their Web site: www.americanbible.org.
The Bible in the News
One of my all-time favorite cartoons, from the early 1990s, employs the similarity between the first name of the current Iraqi dictator, Saddam, and the name of the first of two biblical cities of sin, Sodom, to explain the evil that led to the Gulf War. Although we would not be surprised to detect an increase in such references in today’s newspapers, let’s look at other “Sodom” citations in the popular press.
First are references to Sodom as a street or place name like any other. Thus, several news accounts refer to a Sodom Road, in the vicinity of Niagara Falls, and another, near Providence, Rhode Island, with no more notice taken than if it were Main or Maple St.
More interesting are reports that link a modern site with its biblical namesake. So, Sodom Pioneer Cemetery, in rural Minnesota, owes its origins to the following incident: “Around 1870, a minister held a hell-fire revival at an adjacent school, but disappointing attendance prompted him to call the area Sodom and Gomorrah. The Sodom name stuck” (Minneapolis Star Tribune, October 6, 2002). In a similar vein, Sodom Road, in Clinton Township, New York, is said to owe its name to a 19th-century designation by Quakers, who disapproved of a liquor-serving tavern at this spot. Some contemporary residents, tired of queries about how to get to Gomorrah, have petitioned to have their street renamed.
More often than not, Sodom (or Sodom and Gomorrah) is not the actual name of a place but is used as a description—almost always in a negative way. Thus, Shenandoah, a small town north of Houston, was seen as “an all-out Sodom and Gomorrah” by some, who insisted, among other things, that a fig leaf be strategically placed on a statue of David situated in a local mall and that a restaurant cover two pictures depicting nudes.
It seems that some cities just naturally attract comparisons with these biblical municipalities. New York City is spoken of as “Sodom by the Hudson” in an article commemorating the opening of America’s first Museum of Sex. Venice, Italy, is similarly described in two sources—a British book reviewer reminds readers of Lord Byron’s reference to the city as a “sea-Sodom,” and a Houston theater critic opens his review of Shakespeare, with the title “A Dreamy Midsummer Night,” in this way: “The wicked city of Sodom’s got nothing on Venice, where big-breasted, red-lipped women stand on every street corner dressed in nothing but black garters, silk stockings, and curve-hugging skivvies that look like undergarments from a futuristic brothel.” Such language could certainly have spiced up the Genesis account!
Again unsurprising is an Australian correspondent’s application of the phrase, “21st-century Sodom and Gomorrah,” to Las Vegas. We are likewise not surprised to read of a similar expression applied to Moscow, although its source (the city’s long-serving mayor) and its rationale (too many billboards, creating an “ad-pocked landscape”) are quite remarkable.
It is also somewhat startling when we read of a comparison such as the one made by a native Canadian (as reported in the Birmingham Post, September 30, 2002): “I grew up in Canada and I can assure you, Friday night in Oslo makes Toronto look like Sodom on a busy night.”
The biblical image is also frequently summoned to warn of dire consequences if a particular action is (or is not) undertaken. Thus, Ghana’s Chief of Staff warned that “indiscipline would threaten Ghana like the Biblical Sodom and Gomorrah, unless a concerted action was taken to uproot the canker that had permeated all spheres of the society.” Opponents to a proposed Indian casino in Maine characterized it as “Sodom-by-the-Sea” (shades of Venice!). Similarly, the plan to open a club with topless or naked dancers in Swansea opened up “the possibility of the city becoming the Sodom and Gomorrah of South West Wales.” If these seem a bit overstated, consider the Albany, New York, parent who is “concerned about putting my child in the Sodom and Gomorrah environment of our local public school” or the music critic for the Chicago Daily Herald who judges that “the music industry has come as close as it has to Sodom and Gomorrah’s border … where the consumer is shamelessly gorged for an increasingly mediocre product.”
Turning, if only briefly, to the world of entertainment, we find “The Last Night in Sodom,” which was the last album, in 1984, of the electro-pop duet Soft Cell; the long-running and widely-produced play, “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom”; the angst-rockers, Queens of the Stone Age, “known for Sodom and Gomorrah-style rock ‘n’ roll debauchery”; and ’90s superclubs, like Gatecrasher, where the nocturnal activity “resembled nothing short of a scene from Sodom and Gomorrah.”
Finally, we turn to the search for righteous residents of Sodom, whose presence could have averted the city’s demise. On a relatively light note, we read of a Nevada county commission that sought out opponents to a proposed tax increase with all the seriousness of “Abraham the patriarch, searching the streets of Sodom for 10 righteous men.” More somberly and related to the opening of this column, we close with a remark found in an early December 2002 column by Thomas Friedman, in reference to U.N. inspectors and Iraq: “It’s really an Abraham-like situation, when God told Abraham he would not destroy Sodom if he could find just 10 good men there. Are there 10 Iraqi refuseniks who dare to say, ‘Enough is enough’ … Is there one?”