Did Christianity create slavery?

Did Christianity create slavery? No.

Might it have been used to condone slavery in the American south? No doubt. 

How are we to think about it?


1) Slavery was universal in the ancient world and not racially based. Typically slaves were the spoils of war. The first nations in the world to outlaw slavery were Christian nations including Catholic Spain as the movement gathered steam through the Catholic middle ages. Much of the slavery of Africans was by Africans who sold conquered members of other African tribes to Moslem slave traders who then sold them into the international slave trade. Moslem nations were among the very last to abolish slavery. That Christian nations participated in that slave trade was more the evidence to the power of sin rather than to the triumph of Christianity. And it was Christian nations that abolished the slave trade.

2) Britain used its power and influence to eliminate the slave trade worldwide in the first half of the nineteenth century led by Christian principles rather than political or economic interests (British slavers made as much money as other slavers and they were opposed to the reforms that threatened their profits.)

3) Presentations of Christianity as the ideology used to hold slaves down strike me as propaganda. If Christianity was used by some in the south, consciously or unconsciously, to subject Black slaves, it also pricked the consciences of others to treat slaves as children of God. The reason we in the West believe "that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights" is because Christianity taught us in the west that we are made in the image and likeness of God and what we do to the least of our brethren, we do to Me (Christ.) Christianity converted both the barbarians and the cultured Greeks and Romans, neither of whom believe in such an idea, through stories, by the courageous evangelization by monks and priests, and by martyrs. Belief in such a counter-intuitive view was only spread to Black Africa with the spread of Christianity where it is now the fastest growing region of the Christian faith in the world and is producing new martyrs every day.

4) Christian churches have done much to build Black communities and support the Back family. The government and the ideologues have done much to destroy the Black family finishing the job slavery started. Rebel against them not the Church.

5) The temptation is to blame something outside us not ourselves. I know this from my own shameful experience. That is sin talking not the Holy Spirit. The easy way out is blaming the Other rather than rallying yourself and pulling yourself up by your efforts and your friends' help. That is the culture talking whether Trump to the Hillbillies or the ideologues to Blacks. They are not our friends. They make money by shilling sin to our weakness.

6) I just got finished reading (actually listening to) J.D. Vance's book Hillbilly Elegy. Read it. It is not just the Black family the culture is destroying. I come from neither a Black nor a hillbilly family and yet I found much to identify with and shed more than one tear. Don't give in to the easy path that the culture portrays, the excuses it gives you or the enemies it lets you wallow in. Rather  take charge of yourself and triumph!

Java Trivia

Twelve coffee facts via the Catholic Relief Services.

Who Needs German Lessons? Germans

Zeke Turner, "Who Needs German Lessons? Germans, ApparentlySwabia’s dialect has locals putting hand to mouth; drool drills," WSJ October 9th, 2016.

West Texas Comes to the Big Screen: Yes Heroes and Anti-Heroes Still Live in America

Ross Douthat wrote that "Hell or High Water" was one of the few movies Hollywood makes in a year that you should see. Good plot, believable characters, dramatic tension what's not to like? Here is the trailer. although I suspect the triler over sells the action:
Meanwhile Armond White give "Sully" a thoughtful and very positive review. Those of us who remember United Flight 1549's dramatic landing in New York Harbor, will appreciate the tale. Clint Eastwood directs this drama to show America's elites want to eat its heroes not honor them.Another movie critic in San Antonio, Patrick Harris, gives it a rave review.

Watch the trailer:

Trump: $20 Billion for School Choice

Opinion Journal: Trump’s ‘New Civil Rights Agenda’ 9/9/2016 1:05PM Center for Education Reform Founder and CEO Jeanne Allen on the candidate’s clarion call for school choice. Photo credit: Zuma Press.

Sarah Connor: Muttersprache - TV total

Sarah Connor: Muttersprache - TV total Sarah Connor will international durchstarten - TV total

What Did John See?

In the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite, the Gospel for the Mass of Easter day is John 20:1-9.  In the Extraordinary Form, this is the Gospel for Easter Saturday. 

John and Peter run to the tomb. John, the younger of the two, gets there first, but stops and peers in.  True to character, Peter, rushes headlong in.  John sees and believes.  

What did he see?

Was it the image on the shroud?  Was it the way the jaw cloth was tossed aside?

The Shroud of Turin will be exhibited this spring from April 19th through June 24th. At National Review, Myra Adams asks, "What Does the Shroud of Turin Prove about Easter?"  It also reproduces Babara M. Sullivan's 1973 article, "Reading The Shroud of Turin."

While a famous (infamous?) carbon dating puts it in the medieval period, there are a great many mysteries that baffle scientific explanation, particularly if it were a medieval forgery:

1) Why is the image a photographic negative?
2) Since the image consists of light scorch marks on the outer fibers of the cloth, what process created it?
3) How did the image come to contain three dimensional information, a technical feat only brought out by the technology used to interpret images sent from probes to outer space in the twentieth century.
4) How did the cloth acquire the micro spores from precisely the right centuries and locations that show its originating in first century Palestine, resided in Syria and Turkey as well as modern Europe?

The list goes on.

No known scientific process could have produced the image.  It is more difficult to explain it as a forgery than as being authentic.

Resurrexit sicut dixit, Alleluia!