Jeffrey Miller

LOS ANGELES – When people talk about seeing holy signs, they don’t usually mean "Your Ad HERE."

That was the message which appeared Wednesday evening as a 50-foot projected image on the bell tower of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, headquarters of the Los Angeles Roman Catholic Archdiocese.

Visible to thousands of commuters on a nearby freeway, the sign was gone the next day.

It wasn’t authorized by the archdiocese, spokesman Tod Tamberg said.

"A church tower is different from a billboard. If it wasn’t, we would have been selling ad space 2,000 years ago," he said. "There are plenty of ways to communicate without making ad space out of your sanctuaries. I think most people would react negatively to that."

Turns out, the sign wasn’t really trolling for advertisers. It was a guerrilla art piece by James Cui.

"I’m flattered you noticed," the 28-year-old Highland Park graphic artist told the Los Angeles Times, which called a telephone number listed on the sign.

"I hoped I was hitting a lot of people with it," Cui said. "That’s the trick in L.A. The only way to hit a lot of people is on the freeway."

Cui uses a laptop computer, a video projector and a portable electric generator to cast the images on blank walls.

This was really a wasted opportunity of the signs that could have been placed on the Taj Mahony. Such as perhaps "Ugly Cathedral for sale, Our Lady of Cement Blocks, or Our Lady of the Angles as some have called it. I am sure my readers could come up with a few more.

From an article about Holy Angels Church –
An Ecumenical Catholic Community (first off never trust a Church whose parish website is on geocites) about their new "Deacons."

She said she encouraged her husband to become a deacon. He wanted her to become one as well.

"It seemed the right thing and the right time and place," she said. "Because really all it is, in some ways, is the formalization of what we already are, as opposed to something entirely new. It was a natural progression."

Most of the training was background material for Donald Metz.

"I’ve been president of the parish council liturgy boards and the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, and for each had lots of training programs, and that’s training which is spread throughout a lifetime," he said.

Yea all that background with liturgy and the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine really paid off in joining a faux Catholic church founded by Reverend Patricia A. Zorn who specializes in products like "Flower Essences for Animal." She does have some profound things to say about the meaning of life though.

Baptism/Baby Naming Ceremony: Life is Hello!

Bereavement: Life is Goodbye!

Now I am confused which is it? Maybe she is well versed in those two pop theologians Paul McCartney and John Lennon (who was bigger than Jesus you know).

You say yes, I say no
You say stop and I say go, go, go
Oh, no
You say goodbye and I say hello
Hello, hello
I don’t know why you say goodbye
I say hello
Hello, hello
I don’t know why you say goodbye
I say hello

Part of their Mission Statement also made me laugh.

We are a Community of Believers, members of all religious faiths, and from every walk of life.
We are deeply rooted in Holy Scripture and firmly grounded in Christian Tradition.

Wow this must be a really really large church. Members from all religious faiths? Hindus, Gnostics, Islam, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, Pagans, Pantheists, Falun Gong, Taoism, Baptists, Russian Orthodox, Catholics, etc all in one church founded in Holy Scripture and Christian tradition. Not to mentions from every walk of life. Considering the thousand of professions this is really quite an accomplishment. I wonder what there mission statement was before they found that next to last person from a walk of life or religion. Gee if we could just find a Sunni who is also a shoemaker we will finally have them all.

Via Mary Meets Dolly

I found this gem in the Telegraph. In this piece, Roger Highfield writes about the unease about breeding cloned animals the conventional way and letting them enter the food chain. This is a very real conundrum. Most people agree they don’t want to eat meat from a cloned cow (although they are clamouring to inject themselves with embryonic stem cells from cloned human embryos) but what about the offspring of a cloned cow. The daughter cow is technically not a clone, but "half-a-clone." Does that count? Would you eat the offspring of a cloned cow?

What left me scratching my head about this piece is how Mr. Highfield finishes it:

Underlying much of the concern about a calf that is not even herself a clone is the "yuck factor". This articulates a visceral fear that these methods are unnatural, though what people mean by this is hard to say.

After all, in the Garden of Eden, the first life was reproduced by cloning. Like Dundee Paradise, we all have clones in our family tree.

Huh? I guess I just wasn’t expecting a science editor to suggest that Adam and Eve were our real ancestors and that they were clones in the same breath.

If Eve was a clone then I guess we need to revise history since it was not Alexander Graham Bell, but Satan who made the first clone fall.

More seriously though Rebecca is right is wondering about this add convergence. Sillier though is if Eve was cloned then she would be genetically identical to Adam and of course of the same gender.

ATLANTA (BP)– Former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton have proposed the establishment of a broadly inclusive alternative Baptist movement to counter what they called a negative image of Baptists and to address poverty, the environment and global conflicts.

Carter and Clinton kicked off their plans with a news conference Jan. 9 at the Carter Center in Atlanta, flanked by leaders of moderate Baptist groups including the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, a breakaway group of an unverified number of churches that objected to the election of conservative leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention. Carter and Clinton announced a “Celebration of a New Baptist Covenant,” tentatively set for Jan. 30-Feb. 1, 2008, at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, which they hope will attract 20,000 Baptists.
[Via Jay Anderson]

An alternative to the Southern Baptist conference? I wonder what they will call it? Perhaps "Way Southern Baptist", that is they are so way South that they can smell sulfur.