Maryland Blogger alliance
The Maryland Blogger Alliance
Easter Stew
I generally avoid writing blog entries comprising loosely connected "tidbits," with the exception of continuing subject matter like my Public Education Watch. Yet, this time a few ideas related to Easter came to my attention almost simultaneously, so it's worth making an exception.
ITEM: This year is the earliest possible date on the calendar for Easter. The holiday falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox. This dating of Easter is based on the lunar calendar that Hebrew people used to identify Passover, which is why it moves around on our Roman calendar. As it happens, 2008's equinox is on March 20, followed by a full moon the next day, making that Good Friday. According to some information I received (but have not verified),
This year is the earliest Easter any of us will ever see the rest of our lives! And only the most elderly of our population have ever seen it this early (95 years old or above!). And none of us have ever, or will ever, see it a day earlier! Here's [sic] the facts:
1) The next time Easter will be this early (March 23) will be the year 2228 (220 years from now). The last time it was this early was 1913 (so if you're 95 or older, you are the only ones that were around for that!).
2) The next time it will be a day earlier, March 22, will be in the year 2285 (277 years from now). The last time it was on March 22 was 1818. So, no one alive today has or will ever see it any earlier than this year!
The oldest member of my mother's church happens to be 94, with a great sense of humor. I can't wait until Sunday to rib her about having been "born too late" to have seen two March 23 Easter Sundays.
ITEM: The top story (front page, above the fold) in the March 20 issue of The Jeffersonian is a puff piece about a center for the practice of Wicca! This is an ongoing story of some interest in the county. It seems that a thirty-ish man here who won millions of dollars in the state lottery is a follower of Wicca, and he decided to convey quite a bit of money to this existing business for its expansion. The place is a café-cum-book-and-coffee shop run by a handful of people who consider themselves pagans-in the most charitable and innocuous sense of the word. The newspapers have been at pains to point out that this quasi-religion does not involve Satanism; in fact that the practitioners do not even acknowledge the existence of Beelzebub or his equivalent.
This is all very fine, and it's a nice, heartwarming tale, but the Jeff's timing is just awful. The grand reopening of this place occurred last weekend, which meant that the story could-with a bit of extra effort-been run in the Tuesday number of the paper. Or it could have waited until next week. To headline this story on the day before Good Friday seems like a deliberate slap in the face of the Christians who comprise the majority of the county's population.
I cannot imagine that the paper would have run a feature about radical Islam three days before the start of Yom Kippur, just as it wouldn't have run a feature about the Jewish Defense League on the eve of Ramadan. But apparently Christianity is fair game for any sort of abuse.
ITEM: Wednesday nights, I am out at a community band rehearsal across town, and on the way home it has become my practice to tune in to about ten minutes of the Les Kinsolving show on WCBM. There are several reasons: (1) ten minutes is about all I can abide of this old gasbag; (2) he occasionally gives half an hour or more of air time to one Larnell Custis Butler, arguably the greatest crackpot caller in the entire history of talk radio; and (3) when Kinsolving is on a tear about homosexuality, it's interesting to count how many times he can work the term "sodomy lobby" into the conversation in a short period of time.
As it happened, last night I managed to just miss Ms. Butler's diatribe, but shortly after I tuned in Kinsolving was hyperventilating with another caller, a man from Delaware who was in a lather about his local school system having ordered the removal of Easter decorations, as of Thursday.
Now this might have been an outrage if the decorations in question made even the most indirect reference to the betrayal, trial, crucifixion and rebirth of Jesus of Nazareth. But this caller's complaint dealt with nothing more than decorations depicting bunnies and colorfully decorated eggs.
Initially my reaction was to think that the school administrators were a bunch of old soreheads who found yet another excuse to make the public school experience dull and enervating. But as a bit of research this morning revealed, the caller was merely repeating an unsubstantiated rumor. WGMD radio reports in some detail that the story appears untrue. Moreover, perusing the web site of the Indian River School District, where this non-event occurred, reveals that the school administration had been the defendant in a recent lawsuit related to prayer in the schools, and has crafted a policy relating to prayer, religious symbols, teaching of religious history, and other forms of religious expression that seems quite fair and well-crafted, albeit a bit ponderous. But that's what you get when lawyers get their hands on an issue.
So, as usual, Kinsolving's blast was a waste of oxygen that someone else could have been using.
Look for a dispatch early next week about this Easter Sunday, which will be an interesting and bittersweet occasion for some of my friends and family.