08 November 2008

A "Hot Steamy Night Of Scripture"...

...Is promoted at The Episcopal Church's Diocese of California website. And we're not talking temprature or humidity here:
On the night before the big election, I was done with campaigning and the last thing I wanted to see was another political commercial. My pre-election tension was high, as a Facebook friend wrote in her status that she felt “the same anxiety as on Christmas Eve when I was six-years-old and I had asked Santa for a bicycle.” I completely understood the sentiment and I needed relief. What better than a night out for trashy tales of sex and smut? And in the fullness of pre-election ambiguity, where better to go for bawdy fare than St. Mary the Virgin, San Francisco?

Advertised as “For Mature Audiences Only,”
Pulp Scripture by SMV-resident playwright William Bivins, was billed as “Bible stories they didn’t teach you in Sunday School.” The seven one-act plays were performed as dramatic readings by four actors who showed remarkable breadth of character and range of emotion.
If they had taught me this kind of thing in Sunday School, our family would have been at the Roman Catholic church the next weekend. But the rector of St. Mary the Virgin is thrilled:
With a show that opens with feigned sex, the series of short plays were at once brow-raising, funny and reverent – Pulp Scripture illustrated how encounters with holy history are best revealed as equally sacred and profane. “Bivins has made scripture more accessible and immediate,” the Rev. Jason Parkin, Rector of SMV told me after the play, “and he has shown that engaging the divine story can be happy, joyous, and fun.”
It's a free country - they can do as they please. But I'm sorry; I can't "live in tension" with this kind of pop twaddle masquerading as theology. The new North American Anglican province can't come soon enough.

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