From the first time Christian children settle into Sunday school classrooms, an image of Jesus Christ is etched into their minds. In North America he is most often depicted as being taller than his disciples, lean, with long, flowing, light brown hair, fair skin and light-colored eyes. Familiar though this image may be, it is inherently flawed. A person with these features and physical bearing would have looked very different from everyone else in the region where Jesus lived and ministered. Surely the authors of the Bible would have mentioned so stark a contrast. On the contrary, according to the Gospel of Matthew, when Jesus was arrested in the garden of Gethsemane before the Crucifixion, Judas Iscariot had to indicate to the soldiers whom Jesus was because they could not tell him apart from his disciples. Further clouding the question of what Jesus looked like is the simple fact that nowhere in the New Testament is Jesus described, nor have any drawings of him ever been uncovered. There is the additional problem of having neither a skeleton nor other bodily remains to probe for DNA. In the absence of evidence, our images of Jesus have been left to the imagination of artists. The influences of the artists’ cultures and traditions can be profound, observes Carlos F. Cardoza-Orlandi, associate professor of world Christianity at Columbia Theological Seminary in Atlanta. “While Western imagery is dominant, in other parts of the world he is often shown as black, Arab or Hispanic.” And so the fundamental question remains: What did Jesus look like?
Category: culture
Is Facebook Luring You Into Being Depressed?
In his free time, Sven Laumer serves as a referee for Bavaria’s highest amateur football league. A few years ago, he noticed several footballers had quit Facebook, making it hard to organize events on the platform. He was annoyed, but as a professor who studies information systems, he was also intrigued. Why would the young men want to give up Facebook? Social scientists had been saying the social network was a good thing.
The Necessity of Football
Nigerian-born pathologist Dr. Bennet Omalu published his controversial paper in the journal Neurosurgery on the brain of Mike Webster, the Hall of Fame center for the Pittsburgh Steelers and Kansas City Chiefs, who died in 2002. Omalu is the subject of both a recent book and film that share the same blunt title: Concussion. The book, by Jeanne Marie Laskas, expands on her reporting in the 2009 GQ exposé “Game Brain.” (The film, which stars Will Smith as Omalu, will be released by Sony Pictures this Christmas.) Omalu’s article described in detail his discovery that chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), an impact-based head trauma, was killing football players and other athletes who suffered repeated blows to the head. Three doctors with the NFL’s Mild Traumatic Brain Injury committee wrote a letter to the editors of Neuroscience alleging Omalu had misunderstood his own findings. But even as the NFL tried to bury his breakthrough, the doctor continued to accumulate data on what head trauma did to the brains of athletes until a former neurosurgeon for the Pittsburgh Steelers who had known Webster called Omalu to tell him he believed him. As Laskas wrote in GQ, “It was the first time anyone who ever had anything to do with the NFL had validated Omalu’s work.”
Women Behind Bars
In the last few years, America’s out-of-control incarceration boom has finally started to get the sustained public scrutiny, and condemnation, that it deserves. But one key element of the story still receives too little attention: the number of women in the nation’s prisons and jails.
A Tibetan’s Journey for Justice
Worried about the erosion of Tibetan culture and language, one man takes his concerns to Beijing, hoping media coverage and the courts can reverse what he sees as a systematic eradication.
The Two Asian Americas
In 1928, an Indian immigrant named Vaishno Das Bagai rented a room in San Jose, turned on the gas, and ended his life. He was thirty-seven. He had come to San Francisco thirteen years earlier with his wife and two children, “dreaming and hoping to make this land my own.” A dapper man, he learned English, wore three-piece suits, became a naturalized citizen, and opened a general store and import business on Fillmore Street, in San Francisco. But when Bagai tried to move his family into a home in Berkeley, the neighbors locked up the house, and the Bagais had to turn their luggage trucks back. Then, in 1923, Bagai found himself snared by anti-Asian laws: the Supreme Court ruled that South Asians, because they were not white, could not become naturalized citizens of the United States. Bagai was stripped of his status. Under the California Alien Land Law, of 1913—a piece of racist legislation designed to deter Asians from encroaching on white businesses and farms—losing that status also meant losing his property and his business. The next blow came when he tried to visit India. The United States government advised him to apply for a British passport.
According to Erika Lee’s “The Making of Asian America,” published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Immigration and Nationality Act, signed into law on October 3, 1965, this swarm of circumstances undid Bagai.
Why Japanese Kids Can Walk to School Alone
Even in big cities like Tokyo, small children take the subway and run errands by themselves. The reason has a lot to do with group dynamics.
What the Hell Is Wrong With America? 7 Myths That Prop Up Mass Shooting Culture
When is America going to wake up and realize that as long as we as a society allow easy access to guns, we are complicit in mass killings?
Tragedies like the Umpqua Community College carnage are not inevitable facts of life in America.They are a consequence of a society that doesn’t want to take a hard look at the roots and causes of violence, and understands that you don’t make deadly force widely and readily available to human beings.
Another gun-wielding young guy has left a trail of death, mayhem, injuries and maimed lives in a murderous spree, this time at a rural community college. The unfolding media coverage has featured residents of Roseburg, Ore., saying they didn’t think that could happen there. Others have replied that violence in America is just like violence anywhere else. Pro-gun advocates say the tragedy could have been stopped if students were armed. (Some were nearby but said they didn’t want to intervene because they feared getting shot by SWAT teams.) On the political front, almost everyone has expressed sympathy for victims but predicted that, yet again, Congress will not act to end easy access to guns.
These reactions reveal what is deeply wrong with America, from myths about where violence occurs to ignoring the ways in which traumatized people act out. Let’s start with the myths that perpetuate the cycle of gun violence:
Map: These are the world’s least religious countries
The survey of 65 countries, conducted by Gallup International and the WI Network of Market Research, is based on 63,898 interviews. China tops the list of the world’s least religious nations by far; it’s followed by countries in Europe — about three fourth of all Swedish and Czech also said that they were either atheists or not religious.
How Americans can lose a lot of weight without giving up a single calorie
You’ve heard for years that the French and Japanese are much thinner than Americans because their diets are so much better than ours. A new mathematical model assesses why that is and how much thinner Americans could be if they changed their eating habits.