The Vatican canceled Easter. You know how much stuff has to suck for the Pope to be like “you know what, this year Jesus stays dead”.
You know how they determine when Easter Sunday should be? I didn’t when I was a kid, and since this was before Wikipedia none of the adults in my immediate social circle knew either. I didn’t learn it until high school when the Jesuits (essentially Catholic Jedi) at St. Xavier taught me how the Catholics decided on a “movable feast,” solution to their scheduling problem…
Jesus rose from the dead on the first Sunday following the feast of Passover. (Technically, he may have risen Saturday night, but that still counts as Sunday on the Jewish reckoning, which begins each day at sunset instead of at midnight.)
The date of Passover is a complicated thing. Theoretically, the date should be the 14th of the Jewish month of Nisan, and it should correspond to a full moon (the Jewish calendar being partly lunar). In practice, it didn’t always work out that way. The month-moon cycles got out of synch, and sometimes feasts would be held on a “liturgical” full moon even when it was not an astronomical full moon. As a result, rabbis periodically had to announce when Passover would be celebrated.
Christians didn’t like being dependent on the pronouncements of rabbis for how to celebrate Christian feasts, so they came up with another way of determining the date. They decided that Easter would be celebrated on the first Sunday after (never on) the Paschal full moon.
Theoretically, the Paschal full moon is the first full moon occurring on or after the spring equinox. However, this day can be reckoned in different ways. One way is by looking at the sky, which yields the astronomical spring equinox. But since this shifts from year to year, most people follow the calendrical spring equinox, which is reckoned as March 21.
Seriously? Could following the moon around to time your death and rebirth festival get any more fucking pagan? Oh, and some nifty anti-semitism worked in there as well. Eastern Orthodox Christians calculate it slightly differently because they use the Julian Calendar instead of the Gregorian Calendar, like God intended. Christians all around the world follow this bonkers scheme to commemorate an event that they INSIST really took place on a specific day, a day we should be able to pinpoint with more precision one would think. Even Protestants still use this Papist calendrical wizardry rather than just picking a fucking day.
Anyways… what were we up to around here in the long long ago?
Two years ago Weekly Reads noted the final resolution of the sordid career of America’s Dad, Bill Cosby, convicted of three counts of aggravated indecent assault against Andrea Constand, at the time a Temple University employee he had mentored.
The Grounded Wife pitched in with a review of the 2017 live action Beauty and the Beast.
Of course, we can’t leave out the review without mentioned the gay character. Disney caught a lot of slack for having LeFou, Gaston’s obsequious sidekick, be a gay character: a theater in Alabama refused to screen the film and Disney had to withdraw the release of the movie altogether in Malaysia when it ran afoul of the Film Censorship Board. There was also some criticism from the LGBTQ side for queer-coding a villain.
The reality: LeFou is only just barely gay in the Disney universe. IMHO: Disney is still much too sensitive to its international audience and has much further to go to develop a pro-LGTBQ voice.
And here’s GMO heavy hitter Kavin Senapathy with a Kavin Can’t Even: Who Needs Birth Control When You Have GMOs? She’s responding to a classic Thanks Obama tweet from elf-proclaimed “Mama Lion” Zen Honeycutt, the founder of anti-biotech group Moms Across America.
@BarackObama Teen pregnancies are at an all time low because our people are being sterilized by glyphosate in our food and water!!!
— Zen Honeycutt (@zenhoneycutt) January 21, 2015
What were you doing in the before time? Let us know!
Featured Image: Evil Bunnies come out at night, Prescott Pym on Flickr shared with a Creative Commons license.
