Posted on 04/01/2002 2:23:35 PM PST by MusicDude_Rep
Heard on the local police scanner in Lawrenceburg, TN. Three men, who appeared to be of Middle East origin, were in a maroon Plymouth sitting by the cities water supply.
And THIS one is by a Berkeley Leftie who has bashed America. Promoting a guy who bashes the US...oy.
I'll have to look at your other links.
(National Catholic Reporter) Jesus 2000: Contest Draws Varied Images, and Strong Reactions By Bill Broadway/The Washington Post
Some who sent their comments about the winner of Jesus 2000, a contest to select an appropriate image of Jesus for the third millennium, were incensed.
"It is nothing but a politically correct modern blasphemous statement reflecting the artist's and the so-called judge's spiritual depravity," one critic said of the dark-skinned portrait that appeared on the Dec. 24 cover of the National Catholic Reporter, an independent newsweekly.
The e-mail was signed, "A Christian Patriot."
Said another anonymous e-mailer: "I am not pleased with this choice. If it is Jesus of all the people, why doesn't it show Asian, Latino, Hispanic, Italian, White, Irish, Europeans, Middle Easterners, Indians, Pakistanis, Jewish? Why just a black in dreadlocks?"
Another complained that the artist made the Prince of Peace "look like the Artist Formerly Known as Prince," and someone else called the portrait "a blatant rip-off of Jimi Hendrix. Just add a guitar and you have Jimi from the 'Electric Ladyland' album. Good album, but nothing that would make him the Messiah."
The artist, Janet McKenzie, of Island Pond, Vt., used a female African American model to create her winning entry, "Jesus of the People." The figure is flanked by a yin-yang symbol, an Asian sign of harmony, and a feather, symbolizing transcendent knowledge and the Great Spirit of American Indians.
But one cyberspace critic satirized McKenzie's attempt at universality.
"Next time I'm going to join this contest," the e-mailer wrote. "My Jesus will be a narcoleptic vegetarian astronaut clown mime who lives in a Sri Lankan tree with three lesbian popes and sings the boogie-woogie in Navajo. And I'll probably win."
Fortunately for McKenzie and the National Catholic Reporter, such angry reactions represent a minority of the more than 1,000 e-mails, telephone calls and letters that continue to arrive at the newspaper's offices in Kansas City, Mo.
Most have been "overwhelmingly very favorable," said Editor Michael J. Farrell, who conceived of the contest. But Farrell acknowledged there was a "sharp division" in reactions to a black Jesus. "It's one of those things nobody is neutral about."
Wrote one enthusiastic Roman Catholic priest: "I am sitting here with tears brimming over and running down my face. This is a magnificent image of haunting, inviting serenity. And the other images! ... Jesus would recognize himself, as well as our time, in these images." (really?, one was a clown)
The contest, according to Farrell, was introduced last fall to generate "something new, not a Jesus of yesterday but a risky squint into the future" at the brink of the third Christian millennium. The "gracious consent" of Sister Wendy Beckett, a Catholic nun and art critic for the British Broadcasting Corp., to pick the winners greatly enhanced the project, he said.
The competition attracted 1,004 artists in 19 countries, who submitted 1,678 photo slides of paintings, sculptures, drawings and other images. A panel of three U.S. judges selected 10 finalists, from which Sister Wendy chose a winner and three runners-up.
She said the decision was difficult. "Reluctantly and timidly," she chose McKenzie's painting.
"This is a haunting image of a peasant Jesus -- dark, thick-lipped, looking out on us with ineffable dignity, with sadness but with confidence," she writes. "Over his white robe he draws the darkness of our lack of love, holding it to himself, prepared to transform all sorrows if we will let him."'
Jesus draws one hand to His heart, and He looks deeply into the eyes of the viewer.
"The essence of the work is simply that Jesus is all of us," McKenzie told the Reporter, a self-proclaimed "liberal" publication with a circulation of about 50,000. She said she was raised Episcopalian but today is a "devout agnostic" with "no connection to one institution." ...
Reminds me of the old Jerry Clower story, "You wanta' fish or talk about your job?"
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