(This is part 3 in my series on 1 Corinthians 5. Click here to read from the beginning.)

Most of us probably imagine the first swingers as 1960’s hippies in a free-love commune. But in fact, it started earlier than that, in World War II. Christopher Ryan explains:

It seems that the original modern American swingers were crew-cut World War II air force pilots and their wives. Like elite warriors everywhere, these “top guns” often developed strong bonds with one another, perhaps because they suffered the highest casualty rate of any branch of the military. According to journalist Terry Gould, “key parties,” like those later dramatized in the 1997 film The Ice Storm, originated on these military bases in the 1940s, where elite pilots and their wives intermingled sexually with one another before the men flew off toward Japanese antiaircraft fire…

Joan and Dwight Dixon explained to Gould that these warriors and their wives “shared each other as a kind of tribal bonding ritual, with a tacit understanding that the two thirds of husbands who survived would look after the widows.”

I’m going to do something silly, anachronistic, and completely improbable. I’m going to retell the Story of the Corinthian Stepmother in these terms.

(This is part 2 in my series on 1 Corinthians 5. Click here to read from the beginning.)

One marvels at the repetition of intentionally tragic stories, like Evergreene’s: After her Christian marriage ended in divorce, and after she slogged through the concomitant depression, she decided she’d be happier living a bisexual, polyamorous lifestyle. She hid her new lifestyle from her Southern Baptist friends and family, but not well enough.

The Passover stuff is already out at the grocery store. At the other end of the store, an even greater selection of pastel-colored candy and related items.

But Pesach is still several weeks away, and first I have another bat mitzvah to think of. My Beloved will finally herself be called to the Torah in an adult bat mitzvah. Better late than never, as they say.

We’re all helping out. Our younger daughter is laining the day’s maftir portion. Our elder daughter is canting as chazzanit. And I am laining the New Testament reading for the day, which is from First Corinthians chapter 5:

Matthew begins his gospel by breaking the rules.

It’s not so much that he includes a boring genealogy that breaks the rules—although from a storytelling perspective, starting with a boring genealogy certainly breaks the storytelling rules. To the ancient Jews, genealogies were very important, and they pop up throughout the Bible.

Rather, it’s the way that Matthew tells his genealogy that’s likely to raise eyebrows.

For one thing, he names several women, which is definitely against the rules. The last was Bath-Sheba; King David murdered Uriah in order to steal her for himself. And in David’s ancestry, he mentions Ruth, who was a Moabite. And before that, Rahab, the whore from Jericho. And before that, Tamar, the mother of Peretz and Zerach, of whom you may never have even heard.

Today's Quote

The trouble with religious morality comes not from morality’s being inescapably pure, but from religion’s being incurably unintelligible.

(Bernard Williams)

Williams, Bernard. “God, Morality, and Prudence.” Morality: An Introduction to Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. 72. Print.

My father over at his blog posted a two-part series on gay marriage. It started as an initial post called “Redefining Marriage," which proved controversial enough among his theological colleagues that he felt a need to post part 2 to clarify.

What follows is in reply to part 1.

Same-sex marriage is now a fact of life with state after state endorsing it as a bonafide marriage contract. This has brought me to reconsider the subject hopefully without prejudice and just a soupçon of bias. I have come to the conclusion in studying the, so-called, relevant scripture that God does not approve. But by the same Biblical message I cannot limit God’s grace in matters of the heart. [emphasis in original]

Little Cam Smith and River Jones huddled around the former’s desk during third-period Social Studies. The teacher thought they were preparing their report on the history of woman U.S. Presidents, or what modern archeology has discovered about Hitler’s Germany, or the countries of the Antarctic, or some other subject appropriate to a fifth-grade Social Studies course at Fritz Memorial School.