A question for everyone who grew up within a Christian tradition: what translation of the Bible did you read, and did you know that Catholics got extra secret Bible, like the first 100 callers for an As Seen on TV product? Conversely, did you Catholics know that Protestants get less Bible than you, and also weren’t allowed to get our ears pierced until we were thirteen?
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Grace Choi calls 3-D printers “thingy makers” (“It just got bookended as a 3-D printer because it makes a 3-D object, but essentially it’s a thingy-maker. You could call it an ink-jet printer that makes a 3-D object. It’s whatever you want, but it’s an object-maker”) and wants to fix the color problem in the beauty industry:
For instance, let’s say you want to make a BB cream. I wanted to make one and went to the manufacturing guy and I was like, “I want to make beauty cream for everyone. I want as many SKUs as possible. I want to make 50 shades for every single skin color and every single skin tone.” And he was like, “Sure, that’s going to cost you about a jillion dollars.” [Laughs.] And I’m like, “Why?” He said, “Well, we have these huge kettles and each kettle only makes one color at a time, and so if you want it, you’re going to have to pick one color or a few colors.” It’s very inefficient, because you have to decide which colors are going to be the most worth your money. And therein lies the problem of skin color and the beauty industry: You’re forced to decide which ones are the most important.
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Anne Helen has been writing some killer stuff lately (did you see her thing on Nicholas Sparks? I did not think I would want to read that many words about Nicholas Sparks, but I did) and this Aeon piece about dude ranches and Western mythology is pretty interesting, especially if you grew up going to dude ranches, WHICH I DID. There are a lot of home videos of me carrying a little cat as a dude named Travis leads me gently around an arena on top of a pony.
“What’s the kitty’s name, Mallory?” my mom gently prompts.
“Kitty doesn’t HAVE a name.” Anyhow, that’s all I have to say about dude ranches.
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DON’T WORRY, I’m still working on a long piece about the Lost Cosmonauts theory, but in the meantime please enjoy this five-year-old forum discussion.
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The “See Also” section for the Wikipedia article on true names is going to lead you down a K-hole to end all K-holes. Adamic languages, Enochian, Ineffability, Phonosemantics…it’s like an episode of So Weird.
“According to practices in folklore, knowledge of a true name allows one to affect another person or being magically.” 100% TRUE.
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Take a minute to look through Essence‘s gallery on Ruby Dee’s life. Have you read the book she and Ossie Davis wrote about their open marriage? (“One thing is certain: The best of me has been subsidized by the best of what you are. I have no hungers that you do not feed.”) It’s fantastic. You should buy it. She also had an amazing part in The Tall Target, which is a Civil-War-era proto-noir thriller that almost nobody talks about anymore. Buy her book and watch one of her movies while wearing a fur this weekend in honor of her.
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“Frog’s tongues much stickier than thought.” Well, that is just fun.
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“Urban youth are affected, collectively and individually, by trauma. But it’s not the trauma everyone says it is…we don’t think of this condition as PTSD. Instead we think of it as: PTSE: Persistent Traumatic Stress Environment.
We want to take the discussion of trauma away from the pathology of the individual, and treat it as the persistent state of an environment. Youth are living in the midst of painful and stressful events that ongoing. Walking to school, coming home, looking out the window, going to the store, scrolling through social media feeds — in these mundane activities, they are exposed to the very same violence, racism, gender oppression, and poverty that is disturbing in the first place. We are not responding to past trauma. We are responding to living trauma. And while the approaches that have been developed to deal with PTSD are valuable, they are not totally relevant. A new approach, an approach custom made for urban youth, is needed.”
My buddy Carvell Wallace is doing a very cool thing.
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Tags: link roundup, the internet
i think i fixed it??
FWIW, I was able to read & add comments after logging in to IntenseDebate. Not that this will help anyone who is not logged in.
Translations: pretty much anything except the New Living Bible because it was too hippy. We liked The Message a lot when I was in high school. I was jealous of the Catholic Secret Extra Bible.
From a nondenominational lady (till I started attending a CRC college, but even then that didn’t really change): NIV, but I really liked the NASB and the NAS. When I was freelancing for Zondervan, I wrote the back of the KJV for kids, which seemed really funny to me for some reason.
I interned at Zondervan in college! (But I didn’t work on Bibles, I did stuff with Lee Strobel and a few international authors).
Wait, CRC college—did you go to Calvin? (I’m class of 2007)
I absolutely did! Graduated in 2009. It wasn’t 100% awesome (the administration gave me many headaches), but I loved a lot of things about it.
Yeah- I have mixed feelings about it but I think it was kind of the place I needed to be at the time, you know? I’m really glad about a lot of the opportunities I had there (good profs, interim trips, internship, Festival of Faith and Writing) but also a good amount of Not Okay stuff going on.
!!! CRC folks! I did not go to Calvin but I went to GRCHS, which was kind of like a mini version. And encouraged me to run away from Calvin.
My husband’s a GRCHS grad! I have heard told that Calvin is more palatable in ways, but he had a decent experience there. Helps that he was a badass at debate. (Which is a thing you can totally be.)
For sure–profs were good more often than not, I got to go to Scotland and England, and the festivals (both FFM and FFW) were solid. I wouldn’t go somewhere else if I was in some kind of time travel scenario.
…
Probably.
My parents went to Calvin! (Actually, my dad’s whole side of the family went/is going there, including all four of my cousins. I decided to mix it up & go Jesuit)
I was the first person in 3 generations (on my dad’s side) to NOT go to Calvin… I am the black sheep. But I love Calvin, did the summer program with my family once, and my cousin and his awesome wife live right across the street from the side entrance of Calvin, so it’s almost the same right?
Hope rules, Calvin drools! We may have had shitty guests speakers and musical guests compared with Calvin, but at least I could go in a boy’s dorm room…and shut the door.
Seriously, though, MY PEOPLE! My parents both grew up in GR and I grew up in the RCA and actually worked in the denominational office in GR for a few years….before I, you know, got out. I have similar conflicted feelings about my time in the RCA and West MI–overall it was good, but I’m glad I had opportunities that helped me eventually expand my horizons and realize that the world is much, much, much bigger. Oh and yes, I’m Dutch to the hilt, but maybe that goes without saying.
If you started with the KJV, though, there’s something utterly wrong and awkward about latter-day translations using unpoetic language. It’s like when your dad tried to use 90s street slang to sound ‘hip’ and ‘with it’ only with God.
Look.
Catholics don’t read the Bible unless forced to in CCD/private Catholic school OR they’re doing the full Advent Wreath ceremony at home. Or they’re gleaning anti-abortion quotes for some protesting bullshit.
That said, when forced to read the Bible at school, we either used the King James version or more often the Good News Bible with the goofy illustrations.
In CCD, we had this weird “student’s bible” that had a whole section in the front chastising people for watching MTV and being gay.
Former private Catholic schoolgirl here. I went through a hyper-religious phase in 7th-8th grade and I actually asked for a Precious Moments Bible that I would read nightly. I want to go back and time and ask that little girl, “WTF?!?!” I guess there is no accounting for those confusing tween years.
I went through that, too. It was in part because I was desperately lonely & extensively bullied at my grade school. In high school I gave serious thought to becoming a nun, but after much prayer and reflection realized I would be running away from the world, and not running toward joyful communion with God.
I STILL think about running away to a nunnery (despite the fact that I’m an Atheist now). It seems like a Misandrist Paradise.
In the event of being Mysteriously Transported Back In Time, like in the opening chapters of cheap historical fiction, a nunnery does sound like the best course of action, in that it is about the only Mediaeval-y life plan for a woman that does not involve bearing like fourteen children.
I went to Catholic school and there was really not a lot of Bible reading going on. Maybe 2 semesters in all of high school were Bible time. (But we DID take a social justice class one year!)
We had a social justice/ethics class, too, but we also had a class about the history of the Bible and had all these complicated mnemonics to remember the order of the books. It was ALL rote learning, with no look into any kind of meaning or context, sadly. We never used that information in any other class.
That was kind of my experience too. There was no “why” behind the reading and learning. It didn’t help that the teacher for that particular class was a nun who was widely regarded as, uh, a very gifted storyteller. (You cannot call nuns liars.)
I went to Catholic schools for 12 years and we never read more of the bible than would be included in a kids’ illustrated version. Religion class was compulsory in high school, but also ungraded, so we did a lot of meditation tapes and role plays of bible stories.
This Catholic girl had an illustrated Bible and frankly that was all I needed until I reached high school and needed one for Bible class. It was great.
I did, but we were Bad Catholics who never even went to church at all, so I read the thing to try to figure out what the hell I was.
SPOILERS: I was Not Impressed.
Did we really get an extra secret bible? I thought it was just whichever one the school could pick up for cheapest as a lot of 200. But what would I know, I never opened it except to look for the sexy parts when I was bored in class.
you DID! you guys had TOBIT and WISDOM and JUDY and MACABEES and probably a bunch of other stuff too
I have never heard of any of those things. Thanks mom and dad, some good I got out of all that Catholic school.
http://www.biblica.com/en-us/bible/bible-faqs/why… They’re listed as The Apocrypha and Martin Luther yanked them out in the first place.
And we don’t even have to take it literally. Or really read it unless you’re trying to win CDC jeopardy.
I didn’t hear of the Maccabees until the sixth grade and I was dang mad my parents had never told me something that thrilling had happened! That’s what I get for being a protestant!
We really do. I had a CDC leader who was very competitive with Protestants in some hilarious ways, perhaps because I grew up in a Midwestern Lutheran stronghold, anyway we were told all the ways in which we did/had MORE BETTER RIGOROUS CORRECT INTERESTING religion.
Ha! I love how all of us Catholics/former Catholics are all, “Bible wut? Never heard of it.” Protestants know way more about our religion than we do.
I am a Unitarian Universalist, so I grew up reading everyone else’s holy books/writings but never cracked open a Bible. I also thought I was Catholic until I was about 8, because everyone I went to school with was. Then First Communion time rolled around and my dad had to set me straight.
lollllll
He had a similar childhood experience, growing up as a WASP in NYC and thinking he was Jewish for a long time because all his friends were. They all went to the same school, they all ate bagels, what’s the diff??
Ha! As a kid I thought everyone in the world was either Jewish or Catholic, since I knew hardly anyone who wasn’t one or the other. There was also a brief period where I thought my dad was Jewish for some reason, maybe because I had some friends who had one parent of each, and if my mom was Catholic…? The first time I encountered a real-live Presbyterian was a thrill!
Re: Bible: I was raised Catholic, but my parents jokingly call it Catholic Lite because we were not very serious about it. My dad’s mother was a pretty devout Catholic, and I remember when she passed away there was this whole argument between my dad & his Bornagain sisters. They wanted to bury her with whatever bible Bornagains use, and my dad was like “or we could bury her with the one she actually read.” I think the Bornagain sisters actually won, and I’m sure my dad’s mother was all, “why are you burying me with a bible? I can’t read it when I’m dead, you dumdums” because that’s the kind of woman she was.
ANYWAY, that was the first time I became aware that Catholic bibles were different from other bibles.
Ha, I read Bornagain as Bornagian and I was like, huh, I’ve never heard of that sect.
I thought it was some arcane French sect.
re: Vibosity and PTSE – YES YES YES. Fully on board with this concept.
Penn recently concluded a research study following children born to mothers who were addicted to crack. They found evidence that in utero crack exposure had much less significant long-term detrimental effects on the individuals than their ENVIRONMENT – witnessing violence and exposure to abuse being the experiences that seemed to have the most significant impact on long-term health and happiness.
On top of that, it’s been long established that the stress of being poor or the object of racism actually decreases lifespan and has notable negative health impacts. Life spans of the poor are, on average, 10 years less than life spans of the affluent. If you’re in a minority that is targeted by racist beliefs, your life span is also less by on average 2 years. The impact of the persistent stress on the body actually decreases brain mass and inhibits the immune system, along with a slew of other health impacts.
So it looks like all we need to do is chop off the top and bottom rungs of the economic ladder in the Unites States, and eliminate racism. Either that or start a Multicultural Misandrist Socialist Community?
Just not having enough food or guaranteed housing is also a big contributor.
I used to tutor kids who lived in a housing project here in Chicago in the late 90s/early 00s. They were AWESOME kids but sometimes they weren’t able to do their homework because there was so much scattered gunfire they were camped out under beds to keep from getting hit through walls/windows. Like, isn’t it obvious that would profoundly affect someone’s physical & mental well being and ability to be successful?
This kind of thing is the first thing I think about when I consider white privilege. How some people don’t realize it and/or insist that it isn’t true will always be beyond me – there are so many documented negative effects from living in the projects and guess what? It was white people who put black people there! Agh!
New International Version UNTIL the release of the New Revised Standard Version which became the ultimate in elite progressive academic Presbyterian bible-ing.
I grew up Presbyterian–PC(USA). Translations used: NIV (NRSV second choice).
Yes, I did know about the apocrypha. It was described to us kind of as a magical book of lies and was yet another reasons Catholics were highly suspect. I don’t think I read any of it until high school when I took a class at church about the history of bible canonization (cool teen alert).
I got my ears pierced at age 10 because my best childhood friend (who was Catholic!) got them done then and my parents gave in.
Most of what I remember about that Canon class was the clay sparrow story ( http://www.cracked.com/article_18948_5-real-delet… )
And I know we read Tobit in my Biblical lit class in college but I have zero recollection of it.
we read whichever gospel has mary magdalene preaching in it, it ruled
Magic and books of lies are like the best parts of Catholicism. Plus beautiful worship spaces bc our faith tradition is far older than the printing press. We’re definitely highly suspect.
As small protestant children we thought Catholics were interesting and mysterious–priests! incense! giant crucifixes! latin! all the kneeling! confessionals! Always seemed a lot cooler than our stuff (sorry Zwingli and Westminster Catechism but you’re no Child’s Book of Saints and fancy red pope shoes).
I only go to Mass once a year when I stay with my brother and his family for Xmas, but it seems like the incense thing isn’t really done anymore? At least not at Bro Jinx’s suburban GA church. It’s a big bummer to me – incense was pretty much the only thing I enjoyed about going to Mass.
million years late, but just come the hyper conservative washington dc diocese. INCENSE EVERYWHERE in superhot and stuffy churches
I remember being really weirded out the first time I went to a Protestant church and there was no stained glass and no beautiful sculpture and no Jesus on the cross at the front. IT WAS SO BORING THERE WAS NOTHING TO LOOK AT.
YEP. I went to my Protestant friend’s church for Christmas one year in high school and I was kind of shocked at how plain everything was. I spent a long time making imagining making things bigger and covering them with gold. Everything’s better huge and gold, imo.
My dad and I always favored The New American Standard, him because it was a good mix of plain/not-so-plain language, me because it was the closest to a literal translation I’ve ever found. As someone who’s translated her fair share of biblical text, the other translations tend to drive me up a wall. I vaguely know about the Super Secret Catholic Bible, but I’ve never seen one in real life. Why are the Catholics in my life holding out on me??? I may never know.
Also, is there a link to the Anne Helen piece about Nicholas Sparks?? I hate Nicholas Sparks, but I love Anne Helen…so…curiosity is getting the better of me.
ETA: OMG THE TRUE NAMES THING!! I haven’t thought about true names in SO LONG!
no girl it’s just on her new buzzfeed beat
Sweet.
The Catholics are holding out on you because as someone said above, we don’t read our bibles and probably had no idea we had extra bible. *cough* some of us have maybe just learned about if from Mallory today.
this Aeon piece about dude ranches and Western mythology is pretty interesting, especially if you grew up going to dude ranches, WHICH I DID.
Not having noticed yet which of you authored this link round-up (or, indeed, much else in my uncaffeinated haze), I thoroughly expected the dude ranch and ponies to be Nicole’s childhood, so getting to “What’s the kitty’s name, Mallory?” jolted me as wide awake knocking back as an espresso. DON’T MAKE ASSUMPTIONS, EMILY.
I, too, was confused 🙂 And I’ve been awake for the whole day! Maybe I can use the excuse that it’s my bedtime?
Presbytarian here. We used a mix of King James version and New Revised Standard in my church growing up. I went to a loosely Lutheran college, chapel or worship attendance wasn’t mandatory but we did have to take 2 “religion” courses in order to graduate. For the basic religion course I had to buy a different copy of the bible that contained the Apocrypha, which was the first time I learned that Catholics had extra books in their bibles.
I don’t remember what translation we used at my small southern Methodist church. I suspect it was probably either RSV or NRSV since I don’t remember the language being particularly archaic or new agey.
I do remember the bible cover, though. My mom painstakingly made us matching floral cloth Bible covers with handles for carrying, pockets for church bulletins, with lace and pearl buttons hot-glued on. Almost all the church mothers and daughters had them. Anyone else? Or is this a peculiarly Southern pre-Pinterest thing, like when all the moms hot-glued us Christmas blub necklaces and when they stitch-witcheried us matching jumpers with bunny silhouettes on the pockets?
It may be a Methodist thing. I remember all the church ladies had the floral lace bible covers while the church men had the worn leather ones. I also had the hot-glued christmas bulb necklace but not the bunny pockets. Thanks for nothing, mom!
Nope, not just you. I thought mine was so cool because it was DENIM. Like jeans. Which are cool.
My mom made a padded fabric one for my 3rd grade bible, I think it was a Noah’s Ark print. No lace or hot glue, despite being Methodist. I don’t think covers were a Thing there though, just my mom makes stuff.
In middle school I got a small NIV with silver-edged pages and a navy cover that folded over the edge and snapped shut. Pretty snazzy.
I think my parents had a copy of the apocrypha, I snatched it up and remember it being both fascinating and kind of boring. There were some great stories about teenage Jesus smiting everyone who annoyed him and Joseph explaining that wasn’t ok.
its totally a Southern thing, I had one too and loved it because it was blue.
Let’s see, the private Christian school I went to until I decided I wanted to go to public high school for real honors/AP classes used the NIV for everything. That was my standard until a few years ago, when I switched to the New Living Translation (my current one is just called The Book) because I liked the more modern language.
According to the internet my church uses the New Revised Standard Edition, which I couldn’t have told you. This is rather interesting as I went to church almost every Sunday for 18 years, was also baptized and confirmed in the ELCA church, and event went to weird youth retreats – but I guess none of that involved paying much attention to the bibles I was using. But partly to my credit, the week’s scripture was printed in the bulletin, so I didn’t have to open a bible during service.
Strangely the first edition that came to mind was a giant King James version my parents had in my house. Which, I am now surprised that we even had.
I want Mallory to write about attending a megachurch as a youth sometime. I did it, too, but my mom merely works at one. She never PASTORED one as Papa Ortberg did.
it had a food court and we played sardines all over the place, overall i give it a B+
I went to Mars Hill in West Michigan for a long while. My mom still works there. No food court, but it does operate out of what was once a mall, and the pastor used to be Rob Bell, offender of many former churchgoers and friend of Pete Holmes. I started going to a much more traditional church after college began and now don’t go particularly often, but Mars Hill was a solid B.
oh, rob’s a great dude! he used to come down to willow all the time.
Agreed! He’s been a family friend going a long way back. He was always happy to see me when I visited after I wasn’t attending regularly anymore. Stand-up dude.
WHAT? Shit, man, maybe I’d have been more interested in church if we had any snacks other than the body and blood of Christ (which isn’t very tasty).
Find a Catholic church in the suburbs. If it hasn’t got “cathedral” in the name, it has donuts on Sundays.
A food court. A food. court.
lol its weird to me when churches DON’T have food courts
I’m picturing a mall food court, complete with Subway, Panda Express, and TCBY. Accurate?
lord no we didn’t have NATIONAL FRANCHISES
I grew up Methodist and always had NIV Bibles, until (Methodist-founded) college, when my Bible class professors all strongly recommended the NRSV, at which point I got one of those. I also was forbidden to EVER EVER get my ears pierced, not as much based on religion as the fact that my dad worked in the oil and gas industry and had multiple horrific stories of people’s jewelry getting caught in machinery and getting dismembered and THAT’S why I, as a bookish, homebody teenage girl was never allowed to get my ears pierced. Until I turned 17 and decided to do an at-home upper ear cartilage piercing with a safety pin, under the logic it could easily be hidden with my hair.
My Mum has her story about playing doubles tennis with dangly earrings on. Her partner went for a shot and riiippped out Mum’s earring and some ear in the process.
So needless to say I have always been diligent about removing earrings before playing sports!
My parents were lapsed Catholics, but our next door neighbor was a Baptist pastor, so every Sunday we went to Sunday school at the Baptist Church and believe me, those ladies had us read the bible. Also they made great cookies. Nothing from a package was good enough for the Lord, my teacher said.
Catholics may have more books, but they do not read or discuss the Bible in CCD the way Protestants do.
I read the King James Version in college as part of my History of Religious Texts study. It’s actually my favorite.
Wait, when did people get their ears pierced(if ever). My parents had mine done when I was 6 days old, which lead me to be scared of getting my nose pierced because I didn’t have a baseline for how much it should hurt.
I wasn’t allowed to get mine done until I was old enough to care for them myself–but I was scared of it hurting, so didn’t do it until I was about 13 or so? (This followed a couple years later by my second set of holes, and later on my tongue frenulum and tattoos, so, clearly: slippery slope.)
I got mine done when I was 11 maybe? My mom was very serious about me waiting until I could make the decision for myself (my grandmother never had hers pierced, and my mom had a botched job, so one hole was higher than the other). I think there was some suspicion of practice there. But Claire’s in the tiny 90s mall did the trick for me!
only Catholics pierce baby ears! IT IS A ROMANISH DOCTRINE
that could be way off, but in my experience the split was pretty much catholic girls got their ears pierced as babies, protestant girls got their ears pierced around 11-13
I mean, I grew up in the US but wasn’t born here and where I am from everyone(including my pops and all my nephews) get their ears pierced as babies. Are there other religious breakdowns?
Could be true, but I’ll say it’s not a thing for Irish Catholic families? My parents made me wait until I was 10, and no one in our extended family did the baby ear piercing thing. Now I’m curious about the cultural breakdown of the practice!
How do these parents perform the proper pierced-ear hygiene on squirmy infants with their tiny, tiny earlobes??
I got mine at 15, but my parents are cafeteria-Catholic. My practicing cousin got both her kids’ ears pierced when they were toddlers.
My mum had mine done when I was tiny as well. If she was any religion (which she wasn’t) it was Church of England. I had 6 more holes put in between 13 and 15 and did my own bellybutton but took it out when every other bugger started doing it as well. Then started tattoos age 30.
Ha! I’m not Catholic! Guess my religion!
I got mine when I was 5 or 6. I got my belly button pierced when I was 14 (why??). I almost passed out during that one.
Got mine done when I was like 11, I think, after months of pestering. I had to prove I could keep my nails clean first. (Kid Me was kinda gross.) Now, of course, I almost never wear earrings because most of them make my ears hurt. It’s probably a contact allergy, I just never gave enough of a shit to investigate it.
I got mine pierced as a graduation present at 18, but it was done shittily (with a gun, and also lopsided) and they never healed right and eventually they closed up; I got them re-pierced (at a reputable piercing studio, with a needle, NOT lopsided) when I was 23 because I wanted to wear earrings for my wedding.
I wasn’t allowed to until I was 16. My grandma never had hers done, she still looks askance at it as some form of mutilation. My mom went with me to get mine done, and decided to get hers done at the same time. It was a funny kind of bonding moment, she’d always been discouraged/scared and finally allowed herself to once she saw me do it. I held her hand and she squeezed it and yelped when they pierced her ears. She now has a much nicer earring collection than I do.
This is an incredibly sweet story, thanks for sharing!
I was twelve or thirteen. My aunt took me to a jewelry store to have them done. The first one hurt a lot and bled a bit and I cried and had to be coerced into having the second one done. The second one was better, so I dunno why the first one was so bad.
Anyways, once they got to the point where I could take my earrings out briefly, my ears kept getting sore and puffy intermittently, so I’d take my earrings out for a day or two until my ears felt better. Eventually I left them out too long, and the holes closed over. So then I claimed that I had decided I didn’t want them pierced after all.
My sister also had problems when she got hers done, but she had enough sense to tell our parents and go see a doctor and switch to hypoallergenic earrings, so hers are still pierced.
I occasionally consider getting them re-pierced by an actual piercer with a needle. Maybe someday.
My parents had a rule that I had to wait until I was 13 (because my cousins did) but randomly surprised me when I was 12 and said I could do it.
I almost never wear earrings now. The holes are still there and not closed up, but every time I do wear earrings they itch and hurt a bit because I am not used to the sensation and I end up taking them out after an hour or so.
I got mine at 8, and then a second set at 11, and then two cartilage piercings at 17. We went to one of those churches with a pastor who played guitar & where people (unfortunately not me) could wear jeans.
My mom had mine done when I was a baby, which is normal in the Turkish culture I was raised. I never realized that some Americans would find that horrifying until I casually mentioned it to a friend. I mean my American dad was annoyed at the time but I just assumed, it was a Dad Thing.
10th birthday. At a Claire’s in a crappy little mall. I got a second hole in my right ear when I was 12, from a booth at the 4th of July fair, it’s all crooked and kind of in a weird place. I just keep a tiny silver hoop in it at all times. I got my tongue pierced at 18, and then 6 months later I got a cartilage piercing. Took the tongue bar out when I was 24-25. Didn’t get tattooed until 29.
For my eighth birthday, along with chopping my hair short. I was Very Grown Up.
I got my ears pierced at the mall, with the gun, when I was 10. I never put earrings in them anymore, though I am still stupidly in love with my 4-year-old nose ring.
My sister and I took my dad to get his ears pierced at a real piercing studio last year as a tribute to our recently deceased mom. (He was jealous of our lymphoma ribbon tattoos). He is 64 and he wears her birthstones in his ears every day, and her diamond crosses on special occasions. Like Christmas, her birthday, and any day we are celebrating model railroading or eating out of a food truck.
Ours were around age 11 or 12? I think 11, which was 5th grade. I am still glad, even though with little kids around we only wear earrings occasionally.
The great unfairness of my pre-teen life was when, after YEARS of begging to get my ears pierced, mum and I were out shopping one day and she asked at a jewellery shop about ear piercing and I thought she’d finally changed her mind, but she was asking about HER OWN EARS. I wasn’t allowed to get my ears pierced until I was 14 (despite being raised Catholic).
Eight years. Church of Christer here, and we’re pretty darn strict.
I think we had a King James version? Or a version of that version? I think there was one trendy-type one with 80s style graffiti style green writing on the front, and it said ‘Good News Bible’. I don’t know if that’s a different translation or was just snappy graphics to draw more people in.
I grew up in a fairly religious household but the Handsome Sidekick and I are atheist with a side serving of agnostic, so our children only get exposed to religion in passing. I caught myself yesterday because my daughter asked me if I knew how birds got their colours, and I started saying, ‘you know this is a story, right?’ and then she came out with a Dreamtime explanation which I was totally on board with. And then I thought, ‘really? I’m jumping on the bandwagon to make sure she’s not blindsided by some biblical explanation of something, but when it comes to Indigenous myth, I’m fine??’
Perhaps I’m just biased because I feel as though the Dreamtime myths are more identifiable as such, whereas the Christian myths seem more likely to be woven into everyday narrative as truth?
Yeah I grew up Methodist but wouldn’t know off the top of my head what translation we used. But we definitely had the Good News bible! I remember seeing it at church and even as a kid thinking what a stupid happy clappy name it was for any book, but particularly one so full of fire and brimstone in places.
Also re: Catholics getting extra Bible, the one and only time I went to mass with my culturally-Catholic Irish ex-bf, we were reciting the Lord’s Prayer and he turned to me after ‘deliver us from evil’ and whispered THAT’S THE END STOP THERE. Like I didn’t know the last two lines were prods only and if I recited them in a Catholic church I might burst into flames.
I have both Protestant and Catholic branches in my extended family, and at family reunions someone always wants to lead the group in saying grace and the Lord’s Prayer, and I always, always guess the wrong version.
I related it below but I had the opposite problem – yelled out AMEN before the kingdom and the power and the glory line when I was at a Protestant church.
I read “deliver us from evil” and automatically recited the last two lines. Thank you Methodists for making me recite it (and the doxology I didn’t like!) every. single. week.
Also, Catholics: why? Also, Protestants: why?
For Catholics, it’s the end but not quite–we stop at “deliver us from evil”, pause while the priest addresses God (which Wiki calls “the Embolism”), and then complete with the form ‘for the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours, now and for ever’. If you deliver the Protestant version of the doxology during that bit some people might notice, but whatever. Most of us twice-a-year Catholics probably get more side-eye for stumbling over the response “and with your spirit”. THANKS FOR RUINING THE CATHOLIC JEDI PRAYERS, BENEDICT. (XVI, not Cumberbatch.)
My folks’ Catholic church- and this is the only church I know to do so- SINGS the Our Father. Like a bunch of BAPTISTS. And changed the prayer to fit the meter, so that you can’t bring religious relatives or they’ll start railing about “sins” vs “trespasses.”
Our music guy started doing that when I was in high school. *I* gave him the side eye. Bunch of Mid-Michigan German Methodists at traditional services don’t go for that.
My childhood church did that! Was it the kind of syncopated version that sounds like it’s from a ’70s youth mass?
We sang it in primary school (UK, so school assemblies are meant to include an act of “collective worship”. This meant hymn-singing and prayers, en masse. Actually being a practicing Christian is still really rare, though).
Yep, so true. And even the ‘good news’ didn’t seem that good to me, as a child. I don’t think I could really identify with how excited people were getting.
Oh god yeah. I remember aged 8 someone in Sunday School telling me Jesus loved me and me being like ‘But I never met the guy?’ like genuinely confused because it didn’t fit with my kid logic. Perhaps I was never cut out to be religious.
When I was little, one of my Protestant friends gave me an invitation to come to her church with her that said something along the lines of “Come to Church, Jesus Will Be There!” I took it quite literally and was like “Well, I guess if JESUS is going to be there, I can make an appearance.”
Aw! Were you disappointed? (I’m just taking a punt, here, and assuming he wasn’t actually there?)
I was VERY good at following rules, so given the right religion, I think I could have been a really devoted religious person… but obviously not in any to which I was exposed as a child. And then I grew up and became cynical about pretty much all of them.
I didn’t realize that the Good News Bible had different covers! Ours were metallic gold, like this one.
Ah, we also had that one! But then they did a cool trendy one, which I will try to find…
Here! I don’t trust my html abilities, so I will just provide the link:
http://www.amazon.com/Good-News-Australia-Austral…
Apparently it’s the bicentennial edition. Good to see the church was getting in on the celebration of 200 years of European occupation! Woohoo! (To be fair, most people seemed to be in on that).
Eagerly anticipating the day I can 3-D print makeup FROM MY BED!
I’m surprised you guys didn’t get Judith. I could have sworn there was a Superbook episode about Judith.
Waitnevermind, that episode was about Yael and Sisera.
I still think it’s weird that my first exposure to anime was Superbook and the Flying House.
Wait a minute, Catholics aren’t Christians? i mean, I’m a Buddhist now, but I went to catholic primary school and as far as I remember they seriously talked about Christ a LOT.
No they’re Christians! I mean, sometimes I tease them about their FALSE POPERY, but yeah, unless you’re talking to a real out-there fundamentalist, Catholics are considered Christians by pretty much everyone in the mainstream.
fun fact I’m pretty sure is true: in (at least Mexican) Spanish there isn’t really a word that means all Christians. Catholics = católicos and Protestants = cristiános, no word that combines them that I know about.
‘K, understood. I was feeling a little bit like ‘is this… an ecumenical matter?’
King James early on, New American Standard later. And the Jerusalem Bible as contraband because I heard about the missing bits and wanted to read them. Personal fave was the book of Tobit. Great story!
I effing hated Tobit, but only because the first time I encountered it was in the little guide for wedding readings and you can tell they are just searching for anything that mentions a wedding.
On the topic of Bibles: would the Toast ever run a “religions” series? I love reading about other people’s beliefs and how they got there, their crazy experiences in religious campus or schools (full disclosure: I went to all girls Catholic high school and could talk about it probably til my face melted), how their beliefs have changed, stories of people converting, being raised in an interfaith family… anything. I think this stuff is fascinating. In college I went on an alternative break trip that was “interfaith education” themed and it was the coolest shit. We stayed in a Reconstructionist Jewish synagogue that was led by a lesbian rabbi so I quickly became convinced that Catholicism droolz and Reconstructionism rulez.
we’ve run a bunch of religious stuff! check the religion-y tags
Sweeeet
For those of us who do not frequent The Hairpin as much any more, there was an interesting item about a neat new Fake Phone Number you can give out that reads out bell hooks feminist messages (texting included)!
Jesus Christ those comments, though. A whole lot of, “Blah blah blah so immature why would you give out a fake number you big baby”.
Those comments are disheartening and I miss the good old days/dread that that might happen to The Toast someday.
i hope it happens TOMORROW, i want to burn this ship into the GROUND
no but the internet is full of change! great new things pop up all the time though
Thing is, the average Hairpin article these days has less than five comments, all generally positive ones. That article must have gotten linked somewhere else to bring the not all men trolls.
I would believe that stuff about the Mink if it actually was all that good at matching colours (which it isn’t).
Yes it’s hilarious Catholics get all the extra Bible when alllllllll of the catechism focuses on literally NEVER READING THE BIBLE. NEVER. Your theology workbooks will provide you with relevant quotes so you don’t have to trouble yourself with looking at that weird smelly book that’s the basis for all Western culture. The less Bible in your brain, the better Catholic teachings slip down your throat and poison your life! LOL religion
Well to be fair, Luther read it and look what happened there. Lesson learned.
I love this Bible thread so much.
I grew up with NIV primarily (Southern Baptists), though a variety of other translations were littered around various bookshelves at home. When I was 14ish and in the throes of becoming a huge Shakespeare nerd, I fell in love with the straight-up KJV and stuck with that for a while. These days, I rely on a mix of the NKJV and the New Oxford Annotated Bible, which is NRSV.
(This story likely demonstrates why my family was deeply unsurprised when I became an Episcopalian as an adult. My parents are now Methodists, but as far as I know, haven’t switched Bible translations as a result. My dad started out Catholic, though, so we had at least one Bible with the “extra secret” parts.)
I also grew up Baptist, and we used the NIV. Weirdly, however, all my early Sunday-School-and-Evangelical-private-school-Bible-verse-memorization was drawn from the KJV. So now, when I try to dredge up something, it comes out in a weird pastiche of “whoever” and “believeth”.
Also, my dad is one of those theologian-pastor types and made us all memorize the Westminster shorter catechism in the evenings before bed. I can only imagine we must’ve been the most pretentious of children at Sunday School.
That’s so interesting! I feel like, now that you mention it, I may have done that, but only for the big verses – John 3:16 and the like. Oh, and the Lord’s Prayer definitely was. “Hallowed be thy name,” never “your name.”
I also grew up reluctantly Southern Baptist — my parents weren’t exactly Southern Baptists, but that was the only kind of church in town — and we memorized from that same NIV-with-a-little-KJV. At Wheaton College, most of my Greek professors preferred the ESV, so that’s what I switched to.
My Anglican church uses mostly ESV, but also whatever the preacher prefers at the time. Sometimes he/she switches translations mid-passage, I assume to keep us on our toes.
Because I still live in the Chicago suburbs, you can’t throw a rock without hitting someone who worked on a Bible translation.
Also a recovering Baptist here, and I feel like your lives are my life. NIV with KJV sprinkled in for emphasis.
My parents bought me my first non-illustrated Bible when I was baptized, and it was an NIV Study Bible with the fun annotations and history bits at the bottom of the pages. BUT our Bible Drill Classes were conducted exclusively with KJV Bibles. (Anybody remember Bible Drill? GA’s? Mission Friends?)
If I ever attended Vacation Bible School with a non-Baptist friend, the teachers all knew which church I went to, because I could already recite the memorization verses in KJV. I was forever having to translate them in my head so I would sound “more normal” around the other kids.
Then there was a brief couple of years in high school when our Sunday School teachers started using The Message, which I thought was just THE WORST. I’d always pull out my own Bible to read, because in my own little passive aggressive dirtbag way, I secretly refused to accept that TM was even Scripture at all…
I still get the GA song stuck in my head sometimes. I could be using that brain space for something else, but no.
I’m a Jew feeling left out of the whole Christian Bible thing (though we do have the entire 60+ books of the Talmud — verbatim transcriptions of rabbis arguing over legal minutiae and and far-out eschatology). So I just want to share that when I was growing up and attending an ultra-Orthodox girls’ school, we had English lit textbooks that we bought from the Satmar Hasidic community, which considers any depiction of human faces, graven or not, idolatry. But for some reason they were illustrated. So these pretty standard early American lit short stories were accompanied by sketches of people who had no faces whatsoever. Pages and pages of them. If the Internet had been around we would have all murdered each other in deference to Slender Satmar Man. I tried to find an example online, but yeah, the Satmars aren’t big on the whole internet thing either so.
omg
Wow oh wow do I want to see one of those books!
Console yourself with the secret knowledge that all the discussion here about different versions of the “our father” prayer is really just about a translated version of Kaddish, and you know the real, original version.
I go to a church that describes itself as “an Episcopalian church in the Anglo-Catholic tradition”. We mostly seem to use the NIV in readings.
In my Protestant (Lutheran) church we used the NRSV or the NIV, and I totally new about what we called The Apocrypha. But that might have been more from dinner table conversation (my dad’s a pastor and was getting his doctorate when I was in middle school, so things got weirdly academic for a bit) than from church itself.
Eta: once in my Sunday school class the teacher decided to let us read a few verses from a bunch of different translations and pick the one we wanted to use, which ended up being some slangy, modern translation. He wasn’t the Sunday School teacher for long.
I didn’t know until college, I think, that there were multiple versions of the Bible. My dad’s an ex-Catholic atheist and I’m pretty sure my mom’s agnostic (also grew up Catholic), and I tried Baptism with my first stepmom when I was around ten–I still don’t have the faintest idea what Bible her church used. I mostly remember sneaking home Sunday School candy for my brother and going to a Christian Rock Concert at, like, Six Flags and buying a poster with a panther on it.
I remember being super annoyed when I found out the “Old Testament” was the Torah. THAT’S COPYING. NO FAIR.
Hahaha I grew up UCC and we used some hippie bible like the Good News bible. I always kind of wanted to be Catholic because I like rituals and their churches are so fancy, soooo maybe it’s a good thing I don’t have religion now
TRUE NAMES: “Likewise, in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea canon, and specifically in her seminal short story The Rule of Names, power over dragons, and additionally, men, is conferred by the use of a true name.”
Bless you Wikipedia. That gave me such a laugh.
Mallory, your tweets last night about uber-Protestant lyfe and this Link Roundup are making me live. This is all very relevant to my interests. A timeline:
7-8 years old – I first hear about the secret extra bits in the “Catholic Bible,” especially the last two chapters of Daniel in which a dragon is slain (evidence of dinosaurs coexisting with man to creationists like my parents, who are ironically Protestants and don’t even accept the “Catholic Bible.” But evidence of dinosaurs is evidence of dinosaurs). I ask my Catholic best friend if I can look through her special secret Bible. She insists there’s no such thing. Our discussion escalates until she screams at me that there is one Bible, that hers is not different, and even if it was, they invented it and it’s OURS that is wrong. I just wanted to read about the dragon.
10-15 years old – My family only reads the King James Version. Anything other than the KJV is a corruption. Jesus read the KJV. Who’s King James? Is he in Kings I or II? Other things that are an abomination: me trying to wear pants to church, me in general, also the Virgin Mary. My mother has opinions about idolatrous Catholics. I point out that maybe she shouldn’t say bad things about Jesus’s mom; I am stared down.
15 – 18 years old – My parents start going to a new church which is more relaxed. These people read the NIV. Who are these people?
18 years old – I got to an Episcopal college. My professors talk about the ecclesiastical calendar. I ask what that is. I am stared at, but I’m the only person in my theology and medieval history classes who has read the Bible and knows anything about Christian iconography.
19 years old – I study medieval art abroad at Oxford. They tell me I will need the Oxford Annotated Bible. Everything else is dross.
21 years old – I tell my mother I’m going to grad school to get my master’s in medieval art. She asks what that is. I have to explain the history of Catholicism. My mother clutches her heart.
24 years old – I’m getting married and have to explain to my grandmother why we’re considering an Episcopal service. This leads to explaining the history of Protestantism. My grandmother asks what about the Baptists. I tell her the Baptists formed around this time as well. “Wait,” she says, “the Catholics are older than the Baptists?” She looks so confused. There are tears in her eyes. I am the worst person who has ever lived.
25 years old – My mother keeps inviting me to go to church with her. My family goes to a new church. There’s a band with guitars, the choir is volunteer, and everyone wears jeans and t-shirts. These people have a coffee shop in the lobby. There’s no telling what fly-by-night translation they read.
I go to Mass with a friend who’s grown up Catholic. I say the Mass in Latin because I don’t know it in English. Everyone stares at me.
the oxford annotated is the best bible tho
It’s still on my shelf!
1. This is fantastic. Please submit a big long piece to the Toast, and you will get paid and I will read the hell out of it.
2. Your poor grandmother. I hope you refrained from telling her about the Orthodox church.
Well, I’ve never written a piece about my family’s struggle with religion–and I didn’t even get into their views on homosexuality vs. me clandestinely dating women–but if you just want my writing on The Toast about anything, there’s this: http://the-toast.net/2014/05/20/nuns-and-medieval…
And if I could go back in time and have never said to my grandmother, I’d lie and tell her the apostles founded the Southern Baptist convention to keep her from making that face.
WHAT DRAGON
I wasted 16 years of my life in Catholic Sunday school, read my parents’ Bible cover-to-cover, and during all that time I only found the dragon in Revelations. (They have the NIV though.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bel_and_the_Dragon
I grew up in the United Church of Canada. My church had a bajillion copies of the Good News Bible, but we rarely used them because it’s such a paraphrase-y translation. I don’t know if fashions had changed or if some previous minister had liked it better or what. I think we mostly actually used the NRSV at church. I don’t remember what version we had at home (aside from the Fount Children’s Bible).
For the Sunday services, if you were doing the reading then you could pick any translation you liked, but if you wanted to use a paraphrase-y version (ie Good News), then you were supposed to compare it to a more accurate translation and make sure it wasn’t too different.
I don’t think I was aware of the Catholic extra bible when I was a kid.
I think we mostly used the King James version in my Southern Baptist church (more fun for the pastor to shout in thees and thous probably), but the best/worst was the magazine one I got in high school.
Guys Speak Out, finally we will know what Guys think
Whaaaat is that. o.O
OMG REVOLVE.
It was like someone turned the Bible into a Seventeen/Delia’s mashup. Quizzes! Beauty Tips! They actually called it a “Biblezine.” I loved/hated it too.
For devout Catholics, my parents own a suspicious number of Bibles. (My dad has long beein interested in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement.) I had a New Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition with sidebars of Relevant Youth Content on each page. This is probably why I destroyed the Evangelical kids at Bible Trivia during the youth group lock-in my best friend invited me to in 7th grade.
If anyone wants to read a story about the recovery of a mentally ill bonobo named Brian: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06…
Note: some kind of troubling details about the abuse poor Brian suffered are contained within. But it does end on a happier note.
Rhode Island is so heavily Catholic that even though I wasn’t and am not religious, I really had no conception that Catholicism isn’t THE Christian religion until I was older. I also once yelled out “AMEN.” at the wrong time during the Our Father when I was attending a Protestant church for some reason because the version I knew didn’t have the “kingdom and the power the glory” business.
I definitely grew up with the kingdom, the power and the glory, now and forever amen – but we were Catholic? But also now when I attend the occasional Catholic service they don’t say it. So I dunno what’s going on there – except that I know my Catholic grandfather started attending an Episcopalian church at one point when I was little (which I completely did not understand) because he liked the people there better. So maybe going to a couple of those services ingrained that wording into my brain.
Baptist here. At first, I mostly used the NIV with a side of King James, but then we got a new pastor who was partial to the ESV. Gradually, over the 10 or so years he was at my parents’ church, everyone started using that version.
I was aware of the Apocrypha from about 10 years old on because my Dad had a copy of them (just those books together, separate from the rest of the bible) and I asked about it.
I started out as a wee babe attending a Mennonite church, then my parents started a very strange home church deal which imploded after a couple years, and we sought refuge in a Baptist church and then a “non-denominational” Protestant church. Strangely, throughout this whole time my family used nothing but New King James. I knew there were other translations, as well as the Apocrypha, and of course the Mormon ‘bible’ which was just plain weird (sorry, any LDS readers). My best friend growing up used NIV, and we compared verses sometimes.
I’m agnostic now. It’s been quite the ride.
I had to read the Oxford Annotated Bible in college and just thinking about it makes me want to kill myself all over again. Hey God, you wrote a fucking boring book.
BUT WHAT ABOUT LATTER DAY SAINTS.
*ahem*
I grew up Reorganized LDS (now Community of Christ), so we also go extra special secret books: The Book of Mormon, which I frankly never read but can sing a song of the book titles; and Doctrines & Covenants. RLDS likes to keep adding chapters to D&C because they’re awesome like that, so I knew folks who had the new chapters paper clipped in.
Also, I was that weird kid super into Revelations. I read it like, 3 or 4 times by the time I finished high school and realized that this whole church thing wasn’t working out for me.
Maybe this is a good place to ask a question I’ve had: do other European languages have multiple translations of the Bible, or as many as English seems to? Like, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.? Anybody know?
there are a few in Spanish – Reina Valera has been revised a couple of times and I compare it to KJV/NKJV (for time of original translation, and time of revision). It’s by far the most used translation in evangélico (Protestant) churches, and probably also Catholics, but as I am Mennonite, when I have gone to spanish mennonite churches, that is what it has been. There are other translations in language much more like what people speak, but I have not seen those used so often – one of them is analogous to the good news version, even including the pictures. (Mennonite Church Canada and USA are VERY DIFFERENT from most mennonites in latin america who speak spanish. for readers – they are like the lancaster conference on steroids).
I always got the impression that all the extra Catholic stuff was like, Bible fan fiction.
Church of Christ kid here, KJV ONLY (& Strong’s Concordance). I got my ears pierced when I was 17 and still had to deal with Jezebel commentary (even though the preacher’s daughter had had hers pierced YEARS AGO by a wayward aunt during a slumber party and was allowed to keep them). I credit my early exposure to and almost complete memorization of the KJV with my relative success as an early modernist. I go to a Methodist church now, with my husband, and the bible readings sound like story time at the library.
The one I really like, for fun, is the Geneva Bible. And I love reading the Anglo-Saxon gospels.
Growing up Mormon, we used the KJV bible and then had what was awesomely (but anticlimactically) called the Triple Combination: the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price. The KJV Bible was impressively indexed with references to the mormon texts, but other than that, was standard KJV to my knowledge… I think the BoM is what people refer to as the “Mormon Bible” but I don’t really know, since that phrase makes no sense to me. You could get all four books in one massive bible, preferably with soft leather cover and metalic leaf pages, and fancy cut out tabs to find each book. My favorite part as a kid was looking at all the maps and photos of Jerusalem etc.
I have seen Books of Mormon separate – but it makes so much more sense to have them all together. so many questions I didn’t know I had answered.
During my stint in a Southern Baptist church as a teenager, they used KJV and *only* KJV. There was something said about that being the only translation inspired by God, but I’m fairly convinced that that congregation just didn’t really feel like it was the Bible unless they couldn’t understand half of it. The few other churches I attended briefly during that period used more modern translations, though hell if I know which ones.
Sadly, I didn’t know that Catholics have extra bits in theirs because my hometown has approximately -2 Catholics, so basically all of Catholicism was pretty exotic until college.
I grew up weird Baptist in a very stringent KJV-only church. My Sunday School teacher literally told me that all other translations of the Bible were written by “two witches and a warlock.”
The same witches and warlock each time, or lots of different sets?
Sort of blown away that this community is so churchy. I always feel like an outsider when I want to nerd out about religion.
My primary youth group Bible was an NIV, but I have a huge soft spot for the King James and all its poetry. It maybe has something to do with the fact that my parents gifted one to me in my youth that had the “Footprints” poem inside on the flyleaf. This was before I came to regard said poem as omnipresent hokey sentimental pap. Back when I was impressionable and sensitive. Ahem.
We are always here when you want to nerd out about religion.
Really? The Toast readership has always seemed very Christian or Christian-raised to me. But then, I don’t have a Judeo-Christian background and sometimes it’s easier to spot someone who’s not like you than it is to realize you’re mostly surrounded by people who are.
Yeah, it seems very Christian to me too – as an atheist with atheist parents, living in a very secular country, it’s very noticeable.
I just clicked on my first web advertisement on purpose – to download the audio version of Go The Fuck To Sleep, as read by Samuel L Jackson. I clicked that very, very fast.
Wow, I didn’t even know the Bible came in flavours other than King James, Gideon, and For Kids. The Toast is so educational!
NIV is as daring as the Church of Christ gets. And that’s bordering on heresy. I always secretly wished I was Catholic so I could just confess my sins and have them absolved away in a tangible sense. The apocryphal gospels are way cool, too.
Thingy makers: clothes in your size, for your body shape, instead of the six sizes carried by all shops that fit nobody, ever.
Growing up Catholic, we used the St Joseph’s New American version. When I visited Protestant services, it always surprised me how little bible quoting was done – where in the Catholic service there would be an OT passage, at least one psalm, a NT passage and a passage from one of the Gospels. (Of course it helped that I am young enough to be completely post Vatican II. They had the same format before then, but in Latin.) I figured that was why the protestants had to read so much at home – most of their service was listening to the opinion of the preacher. And of course, they had thrown out chunks of some of the best stories. (But they kept Numbers. Which I could never figure out. Numbers has always been on my list as “first to use for emergency kindling in case of hypothermia and/or zombies”.)
I would qualify this by saying Catholics of Southern European extraction. Up here in the NY metro area, baby girls with pierced ears come from Italian, Latino and Greek families. The Irish Catholic and Eastern European girls don't as much. Also lots of African-American and South Asian (India & Pakistan) baby girls have pierced ears.
million years late, but just come the hyper conservative washington dc diocese. INCENSE EVERYWHERE in superhot and stuffy churches