By Morris Dean
If you're an older Southerner (and spent much time in church those years ago), do you
remember those hand fans stored in church pews back before air-conditioning? There was an image of Jesus knocking on a door to your heart on the front. And a funeral home advertisement on the back.My friend Madison Taylor remembers. He's an editor on the staff of the Burlington, North Carolina Times-News newspaper, and he included that paragraph in his lifestyles piece "Southern Comfort" last Sunday.
I think Madison included it for the humor, and it did make me laugh.
But not many seconds passed before I realized how clever the funeral home had been to put their ad on a fan with Jesus...and how devilish of the church to let them – the juxtaposition's being a brilliant piece of subtle come-to-Jesus intimidation. You're going to die one day, so you'd better get your heart right with Jesus.
I'm going to try to work that fan into the fifth installment of Kyle Garza's and my "Christian-atheist conversation: About Christianity’s proselytizing through fear."
But that won't be for a few more weeks. Some of you were expecting the second installment last week ("Christian-atheist conversation: About Christianity’s non-'holy days'"). But here it is a week later, and Kyle and I are still going back and forth via email to produce a hopefully coherent dialogue about that...Good conversations take time.
I hope you will think it's good when we have it ready next week...Fingers crossed.
In the meantime, you could always go back and re-read our first installment: "Christian-atheist conversation: About animal rights"....
| Copyright © 2014 by Morris Dean |
Your choice of a Greek Orthodox icon Jesus as illustration, rather than the ethereal White Protestant image that the funeral home fan would have had, reminded me of the Ron Cobb cartoon from the 1960s. Images can't be included in comments, so here is a link to it: Ron Cobb cartoon.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Tom! I like it!
DeleteWell, it would have been wonderful to have used an image of the fan (one for each side), but I actually wanted something showing crossed fingers, to relate to my paragraph about Kyle's & my hope to have our "non-'holy days'" installment ready next week. Hence, I chose the one I did.
And, actually, I didn't even TRY to find images of the fan. But I just googled on "church hand fan with Jesus" and found some for sale on eBay! Here are links to images of two I saw: #1; #2.