You couldn't make it up dept no.87: the sermon will not be televised

[fpb]

From www.floridatoday.com:
A church giving sermons about sex may have to find a new home. Brevard Public School District's risk-management department has threatened to boot New Hope Church out of Sherwood Elementary because of a worship series titled "Great Sex for You."

Church leaders mailed 25,000 fliers, asking residents "Is Your Sex Life A Bore?" The three-week program kicked off inside the school auditorium. Pastor Bruce Cadle had said the Christian church has been "shamefully silent" on the taboo topic.

Mark Langdorf, the director of risk management, says the mailers generated complaints, were not appropriate for elementary school children and shouldn't be used to advertise the sermon in the school.

Langdorf says the church's lease contract is under review.

Comments

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

(I am now interested in knowing what your deleted reply said...)

It was a reference to the Irish conflict which I seriously doubt you would have found offensive, but which constituted a rabbit hole in the discussion I really didn't want to start down. I only mentioned deleting it since (if anyone noticed its disappearance), I wanted to be clear that I had removed it and not Fabio.

By the way, mentalguy, I was in no way irritated or made angry by anything you said, so I hope it does not appear that I was personalising anything I said in response to your comments.

That's good to know. I didn't take anything you said personally. Mainly I was concerned that you might have taken dustthouart's comment more personally than necessary.

I did get irritated at the comment "This is pretty much exactly what I meant by "not having a true grasp of sacred space," lol" Mainly because of the lol, but that was an emotional response after a bad, bad week at work, I took the comment, perhaps incorrectly, to be mocking and it made me angry.

To be honest, I had much the same reaction she did; at least in my case (and I strongly suspect in hers) it wasn't so much mockery as frustration. During the 60s and 70s in particlar, a large swath of the Catholic world internalized a number of Protestant ideas in this area which over the ensuing decades utterly devastated the Church, leading to monstrosities which I expect even a lot of Protestants would be appalled by. Some regions were more affected than others, hence the knowing comments above regarding the Netherlands and Austria; my impression is that Ireland was comparatively untouched. (Of course, as fpb noted, that isn't to say that all the Catholic problems are the consequence of Protestant imports.) At this point, we're just beginning the long task of picking up the pieces and putting things back together. So there is a certain underlying frustration there. Then there's the issue that what your minister described isn't even what many people consider the term sacred to mean, so it's kind of like ... where to even begin?

(I'll give it a shot in another reply, though.)