Messianic messing

Barack Obama as Christ? That's one surprise on Jesus of the Week. This site, published by the Village Voice, seemingly has hundreds of images sent by readers.

As you can imagine, the pictures range from the classic to the classically stupid. Examples:

Slam-dunking a goal in a yellow Los Angeles Lakers uniform.

A reverent painting of Jesus offering bread and wine.

Twin faces of Christ as earrings, his hair studded with diamonds.

A Rasta-locked Lord on a shoulder tattoo.

A cartoon Jesus surfing on a cross.

And assorted Jesus faces on light switches, bandages, sticky notes, black velvet, and of course airbrushed onto vans and motorcycles. And on and on.

You submit the picture -- or someone out there does -- and the Village Voice editors add what they consider witty comments. Like the suggestion that a sitting statue, with hand to the side of his head, looks like he's talking on an iPhone. Tee-hee.

What to make of this site? One lesson: Culture can get pretty silly, even with revered figures. Two: Ridiculing the sacred is funny, at least for some mentalities.

Conclusion three: Ignorance is no handicap online. Whoever wrote the snickering paragraph for a crucifixion painting totally missed that the artist was Salvador Dali.

Faith made sight

Evangelicals are not known for artistry. Or so I thought. Then I came across Christians in the Visual Arts -- founded way back in 1979.

CIVA is Christian at heart, housed as it is at Gordon College. It also encourages refined artworks: sensitive, intelligent, skillfully rendered.

Appropriately, its Web site does little talking and much showing, with several online galleries. Media include photography, acrylic, collage, metal sculpture, even a mixed-media work of music with sound and light sensors.

Some of the pictures are religiously explicit, like an oil painting of the Annunciation to Mary. Some are enigmatic, like a wall hanging of woven teabags. Some explore general human themes -- like Mystical Marriage by Tanja Butler, shown here. One gallery experiments with the medieval triptych motif.

A minor gripe: The galleries could be easier to navigate. They're numbered but have no thumbnails, and there's no "Next" button on each picture. So you'll have to remember which number picture you're on.

CIVA acknowledges the hazard of visual art: People may see a variety of messages, and not necessarily what the artist meant. They're willing to take that risk, says Sandra Bowden of the group, to "lead the audience to a place of introspection."

Magdalene: Holy whore?

Priestess, demoniac, redhead harlot, secret wife of Jesus: Perhaps no one in the Bible has suffered as many image makeovers as Mary Magdalene. But how to make sense of the tons of ink, paint and celluloid about her?

A one-site answer: Magdalene.org. Created by Lesa Bellevie in July 1998, the site gives quick answers, detailed information and some fun facts.

A long FAQ file deals with the "gossip"-type questions. You know, like whether Magdalene was a prostitute, as movies and sermons have often branded her. Or whether she married Jesus and had a child, as The Da Vinci Code says. Or if she had long, red hair, as a lot of European paintings depict her.

Magdalene.org lays out the various arguments for Mary's identities: leading apostle, cult priestess, mother of European royalty, a healed demoniac who supported Jesus' ministry. But you don't have to take their word for it. In a true reader service, Bellevie adds the actual much-argued texts -- including the gospels of Philip and Mary. For biblical passages, she gives links to the Blue Letter Bible, a handy online edition of the King James Version.

But Bellevie's own articles aren't bulletproof. In one, she questions the authorship of the Gospel According to John, saying only that the early church father Irenaeus "believed he recalled hearing in his childhood that it had been written by the apostle John." She doesn't add that another church father, Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna, was a disciple of John -- and Polycarp said the gospel was written by that apostle.

There's a section on Mary in Renaissance-era paintings, but they're small and fuzzy. And some of the links are either broken or have never been filled.

Better is the pop culture stuff. Did you know she was once played in a movie by June Carter, the wife of Johnny Cash? Or that she's a lithe, scantily-clad superheroine in a comic series? Or that she's the subject of a song by Tori Amos -- who has long, red hair?