{"id":69,"date":"2007-02-27T06:29:12","date_gmt":"2007-02-27T06:29:12","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2007-07-20T22:24:56","modified_gmt":"2007-07-21T02:24:56","slug":"you-are-what-you-wear-or-is-it-you-wear-what-you-are","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/grace-ed.org\/blog\/archives\/69","title":{"rendered":"You are what you wear (or is it, you wear what you are?)"},"content":{"rendered":"

You know, Baptists just don\u00ef\u00bf\u00bdt have to worry about any of this, but it may be fun to give a quiz in a pastoral leadership class on clergy liturgical vestments.<\/a> I always enjoyed visiting Virginia Theological Seminary (Episcopal) and watch the student aspiring clergy ordering their vestments along with their graduation regalia. They LOVE this stuff!
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\nAnthropologists used to claim that two elements existed in every culture ever discovered: (1) a religion, and (2) clothing. Sometimes the clothing consisted of a grass belt and nothing else. That\u00ef\u00bf\u00bds because the primary function of clothing<\/i> in culture is not protection from the elements, but rather, it is identification. You can know immediately by sight who someone is in a society by looking at the clothes that person is wearing: they occupy a stratum (rich, poor), a class (ruling, leisure, working), a rank (soldier, clergy, executive, etc.). <\/p>\n

Some time ago someone wrote an insightful albeit tongue-in-cheek piece about how you could tell an old-school Southern Baptist and the new-school CBF Baptist. SBC types wore suit, ties, and white shirts. The CBF \u00ef\u00bf\u00bduniform\u00ef\u00bf\u00bd was polo shirt and casual slacks. Those early CBFers may have had a tough time defining their theological and cultural differences from the mother denomination, but it didn\u00ef\u00bf\u00bdt take them long to use clothing as a form of self-defining identification medium!<\/p>\n

When I was in seminary in the \u00ef\u00bf\u00bd80s it became easy to identify which school a student belonged to. New Testament and biblical studies students always wore white shirts, tie, gold-rimed glasses, and sported gold cross pens in the pockets of their starched shirts (no pocket protectors, of course). Aspiring religious education students wore loud checkered sports coats; and pastoral care and counseling students wore open-collared shirts (white or colored) with rolled up long sleeves and undone ties. Women students at the time wore a de-rigor outfit that communicated modesty, inaccessibility, and chastity. (I\u00ef\u00bf\u00bdm not making this up). Today, our seminarians are comfortable in jeans, t-shirts, shorts, and baseball caps (and I wish I was<\/i> making that up!). <\/p>\n

galindobanner3.jpg<\/p>\n

Lazlo’s Chinese Relativity Axiom:
\n“No matter how great your triumphs or how tragic your defeats—approximately one billion Chinese couldn’t care less.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You know, Baptists just don\u00ef\u00bf\u00bdt have to worry about any of this, but it may be fun to give a quiz in a pastoral leadership class on clergy liturgical vestments. I always enjoyed visiting Virginia Theological Seminary (Episcopal) and watch … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ecumenical"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/grace-ed.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/grace-ed.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/grace-ed.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grace-ed.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grace-ed.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/grace-ed.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/grace-ed.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grace-ed.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grace-ed.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}