Perspective is a funny thing in that it changes all the time.  For much of my adult life I’ve always felt fortunate to have lived during a time that I thought must be the most enlightened of all human history.  After all we have the benefit of lessons learned from all the generations of humans that preceded us.

Then I read, see or hear something that makes me question our enlightenment.  Here’s just one such event, a Frontline profile of the genocide in Rwanda back in the mid-90s.

I remember vividly reading about the genocide in the paper, as it was happening.  I remember thinking, "How can we, that is human beings, allow something like this to happen?"

When reading about the Holocaust I used to think the reason the Nazi’s were able to pull it off is that most of humanity was ignorant of what was going on.  People still argue about that, but I KNOW that the genocide in Rwanda was not a deep dark secret, and yet we let it happen.  I read about it in the Washington Post every day.

Given that the Holocaust occured only 50 years before the genocide in Rwanda we can’t even claim that something like this had not happened in recent times so we could not expect to be prepared to respond to such an event. No, we simply allowed it to happen.  Again.

You may wonder why I keep saying we.  It’s really very simple.  My theory is that we allow atrocities to happen because we think they happen to others.  We allow them to happen because they are really not like us.  They are Jewish, they are African, they are Cambodian, they are not us.  Until we begin to think of ourselves as members of the same extended family on this little life raft we call Earth, then we will never avoid repeating the sins of our past.  We will never attain enlightenment.

Much of my liberal arts education in the late ’80s could have been accurately categorized as the study of "old, dead, white guys."  Sure I had a course or two in what was then thought of as alternative fine-arts education (African American Literature, History of Middle Eastern Literature, etc.), but by and large it was the now-much-derided classics curriculum.

Well, from Ed Cone’s blog comes a link to an article in The Independent (UK) about a new technique being used by scholars at Oxford University (interestingly with help from some scientists at Brigham Young University) to read the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, a treasure trove of ancient Greek and Roman literature that was discovered in the late 19th century.  It seems that the stuff was illegible until now, and with the help of new technology the scholars are now able to read long-lost works from the likes of Sophocles, a very dead, very old, maybe not-so-white guy.

Obviously this opens up a whole lot of possiblities for understanding the ancient world, but the part that intrigued me most was this:

In the past four days alone, Oxford’s classicists have used it to make
a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles,
Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost
for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian
gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the
earliest books of the New Testament.

With all the flack that Dan Brown is getting from mainstream Christian scholars about his fictional work, The Da Vinci Code, wouldn’t it be a hoot if they found some biblical texts that supported even one of his fictional assertions?  Even better wouldn’t it be very interesting to see how the church deals with any new revelations that might be had if new gospels are discovered?

Personally I think that so many leaders of the mainstream Protestant and Catholic churches are beholden to the tradition developed, passed down, modified and enforced by generation after generation of men (and a few women) that it’s good to have a fundamental shake-up every once in a while.  Too often the answer to a flock member’s question is, "Because that is the way it has always been." Which is why now is as good a time as any to ask, "Why?" 

Could make for an interesting first year for the new Pope don’t you think?