Clean shoes

Earlier this month we witnessed the Shoes Heard 'Round the World, when Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zeidi chucked both of his shoes at President George W. Bush during a Baghdad press conference.

This prompted a slew of articles helpfully explaining that al-Zeidi was expressing anger at Bush -- as though his gesture had somehow been open to any other interpretation. When this quaintly exotic foreign man called the president a "dog," these articles further explained, this was also meant to express contempt. In the Arab world, the articles all said, shoes and dogs are regarded as unclean.

Here's a taste of this sort of thing in our paper:

Taken off and thrown at someone, a simple pair of shoes becomes the most egregious of insults in the Arab lexicon -- a way of telling a person that he or she is held in the highest contempt. ...

"The whole idea of throwing the shoes is trying to say, 'You're beneath my feet, you're worse than dirt,' " said Muqtedar Khan, director of Islamic Studies at the University of Delaware and fellow of the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. ...

Shoes hold a special position at the top of insults in the Arab world because they are dirty, used to tread on the ground. That's why Muslims remove their shoes to pray. Even sitting cross-legged with the sole of a shoe, or a bare foot, pointed at another person is seen as disrespectful.

Blah, blah, blah, etc.

But none of the many such reports I saw in print, online or on cable TV recognized that this wasn't news for many Americans. We already knew all about Middle Eastern attitudes toward the uncleanness of shoes and feet because we learned about it in church. We learned about, specifically, when we told and retold one of our favorite stories about Jesus.

In Jesus' day, feet were regarded as unclean because they really were unclean. They were filthy, in fact. And so Jesus did what he always did whenever he was told that something or someone was unclean:

... He got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples' feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him.

Getting down on his knees and taking unclean things in his hands was more than just a pattern with Jesus -- it was something like an obsession. This goes beyond a mere motif or refrain in the Gospels. Jesus looked at the purity codes and the holiness codes and the long lists of people and things that were unclean and never to be touched and he treated these like he was collecting points on a scavenger hunt.

Lepers, women, Samaritans, Samaritan women, menstrual women, gentiles, Romans, collaborators, dead girls, cripples, prostitutes, crazy naked guys in cemeteries -- the Gospels read like Jesus was on a three-year sprint to touch, to embrace, as many unclean people as he possibly could. And that meant, according to the same set of rules that he was so determinedly violating, that he was unclean as well.

This just isn't how holy men are supposed to behave. Holy men are supposed to be, you know, holy. There are rules, after all. And there's a word for people who break those rules -- particularly for people who break them with gleeful abandon. Those people are called sinners.

Yet here's the strange thing. Despite his transgression obsession, despite his embrace at every turn of Those Who Must Not Be Touched, Jesus insisted that he was blameless.

This infuriated and confused many of Jesus' contemporaries, just as it infuriates and confuses many of our contemporaries. We can't just throw out the rules, they protest -- that would lead to chaos, anarchy, antinomianism, dogs and cats living together ... mass hysteria.

It would be less confusing if Jesus had been merely an anarchist. But he wasn't. His vision of utopia -- a utopia he insisted was already becoming a living reality -- was not a lawless anarchy, but a kingdom. Granted, it's the sort of kingdom in which the king wraps a towel around his waist and kneels to wash the filthy feet of his subjects -- the sort of kingdom for which we have no model, no comparison, and which we probably can't fully fathom. But, still, it's a kingdom.

So what are we to make of this anarchist king, this unclean holy man, this walking contradiction and his embrace of everyone we'd been taught to think of as unclean?

Here I turn again to a story from the Book of Acts. We looked at this story a few years ago (see "The Abominable Shellfish"), but it's worth revisiting, because this story finds Simon Peter wrestling with this very question of clean and unclean.

A man named Cornelius wants to join the young church. He says, actually, that God wants him to join the church. But Peter has a problem with this because Cornelius is unclean. The man is a gentile, a Roman -- a Roman centurion, in fact. And the rules are pretty clear about the uncleanness of such people.

This new community, this new kingdom, is supposed to be inclusive. Peter knows that. The multicultural miracle at Pentecost, after all, poured forth out of his very own two lips. But surely there must be some limit to this inclusiveness. Rules are rules.

Plus, truth be told, Peter doesn't really like Roman centurions very much. Roman centurions tortured and killed his friend, the best man he ever knew. That probably gives Peter a more substantial grievance against Cornelius than most of us can claim for wanting to exclude as unclean the people we don't want to welcome.

But no matter his reasons, God made it clear to Peter that such exclusion simply wasn't kosher. God sent Peter a vision, spelling that out explicitly. And Peter being Peter, and God knowing him well, God sent that same vision three times.

Peter's rooftop vision didn't mention Cornelius in particular, or even Romans in general. On the surface level, it didn't have anything to do with them. It seemed to be about diet: Peter was shown a big tablecloth covered with pork and bacon and shellfish and calamari, and he heard a voice from heaven telling him, "Do not call anything impure that God has made clean."

This vision, this very story, is the explicit reason that to this day Christians feel free to eat things like pork and bacon and shellfish and calamari, even though the Bible says, unambiguously and explicitly, that eating such things is "an abomination." We've decided, based on this vision and this story and this passage from the Book of Acts, that these abominable things are no longer abominable. This passage is why we "pick and choose" (as Jack Black Jesus sings), deciding that some abominations are now OK while others aren't.

But if we're going to pick and choose abominations on the basis of this story, then we ought to get this story right. Because to read this passage as primarily about giving us license not to eat kosher is an indefensible interpretation.

That's not what Peter himself understood this vision to mean. And it's not what Luke took it to mean either when he wrote this story down. Luke tells us that the very next day Peter went to Cornelius' house, and once there he provided his own, definitive interpretation of his vision.

"You are well aware that it is against our law for a Jew to associate with a Gentile or visit him," Peter said. "But God has shown me that I should not call any man impure or unclean."

Not a word there about calamari or bacon. That's not what the vision was about. It was about people. God has shown us that we should not call any person impure or unclean -- that we should not treat any person as impure or unclean.

So here's an invitation or a challenge for the New Year: Sign up for the scavenger hunt. Take the Big List of the unclean and the untouchable and turn it upside down and inside out. Seek out those people instead of avoiding them. Touch them and let them touch you.

Comments

[Cowboy Diva]

(....On the other hand, neither could we stand there and watch these people suffer, knowing that we—well, Joshua—had the power to help them.) He’d also taken to poking one of them in the arm with his finger anytime anyone said the word “Untouchable.” Later he told me that he just hated passing up the opportunity for palpable irony. --Christopher Moore, Lamb

Thanks for the push, Fred.

[Mithras]

Why the hell don't you have a regular op-ed in a good paper? This is a fantastic post.

[Kit Whitfield]

A fine post. Thanks for another year of being enlightening, compassionate, incisive and hilarious; I wish you all the best for 2009.

And happy new year, everyone! :-)

[Robb]

Beautiful Fred, a most excellent encouragement for all this year.

[schism]

Seek out those people instead of avoiding them.

But I like being a hermit...come to think of it, people around me seem to like that too. Everyone wins!

[VP]

This reminds me very beautifully of Nietzsche.

But I think I'm going to stop eating calamari. Too intelligent.

Happy New Year, everybody. I come here every day, and it's great.

[hapax]

pork and bacon and shellfish and calamari

Wow, it's like you just looked at my New Year's Eve menu. But you forgot the salmon and mushrooms and guacamole and hummus and the seven different kinds of cheese...

But thanks for the clean shoes for New Years. May the Good Lord have mercy on all our soles.

/what? what? SOMEONE had to say it.../

[EarBucket]

It's incredible how, every couple of months, I read a new post here and think "No, this is the best thing I've ever read on the internet."

Beautiful, Fred. Thank you.

[Cowboy Diva]

I am so glad I do not have to walk a mile in hapax's shoes.
*so tempted to blow the close italics tag*

[CombatQueer]

I remember the first time I came to realize that it wasn't that God and Christ love me despite my transsexuality, it was that God had blessed me in my transness.

The gulf between looking up to see a mean, petty, white male god favoring the pretty, rich, Evangelical and sneering at ugly, sinful me and the process of trying to know Christ, the love of the universe, the source of freedom it is, uh, difficult to fully explain. It's like being let out of jail.

[Dash]

Amen, CombatQueer. Fred, thank you, yet again, for an insightful and inspiring post.

[Tehanu]

I wish all preachers and religious people were like you, Fred. Thanks for this beautiful post, and may you and everyone have a happy New Year.

[drakepope]

Great post!

What I don't really understand is why they had to specify that this was supposed to be insulting. Is there a culture where hurling your shoes at someone is considered polite or deferential? Maybe in Israel; "You are an excellent Prime Minister, Mr. Olmert! Take that! Your domestic policy has been especially effective! Ooh, yeah, right in the kisser!"

[schism]

This prompted a slew of articles helpfully explaining that al-Zeidi was expressing anger at Bush -- as though his gesture had somehow been open to any other interpretation.

Maybe this is just the coverage I saw, but mostly they seemed to be pointing out the degree of insult involved. Sure, bouncing something off of somebody's head (or trying to) is obviously an attack, but it seems likely that not everyone in the western world would know that shoes up the insult to mortal levels in this case.

Perhaps you all encounter more pedantic bobbleheads than I do.

[Geds]

but it seems likely that not everyone in the western world would know that shoes up the insult to mortal levels in this case.

Yeah. I mostly associate throwing shoes with the second Austin Powers movie. "Ow. That hurt. And, really, who throws his shoe?"

Also, in a much more obscure reference, I kept wanting to shout, "Shoe the shoeless!" in homage to Eddie Vedder's infamous shoe rant...

[Reynard]

Taken off and thrown at someone, a simple pair of shoes becomes the most egregious of insults in the Arab lexicon -- a way of telling a person that he or she is held in the highest contempt. ...

Egregious, maybe; but a brick would have been more *effective*...

[lightning]

And this is why the Fundigelicals are so hot on the idea that homosexuality is a "lifestyle choice". If it's something inborn, it comes under the "Cornelius exemption" and they lose what they see as their license to dump on gays.

[Sniffnoy]

Of course, you're certainly not born a centurion...

[Ryan Ferneau]

That was the first Austin Powers movie! The good one!

[Geds]

That was the first Austin Powers movie! The good one!

Oh, yeah. It's, uh, it's been a while...

[Mabus]

Actually, Fred, the source of that other teaching you reference is generally considered to be Mark 7: 14-23, which the story of Peter and Cornelius only refers to in retrospect. He (at least according to some manuscripts), "rendered all foods clean" via this teaching.

Which, I note, he also does to the apostles' feet. It's not as if he sat around handling them in their dirty, sweaty state; he got a bucket of water and a towel and he cleaned them up. Which, you know, seems to be the point here: Jesus has no problem handling filthy things, but he does so to clean them. He recognizes the problem as real and, y'know, fixes it.

[Geds]

He recognizes the problem as real and, y'know, fixes it.

Which is the official top of the slippery slope known as the "ex-gay ministry..."

[Cat]

"Taboo" means both "holy" and "untouchable." I think it's one of those polar opposites that religion is supposed to negotiate.

[Spalanzani]

Reynard: "Egregious, maybe; but a brick would have been more *effective*..."

Throwing a brick at someone can actually be a sign of misdirected love in some cases, so it wouldn't really be appropriate here.

[The Amazing Kim]

Here I am, rainbow pinko greenie commie atheist vegan, gay as a tree-full of monkeys on nitrous oxide, and I'm thinking "That Jesus, he was a pretty cool guy."

God damn you!

And is there a better time to say Jesus was way cool?

[The Amazing Kim]

aw, frig.

[Dash]

Sniffnoy: Of course, you're certainly not born a centurion...

The Roman Army--just another lifestyle choice.

-----

OT, but I found it interesting that Bush's response was typical of our guilt-culture: he recognized that al-Zeidi intended to insult him, but treated the whole thing as a joke--he refused to accept, i.e., consider himself shamed by, the insult.

[Lila]

Dash: while simultaneously ignoring al-Zeidi's cries as he was beaten in the next room. So Bush apparently thought the incident was both laughably insignificant, and worthy of punishment possibly including summary execution.

[cjmr's husband]

May 2009 Not Suck

[Brenda]

Happy New Year everyone.

Fred, I have been lurking for some time and I just want to thank you for being a breath of fresh air on the internet. I have to admit that reading your essays has made me a much better critical thinker and thus a better student. Thank you for the work you do.

To everyone, I love your comments! Someone always says something to make my day. Thank you, too.

Brenda

[damnedyankee]

Throwing a brick at someone can actually be a sign of misdirected love in some cases, so it wouldn't really be appropriate here.

Li'l ainchil...

After a while the constant "no-duh" explanations of how throwing shoes is a sign of contempt in the Arab world had me thinking of this bit from Life on Mars:

Tyler: I think what we have here is a hate crime. Hunt: A "hate" crime? What, as opposed to an "I really like you a lot" crime?

Or something like that.

[damnedyankee]

And yeah, why doesn't Fred have a column somewhere? He runs rings around the guys the Philly Daily News finds for its Saturday "On Faith" pieces.

[funkycamper]

Long-time lurker, finally posting.

This is a great post to start off the new year with, Fred. As a former fundamentalist, now attending a more loving and inclusive liberal church that is a part of the reconciliation movement, this gives me some, much-needed Scriptural ammunition.

I agree with Mithras...you should be getting paid for this. Wonderful stuff!

Happy New Year, Fred & Everyone!

[Amaryllis]

Mithras: Why the hell don't you have a regular op-ed in a good paper?
I don't know, why doesn't he? I've often wondered.

damnedyankee: He runs rings around the guys the Philly Daily News finds for its Saturday "On Faith" pieces.
He writes rings around most of the religion columnists I've seen anywhere. Thanks for doing this, Fred!

cjmr's husband: May 2009 Not Suck
Amen.

I was going to quote Ogden Nash on the futility of expecting that any new year will be better than its forbears, but then I remembered that there are new babies present. And parents of young children. And people who've survived plumbing catastrophes without irreparable damage. And other hopeful souls. So I'll just say, Happy New Year, everybody!

[Caravelle]

So here's an invitation or a challenge for the New Year: Sign up for the scavenger hunt. Take the Big List of the unclean and the untouchable and turn it upside down and inside out. Seek out those people instead of avoiding them. Touch them and let them touch you.

I'm going to the movies this weekend with a guy who's studying marketing, surely that counts !

Thank you for this post Fred.

Dash : OT, but I found it interesting that Bush's response was typical of our guilt-culture: he recognized that al-Zeidi intended to insult him, but treated the whole thing as a joke--he refused to accept, i.e., consider himself shamed by, the insult.

If it were anyone but Bush I'd agree with you, but Bush... Given his habit of cracking jokes about pretty much anything to distract from his actual words and actions, and the fact he never publicly acknowledges any criticism except to deny and dismiss it... I think he was just being his good ol' self.

As to whether Bush works more from a guilt-culture perspective or an honor-culture one, I'm not sure this episode proves anything because Al-Zaidi is "little people" (brown, foreign "little people"). Do we have examples of how Bush reacts to that kind of thing coming from somebody he'd consider an equal ?

[Dash]

Lila, thank you for the reminder about al-Zeidi. Like, I think, all people of good will, I am deeply concerned about him and hope Amnesty International is keeping very close watch on what is happening to him. I fear the worst, however.

What I was trying to point out was simply the cultural difference. To a member of a shame-culture, throwing shoes at someone says something about the person at whom the shoes are thrown: that person is then tainted, so to speak, by being shamed. To a member of a guilt-culture who is not prepared to acknowledge that he's done anything wrong (Bush to a tee, I'd say), it's the thrower who is saying something about himself. Whether Bush understands the degree of the insult--or cares--I don't know. But he responded in a pretty typical guilt-culture manner, by acknowledging that al-Zeidi did something, but not acknowledging that it was more than an expression of dislike, and focusing on the physical aspects of the expression rather than its meaning.

I don't like much of anything about George Bush, but in this case, I think he played well to his primary Western audience. Looked like an idiot to Iraqis, of course, but then....

[russell]

This was great. Many, many thanks.

[Dash]

As to whether Bush works more from a guilt-culture perspective or an honor-culture one, I'm not sure this episode proves anything because Al-Zaidi is "little people" (brown, foreign "little people"). Do we have examples of how Bush reacts to that kind of thing coming from somebody he'd consider an equal ?

Anybody know Jeb Bush well enough to ask?

[Mary]

This post reminds me of this theory of morality, which speculates that there are five basic types of moral concern:

"1)Harm/care -- This foundation underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance.

2) Fairness/reciprocity -- This foundation generates ideas of justice, rights, and autonomy.

3) Ingroup/loyalty -- This foundation underlies virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the
group.

4) Authority/respect -- This foundaiton underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions.

5) Purity/sanctity, shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. This foundation underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way."

The authors observe that: "The current American culture war, we have found, can be seen as arising from the fact that liberals try to create a morality relying almost exclusively on the Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity foundations; conservatives, especially religious conservatives, use all five foundations, including Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity."

In that light, this post seems to me to be saying that Jesus himself was more interested in Harm/Care than Purity/Sanctity, which is interesting, because in general that seems to be the hallmark of a more humanist than religious morality...

[Cory Gross]

It depends which religion...

If you go by the sort hierarchy of personal development that I've found lately to be most clearly expressed in integrative philosophy, then what you're talking about as "religious", Mary, is aligned with the ethnocentric stage of development.

The short form of the whole thing is that we first begin life in a biocentric stage of devlopment, being literally unable to distinguish between our body and the bodies of others. When we get a little bit older and recognize that mom is a different physical being, we enter the egocentric stage of development where we can't distinguish other people's mental and emotional self from our own. Neat trivia: kids are incapable of lying until they are about two or three because they don't know that you don't know what they know.

When kids can start lying they enter the ethnocentric stage of development, which is when they have recognized that other people have distinct mental and emotional selves. At this stage, socialization is critical and from society they learn what rules to obey and roles to play in order to function in a world filled with mysterious other people. The unfortunate side effect is that they take their own society as normative, and morality is determined along what the rules and roles of the society are.

After decentering oneself, the next stage is decentering the society... Not only looking at things from the perspective of other people but looking at things from the pespective of other societies. This is the multicultural stage of development, which challenges how normative the society is and attempts to develop a universalist morality (what is right and wrong for all people at all times).

By the scheme posted above, the ethnocentric stage not only uses all five, but actually uses #3-5 more as the basis for morality than #1-2. Multiculturalism can use all five to an extent but rests its foundation on #1-2. With the stuff about Jesus and Peter that Fred outlined in his excellent post, Christianity can actually be said to begin at the multicultural stage of development. To try and conform Christianity to an ethnocentric in-group is a fundamental betrayal of Christ.

[Mary]

I don't know that I believe there's anything primitive about the other three "foundations," or that they necessarily have anything to do with psychological development. In fact, despite my rhetorical ellispes at the end of the previous post, I'm actually kind of skeptical about the authors conclusion that those last three foundations are limited to religious people. I think that the environmental movement taps into the "purity/sanctity" impulses, for instance, as does the Western approach to hygiene, with daily showers and deoderants. And most of us feel we owe a loyalty to our family and friends that we don't owe to strangers, whatever our religion or lack thereof.

I think the strongest statement I'd be willing to make is that, while all humans share these moral foundations (and it does seem to me to be a pretty exhaustive list), we priortize them differently. Sometimes they come in conflict -- what's fair may not be what's kind, or an authority may ask you to do something sacriligeous, and so on. In these conflicts, I would agree with the authors of this theory that "liberals" tend to value the principles of the first two foundations over those of the latter three, whereas they are a little more equal for religious people, of nearly all religions.

(In this story, Jesus definitely picks harm/care over purity/sanctity. But is he consistent in that?)

[bam]

Wow. Just WOW.

Probably the single best sermon I've ever heard. I've said this before, Fred, but you do me a great service by reminding me that not all religious people are sanctimonious twits at best and hate-filled monsters at worst. I believe a person gets out of religion exactly what they bring to it, and in your case I think you bring a lot of love, a lot of compassion, considerable humility, and the knowledge that while you may not have all the answers at least you know exclusion isn't one of them.

@ Mabus
The point isn't that he cleaned their feet. He touched something unclean, making himself unclean. And washing their feet did not make their feet ritually clean.

According to the rules of the time "Lepers, women, Samaritans, Samaritan women, menstrual women, gentiles, Romans, collaborators, dead girls, cripples, prostitutes, crazy naked guys in cemeteries" were not unclean in some "Gee, are these guys filthy" way that can be 'fixed' by a little warm water and a bar of soap. They were unclean in a fundamentally spiritual and ritualistic way that all the water in the world could not fix. We do not tend to think in this "magical/ritualistic" way about most things these days but they did.

The only way, in their belief system, to regain cleanliness in that circumstance was to take a ritual bath and go through the whole rigamarole outlined in such legalistic detail in Leviticus and Deuteronomy and such. And Jesus embraced unclean people and body parts and he didn't take a bath and kill some animals afterwards. And he enjoined his followers to "Go and to likewise."

As Fred pointed out, Jesus made it clear that touching the unclean, including them, did not make him (or anyone) unclean. Although he insisted he wasn't there to change the law, he willfully ignored the laws that excluded people, even terrible sinners, murderers and thieves--hell, even Romans.

It was all part of his fundamental message "judge not". He kept saying it over and over: "Let he who is without sin..." etc. His behavior toward unclean people was part of that message, which I have interpreted to be: Mind your own damned business. The other guy's relationship with God is not your business. Your relationship with God should be your only concern. As for all those other guys around you? Love them. Do good to them, even if they are mean and call you names. By loving them--as they are, not as you think they should be--you are loving God.

Which is Fred's point.

Sorry about the long post. 8-(
You inadvertently hit one of my buttons.

[Seraph]

The authors observe that: "The current American culture war, we have found, can be seen as arising from the fact that liberals try to create a morality relying almost exclusively on the Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity foundations; conservatives, especially religious conservatives, use all five foundations, including Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity."

Conservatives use all five foundations, but they are far more focused on #3 and #4. Care and Fairness are for those within the Ingroup (as defined by the Respected Authority) only. If you extend Care or Fairness to someone outside the Ingroup, you're a bleeding heart. If you ask them to, you're stealing from them (or violating their rights to religious freedom, if you're asking them to extend Care or Fairness to the Impure). If you so much as question a Respected Authority, you're a traitor, but if someone from outside their Ingroup attains the same position, that person is not a Respected Authority.

Look at the last eight years, especially the 2008 campaign and proposition 8, and tell me I'm wrong.

[Not Really Here]

If you extend Care or Fairness to someone outside the Ingroup, you're a bleeding heart.

You say bleeding heart like it's a bad thing

(note, this is not directed at Seraph, but at those conservatives who seem to have forgotten who the original Bleeding Heart Liberal is)

[Mark Baker-Wright]

I can't help reading this but think of potential conservative responses. For example, conservatives feel justified in shunning homosexuals (treating them as "impure or unclean") on the basis that they are responding to a behavior that God forbids. The whole "hate the sin, love the sinner" schtick.

Obviously, this would give them an easy "out" if Fred were understood to be talking about homosexuality (I've little doubt he is, but he's nicely vague so that we can also talk about any other group or person that we've shunned).

However, I find that I also can't help but counter my own hypothetical argument. Although homosexuality is, in some measure, defined by behavior (I'm not disputing that it's a drive one's born with. Just bear with me), I don't really see how the "love the sinner" bit works out. Generally, as I see it, they are shunned (or worse!). That can't be how God expects us to treat even sinners, again using Jesus as our model.

[Reynard]

Posted by Spalanzani: Reynard: "Egregious, maybe; but a brick would have been more *effective*..."

Throwing a brick at someone can actually be a sign of misdirected love in some cases, so it wouldn't really be appropriate here.

Okay, a *hand grenade then. No room for misinterpretation there, I should think...

[Froborr]

I know this was intended as a jumping-off point, not the focus of the post, but, um, no. Modern Arab attitudes toward feet and shoes have no connection whatsoever with the New Testament story of Jesus washing feet. Feet were not considered ritualistically unclean in Roman Judea, by Romans or Jews; rather, washing them was a typical duty for a servant, slave, or wife -- a second-class citizen, in other words, but not regarded with anything like the horror that was the prevailing attitude toward lepers and menstruating women. It would have been entirely unremarkable for, say, Mary or the apostles to wash Jesus' feet; the reverse, however, was a way for Jesus to metaphorically put himself on a level below his own followers, showing that he was not a typical holy man.

I guess the moral of this story would be that attempting to derive ancient Middle Eastern attitudes from modern Arabs is like trying to derive the attitudes of the Manhattan tribe from modern-day New Yorkers.

[CombatQueer]

Well, Reynard, sadly violence doesn't solve violence. It sucks, the "you harm, I'll harm you right back" doesn't actually prevent any harming. Often, a symbol action can have more punch than an actual attack. I mean, seriously, how would one more person throwing a hand grenade ever stop people from throwing hand grenades?

Violence is a system that can only be broken by a person decision to stop fighting and personally accept the consequences of not fighting.

[Hawker Hurricane]

I have no doubt that the people at the press conference were searched for grenades (and possibly bricks), and had them taken away before being allowed in *The Presence*. But taking away shoes... You use the weapons you have.

[cjmr]

So at the next press conference will all the reporters be in sock feet?