Now that my favorite part of the church year, Holy Week, is over, I figured I could stand to miss "Low Sunday" at St. Christopher's in the hopes of meeting some interesting people elsewhere. I had originally intended to attend the Greek Orthodox church in Lubbock, but I discovered at the last minute that this weekend is the Orthodox Easter so their ordinary Sunday service had been canceled in favor of a Saturday night Pascha vigil. (That's the way it should be done, I might add.) So I went to ultra-modern Second Baptist instead, which our political science professor, a member, had recommended. In fact I didn't see him there, nor was I greeted by anyone else, so after sipping coffee for a few minutes I took off for Barnes and Noble, where I spent all afternoon writing and rewriting the LJ review due tomorrow. Yes, I'm a perfectionist, but at the same time I think it's genuinely difficult to fairly summarize and evaluate a book in under 175 words.

In the evening I went to Tech's Canterbury House to take the Eucharist. The typical liberalism of Episcopalianism is generally magnified in university settings, and with my sensors on heightened alert I detected a few warning signs. One woman wore a T-shirt proclaiming that "VAGINA is not a dirty word" and displaying an anatomical diagram of said orifice. On her car a bumper sticker read "Safe Sex is in the palm of your hand." Another gal had hairy legs, in my experience a symptom of either feminism or lesbianism. The priest had more Beatles posters than icons on his office walls. He also mangled the liturgy, omitting the Creed and the General Confession and substituting a reading about the Holocaust for the appointed Old Testament passage. On the other hand, when he mentioned that the Prayer Book was being revised (again!) one of the students complained that each subsequent revision waters down the theology still more. To which I said Amen--let's get back to the 1549 edition! There were about a dozen students in attendance, most of them undergraduate women, although the Young Veteran from St. Christopher's was also there. I'm not sure if I'll go back.

I've come across the motto "Vagina is not a dirty word" before, in an advertisement for "The Vagina Monologues." But I would think liberals would be opposed to the nomenclature; since "vagina" is the Latin for "sheath," it vividly and succinctly encapsulates a belief in the normativity of heterosexuality.