{"id":502,"date":"2009-05-27T13:35:32","date_gmt":"2009-05-27T13:35:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2009\/05\/esther-schmester-carrie-prejea.html"},"modified":"2009-05-27T13:35:32","modified_gmt":"2009-05-27T13:35:32","slug":"esther-schmester-carrie-prejea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/05\/esther-schmester-carrie-prejea.html","title":{"rendered":"Esther, schmester: Carrie Prejean as Bible heroine"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\"Carrie<\/span>Don’t see the connection? Check out my essay on the topic at PoliticsDaily<\/strong><\/a>.<\/strong> The lede:<\/p>\n

\n

So why does it seem as though every prominent shiksa<\/em> wants to be a Jewish queen? As in Queen Esther, a favorite heroine of the Hebrew Bible who used her feminine wiles — and risked her life — to save the Jews of Persia from a plot to exterminate them. <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

The latest Christian gal fitted for Esther’s crown was Miss California USA, a.k.a. Carrie Prejean. As soon as Prejean was dissed for publicly objecting to gay marriage on the basis of her Christian beliefs, she was held up by Focus on the Family and other evangelicals as a “modern Queen Esther,” who uses her good looks to witness for her faith and rescue God’s people.<\/strong><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
So what’s up?<\/div>\n
 <\/div>\n
\n
Above all, the story of Esther allows conservatives to mediate-or accommodate-conflicting feelings about sex and purity, women and power. “I think in many ways she is a dubious role model,” says Anne Lapidus Lerner, director of the Program in Jewish Women’s Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. “But she does offer beauty and power together-and subservience. So it’s a good mix, it would seem to me, for people who are interested in seeing women as subservient but not totally powerless, and to see their beauty as something that carries them to whatever modicum of power they achieve.”<\/strong><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Then again, Esther may be the only thing Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton have in common. <\/div>\n
 <\/div>\n
Read on<\/strong><\/a>, if only to get the real story of the real Esther. Oh, and Vashti. And check out Rabbi Brad Hirschfield’s take<\/a>. <\/div>\n
 <\/div>\n
 <\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Don’t see the connection? Check out my essay on the topic at PoliticsDaily. The lede: So why does it seem as though every prominent shiksa wants to be a Jewish queen? As in Queen Esther, a favorite heroine of the Hebrew Bible who used her feminine wiles — and risked her life — to save…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7,3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-church","category-history","category-politics","category-pop-culture"],"yoast_head":"\nEsther, schmester: Carrie Prejean as Bible heroine - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/05\/esther-schmester-carrie-prejea.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Esther, schmester: Carrie Prejean as Bible heroine - Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Don’t see the connection? Check out my essay on the topic at PoliticsDaily. The lede: So why does it seem as though every prominent shiksa wants to be a Jewish queen? 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=502"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}