{"id":3895,"date":"2006-03-22T00:08:11","date_gmt":"2006-03-22T00:08:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/greet-each-other-with-a-holy-kiss.html"},"modified":"2006-03-22T00:08:11","modified_gmt":"2006-03-22T00:08:11","slug":"greet-each-other-with-a-holy-kiss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/greet-each-other-with-a-holy-kiss.html","title":{"rendered":"Greet Each Other With a Holy Kiss"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gashwin Gomes has good commentary on an interview with an author of a book in Christianity Today. Got it?<\/a>  The interview was in CT, not the book. Sorry.<\/p>\n

Here’s the interview:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

M<\/strong>ost of us give little attention, other than winks and giggles, to the verses commanding us to "greet one another with a holy kiss." Mount Holyoke religion professor Michael Penn<\/a>, however, has recently written an entire book on that early church practice: Kissing Christians: Ritual and Community in the Late Ancient Church<\/em> (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).<\/p>\n

Let’s first define "ritual kissing." When did early Christians kiss and who kissed who?<\/span>
Our earliest reference to the kiss is from the apostle Paul in 1 Thessalonians. He doesn’t give us very many details, which suggests that it was already a well-established practice.<\/p>\n

It’s only decades later that other Christians give us more details. We discover that early Christians kissed each other in a variety of different rituals, as part of prayer, baptism, Eucharist, everyday greeting, martyrdom, and so forth. In the first two centuries, at least, not only did men kiss other men and women other women, but men and women kissed one another. And most often this was a kiss on the lips.<\/p>\n

What did the kiss mean culturally in the broader Greco-Roman context?<\/span>
The short answer is that it meant a heck of a lot of different things, just as it does in our own time period. We find everything from a romantic kiss to a familial kiss to a kiss between friends. One difference between us and the ancient world, however, is that then when people kissed, particularly on the lips, it was seen as an exchange of spirit. Sometimes Christians would take the contemporary cultural meaning wholesale, and other times they would modify it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gashwin Gomes has good commentary on an interview with an author of a book in Christianity Today. Got it?  The interview was in CT, not the book. Sorry. Here’s the interview: Most of us give little attention, other than winks and giggles, to the verses commanding us to "greet one another with a holy kiss."…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nGreet Each Other With a Holy Kiss - Via Media<\/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\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/greet-each-other-with-a-holy-kiss.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Greet Each Other With a Holy Kiss - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Gashwin Gomes has good commentary on an interview with an author of a book in Christianity Today. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3895"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3895\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}