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Saturday, January 21, 2006

Black Mass

Posted by on January 21 at 10:18 AM

I don’t know quite how to feel about this story from the UK:

A British vicar has created his own version of the Rocky Horror Picture Show to lure the faithful back into the fold—a new twice-monthly church service for the Goths in his parish, complete with rock music and compulsory black garments. The idea is the brainchild of Martin Ramshaw, associate Anglican vicar and resident Goth at the very traditionally named church of St Edward King and Martyr in the very well-heeled eastern university city of Cambridge.

“The service seeks to find new ways of making the life of the church meaningful to people from alternative, and particularly Goth, communities,” Ramshaw explains on the church’s website, www.st-edwards-cam.org.uk.”

St. Edward King and Martyr isn’t named for Edward II, the English king who was murdered at the orders of his wife, Queen Isabella, and her lover, but it should be. Edward II was a big homo, so they shoved a red-hot poker up his butt—they literally got Medieval on his ass. A very Goth way to go. I just read a new biography of Isabella, Edward’s wife, by Alison Weir. Weir argues that Isabella not only didn’t have Edward killed, but that Edward II escaped from England and lived for decades as a hermit and a penitant Italy until his death decades after his son, Edward III, took the throne.

I only mention this crap because after I posted something about Project Runway earlier this week I was accused in the comments favoring trash TV over reading books. Not true. I make time for both.