This page is a Monthly Archive of entries from January 2008 listed from newest to oldest.
In my Christian tradition, we set aside special days to honor certain noteworthy people (saints and martyrs) of our faith. A long time ago, the Orthodox Church thought it would be really cool to make small hand-held pictures, or icons, of the saints so Christians could carry them around and honor their memory. It was sort of like the ancient Christian version of baseball cards. Today, there is even a website where you can send icons of the saints on their special days to your friends.
After a couple thousand years of canonizing, there were lots of saints and lots of icons. Now there’s practically a saint (or even multiple saints) for every day of the year. That got to be a bit too tedious for some of us Christians in the West, so we simply expedited the saint-honoring process by lumping everyone together into one day on November 1st. Of course, there’s still a couple of really popular ones such as St. Patrick’s and St. Valentine’s that we couldn’t manage to pack away into the mothballs of All Saints Day.
I wonder if Jack Davis, the University of Illinois graduate who created the Chief Illiniwek logo in 1980, feels like he created a golem? If you already know what a golem is, you can probably skip the next couple of paragraphs. But for those readers unfamiliar with the term, allow me to explain.
First, a golem is not to be confused with Gollum, the character from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (though there are certainly some parallels between the two).
The Hebrew word golem appears only once in the Bible, in Psalm 139:16, where it is translated (according to the NRSV) as unformed substance: “Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed.”
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