Casting Shoes before Swine
ELIGION Dispatches walk us into the deeper meaning of the shoe incident. Yes: hitting someone with your shoes is a bad thing in any culture. But it’s important to understand what shoes mean in a culture where you take your shoes off at the boundary of holiness.
“If Iraqi people come at you with shoes, you have lost their hearts and lost the war and God help us all.”
I meant to post earlier but have been travelling a lot. So, though this is not actually the shoe post, I found myself wondering about the theology of shoes.
I mean, could you imagine if someone threw a Wellington at Bush? What would be the hidden meaning if someone threw pumps? What if it were cowboy boots with the spurs still attached?
I do not think that you have delved enough into shoe theology, Huw.
Mind you, my personal preference, if you really want to indicate lack of holyness, would be to throw the slippers that all Coptic priests put on when they enter the sanctuary.
You’re not comparing apples to apples. It would be interesting to throw spurs, yes, but we have no theology of shoes here such as they do in Asian cultures – which was the point of the article to which I linked. You have hit on the right point with the Coptic slippers, however. Copts have a theology of shoes – because they have holy shoes and unholy ones.
I can hit someone with my shoe just as the Iraqi gentleman did. It would be bad. But he has a (cultural, racial, ethnic) theology of it. I do not. To me it’s a weapon. To him, it is a statement.