Lesser Kissing

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“The fact that humans can have it all worked out in their abstract theology (latria, hyperdulia, and dulia) such that they can admit to being an iconodule, but not an idolater, makes me hop in place in my impatient Protestant way. Imagine a wife catching her husband kissing the chambermaid. ‘Ah, my dear,’ he says. ‘I was meaning to talk to you about this. This is not what it appears. This is a species of what I have learned to call lesser-kissing. It doesn’t mean the same thing to me as when I am kissing you—kissing you, my love, my dear, my only sweet, is what I call special-kissing.’ ‘It may not mean the same thing to you,’ she says, jealous and angry as she should be. ‘But it means the same thing to me.’ And so she throws an expensive vase at his head, demonstrating an unwillingness to master some of the finer points of his theology” (Papa Don’t Pope, p. 137).