Voodoo and Halloween and New Orleans

Some Christian web sites are linking to the ABC news item about Hurricane Katrina allegedly killing the retail voodoo-supply business in New Orleans. Plans for today's celebration continue, however.

Some Pagan Witches on the Mississippi Gulf Coast find themselves more accepted after Katrina. Halloween partiers, meanwhile, cram the French Quarter.

Two months after the monster hurricane's horrifying rampage, Halloween has brought back the French Quarter's thirst for theatric horror and debauchery, its Mardi Goth mojo in the heart of a city long known for its reverence for voodoo and Anne Rice's glamorously gothic vampire novels.

Speaking of Anne Rice, much has been made of her return to her Catholic roots and plans to write a multi-volume novel on the life of Jesus. Religion-beat journalist Terry Mattingly, however, raises an interesting question:

Well now, I wonder — when these books reach the adult life of Jesus — what we will learn about his relationship with Mary Magdalene? I would not be surprised in Rice’s series turns out to be a major event on the Christian left.

In other words, a bigger literary controversy than that over The Da Vinci Code.