Water is central to many religions, and not least of all Christianity, in which water baptism (in Greek, "dipping") is one of the defining symbols of second birth. So I guess it was only appropriate that the holiday season brought me not one but two water baptisms, as a pipe burst in my apartment and a water leak flooded my library in storage!

But fear not, faithful readers!  After countless hours of cataloguing damage & moving in and out of the apartment we are BACK for good. So in honor of the cleansing floods that washed me away from the site (and my apartment building) last December, here is an example of religious bling appropriate to the occasion.

This look like an ordinary pearl necklace, but be not deceived.  It is actually a baptism bracelet, given to the baptizee to celebrate his or her immersion into the Christian faith. 

Why pearls?  One possible explanation lies in Jesus' famous metaphor of the "pearl of great price or the image of pearls as a symbol of purity; but the real answer is probably much more simple: pearls come from water.  Not that this is without its own theological complications--after all, pearl-producing oysters can be hermaphrodites or can change their sex!

If you go to the site that sells this bracelet, you'll notice that it pitches the jewelry to anyone from babies to adults.  The reason for this age-spanning ecumenism lies with an age-old controversy within Christianity.  Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Presbyterians, & Methodists are a few of the prominent denominations that baptize babies, a practice that serves as a Christian analogue to infant circumcision.

But not all denominations equate baptism with sprinkling babies on the head.  Baptists and many other Christans follow the more ancient practice of immersion or dunking the whole person in water, although few Baptists do it the way it was originally done 20 centuries ago--with the new believer in the buff.