It’s fall, and in the new upscale German Tudor “Keswick Village” a few blocks from my house, with faux gas lights and flower-festooned traffic circle, I drove smack into the effigies of men hanging on crosses. I counted at least four filler-stuffed figures with droopy heads lifted up on stakes, their arms tied horizontal to crude crossbars. The scene was surreal.

This being 21st century Pennsylvania and not Sicily at Easter time, I recognized at once that this was not the “via cruces,” and there would be no throngs in the streets commemorating the Passion of the Lord. Such a thing could never be. The city’s sensibilities would not abide the cramming down our throats of a message of sacrificial death to save us from our sins. There would be an uproar, I can hear it now.

The city’s sensibilities would, however, abide a grisly display of wanton death reminiscent of the Klan’s work, or of Sennecharib’s impaled trophies on ancient Assyria’s walls. Bring on the ghouls of autumn, and don’t scare the children with your Jesus stories.