In Modern Popular Culture
Saint Barbara's day or Eid il-Burbara is celebrated in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine among Arab Christians annually on December 4, in a feast day similar to that of North American Halloween. The traditional food for the occasion is Burbara, a bowl of boiled barley, pomegranate seeds, raisins, anise and sugar offered to masquerading children. The general belief among Lebanese Christians is that Saint Barbara disguised herself in numerous characters to elude the Romans who were persecuting her.
Saint Barbara is mentioned in Federico García Lorca's play, La Casa de Bernarda Alba (1936). According to this drama, a popular Spanish phrase regarding this saint in the early 20th century was:
Blessed Santa Barbara, / Your story is written in the sky, / With paper and holy water.
The first Spanish-language Telenovela filmed in color for TV in the US, was the 1973 production of Santa Bárbara, Virgen y Mártir, filmed entirely on location in Hialeah, Florida.
GK Chesterton wrote the Ballad of Saint Barbara, interweaving the Legend of the Saint with the contemporary account of the huge artillery barrages that turned the First Battle of the Marne.
In "Time Bomb," an episode of The Closer, the LAPD deploy a bomb-squad robot named Babs, after St. Barbara in her role as patron saint of artillery and explosives personnel.
The Hold Steady wrote a song on their album Separation Sunday called Don't Let Me Explode which name-checks Saint Barbara.
Read more about this topic: Saint Barbara
Famous quotes containing the words modern, popular and/or culture:
“The United States is the only great nation whose government is operated without a budget. The fact is to be the more striking when it is considered that budgets and budget procedures are the outgrowth of democratic doctrines and have an important part in developing the modern constitutional rights.... The constitutional purpose of a budget is to make government responsive to public opinion and responsible for its acts.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“For the people in government, rather than the people who pester it, Washington is an early-rising, hard-working city. It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money.”
—P.J. (Patrick Jake)
“The treatment of African and African American culture in our education was no different from their treatment in Tarzan movies.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)