Religion Dispatches
…though this, the men would hover around the tent entries, send notes, make phone calls, actually get their phone cords recharged, and send food and drink through every possible opening in the tent. As far as I could tell, it was always the men hanging around our tent and not the women hanging around the men’s tent. Pretty funny if you think about it. They were like lost puppies without their women. Yet patriarchy would have us think they are the m…
Read More…Peter Stephens, his partner of 32 years, (photo right) on the tarmac of a Paris airport for the arrival of Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, when a protocol officer told the ambassador that the prime minister should not be greeted by Mr. Stephens. Ambassador Brady was ordered to have his partner “wait in the car.” To his credit, Ambassador Brady refused to follow that order. Peter remained by his side as the Prime Minister and his delegation…
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…ultural situation as St. Nicholas in Amsterdam, the famed Russian Orthodox parish that broke away from Moscow last month after its pleas to Patriarch Kirill to end the violence in Ukraine were met with retaliation, both online and in real life. It’s worth noting that St. Sergius has only recently become part of the Moscow Patriarchate. For most of its history, until 2018, it was under Constantinople, when it was handed over to Moscow as a (clearly…
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…and anxiety reminds me of the main character in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris who romanticizes 1920s Paris, until he actually travels there and discovers that Parisians of the ‘20s are fantasizing about the 1890s …and so on. We look to other times and other cultures for supposedly healthier, more authentic ways of eating. There’s this idea, and it makes a lot of intuitive sense, that if we’re suffering, and we don’t have solutions to our own pr…
Read More…School in Cambridge, Massachusettss. Egelko reports that Charles came out in 1993 shortly after announcing his retirement, divorced his wife of 42 years, and moved to San Francisco. He ran a gay ministry there and at age 76 he met Felipe Sanchez-Paris, who he later married. Sanchez-Paris died in July. Charles is survived by five children, ten grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. A memorial service is scheduled at 2 p.m. Jan. 11 at St. Gr…
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…out another religion is to study its texts and its official positions. The Paris trial challenges both. Perhaps it’s best to encounter religions in the real world, informally, with a focus on actual actions, not official words. Pope Benedict XVI worked hard to improve the Church’s interfaith profile, with limited success. While his largely positive attitude toward other religions could not have been more different from that of the 13th century chu…
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…he Untouchables), which came out almost a year ago and sold twenty million tickets in France (and nearly as many abroad). Intouchables is a funny and moving comedy, but as politically correct a story as you’ll find: a black young man bordering on delinquency is hired by a tetraplegic wealthy man to be his assistant-nurse-chauffeur. They have a ball together doing crazy—and sometimes nasty—things, and save each other from an apparently inexorable f…
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…eaty in which 100 works of art were explicitly listed for expropriation to Paris. By the end of their 20-year sojourn in Paris, the Laocoön Group and Apollo Belvedere had inspired an explosion of new museum construction throughout Europe. As I’ve said before, new ways of seeing emerge with surprising suddenness in the modern period. Instituting those new ways of seeing was very much what modern museums were designed to do. So a pagan idol become…
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…of blue blazers or silk scarves) does not feel strange. In Germany, by comparison, the main Christian chuches (Lutheran and Catholic) have a privileged position. Although their membership is dwindling, as recently released figures confirm, they still haul in taxes from tens of millions of citizens under a system overseen by the state. Within most German federal states, the churches have an entrenched position as advisers on education and, sometim…
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…two hours. Hofstadter took up salsa five years ago while on sabbatical in Paris, a pursuit he explains in terms of simple admiration. Having envied those who could appear so cool and composed on the dance floor, while also totally virtuosic and precise in their movements, he decided to learn. This fascination with salsa feels continuous with his work in cognitive science. Hofstadter’s persistence is legendary; he’s preoccupied with discovering th…
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