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Lesbian Nuns: Still Immodest After All These Years

By Susan Henking

… Immodest Acts. It was reviewed in the New York Times, The Nation, and the San Francisco Chronicle, not to mention many scholarly venues. Why? Perhaps because the subtitle of the book was The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy. The notion of the lesbian nun was not a new one. Denis Diderot’s 18th-century anti-Catholic piece entitled La Religieuse (The Nun) certainly portrayed what we might see as lesbian activity on the part of nuns. And,…

Isaac Asimov’s Niece Covers the Rapture

By Lauri Lebo

It’s fitting that Nanette Asimov, a San Francisco Chronicle reporter and Isaac Asimov’s niece, covered the failing of the Rapture for her newspaper. She details the story of a man who drove across the country with his family from Maryland to celebrate the event in the empty parking lot of the Family Radio station in Oakland, California, where this whole ridiculousness began. There is no gloating, or smugness in Asimov’s words, only a simple recou…

Judgment Day is Coming; Wear Clean Underwear

By Lauri Lebo

…the World won’t be for another six months, according to Harold Camping, a San Francisco-area radio host and the owner of Family Radio. His web site, wecanknow.com, says that Oct. 21 will be the day “when He will destroy the world and all that is therein.” Camping’s followers around the country have been promoting the big day by putting up billboards and driving vehicles with placards. But this is not the first time Camping has predicted Judgment…

Catholics Talk About Sex

By Kate Ott

…lues to provide comprehensive sexual health information. The University of San Francisco Health Promotion Services and Loyola University Chicago provide information about contraception and STI prevention. Georgetown University allows H*yas for Choice to provide information and condoms to students in Red Square, a “free speech zone” on campus. These institutions are in the minority. In a survey of Catholic Universities, only 12% of colleges say the…

Plant Porn and Physics Prayers

By Meera Subramanian

…ld also be said of academia, not to mention the world of art. One man from San Francisco is taking on all three institutions; targeting priest, scientist, and artist in a playful rally against authority. Jonathon Keats calls himself an experimental philosopher—though novelist, journalist, performance artist, and mad scientist would all fit as well. In his latest work lies an invitation for not just cloistered specialists, but anyone and everyone,…

Sex and Civilization: The Body as Battleground

By Jay Michaelson

…e to Ann Coulter’s desire for well-endowed macho men like George W. Bush; “San Francisco Values” threaten the front lines of the regulation of human desire, and the subservience to authority that conservatism demands. No wonder one Orthodox rabbi recently said that it would be a mitzvah for gay kids to kill themselves. But if liberated sexuality is world-destroying from the mythic, fundamentalist point of view, it is world-creating from a pluralis…

A Life After Death Double-Feature: Eastwood’s Hereafter and Noe’s Enter the Void

By Jay Michaelson

…hereas the characters in Hereafter live in upper-class Paris, middle-class San Francisco, and the most caring and engaged child welfare system the world has ever known. But the differences are more than skin-deep, especially when it comes to religion. Hereafter goes out of its way to demean traditional religion (and esoteric nonsense) en route to its reluctant affirmation of the afterlife—if the film were a person, she’d be “spiritual, not religio…

Obama Administration Gives Free Pass for Faith-Based Groups to Discriminate

By Sarah Posner

…n in employment decisions by grantees.” After the 2011 hearing, Scott told San Francisco Chronicle reporter Bob Egelko that Holder was “obviously ‘embarrassed to try to explain the policy’” and that Obama could repeal the OLC memo via executive order but had made no effort to. The responses to Scott’s question finally reveal the straightforward answer CARD has long sought. Although it was unclear at the time exactly how the Obama administration wa…

American Buddhism: Beyond the Search for Inner Peace

By Joshua Eaton

…ree weeks in California, where I gave lectures both in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area. In these lectures I spoke about our responsibility, as Buddhists, to respond to the towering ethical challenges posed by U.S. militarism, economic injustice, and global warming. Several times, after my lectures, people in the audience came up to me and told me how refreshing it was to hear a Buddhist teacher speak on these topics. This, they said, wa…

Supreme Court Will Hear Challenges to Anti-Equality Laws

By Elizabeth Drescher

…r couples, attempting to bypass challenges before the 9th Circuit Court in San Francisco sponsored by marriage equality advocates. No announcement has been made on whether the court will review the case. Meanwhile, four years after a bare-knuckle battle to pass the California anti-marriage equality Proposition 8, and in the shadow of a presidential campaign in which a Mormon candidate and his conservative Catholic running mate echoed the same sort…