Religion Dispatches
San Francisco was bedlam last night after the Giants broke a 53-year drought to win the World Series; you could hear the sound of the streets from way up in the hills over the Mission district. And near the ball park? Forget it. But amid the din, and my own rarely-elicited hometown pride, I found myself wondering about those elderly nuns who have been praying for so many years for the Texas Rangers. They’ve had a few minutes of fame this season,…
Read More…partially about the hajj. My flight itinerary is set. I fly directly from San Francisco to Paris, and then from Paris to Jeddah, which is like the port city for hajjis. Apparently in the dream, someone was so anxious to show they had gone through Paris, they sort of took anything—because, clearly in the dream, no merit was ascribed to that particular choice. It was worse than my stop at the tourist kiosks near the White House, with big signs “T-s…
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…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…
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…ould come out of the closet. On an overcast day in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, reporters and protesters far outnumbered the ex-gay supporters in attendance. Jerry Falwell was scheduled to address the audience but at the last minute decided to appear via live telecast where his speech was drowned out by heckles and boos. Michael Johnston, an ex-gay who testified to a newfound heterosexuality after years of being homosexual, hurried out the s…
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…tentionally took a detour. I was south of Santa Cruz heading north towards San Francisco and I just had a craving for that ride along the coast, the famous Highway One. Earlier this year when I spent a month in Australia, including a stint at University of Melbourne, I took a day tour along the Great Ocean Road. I learned that its architect of it had been inspired by our own Highway One. Both are stunning testaments to the majesty of God’s creatio…
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…ned expansion that at one point saw St. Petersburg rule all the way to San Francisco. That territory included Muslim-majority regions, conquered territories like the Volga river valley, Crimea and southern Ukraine, and the Caucasus and Central Asia, whose peoples have never fully come to terms with being subjugated. (The lack of real democracy, of course, is a major reason their alienation continues.) But the Russia that once bested Napoleon and H…
Read MoreIt’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…
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…otomayor from the Bronx, Ruth Bader Ginsburg from Brooklyn. Breyer is from San Francisco. What kind of diversity is this—either in geography or life experience? The linking of Jewish socialism and gay rights is also part of the agenda. Nathanael Kapner, writing for Truthseeker, says, “THE THIRD ZIONIST JEW, who is alleged to be a lesbian, is about to be installed to the bench of the highest court in America. If confirmed, (and this is likely given…
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… 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,…
Read More…tographic exhibit depicting similarly uninterpretable male intimacy was in San Francisco a few years ago. It was entitled Dear Friends, and a video essay by Richard Rodriguez walks the viewer brilliantly through the impossibility of knowing now how men one hundred and fifty years ago imagined themselves so touched by their closest friends. They lived before the Freudian revolution, you see. So they didn’t think of sexuality, just sex. And they pre…
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