Religion Dispatches
…nd probably always will be. The famous 2nd-century Roman travel writer, Pausanias, reported that the desiccated corpse of an armored hoplite was found in the rafters of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia when it was re-roofed, indicating that there were actually pitched battles waged inside the sanctuary in antiquity. The modern Olympics have also often been sucked into that same vortex, wittingly or no, in the short 108-year compass of their history….
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…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…
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…and delusional,” and Roman Catholic Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco “denounced the spread of ‘gender ideology,’” according to RNS’ Michael Gibson. In some ways, the most interesting take comes from the Southern Baptist ethicist Russell Moore, who starts off by saying, “we do not see our transgendered neighbors as freaks to be despised.” The reality of a fallen world, Moore says, means that we’re all alienated in one way or another…
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…of watching left him “nauseous with anxiety.” “Trump is evil,” wrote AY in San Francisco, “in the banal and destructive way of petty tyrants, moral vacuums, and especially awful two-year-olds throwing a tantrum….And yes, you can quote me.” LP in Houston wanted to “figure out what Trump voters see,” but also hoped Trump might say something to “destroy his campaign.” I told her I wasn’t sure there was anything he could say to accomplish that, given…
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A couple of weeks before the midterm elections, a man broke into the San Francisco home of Nancy Pelosi, who is second in line to succeed the president, in order to kidnap, torture—and maybe even kill her. She wasn’t home—but her 82-year-old husband Paul was. He managed to call the police before the attacker struck him with a hammer, breaking his skull. The police report shows the clearly premeditated nature of the attack: The attacker had brough…
Read More…aim BLM, not all French citizens can proclaim #JeSuisParis and be believed. This is because, as one of the women interviewed in the Times made explicit, “My heart is 100 percent French, but it feels like I have to prove my ‘Frenchness.’” As a white, Jewish woman in liberal San Francisco, there is a chasm between my experiences of privilege and the discrimination felt by Muslim Frenchwomen and black Americans. This is why The New York Times was rig…
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…d news of the revival was reported in the city’s press the same day as the San Francisco earthquake—it also speaks to the fact that, from the beginning, Pentecostalism has appealed to minorities, migrants, the downtrodden. William J. Seymour was born in Louisiana in 1870 and grew up in African-American Catholicism steeped in strong elements of the supernatural. In 1895, he fled the poverty of subsistence farming and racial persecution. In his trav…
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…sment, and bishops do not like being embarrassed. Archbishop Cordileone of San Francisco said it pretty directly: [Cordileone] said bishops would not be taken seriously if they did not create the communion document. “Our credibility is on the line,” he said. “The eyes of the whole country are on us right now.” There’s some incentive for the bishops to take a tough line with Biden, in other words. They’ve painted themselves into this weird corner b…
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…that a strong voice against the reality of Catholic diversity is the same San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore James Cordileone who fell on his pectoral cross against same-sex marriage. That was a similarly ill-fated attempt to persuade Catholics that they could not in good conscience support marriage equality. As a happily married Catholic, I hope Mr. Cordileone will be just as ineffective this time. His recent letter, “Before I Formed You in the…
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…harity that aided newly arriving immigrants, Columbus Day has its roots in San Francisco’s Italian-American community in which Columbus Day coincided with the celebration of Italian-American heritage. But why Columbus? Were there not innumerable Italian Americans who would be more fitting (and less problematic) to symbolize Italian-American contributions to American society than an individual who never actually set foot in what is now the United S…
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