Religion Dispatches
…say anything and touch God’s anointed… I was scared to say anything.” Thousands of devoted followers still come to hear Hagee preach every Sunday, and untold more hang on his televised words or receive his weekly missives on Middle East policy from CUFI. Those numbers are big enough that McCain, like George W. Bush before him, will bow down at the altar of money and authoritarianism to praise God for all those votes. Tell us what you think! Send…
Read More
…hop noted that he made this decision to avoid confusion among Catholics in San Antonio and around the world. And this is not an isolated incident. Most recently, the Spanish Poor Clares community left the Church. In a letter, Sister Isabel of the Trinity, the superior of the Spanish Poor Clares, announced that the sisters are leaving the Catholic Church and will be placed under the jurisdiction of a self-proclaimed bishop who was excommunicated in…
Read More…eakers are CUFI Board Member Gary Bauer, Daniel Pipes, former senator Rick Santorum, Charles Jacobs of the David Project, Dennis Prager, William Kristol, Israel’s US ambassador Sallai Meridor, AIPAC’s Brad Gordon, and Senator Joseph Lieberman. Despite pleas not to attend the Washington meeting from a number of organizations, including the newly-formed Jewish group J Street (which has partnered with Democracy for America in an effort called “Say It…
Read More
…aying she thought it was a warm and inviting cover. “But, see, you live in San Francisco,” I told her. “I live in South Carolina. In San Fran that may be warm and inviting, here, that’s called porn.” The only good thing was that the font had changed to what it presently is on the book, making it look a bit more like a book about faith and not a whodunit. She agreed, grudgingly, to once again go back to the drawing board. The next pass was the stee…
Read More
…oween night in San Francisco—Michael Jackson on the MUNI bus, Barbara Streisand teetering on four-inch heels at Starbucks—was this one: comix artist Robert Crumb onstage at the San Francisco Jewish Community Center, headlining the Jewish Book Fest at its sold-out opening event. Basically it was the usual Jewish Bay Area crowd, coming out in droves for Crumb, who had apparently become an honorary member of the tribe by illustrating that tribal book…
Read More
…goes on to cast doubt on the reliability of both electricity and roads in San Juan, bitterly ironic in the current catastrophic moment but nasty enough in the original to read like Kipling, but with a quicker rhyme-scheme. As a project, “Almost Like Praying” is a motley collection of styles and voices, in true “puerto” fashion, the hybridity and default cosmopolitanism of port culture. But it’s also an exemplification of a model of community valu…
Read More
…real argument, launched a personal attack on Judge Vaughn: “The ‘trial’ in San Francisco in the Perry v. Schwarzenegger case is a unique, and disturbing, episode in American jurisprudence. Here we have an openly gay (according to the San Francisco Chronicle) federal judge substituting his views for those of the American people and of our Founding Fathers who I promise you would be shocked by courts that imagine they have the right to put gay marri…
Read More
…anted to ask you to say something more about that image of these beautiful sanctuaries, these worship spaces, that are empty, while a soup kitchen, massed with people, operates in the basement below. That’s a really interesting idea about what holiness is. Is holiness the thing that you don’t touch? Or is holiness covered with fingerprints? At St. Gregory’s we have the altar in the very center of the church—and we use it for holding coffee after s…
Read More
…mons is organizing a “Stand Up to Youth Suicide March” at 6:30 p.m. at the San Francisco Civic Center. The march on Friday is in conjunction with Affirmation’s annual conference, which is being held in San Francisco this year and which will feature workshops on standing up to suicide, standing up for understanding and standing up for equality. With the prominence of LGBT suicides the past month, the march is sadly poignant and important. There’s m…
Read More
…n atheist, I question the Abrahamic traditions. Just because those are thousands of years old, just because they’ve been validated by scholars and religious leaders, that does not give them infallibility. Why has it been so easy for society to erase the memory of race with regard to the People’s Temple, to think of it as more or less a white movement? The truth of Jonestown has been lost because it’s been demonized to a certain extent. The impress…
Read More