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Rehabilitating McCarthy: Doug Phillips’ Festival Award

…“dumb-down our children, undermine our families, re-write our history and promote obscenity and immorality everywhere that they can.” These criticisms are made, of course, by folks who want to eliminate public schools, promote Patriarchal families where men have almost absolute authority over women and children, teach David Barton’s version of history and secure continued legal discrimination, and even bigotry, against sexual minorities. Controve…

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

…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…

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The Best-Laid Plans of Mice and Humans

…it stands, in order to clear security, I leave my house for the airport in San Francisco before the time for fajr prayer is even started. This also disrupts my plans for how to get to the airport. I don’t want to leave my car there for 3 weeks. I had planned to take my bags on Saturday and leave them with a friend who lives really close to the airport. Then with a couple of daylight hours on that last day, I could make my way to her house and not…

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Nuns Pray, Rangers Lose

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,…

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Replacing Godless Hollywood with Bible-Based “Cultural Dominion”

…d imaginative; females are dependent, supportive, and submissive. Phillips promotes this family vision in the Academy and Festival by encouraging films that endorse it (in 2007 there was even a special category “Biblical Family”). That year, the “Best of Festival” Jubilee Award went to The Monstrous Regiment of Women, a “documentary” directed by Colin Gunn. The film, which has an all-female cast that includes anti-feminist doyenne Phyllis Schlafly…

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Getting Back into Blogging

…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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“Ex-Gay” is Anti-Gay, Disguised as Compassion

…e should 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 t…

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White Rockers in Search of Soul Salvation

…acred spaces: a legendary studio (Sun Studios in Memphis), a hotel room in San Antonio (where blues legend Robert Johnson cut some epochal sides in 1936), and, most significantly for this article, the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, Georgia. The first two are hallowed ground of American musical recording history. The third is the oldest black Baptist congregation in the country; so far as I know, it has no history of being used as a back…

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Evangelicals ‘Crossing the Tiber’ to Catholicism

…d a difficult time finding a church that was similar to his home church in San Diego. The churches that he attended in New York, even the evangelical ones, often were a bit more structured and incorporated some liturgical elements into their services. In time, Dunn realized that these liturgical practices, which had been all but absent from his church life to that point, were quite rich. When he asked his parents why their church didn’t have a ben…

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Shukr: Gratitude

…ble news of the earthquake in the 80s when the bridge over the bay between San Francisco and Berkeley collapsed. For me, every time I cross this bridge I give thanks. I say, simply, thank you Allah for NOT having this bridge fall while I ride across it. Because, I would imagine all those who lost their lives or were injured on that fateful day leave behind family and friends who will miss them. The Qur’an also often reminds us to put some thing ah…

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