Religion Dispatches
…lar-practitioner Robert Thurman quipped at a City & Arts Lectures event in San Francisco that perhaps the Commander-in-Chief was including Buddhists, who don’t always fit into traditionally theistic models of religion, among the “non-believers.” This might be true, but I’d like to advance a case for including Buddhists more explicitly in the Oval Office’s work with religious organizations and services. Admittedly, we Buddhists in America are few w…
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…s, props, and costumes make the divisions quickly comprehensible. The 1973 San Francisco story looks not unlike the 1970s TV series The Streets of San Francisco, while the 2114 sets are a combination of Blade Runner and the Matrix trilogy, and the 1849 set is a bit Master and Commander with some Amistad thrown in. The mixing of times and stories meshes with a mixing of production styles, all overlaid with a mixing of myths. As all myths are alrea…
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…stupid not to go packing now.” Williams lives in Oakland, just outside of San Francisco, and he’s going to check out the San Francisco chapter of Pink Pistols. As a national organization that encourages lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender to arm themselves to prevent hate crimes the Pink Pistols are also a social gun club. On the San Francisco Pink Pistols website it invites the community to learn how to shoot: “We are a group of primarily gay…
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…-wing conspiracy theories. While he affiliated with the Green Party in his San Francisco voting records back in 2013, he has since posted on a range of conspiracy theories, including QAnon and 2020 election rigging, on two separate blogs and Facebook. Similar to Jake Angeli (aka ‘Q Shaman’), another infamous QAnon supporter, DePape’s blend of conspiracy theories, right-wing politics, and new age spirituality has caused confusion. DePape’s posts, f…
Read More…nt kind of freedom celebration also kicks off this week: Frameline 37: the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival. The festival features a number of religion-themed films not likely to be endorsed by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. In fact, there are 22 films tagged by festival organizers as having religious or spiritual themes. Among them: Joy: Portrait of a Nun profiles Sister Missionary P. Delight and other members of the Siste…
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…work—including, of course, Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church in San Francisco. The Coltrane church began in the late 1960s, when Franzo Wayne King and then-girlfriend Marina King heard Coltrane perform in San Francisco. They called their experience of hearing him live, a “sound baptism.” This led them to form the “Yardbird Temple,” named with Charlie Parker in mind, and with jazz at its base. In 1982 the little independent congregation…
Read More…cking down from his attempt to dictate the private morality of teachers in San Francisco Catholic schools or from his effort to exempt them from federal anti-discrimination protections. The San Francisco Chronicle reported this week that Cordileone will abandon his proposal to declare all teachers at Catholic schools in the diocese “ministers,” which under the Hosanna-Tabor Supreme Court decision would apply the “ministerial exemption” from federa…
Read More…But what was happening in the United States during this period? After all, San Francisco was where “human rights” entered 20th century political discourse after the adoption of the United Nations Charter with the backing of the U.S. and its allies. “Where is America in Human Rights History?” asks a critical commentary on Moyn by Gene Zubovich, who wrote a dissertation on Protestant internationalism and American liberalism from 1940 to 1960. He obs…
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…and know what is best for these poor populations. For two years I lived in San Lucas Tolimán, a predominantly Mayan town in the Highlands of Guatemala. For those years I volunteered at the Roman Catholic Mission and its various outreach projects to the local Mayan community. Spearheaded by Fr. Greg Schaffer, a Minnesotan Roman Catholic priest who has spent close to fifty years living in and struggling with the community, the vision underlying the…
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…f bricolage. This decadent ritualism, which can be both sincere and satirical, casts the festival as a semi-religious cultural happening. Furthermore, many participants describe Burning Man as a “spiritual” experience, but deny that it constitutes a new religious movement as such. Organizers too explicitly hope that the event will “produce positive spiritual change in the world,” even while they also stop short of characterizing the event as “rel…
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