Religion Dispatches
…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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…he Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco recounts how this gay-positive church struggled with how to welcome a very attractive transgender woman who walked through their doors in the mid 1980s. Some straight men in the congregation felt odd when they learned the woman they’d felt attracted to had been born male, while some women did not want to share the bathroom with her. After a month or so this pe…
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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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…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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…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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…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…
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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…ts, and the other dread enemies of God’s plan for a Christian America, the San Antonio Christian Film Festival, which begins next week, provides a telling window. The Festival, the culmination of the 2010 Christian Filmmakers’ Academy, which features Hollywood’s most outspoken evangelical Kirk Cameron as a “faculty” member, intends to create a “Christ-honoring replacement industry outside of Hollywood.” Replacing godless Hollywood with a Christian…
Read More…story on a recently-installed, openly-gay Mormon congregational leader in San Francisco. Get Religion insisted that this story on Mitch Mayne wasn’t really news, and that it was bad journalism to claim that Mayne’s call to serve indicated “evolving” views of homosexuality in Mormonism, because only orthodox institutional statements from high-ranking Church leaders count as evidence. But as someone who’s been writing about Mormonism and homosexual…
Read More…ve another four years on the Texas Board of Education last week. Mercer, a San Antonio Republican, remains one of at least five far-right conservatives who will be reviewing new material over the next two years. Nonetheless, the election results spell cautiously good news. The far-right Christian voting bloc on the 15-member board has dwindled. Voters have rejected several of them, including Don McLeroy, who was the chief architect behind the rewr…
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