I will destroy the sorcery you practice, And you shall have no more soothsayers. Micah 5:11 (The Israel Bible)

witchcraft (courtesy: Shutterstock)

A group of self-professed Christian witches announced they will be holding their annual convention on Easter in Salem, Massachusetts. The gathering of Witches, Sorcerers/Soceresses, Wizards, Warlocks, Necromancers, Readers and like-minded Magickal Beings is being organized by Rev. Valerie Love (aka KAISI). Scheduled for April 10-12, it will coincide with the Christian holiday of Easter and feature elements of witchcraft as well as Christian prayers.

Love bills herself as a spiritual life coach and ordained Minister of Spiritual Consciousness. On her website, Love claims to have been born a witch, and, as a child, saw spirits and communed with otherworldly entities.

She also claims to be a practicing Christian Witch and founded the Covenant of Christian Witches Mystery School which she claims is in the Solomonic tradition. In an Instagram post, Love stated that the Book of Psalms is really a book of spells.

The convention will include lectures on Magickal Practice in the Christian Witchcraft Tradition, a cemetery walk, Tarot, palmistry, and Angel readings. There will be a Harry Potter-themed costume party. The witches convention will culminate with a Church service on Sunday.

On her personal website that focuses on personal enlightenment, love also offers coaching programs for an investment of $5,000 to $50,000. Love also holds seances.

Despite Loves claim that witchcraft can coexist with a Bible-centered existence, the Bible explicitly prohibits witchcraft in two separate places.

You shall not tolerate a sorceress. Exodus 22:17

A man or a woman who has a ghost or a familiar spirit shall be put to death; they shall be pelted with stonestheir bloodguilt shall be upon them. Leviticus 20:27

The Prophet Micha states that witchcraft will be eliminated in order to prepare the world for the Messiah.

I will destroy the sorcery you practice, And you shall have no more soothsayers. Micah 5:11

Incorporating witchcraft into Christianity is the most recent manifestation of what is becoming a common trend as black magic makes a comeback, even surpassing the Church. A later study by the Pew Research Center in 2014 found that 0.4 percent of Americans, or around 1-1.5 million people, self-identify as Wiccan or Pagan. To put this in perspective, a report in the Christian Post on this study compares this to other religions.

There may now be more Americans who identify as practicing witches, 1.5 million, than there are members of mainline Presbyterianism (PCUSA),1.4 million, the article wrote.

But modern witchcraft is taking on new forms. A new Disney animated television series released by Disney Television Animation titled The Owl House follows a young girls adventures in an alternate universe as she strives to become a witch. In a bizarre political use of the dark arts, a group of people used social media to gather in order to hex President Trump. Despite being billed as an arts festival, the annual Burning Man Festival held in the Nevada desert incorporates many idolatrous elements. Satan-themed fashion shows have even been held inside churches.

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Convention of 'Christian Witches' to Gather In Salem on Easter Sunday - Breaking Israel News

By Segun Awofadeji

As part of activities marking its 32 years of existence, the Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC) has offered medical outreach to motorists in Bauchi State just as it declared that the high rate of road accidents across the state is due to the failure of motorists to obey road traffic regulations.

The Zonal Commanding Officer of the FRSC, Zone 12, comprising Borno, Yobe and Bauchi States, Assistant Corps Marshall Imoh Etuk, disclosed this while speaking in an interview Thursday during a sensitization rally and free medical outreach to motorists in Bauchi to mark the commissions 32 years anniversary.

The FRSC boss, who warned motorists to obey road traffic regulations, said that it will not spare any of its officers found to be extorting money from members of the public while carrying out their duties.

According to him, the free medical outreach to motorists was part of its corporate social responsibility of giving back to the public while celebrating 32 years of its establishment.

He said: FRSC is 32 today and we are grateful to God that he helped us these years to carry out the statutory objectives of the establishment act 2007 which says we should reduce crashes to the barest minimum, clear obstructions, do public enlightenment.

It could have been a lot worse if not that the government intervened about 32 years back. We are telling the drivers that they dont need to drive at night. They should do proper journey management so that they dont have to drive at night.

The crashes that occur, quite frankly, occur at night. Yes, we are supposed to do rescue operations 24/7, but you know rescue at night is not the same thing with that of the day.

Members of the public should obey road traffic regulations, not to overload their vehicles, ensure that their vehicles are in good shape and they shouldnt drive under the influence of drugs. A lot of drugs, Tramadol and many others are being sold in parks. Thank God we have been sensitizing them not to sell but these drivers always find a way of taking these drugs before driving and the influence of drugs is not palatable.

On extortion of motorists by men of the corps, the zonal commander said that the FRSC will not leave anything unturned but will ensure that all bad eggs are rid out of the service.

We have always said that both the giver and the taker are guilty and many of them face guard room trials, many of them are being investigated. It is not as if we dont have bad eggs but we urge members of the public to report those bad eggs, those people that are spoiling the corporate image of the corps because it is the corporate image of the corps that is at stake. The bad eggs are always fished out and they are punished.

I have sensitized them that anyone caught will not escape the wrath of the law. We do monitoring and surveillance, we do sensitization lectures in-house, we talk to them, and this is not to say that there wont be a few pockets of indiscipline here and there, but we are urging members of the public to report such to us and we will deal with them accordingly, he warned.

Etuk said that apart from the public enlightenment and rally to mark the anniversary, the FRSC is also giving back to the society urging the people to check their blood pressure, their eyesight, their weight, so that they dont just go on the road without knowing exactly what is wrong with them.

According to him, The medical outreach is necessary because drivers must have a healthy mind and healthy body and they must ensure that all their faculties are working because if your faculties are not okay, your eyesight is not proper, if you are diabetic or you have high blood pressure and something suddenly happens, you wont be able to control.

But once you know, you will be able to control it. Its a whole package that we give them not only to overload their vehicles, not to drink and drive or drive and drink but to also check their eyesight.

He said that FRSC at 32 is a wake up call to them to do more to ensure that road crashes are reduced to the barest minimum, when you see overloading, when you hear of crashes at night or anywhere, it makes you want to do more.

He called on traditional rulers, spiritual leaders and stakeholders to team up with the FRSC to reduce road crashes in the state.

Also speaking, the state Chairman, Road Transport Employers Association of Nigeria (RTEAN), Bauchi State chapter, Abdullahi Mohammed, who felicitated with the FRSC at 32 said RTEANs relationship with the corps has been very cordial.

He called on the federal government and other major stakeholders to help the FRSC with more operational vehicles to enable them respond to emergency situations.

If you notice now, if theres an accident along Bauchi-Jos road for instance, once the FRSC vehicle conveys the victims to the hospital and another crash occurs somewhere afterwards, they wouldnt be able to go because they dont have enough vehicles. The federal government should provide them with more vehicles to ease their work, he pleaded.

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32nd Anniversary: FRSC Offers Free Medical Outreach to Motorists in Bauchi - THISDAY Newspapers

As you might know, Robert Anton Wilson (1932 - 2007) is one of Boing Boing's patron saints. Raw's humor, skepticism, optimism, and ability to reveal the deep weirdness underlying almost everything were deeply influential to Carla and me when we launched bOING bOING as a zine in 1987. In fact, we kind of started the zine as an excuse to interview RAW at his house in Santa Monica that year. I'm very grateful I was able to get to know RAW, and honored that he wrote a regular column for bOING bOING. I'm also grateful to have become a friend of Bob's daughter, Christina, a delightful person who is active in keeping her father's books in print. Here's an essay Christina wrote about a new edition of Ishtar Rising, a book originally published by Playboy Press called The Book of the Breast. Mark

A while back, we knew that Hilaritas Press would soon be working on releasing a new edition of Robert Anton Wilson's Ishtar Rising, prepping it for publication by removing tons of typos (thanks to Gregory Arnott, Chas Faris, Rasa, and a few select others), and inserting a timely new foreword by Grant Morrison. We were excited to be manifesting what we had intended; to publish and make available as many of RAW's books as we could. I had originally read the book in its The Book of the Breast form in my early twenties, having just returned from India (yep, went to gain enlightenment, but instead gained disillusionment which has served me well!) with a goal of starting a small business that would enable me to be financially and emotionally independent. What did I think of it then? Bleh. Not much, I was simply too undeveloped.

What I learned in India was this; after running away from a 10-day vipayan training (because I was sure an inner darkness would eat me up) I ran into a young beggar woman, of India's lowest caste, the Dalit. She stood there begging, with a toddler at her feet and a new baby in her arms. I suddenly had a moment of clarity into how truly different our reality tunnels were; she had no options, and I had many. She was resigned to her position in life, I was not. As a woman, and as an American, I had opportunities that girls my own age around the world had absolutely no concept of, or access to. I suddenly understood that I had the truly amazing GRACE of CHOICE. I stood up, aware that many had died to give me the freedoms I had; and yes, maybe these freedoms were curtailed and stunted by the idiocy of gender discrimination, the power of the "wealthy over poor," and countless belief systems that were like juggernauts of insanity ruling from unconscious thrones; but freedoms I had, and I was profoundly grateful. I could decide to change my life, so I did.

Looking back, I admit I read The Book of the Breast at that time without much contemplation on what it was saying. However, in re-reading it last year, I really enjoyed a peek into Bob's head during the time when I myself was beginning to experience puberty, and as I am now 63 with a lot more life experience under my belt, the book has touched me in a very profound way.

While the The Book of the Breast was being written, we lived in Chicago, on Paulina Street, where we had just moved to. I was in 5th-6th grade, and 3-4 boys had discovered the great joy of pestering me (we all became great friends over the next couple years). They would ride on their bikes to my house, throw pebbles at the window, and then we would exchange tons of adolescent banter. Bob and Arlen shrugged it off good naturedly. I think they were just glad I was home! One day one of the boys, Alan, needed to come in to the house to use our bathroom, and unbeknownst to me, had peeked into Bob and Arlen's bedroom. Where, GASP, he saw the huge collage of women's breasts made with magazine photos Bob had meticulously cut out and adorned one wall with. (He WAS writing The Book of the Breast, at the time you know...) Their bedroom was a large room, today we would probably call it a master bedroom although it did not have a bathroom of its own. My parents slept on a bare mattress on the floor at one end of the room, with one dresser, a couple of bookcases, a card table with Bob's typewriter on it, and a folding chair for him to sit on. The collage was the only thing decorating the whole wall. As far as young Alan was concerned, it was a MIRACLE!

Oh My God.... Alan raced out of the house, beet-faced and squealing "Breasts! There's pictures of breasts!" of course the guys (aged 11-13) all went semi-hysterical, asking me a kajillion questions "I can't believe your dad works for Playboy!" "Why does your dad have breasts on the wall?" "Does your mother mind?" "Can you get us magazines?" ... The last question was asked by just about every boy in my classes for the following two years, until I graduated eighth grade. I never did get them magazines, but they sure tried!

So there's my personal early memory attached to The Book of the Breast. Bob wrote it pretty quickly, and the breast collage morphed into other artwork going up. I do remember when I had asked him about it, "Why do you have that up?" he mused and said something along the lines of "to remind me of the marvelous differences of every breast..." I was like "Uh, okay." Seemed kind of useless to me. But what did I know? I was 11-12 years old!

Some 40 years later, rereading the book, not only did I realize I had childishly dismissed its cultural value, I also began to experience a deep desire to present the manuscript as Bob had intended originally; with as many of the original photographs as possible that he had chosen, and with their captions, as it really helps to flesh out the concepts in the book. This became somewhat of a passion/obsession of mine, and I would often get stuck for hours in the process of researching internet images over the past half year! Poor Rasa [owner of Hilaritas Press], who was excited to get the project completed, would regularly say, "How are the pictures coming along?" Did I tell him finding one image the night before had led me to spend hours researching archeological findings from early Mesopotamia? Or that looking for photos of Clara Bow had led me to investigate deeply into the American silent film era, and the transition to sound? No way! But I did learn a lot about photography, and the logistics required to reprint images legally. I, of course, had rather naively thought that because the images were in the original book, of course we could print them! Nope! Each and every one needed to be researched to determine the current ownership status, and then I needed to seek permission to use the images again in the reprint. For a few images, the process took months. Others were done in minutes. Overall, it cost several thousand dollars to have the rights to reintegrate most of the original pictures as best we could, while also adding a few new images when necessary.

I wanted to put almost every photo I found in the book, and was only stopped by the cost of printing in color. Of course some of the images are in black and white, as that's how they were taken. But I must say I am delighted to be presenting a book with vivid, lovely, and sometimes thought provoking images, in color, and I have a hunch RAW would be delighted.

I can assure you that as a living breathing female of our half-baked species, I have much to say on the weird imbalance of our gender crisis. For me, this imbalance lies at the root of most of the destructive forces of our world. There is no balance; we live in a sort of culture model that I see as based on "vertical thinking" (tends to be more masculine-oriented) as opposed to "lateral thinking (tends to be more feminine-oriented) Vertical access is great, but where does it stop? Growth is everything!!! (think Amazon, Google, etc.) - Grow, Grow, get rich, get powerful! POWER! If you have it you are to be RESPECTED! But what good is power when the ecosystem collapses and you cannot breathe the air? What good are your riches if you live in a gated gilded castle but cannot dare to leave because your fortress is surrounded by despairing, angry masses that have grown to despise you, hate you, and blame you for the source of their woes? Does this give you freedom? Not really, at least not the sort I crave. I see our species in general as ignorantly pursuing an unsustainable and ultimately deadly form of materialism that puts all life in fact, all that is sacred at risk. Perhaps it is a form of spiritual cancer; I have been told cancer is the result of cellular mutations that cause UNRELENTING cell growth to occur, which either kills the host, or the host needs to kill it, often at great personal expense. Cancer teaches us that unrelenting growth is not progress, it is a death sentence, and to live, one must shift direction.

Lateral thinking is more like "hmmm, let's see, what ARE the long-range consequences of this decision, and will it impact my children, grandchildren, my neighbors, the life on planet earth negatively or positively?" It is thinking that spreads outward, more engaged in the network of it than the "one-pointed goal" like "we gotta get to the Moon first, because then we win!" And what did we win? Not really much of anything from my perspective; yes, some medical breakthroughs, and engineering breakthroughs, but did we attain the illusory goal of POWER? Not from my perspective!

Let us become stronger by acknowledging both masculine and feminine are not truly balanced without fully engaging the other; it is both the vertical spires and the lateral trusses that give a building strength; the interweaving, as it were, to strengthen the whole. So. We have choice, my friends. Shall we deny the truth of what is being messaged all around us, and be blown away? Or shall we learn to flex with wonder and gratitude, weaving our very beings with the elemental powers gifted to us by our Elemental Parents, dual complementary Aspects of the One, enabling us to thrive?

I will finish with these words that come from the introduction RAW wrote in 1973 to The Book of the Breast;

Most men, after all, are on their best behavior when under the spell of that double catenary curve; they stare or feed or caress and are as cozy as puppies one cannot imagine them a threat to the earth, the animals or other men. But once they leave this central sacrament of existence and begin thinking about how the universe (or other people) might be improved, they are apt to go a bit wild and start brandishing clubs or cannons or hydrogen bombs. Nobody knows why the rest of us put them in government mansions instead of mental hospitals when they get stirred up that way, but they would certainly be better off contemplating Helens breasts (or Sophias or Marges or Jaynes or Mollys). Earth would not resemble hell quite so much if men attended to such earthly matters more and were not up in the air over ideologies.

So read on, my friends; enjoy and share!

Much love, Christina

A Note From Hilaritas Press:

Decisions about how to put together the new Hilaritas Press edition of Ishtar Rising presented us with an array of issues that arise from the books historical iterations. The 1974 Playboy Press edition, The Book of the Breast, a commissioned work from the magazine, had photographs interspersed throughout the text with captions written by Bob that followed the written narrative.

When Bob regained the rights to the book from Playboy Press in the mid 1980s, he decided to republish it with the text largely as originally written, but with a new title and a new foreword. This new edition was published through a small publishing house, New Falcon Publications. The book that emerged in 1989 (sadly filled with typos), was quite different from the original. The New Falcon edition had inserted new photos and only SOME of the original photos, and all the photographs were clumped together in the center of the book, with no photo captions. We can only surmise that the effort of obtaining legal rights to all of the original photographs was deemed either too expensive or too daunting, as the New Falcon photo choices were quite different from the original. We also are guessing that if you couldnt get all the original photos, then entering Bobs original photo captions on just some of the images probably did not make sense.

In the new Hilaritas Press edition of Ishtar Rising, we have attempted to honor Bobs original guidelines, and recreate the Playboy layout as much as possible. We took the time, effort and considerable expense of tracking down and gaining rights to as many of the original photos as possible. For those photos for which we could not locate permissions, we found suitable substitutions that worked with Bobs photo captions. In many cases, when finding images that Playboy used, we were able to obtain the same image but at a much higher quality. Because of improvements in digital processing and printing, we can not only offer superior graphics, but also an Ishtar Rising in full color.

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Robert Anton Wilson's daughter Christina on the new edition of her father's book, Ishtar Rising - Boing Boing

It isnt advised and I wouldnt necessarily advise it but for me, the occasional trauma of seizures is preferable to the daily misery of headaches, nausea and incoherent drowsiness. I doubt most epileptics would be willing to go so far, especially those with catastrophic forms of the disease. If my condition were much worse, I would most likely find the viselike press of a permanent headache preferable to the alternative. Neurologists tend to be impatient with pickiness about medications, and perhaps they have a point. Things used to be much worse, and we ought to be grateful. But one at least imagines the saints to be sympathetic.

Which is not to say that premodern societies were especially solicitous regarding the welfare of epileptics. The historical record indicates that civilizations dating back to antiquity were aware of people who had seizures chronically and that they struggled to figure out what to make of them. Around 400 B.C., an anonymous physician compiled a monograph on the subject titled On the Sacred Disease, which was meant to dispel the apparently widespread belief that epilepsy had some magical aspect.

His effort to establish epilepsy as an ordinary medical phenomenon was valiant, but long in the vindication. By the Middle Ages, seizures had become associated less with prophetic insight and more with demonic activity, though some physicians held to the ancient idea of epilepsy as a natural disease. Supernatural explanations for seizures lasted through the Enlightenment, and then modernity bestowed its own strange gifts upon epileptics.

In the proceedings of the first annual meeting of the National Association for the Study of Epilepsy and the Care and Treatment of Epileptics, in Washington in May of 1901, a philanthropist listed only by the name I.F. Mack wondered how many such hopeless, helpless, unfortunate creatures there must have been in the United States, all in want of internment in residential colonies for their kind. By his count, thousands were already locked away in such centers, and thousands more would be over time.

In fact, Buck v. Bell, the 1927 Supreme Court decision that enshrined involuntary, eugenic sterilization in law, regarded a woman who was held at the Virginia State Colony of Epileptics and Feebleminded, though she herself was neither. Nevertheless, untold numbers of epileptics were sterilized against their will under the ruling, which has never been overturned, though forced sterilizations declined significantly in the second half of the 20th century.

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What My Epilepsy Taught Me About the Value of Time - The New York Times

Ram Dass, at age 71, in Woodside before moving to Maui in 2004. Photo: DARRYL BUSH, SFC

Richard Alpert had a Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University and an expertise in achievement anxiety when he was hired as an assistant professor at Harvard University. There he began personal research into the medicinal qualities of hallucinogenic drugs. This got him fired, and thats when his enlightenment began.

Renamed Ram Dass, Servant of God, he became a vastly influential professor in the independent study of psychology, psychedelics and mysticism.

Dass, who lived for many years in Marin County, died at his home in the north shore of Maui on Sunday, Dec. 22. He was 88. Cause of death was an infection that spread to his lungs, said Rameshwar Das, his longtime friend and co-author. Dass had suffered a severe stroke in 1997 that left him partially paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair, and ultimately led to his death.

Good grief is shared by all, said Hugh Romney, better known as Wavy Gravy, when reached by phone. He was our light in the dark. His book Be Here Now was the switch that turned on the light for millions.

Be Here Now, published in 1971, combined Eastern mysticism and Western psychology into a usable practice of spirituality. Still in print, it has sold more than 2 million copies. Dass two other influential titles are Be Love Now, published in 2010, and Polishing the Mirror, published in 2014.

Most recently, he co-authored Walking Each Other Home: Conversations on Loving and Dying, from 2018. Dass and Das had been co-authoring a memoir, to be titled Being Ram Dass, which Das plans to complete. It is scheduled for publication in 2021.

Ram Dass was able to mix the Eastern practices of wisdom, love and compassion in language that is accessible to generations of Western seekers, said Das. People love his self-deprecating humor and his deep insights into practical life experience.

Richard Alpert was born April 6, 1931, in Newton, Mass. He graduated from Williston Northampton School in 1948 and went on to Tufts University, where he earned a bachelor of arts in psychology. He later attended Wesleyan University where he earned his masters degree. After earning his PhD at Stanford, he was hired to the faculty as a lecturer but left that for a tenure track job as an assistant professor at Harvard.

In the Harvard psychology department, he fell in with Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner. The three of them started experimenting with mind-altering drugs and co-authored an academic textbook titled The Psychedelic Experience.

As part of his research, Alpert started administering psychedelic drugs to an undergraduate, which got him booted out of Harvard in 1963. Undaunted, he continued to pursue his research in Mexico.

By 1966, he was back in the Bay Area as a freelance researcher and lecturer living in Berkeley. In a state hearing regarding the drug culture, Alpert appeared to testify, dressed professorial in black-framed glasses and a business suit.

Im one of the people who causes you all the trouble, he said, before volunteering that he had taken LSD 328 times.

This helped his reputation, further enhanced by his pep talk from the stage at the January 1967 Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, which launched the Summer of Love.

Richard Alpert was an articulate and irreverent spokesman for the whole counterculture movement of the 1960s, said Don Lattin, author of The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith and Andrew Weil Killed the 50s and Ushered in a New Age in America, published in 2010. He didnt come across as an all-knowing guru. He always seemed like just another spiritual seeker.

In this search he went to India, in the fall of 1967 to study with Neem Karoli Baba, known as Maharaj-ji. After learning yoga and meditation, he took a six-month spiritual quest into the Himalayas and when he returned in March 1968, the Western name and ego of Richard Alpert had vanished. He was Ram Dass from that moment forward.

In a nationwide radio show, shortly after his return, Dass explained the relationship with his guru, Maharaj-ji.

When Im in his presence I experience ecstasy and bliss from the depth of the love that our relationship has for me, he said. And thats a drunken kind of love where I often find myself just dissolved into tears because Ive just never experienced such profound love from any being.

Dass introduced himself at a lecture at his alma mater. Hed just come from six months of silent meditation in the Himalayas and had plenty to say. The presentation started at 7:30 p.m. and didnt end it until 3 a.m. Along the way someone turned out the lights, as a hint to wrap things up, but Dass just kept going in the dark.

That lecture changed my point of view, said Das, who had been a Wesleyan junior named Jim Lytton at the time. It went from seeing yourself as the center of the universe to seeing yourself as a grain of sand on the ocean floor.

After many years as a vagabond, always on tour or teaching retreats, Dass came to Santa Cruz in the mid-1980s before moving to Marin, living a few years each in Mill Valley, San Anselmo and Tiburon. While living in San Anselmo, Dass launched a radio show called Be Here Now with Ram Dass.

He had just moved past the pilot episode and was looking to syndicate it when he suffered his stroke.

He was very articulate, funny and irreverent, and was a popular public speaker, said Lattin. Then he lost the ability to speak and had to re-invent himself.

After lengthy rehab in both Marin and in Woodside, Dass relocated to Maui in 2004.

In 2010, he learned that he had fathered a son with Karen Saum, an undergraduate at Stanford while he was teaching there. That son, Peter Reichard, was 52 when he met his dad. Reichard lives in Greensboro, N.C., but regularly visited his dad in Maui from that point on. Dass also had a longtime partner in San Francisco, who requested not to be named in Being Ram Dass.

Among Dass projects is the Love Serve Remember Foundation, which organizes two retreats a year at a resort in Maui, attracts up to 400 seekers of all ages each session. Also part of his legacy are the Living/Dying Project, a Fairfax-based counseling service for people facing death, and Seva Foundation in Berkeley, which he co-founded with Wavy Gravy and others, to eliminate curable blindness in third-world countries.

In lieu of a memorial service, the Love Serve Remember Foundation is planning a worldwide Be Here Now Moment, with details to be posted at ramdass.org.Wavy Gravy has already contributed, with a poem he wrote Monday, Dec. 23, upon hearing of the death of his old friend: This servant of God whose light burned bright on Maui now illuminates eternity.

Ralph Metzner, Bay Area expert on hallucinogens, death and psychology, dies

From Doris Day to Lyle Tuttle, remembering the ones we lost in 2019

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Ram Dass, who sought enlightenment through LSD and became spiritual leader, dead at 88 - San Francisco Chronicle

On the eve of her 30th birthday, the artist Renee Cox, who at the time was enjoying a successful career as an editorial photographer for Essence magazine, began thinking about her legacy. She was pregnant with her first child, and things that had appeared important to her before now seemed less so. In my 20s, I could talk about a pair of shoes for an hour, she says. As I got older, that got harder to do. The 28-day cycle of her magazine work, too, was on her mind. Then, in 1990, a decisive moment presented itself. Cox was in New Yorks SoHo, having a drink with some industry friends at Jerrys, a favorite of the 90s fashion crowd. I said, Its amazing, Nelson Mandela has been released from prison after 27 years. The group paused and looked blankly at Cox. Then, someone at the table announced that theyd heard Donald and Ivana Trump were getting a divorce. Thats when I knew it was time for me to get out of fashion, she says.

In the years since, after earning an M.F.A. in photography from the School of Visual Arts and completing the Whitney Independent Study Program, Cox has established herself as one of the pre-eminent artists of her generation. Her photographs are both highly personal often depicting her naked body and using her own life as subject matter and occasionally controversial. When her piece Yo Mamas Last Supper (1996), a reimagining of the late-15th-century Leonardo da Vinci painting in which the artist appears, nude, as Jesus Christ, was shown at the Brooklyn Museum in 2001, it prompted then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani to call for the implementation of decency standards at New York City art institutions.

The last decade, in particular, has been a pivotal period for Coxs work. In 2011, during a bout of deep depression and fresh anxiety about her legacy, the artist experienced a moment of spiritual enlightenment while traveling in Bali which, she says, I realize sounds incredibly clichd. A new series of spontaneous self portraits, part of her The Discreet Charm of the Bougies project, followed soon after. Coming out of fashion, I was heavily involved in production. I knew what a shot was going to be two weeks in advance, says Cox. Now, I see a location, I throw on the clothes I want to have on I have no idea what the shot is going to be even 10 minutes before. Its about being present in the moment. Another recent series, called Soul Culture, for which Cox manipulates photographic portraits in Photoshop, draws on the formations and repetitions found in fractals and sacred geometry. People are tempted to treat artwork like Tinder and swipe right or left, she says. The objective with this work is to get people out of their head. Theyre not one-liners. Here, Cox shares a selection of her most memorable images, both professional and personal, from the past 10 years.

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An Artist Shares Her Most Striking Images of the Decade - The New York Times

Swords swirl around their bodies, coming perilously close to piercing flesh. Blades flashing in the morning sun, the young women twirl, cartwheel and then kick in unison, finishing their graceful movements in a centuries old kung fu fighting stance.

Dressed alike with matching shaved heads, the women and girls finish their daily exercise and move on to their other duties as part of the Kung Fu Nuns of the Himalayas, a name they have proudly adopted.

Jigme Yangchen Ghamo has lived at the Druk Amitabha Mountain Nunnery perched high in the mountains outside Kathmandu since she was 10 years old.

"We are the only nunnery in all of the Himalayas doing deadly martial arts," Ghamo toldCNN's Great Big Story in June. "This is a lifelong vow that I made to the Drukpa Order, and I am very proud of my practice."

The Drukpa Order is a branch of Himalayan Buddhism, a faith which traditionally considers women second-class citizens. According toBuddhist narratives, a woman cannot achieve spiritual enlightenment unless she is reborn as a man.

"The idea was that as long as the nuns cook and clean for the monks, they can come back as a monk in their next lifetime and then become enlightened," said Carrie Lee, the former president ofLive to Love, a non-governmental organization that works closely with the nunnery to supply aid to the region.

According to Lee, discrimination toward women is a way of life in Nepal and surrounding nations. Girls are considered a burden and are frequently aborted; if they live, they have limited access to healthcare or education. They are often sold off to traffickers or marry young; wife beating and other types of spousal violence is common.

His Holiness Gyalwang Drukpa, the spiritual leader of the Drukpa lineage, says as a child he believed the Buddhist beliefs about women to be misguided. In the early 2000s he began to promote the nuns to leadership positions.

It wasn't always well received. Local traditionalists called the action "blasphemous," Lee said, "and then they started harassing the nuns and assaulting them."

To teach the nuns self-defense, Drukpa hired a kung fu teacher in 2008. But His Holiness also hoped the training would improve the nun's confidence and self-esteem.

"I consider the kung fu art, martial art, an education," he told actress Susan Sarandon in a2014 interview. "I'm very proud of the nuns.

"I have been breaking through all these barriers," he added. "Whatever the Buddhist people say I don't mind and I don't care."

"We wake up at 3 a.m., we meditate, we bicycle and we train for three hours," Ghamo said. "The Drukpa Order is not for lazy people."

In addition to kung fu practice with swords, sticks and flags, the women jog and run up and down stairs to boost their fitness. They even learn to break bricks with their hands.

All of the physical work has a spiritual purpose, Ghamo said. "Kung fu trains us to focus our minds for meditation."

Martial arts are known for their health benefits. A2018 studyfound "hard" martial arts like kung fu can improve balance and cognitive functions that decline with age, while a2016 studyfound kung fu and karate helped with blood sugar control.

Another ancient martial art, Tai Chi, has been more thoroughly studied. Research shows Tai Chi can improvebone mineral density, reduceblood pressure, lowercholesterol, and reduce harmfulinflammation.

And the mental health benefits are just as strong. The calming, meditative trance needed to do a Tai Chi series has been shown to greatly reduce anxiety and stress, even lowering levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, in the blood of participants.

When a devastating 7.9 earthquake took the lives of 9,000 people in Nepal in 2015, the nuns from Druk Amitabha Mountain Nunnery were some of the first relief workers on the scene.

Supported by the Live to Love organization, the nuns walked to villages that government and traditional relief organizations considered too dangerous to visit.

"When the earthquake hit, our kung fu training helped us to be brave and strong," Ghamo said. "We survived the landslides, avalanches and earthquakes."

Later the nuns were able to "do a medical helicopter rescue, truck rescues, food and medicine distribution, provide solar power, and more,"they wrote on their website, even building 201 new homes after clearing the rubble.

During the cleanup, Lee said, the nuns saw young girls being given away or sold off to potential human traffickers and decided to take action. They organized bi-yearly bicycle trips, taking months to cover thousands of treacherous miles between Kathmandu and Ladakh, India. They stop at tiny villages along the way to spread a message about the value of girls and the dangers of human trafficking.

"We talk about equality and safety," Ghamo said. "We wanted to show everyone that if nuns can ride bicycles, then girls can do anything."

By showing that girls could survive the mountainous terrain, they were sending the message that "girls were strong enough to farm" and thus worth keeping, Lee explained. "They started raising awareness about what actually happens to girls when you give them away."

Many of the mothers had encouraged their girls to leave, hoping they would have a better life, Lee said. "And now when the nuns go back, these families come up to them and say, "We had no idea where our girls are going. We're much more protective of them now."

His Holiness Gyalwang Drukpa, their spiritual leader, joins the nuns on most of their bicycle trips. His presence adds weight to their fight for women's rights, especially in the most traditional villages.

"Because of his religious authority, equality becomes a religious mandate," Lee said. "Respecting women becomes a religious imperative wherever he goes."

The effort appears to be paying off.

"In the past 15 years, I've noticed a huge shift in some of these villages," Lee said. "Before, if I sat down with meetings, it was predominantly men. Now women are so much more vocal in these meetings. Now you see female police officers, you see female politicians and leaders."

The nuns have added a green theme to their good works. Each year they do a "Eco-Pad Yatras," a 400 plus mile hike picking up plastic litter and educating locals on ways to protect their local environments.

Many of the nuns are trained solar technicians, others assist doctors in the Live to Love eye camps, where cataracts surgeries are free of charge. Other activities include music, dance, theater, and animal rescue and care.

When Lee first began volunteering 20 years ago, the nunnery was home to about 30 nuns. Today there are more than 800, ranging in age from eight to 80. There is a waiting list for young girls who want to join the "Kung Fu Nun" revolution.

All of the nuns bear the first name of Jigme, which means "fearless one" in Tibetan.

"I learned I can do anything a man can do," Ghamo said. "Kung fu has trained meto be confident, strong and happy. The teachings help me put my compassion into action."

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Kung Fu Nuns in Nepal boost their health in the fight for women's rights - KAKE

On the drive up Highway 1 along the Sonoma County coast, the road eventually begins to twist and turn and the landscape grows ever craggier, dotted with wind-battered homes. In the coastal hamlet of Jenner, about 80 miles north of San Francisco at the mouth of the Russian River, a quaint, shingled building with a sign that says Russian House #1 is perched along the road. Is it a restaurant? A community center? An experiment in spiritual development?

Yes is the answer.

Russian House #1 has no menu and no set prices for food. Its founders, Tatiana Ginzburg and Polina Krasikova, were inspired in part by their experience at Burning Man in 2014, where they witnessed an intricate barter economy in action. The restaurant also has no paid kitchen staff. Krasikova cooks most of the food and is chiefly responsible for the kitchen, though she relies on a revolving cast of volunteers. Some are neighbors. The owners do not use the word donation. Its not charity, Krasikova says. You pay according to your own sense of fairness. Some visitors pay with labor, staying to clean or chop vegetables.

In Russian Houses five-year history, Krasikova and Ginzburg have welcomed friends from all over the world, so the days flavors are liable to change depending on whos in the kitchen. Theyve hosted French, Italian, Chinese, Turkish, Indian, and Armenian friends. They cook whatever they want, she says.

Sonoma County may seem like an unlikely place to pass a sign reading Pirozhki to go, but Russian House is ten miles from Fort Ross, a rustic Russian outpost where fur traders settled in the nineteenth century. The compound is now a National Historic Landmark that draws visiting Russians and other tourists passing along this picturesque stretch of Californias coast.

The bright, windowed space inside Russian House has a grand quality, owing largely to the majestic view of the Russian River, where geese frolic. And though visitors are likely to get a good meal, Krasikova admits that eating is not the whole point here. The food, however good it is, is secondary to dialogue and communication. Thats what we want. People come for food and stay for something else.

That something else is hard to pin down: The place hosts philosophy and physics lectures and holotropic breathwork workshops, and a poster made by Ginzburg starkly lays out steps toward unleashing human potential. Its a sensibility that seems to combine 19th century Russian mysticism, a Soviet penchant for grandiose acts of bureaucratic classification, and a post-Soviet interest in New Age self-discovery. But the extra-culinary offerings can feel opaque, even to visitors well versed in West Coast wellness culture. One would have to really join the community to ascertain whether it delivers on its self-stated goal of global enlightenment.

That said, a spirit of playfulness is alive throughout the space, where complex wooden puzzles hang along the wall of a corner pantry designed to look like an old-fashioned Russian stove. Matrioshki Russian nesting dolls of various sizes and a miniature balalaika stand sentinel on a shelf above a poster featuring an 80s-style image of a matrix that says Meaning. Binders full of flyers for past events and one-day menus sit on a table near the entryway. The papers reflect the wit and humor that undergirds the Russian House project as well as a charmingly faltering grasp of English. Classical Piano Concert is Quite Possible reads one. An old menu for the Week of Consciousness Expansion lists food for the intellect (riddles and puzzles) as well as earth food (the actual buffet). Another from a past Labor Day lists prices for activities: the right to clean the floor in the kitchen costs $1; the right to bake one pirozhek costs $5; and doing a puzzle with Tatiana would run guests $10,000.

When guests arrive, they take a plate from the mismatched stacks below the table and serve themselves from a motley assortment of chafing dishes and ceramic bowls. A large insulated pot of steaming ukha Russian fish soup beckons as an obvious first course. The clear broth, flecked with dill, maintains its lightness in spite of large chunks of potato and cod.

Though Krasikova draws on traditional recipes, she spent her St. Petersburg childhood cooking and baking alongside her mother, who liked to experiment, and she calls the food she serves fusion. We get tired of cooking all the same all the time, she says, so we always experiment. She enjoys using seasonal vegetables and playing with ayurvedic spice combinations. Krasikova sometimes looks up classic Russian recipes from one of the vintage cookbooks she keeps on a bookshelf off the main room, but adds touches she thinks Californians will appreciate.

For example, when she realized guests didnt love plain kasha (or buckwheat groats, a staple grain dish in Russian cuisine), she added capers and seaweed. Instead of typical blini with buckwheat flour, she uses almond milk to make a lighter, crepe-like version. The resulting pancakes have an injera-like sponginess, and are delicious served lukewarm with a dollop of cold sour cream and a spoonful of raspberry jam. A tart cabbage-and-carrot sauerkraut (made by a neighbor) cut both the blandness of a medley of stewed vegetables and the richness of a braised dish of pork medallions and greens that Krasikova conceded was not very Russian.

Taken together, however, the meal felt Russian: heavy as a woolen blanket, warm, comforting, and filling. It was served with Ivan tea (made from fermented fireweed), an erstwhile export of the Russian empire, in delicate cups from St. Petersburgs Imperial Porcelain Factory. Krasikova refilled the cups as soon as they were emptied.

In a moment when Russian political intrigue dominates the news, it can feel quite radical and nourishing to spend a few sunny hours soaking in a spirit of Russian joy. That rare experience is whats on offer at Russian House #1, even if it isnt exactly for sale.

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Pay-What-You-Can Russian House #1 in Jenner Is One of Californias Most Eccentric Restaurants - Eater SF

By Leonardo Blair, Christian Post Reporter | Monday, November 18, 2019 Rapper Kanye West speaks with Pastor Joel Osteen at Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas, on Sunday November 17, 2019. | Photo: Lakewood Church

Popular rapper and music producer Kanye West declared himself a formidable servant of Jesus Sunday as he called America back to God, teased big plans to evangelize the youth through new music and warned agents of the devil that no weapon formed against me shall prosper.

Every time I stand up, I feel that Im standing up and drawing a line in the sand and saying, Im here in service to God and no weapon formed against me shall prosper, West said in a wide-ranging discussion with Pastor Joel Osteen of Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas, before an audience of 17,000, at the churchs 11 a.m. service.

West, who revealed that his mother and father raised him in church and taught him the fear of God, said he now wants to do the same for his children he shares with wife, Kim Kardashian West.

As I now have a family. Im 42 years old, married for five years, there is a latent responsibility for me to become more like my mother, whos gone to Heaven, and more like my father, whos working and building a water purification system in the DR. You know with rappers theres so many things that weve done to maintain the idea of coolness. You know we have our own daughters and wed still be rapping about trying to hook up with somebody daughter, West said.

He explained that he is no longer blinded by the grip fame once had on him.

A lot of times when you are in service to fame, money, manpower, you start to feel like Satan is the most powerful. And you start to feel like if you service God that in life it means you will not prosper. And the only way to prosper is in service to fame. You know its like the devil stole all the good producers, the devil stole all the good musicians, all the good artists, all the good designers, all the good business people and said you got to come over and work for me. And now the trend, the shift is going to change.

Jesus has won the victory. Because now, now I told you about my arrogance and cockiness already, now the greatest artist that God has ever created is now working for Him, he said with a grin.

Looking back at Wests life in the secular music industry which glorifies anything but the fear of God, Osteen asked the rapper if he had any words of advice he could share with his younger self that could have helped him change the trajectory of his life.

While noting that there is nothing he could say that could reach his younger self, West explained that he believes music could and said he was working on new music to evangelize the younger generation.

Its nothing I could say to the younger Kanye through words. I could speak to the younger Kanye through music so this music gon come every month. We dropping that heat. We in the studio. God is strengthening our hands. We have writers, we have producers, were taking all the most fire producers and bringing them back to God. All the best voices, all the best dancers for us to see that its through Christ, West said.

The rapper, 42, who previously revealed that liposuction, a growing addiction to painkillers and wife Kim Kardashians robbery factored into a mental breakdown in 2016, told Osteen that he began feeling Gods call on his life around that time.

I know that God has been calling me for a long time. The devils been distracting me for a long time. When I was in my lowest point, God was there with me and sent me visions and inspiring me. I remember sitting in the hospital at UCLA after having a mental breakdown. Theres documentations of me drawing a church. ... Even after that I made, went and made the Life of Pablo album. I said this is a gospel album, he said.

I didnt know how to totally make a gospel album and Christians that were around were too, I would say, beaten into submission by society and not speak up and profess the Gospel to me because I was a superstar. But the only superstar is Jesus."

West launched his popular Sunday Service events, which generally include prayer and live music, inJanuary 2019. At the time, his wife said her family was on a path to spiritual enlightenment.

The journey has since led to West's recently released first faith-based album,Jesus Is King,which has gone on to make history onBillboard'sHot Christian SongsandHot Gospel Songscharts. The set opened at No. 1 on both the Top Christian Albums and Top Gospel Albums tallies (dated Nov. 9) with 264,000 equivalent album units earned in its first week (ending Oct. 31),according to Nielsen Music.

On Sunday, he pointed out how important it is to counter the influence of media on young children and explained how he is trying to do that through his music.

Thats why I say Closed on Sunday is the hardest record ever made. Its hard as the NWA record because its talking about protecting your kids from the indoctrination of the media. Thousands and thousands of images that are fed to children by the age of six or seven. And within those images, there are images mixed in that as parents we dont know about, purposely mixed in to lower the kids superpower and esteem so that they can be more susceptible to consumption and feel that they need to consume and become part of the robotic numeric system that controls so much of the media, West said.

West, who recently performed with his choir for an installment of his Jesus Is KingSunday Service concert in Texas jails,was praised by the states Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who encouraged other artists to follow his lead.

What @kanyewest does to inspire the incarcerated is transformative. Saving one soul at a time. Inmates who turn to God may get released earlier b/c of good behavior & may be less likely to commit future crimes. It would be great if other artists followed Kanyes lead, Abbott noted on Twitter.

West alluded to the experience of ministering in Texas jails and called on America to set itself as an example of a Christian nation.

Following the Bible can free us all. Its an interesting thing, when we were at the prison professing how Jesus can set you free and its true. The more and more this entire country follows Christ and sets the example that we are a Christian country. They are attempting to take prayer out of schools. When you remove the fear and love of God you create the fear and love of everything else, he said to applause.

Reinstate the fear and love of God and eliminate everything else, he said, noting that he got that wording from Osteen.

Theres a lot of people in the Christian community that try to give Joel a hard time because when you turn on the radio he keeps on showing you how good God is.

God is not the enemy. God is not the negative part. God is not just the perception of fire and brimstone. God is love God is family. God is friendship. God is prosperity. Keep your eye on the sparrow. Keep your eye on the beauty and love and grace of God that allows us to be here today with all of our sins, West further noted.

When youve got Kanye defending you, youve made it man, Osteen quipped in response.

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Kanye West plans to evangelize Americas youth with music: No weapon formed against me shall prosper - The Christian Post

She. Has. Arrived. In all her glory and with all her mess and all her weird problematic speeches about why she loves gay people, NeNe has arrived. NeNe has also decided that her strategy for this season is to remain completely above it all and spout faux-spiritual nonsense. There seems to be a lot of wiggle room when it comes to those spiritual beliefs. She is walking in the hands of the Lord and at the same time calling Cynthia desperate. Listen, Im not saying that NeNe did a lot in this episode or even that shes achieved moral enlightenment. The main tension for NeNe is if shes going to say hello to Cynthia. Thats her moral quandary this episode, and we dont even get to see if she says hello to Cynthia. NeNes spiritual advisor clearly works hard, but the Real Housewives editors work much harder. Lets get to it.

First up, we get to hear Cynthias side of the story. Shes out shopping for houses with Eva because Eva needs to move houses again. Her sperm donor ex seems to have figured out where she lives and her husband is a lawyer. Should she be on a reality show if there are this many security concerns? Lets show her house hunt on TV just in case.

We need to talk about this positively bizarre Atlanta house. Its a five bedroom house and every bedroom has an en suite bathroom. Wait what hold on Is that really necessary? You can walk through every single bedroom and find a full bath. Who is this for? Eva, maybe. Also, its $775,000 and to my Chicago real-estate mind, thats a goddamned steal for a completely incomprehensible amount of bathrooms.

After looking at the house, Eva and Cynthia sit down to talk about what is happening with NeNe and everyone else. Cynthia says that theres just no universe where NeNe is willing to be accountable or apologize. Eva also says that shes regretted not bonding with Cynthia sooner and we get a montage of all the moments where Eva shaded Cynthia. NeNe and Cynthia will both be on Bravos NYC Pride Float and it will be so awkward because that moment will be all about them. Cynthia is confident she can peacefully coexist with NeNe and there is no evidence on Earth thats possible.

Porsha heads over to Tanyas house for lunch. Porsha points out that Tanya has been half of the groups best friend and Tanya and her husband were Porsha and Denniss couple friends. When the conversation turns to Porsha and Denniss troubles, Tanya asks Porsha if this whole thing can be fixed. Porsha presents exhibit A: Dennis claims that Porsha wasnt emotionally available to him during her pregnancy with his child so Porsha shows Tanya a bunch of photos of them at their happiest. Christmastime with Dennis. Concerts with Dennis. Smiling and giggling with Denniss cheatin ass. Unavailable, where? Porsha wants to work on healing but she doesnt know if when she heals, shell be healing with Dennis.

Up next, Kenya is hanging out at home with baby Brooklyn. Can a baby have a chocolate-chip cookie? Her cousin Che, who is a Kenya clone, stops by for a little baby time. Kenya starts freaking out any time Che wants to touch Brooklyn and the freaking out doesnt stop once the conversation turns to her husband, Marc Daly. According to Kenya, Marc is only in Atlanta every seven to ten days and they havent had any alone time or alone time since the baby has been born. Marc insists on the baby sleeping in the bed with them and thats certainly getting in the way of any intimacy. Kenya says that shes starting to get jealous of how much attention Brooklyn gets from her father.

This. Is. A. Lot. When it comes to Kenya, its always a lot but things are starting to get psychosexual. So many of these women will go all in on a shaky relationship in order to have a baby. Kenya Moore should be pioneering genetic technologies to enable her to use the DNA from a hair from Beyoncs head to create her own egg-fusion baby. But because Kenya has bought into the myth that a man will improve your life, shes stuck with a husband who doesnt seem to think he should spend time with his wife. This also leads to Kenya asking her husband to rank how much he loves her and their daughter. Oh. Oh Kenya, no.

Meanwhile, NeNe and Gregg are getting ready for a video shoot with the American Cancer Society about their experience of NeNe being Greggs caregiver. Gregg tries to give NeNe a pep talk by telling her she did a champions job, which is what your dad tells you after the science fair.NeNe wont let herself cry because then shed be making it about her so instead she says shes ready to move forward with her life. Yes, she sent Cynthia a horrible text message, but shes in a different headspace now.

Well, in other news: Todd took his daughter to a strip club and thats somehow appropriate in his mind??!?! In addition, he repeats, If shes going to go, Id rather her go with me, which is not something people say about strip clubs. Thats what you say about drinking at home if youre a white parent from the suburbs. No one has ever said that about strip clubs. Theres no moderate strip-club use that Todd is trying to ensure. And if theres anyone on this show I would trust to help someone budget their time and money at a strip club, it would not be Todd. At the same time, Todd keeps lecturing Kandi about what she should do with the surrogate despite the fact that he took his daughter to a strip club. He is not allowed to give anyone advice about anything.

Its time for Marc Daly to stop by his wifes home for breakfast. Kenya is trying to swan around the kitchen, pretending to be a dutiful wife, but she didnt buy anything to cook for breakfast. Every time Kenya does or says anything that Marc doesnt like, he makes a face or complains to the baby that Mommy is so silly! I dont like any of that. Im not a fan of this man. Marc spends more time making direct eye contact with a 7-month-old baby than having a meaningful conversation with his wife. Kenya offers that a friend or her cousin can take care of the baby while they go on his birthday trip and he says that wont be necessary. A baby can come on their romantic getaway.

Kenya doesnt really phrase it elegantly but she says that she doesnt feel like a girlfriend anymore. Shes spending time as a mother (taking care of Brooklyn) and being a wife (putting up with Marcs bullshit), but she doesnt get any attention or care from him. She doesnt have any moments where shes Marcs girlfriend. So, how does Kenya deal with this tension? She asks him if shes his No. 1 or his child is. Oh. My. God. Kenya. Marc just pretends that Brooklyn can talk. This is not great.

The girls have made it to New York and Marlo stops by to remind NeNe to forgive and forget. Marlo is just trying to impress upon her that she should be polite, say hello, and keep it cute. NeNe says she plans on doing just that, but we all know shes not going to do just that. Cynthia forwards an interview where NeNe calls her desperate and weak to Eva.

So the time for the float has come. In the hot summer sun, a veritable gaggle of Bravolebrities swarm around and Andy Cohen stands watch. Hes never been more fucking ready. Hes even put Tardy for the Party on the float playlist. NeNe climbs on the float

To be continued

Keep up with all the drama of your favorite shows!

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The Real Housewives of Atlanta Recap: Baby of the House - Vulture

Each Friday, we share three topical longreads in our Weekend Reader newsletter. This week, Lions Roardeputy editor Andrea Miller tells the story of Siddhartha Gautama. Sign up hereto receive the Weekend Reader in your inbox.

For thirteen years, Ive worked as a journalist, interviewing writers, actors, activists, dharma teachers, and more. Recently, someone asked me whom Id interview if there were no limits and I could interview anyone I wanted.

This was not a question I had to think twice about. Beyond a doubt, I would zip back in time some 2,600 years and hoof it all over northern India until I found the Buddha. Then I would turn on my recorder and dive into my million and one questions.

Tradition has it that the Buddha was born a prince named Siddhartha Gautama. There was a prophecy that Siddhartha would either become a great king or a great spiritual master. Siddharthas father carefully sheltered his son from anything unpleasant so his son would choose the path of royalty.

Prince Siddhartha got married and had a son of his own. Then, at the age of twenty-nine, he saw suffering for the very first time: an old person, a sick person, and a corpse. He also encountered a spiritual seeker who was attempting to find freedom from suffering. Siddhartha was profoundly affected and, in the middle of the night, he slipped away from his worldly life in the palace.

For six years, Siddhartha lived as an acetic, eating almost nothing. Eventually he realized that if he continued to mistreat his body, he would die. If he wanted to reach enlightenment, he needed a middle way neither harsh asceticism nor indulgence. Siddhartha ate a bowl of milky rice, which gave him enough strength to sit under a tree until he understood the true nature of things, becoming the Buddha.

For the next forty-five years, the Buddha taught others how they too could reach enlightenment. Then at the age of eighty, he apparently died of food poisoning.

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So that is quite a lot of information about the Buddha and, trust me, there is a mountain more but is it true? Nothing, apparently, was written down about him neither his teachings nor his life story until the end of the first century BCE. Passed down orally for hundreds of years, parts of his biography were surely misremembered and maybe even fabricated.

Since I cant actually get that interview with the Buddha, each of us will just have to decide for ourselves what we believe is factual and what we believe is myth. But in the end Im not convinced it matters so much. Whats important is whether or not we feel the basic tenets of the teachings attributed to the Buddha, such as the four noble truths and the practice of mindfulness, are deeply true and helpful to our lives, however they originated.

Here are three articles from theLions RoarandBuddhadharmaarchivesabout Siddhartha Gautama.

Andrea Miller, deputy editor,Lions Roar

The Buddha was a real historical person who ate, slept, sweated, and got tired. Yet he was also an extraordinary person who developed inspiring qualities that we are all capable of developing. If you find some of the details of the developed hagiography of the Buddha an off-putting burden, look to him as a great human teacher of the path beyond human limitation.

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I approached him, the twenty-fifth buddha, knowing that something new and marvelous had happened in the forest that night. Instead of going where the path might lead, he had gone instead where there was no path and left a trail for all of us. I asked him:

Are you a god now?

Quietly, he made answer. No.

Well, are you an angel?

No.

Then what are you?

Awake.

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Like the Stoics, Epicureans, and Platonists in ancient Greece and Rome, Gautama instructed in the manner of a philosopher, a lover of wisdom. He taught and modeled a viable way to human flourishing, and did so rooted firmly in everyday life. With precision, care, and intelligence, Gautama articulated for us the categories and practices through which we may clearly understand our lives and, doing so, know for ourselves the simple happiness of existing, in difficult as well as trouble-free times. And all of his advice onthesematters stands in full view conspicuous, open to scrutiny, testable.

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Lions Roar is a nonprofit. Our mission is to share the wisdom of the Buddhas teachingsto inspire, comfort, support, and enlighten readers around the world. Our aspiration is to keep LionsRoar.com available to everyone, providing a supportive, inspiring Buddhist community that anyone can access, from curious beginners to committed meditators. Do you share our aspiration? We cant do this without your help.

Lions Roar reaches more readers like you than ever before. Unfortunately, advertising and other revenues are falling for print and online media. We know we have something deeply precious to share with the world, and we want to continue this important work. Can you help support our efforts now?

Lions Roar is independent, unbiased, not-for-profit, and supported by readers like you. Please donate today and help the lions roar echo for readers around the world.

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Who Was the Buddha? - Lion's Roar

Four out of four starsThe Irishman is director Martin Scorseses 37th feature film. While it marks a milestone in his storied career, many are prematurely considering it to be his swan song.

If this is the case, hes certainly going out on a high note. But dont expect him to quietly fade into the sunset. This is a man who views his art as lifeblood and will continue working until his dying breath.

Scorsese (who turns 77 this Sunday) has six more projects in various stages of preproduction (including biographies on Theodore Roosevelt, George Washington and Mike Tyson) and he shows no sign of slowing down.

In the pantheon of Scorsese films, The Irishman ranks near the top (fifth in my opinion) and joins his other crime dramas as the finest of that particular genre ever produced. Scorsese has successfully branched out into other types of storytelling (documentary, spiritual enlightenment, fantasy, musical), but he will be always associated with crime movies which is accurate but also a disservice to his legacy. Hes made many other great movies, but mob flicks are the undeniable zenith of his output.

Clocking in one minute shy of three and a half hours, The Irishman is an epic by any definition, yet it goes by in a relative flash. The narrative is the cinematic equivalent of Shakespeares Hamlet, Mozarts Jupiter symphony or Miles Davis Kind of Blue album.

Beginning with nary a whisper, the story builds with exacting precision; every frame, glance and word of spoken dialogue serves a distinct purpose, slowly growing in intensity. Scorsese, his longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker and screenwriter Steven Zaillian (Schindlers List, Gangs of New York) are determined to let the story breathe and evolve at its own measured pace, and never once do they ever allow it to lull or languish.

This deliberate, methodical and patient approach to storytelling might not work for everyone. Those wishing for another variation on Mean Streets, GoodFellas, The Departed or Casino should avoid the film or greatly temper their instant gratification expectations. There are no jump cuts, no whiplash editing, zero classic rock accompaniment or overt grandiose, operatic flourishes. It is bravura, but not braggadocio, and shows a master filmmaker clicking on all cylinders without ever getting winded or appearing to break a sweat.

Playing the titular character, Scorsese mainstay Robert De Niro takes the lead as Frank Sheeran, a foodservice truck driver who figures out early on hes stuck in a dead end job. He starts a side hustle by short-changing some customers, paying off others, selling stolen goods on the cheap and gaining a reputation for pinching without too many people noticing. This grabs the attention of Philadelphia mob kingpin Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), a man wielding immense power with a similar low-key approach.

More resembling Paul Sorvinos calm Pauly from GoodFellas than his high-voltage character from the same film, Pesci speaks in a muted cadence for the duration and recalls the unfussy grandeur and knowing self-confidence of Marlon Brando in The Godfather or Al Pacino in The Godfather II.

As Teamster head honcho Jimmy Hoffa, Pacino has the showiest part in the film, often recalling his roles in Scarface and Scent of a Woman. This is not in any way a slam on Pacino. Hes playing a guy who reveled in blustery self-promotion and barking his resentment at the most minor slighting. One of the movies best subplots portrays Hoffa as a huge JFK supporter-turned-enemy after Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy began investigating organized labor in general and Hoffa in particular.

After a breaking-in period of sorts, Bufalino assigns Sheeran to be Hoffas shadow and right hand. For a while, all three men are content with the arrangement. As he did with Bufalino, Sheeran gains the respect, affection and admiration of Hoffa, who is indebted more than hed like to be to Bufalino.

The principal rub of the main plot occurs when Sheeran becomes torn in his allegiances to the two men who control his life; it permanently drives a wedge between him and one of his daughters (Anna Paquin).

Based mostly on the Sheeran biography, I Heard You Paint Houses by Charles Brandt, Zaillians screenplay is air-tight regarding continuity, but also takes some degree of artistic liberty on at least two key occasions. Its worth noting that Brandts book is Sheerans slant on events when Sheeran was in the throes of death; a period when he might have been seeking some type of confessional moral cleansing or semi-inflated puffing up of his own legend. In either case, Sheeran by proxy becomes something of a third person, Richard III unreliable narrator, and the story is presented from his often unverified perspective.

If you wish to see The Irishman on the big screen, you better do so prior to Nov. 27. That is the day when it will only be available on Netflix. Whatever viewing venue you choose, The Irishman is a film which furthers the searing impact of the medium to a level we havent yet experienced and is something every serious movie fan should treat themselves to at their earliest possible convenience.

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MOVIE REVIEW: Scorsese, De Niro and Pesci at their best in 'The Irishman' - Gwinnettdailypost.com

The funerals Ive attended have all been very much the same. Relatives and friends arrive in all black and take seats in the church or synagogue pews for a somber ceremony where prayers are said, memories are shared and tears are shed. The attendees walk slowly out to their cars and form a single file line a behind the hearse, arriving at the graveyard where they place roses on the casket just before its lowered into the ground. Then, they proceed to the immediate familys home, where the doorbell rings with a steady stream of loved ones casserole dishes in hand since, in the days ahead, people often forget to eat.

A funeral usually consists of a religious service followed by a procession to the cemetery or crematory. A brief service usually takes place as the body is buried or cremated. Most funeral services as held in chapels, mortuaries, or in churches. Muslims bury their dead as soon as possible. The body is buried with face facing towards the holy city of Mecca. Signs of grief are discouraged, for Muslims believe they should accept the will of God without murmur.

Hindus in India perfume the corpse and adorn it with flowers. They then burn it, and later throw the ashes in the Ganges River. Buddhists believe in reincarnation and that death is a transformation into the next incarnation. Each incarnation brings the soul closer to nirvana, which offers complete spiritual enlightenment. Because of this belief, Buddhist funerals celebrate the souls ascent from the body, rather than the demise of the body itself.

Beside different funeral tradition in religion, there are different tradition in many culture. For example Traditional cremations in Bali are a colorful and elaborate event that can take weeks or even months to prepare.

The coffin, or Lembu, is shaped like an ox or horse and decorated with gold and red. The Waddhu is a decorative tower carried during the funeral procession. Orthodox, Russian rituals, that are held to say farewell to the deceased one. Eastern Orthodox funerals are important rituals with a set structure. There will often be an open coffin, which mourners will circle round in an anti-clockwise direction. Priests sprinkle soil and holy water onto the person who has died as part of the traditional funeral ritual.

Another example Aboriginal mortuary rites in Australia. When a loved one dies in Aboriginal society in Australias Northern Territory, elaborate rituals begin. First, a smoking ceremony is held in the loved ones living area to drive away their spirit. Next a feast is held, with mourners painted ochre as they partake in food and dance. The body is traditionally placed atop a platform and covered in leaves as it is left to decompose. It has been reported that in some traditions, fluids from the platform can help identify the deceaseds killer.

What will your funeral be like? Will you have a traditional ceremony or modern celebration of life? You make arrangements in advance and know youre getting the farewell you want with a funeral service company to prepare a funeral in Sydney.

A funeral service, whether traditional or more modern has two primary functions to publicly acknowledge the death and lifetime achievements of an individual and to bring grieving family members and friends together in support of one another during this difficult time of transition. While the event also involves the final care of the physical remains of the deceased through burial or post-funeral cremation, the service helps repair the tear of the social fabric of a community caused by the death and helps grieving friends and family members through an orchestrated time of social support.

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The Funeral Traditions of Different Culture and Religion - Agence de presse D.I.A.

FUNDRAISING events are going on up and down Gwent today as part of Children in Need.

Across the UK adults and children are putting on fun events to raise money to help children all over the world - culminating in a mammoth live TV show.

And this year youngsters from Gwent will be taking part, with children from Pillgwenlly Primary School and Ysgol Gyfun Cwm Rhymni taking part in a special performance at Cardiffs Broadcasting House.

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Here are some of the events going on across Gwent today:

Caldicot

Caldicot town centre will be a hub of all things Children in Need this evening. Between 5pm and10pm there will be a load of events going on in the town. Hosted by Winds of Time, the entertainment will be hosted by DJ Sam of Get Dancing. Circus skills will be on show, theres crazy golf, inflatable domes, glitter painting, balloon making and more for the kids and adults to do. Pudsey himself will even be along for a visit and you can get your photo taken with the bear.

Malpas

Malpas Spiritual Enlightenment Clinic will be hosting an event to raise money for the charity. Between 6.30pm and 9.45pm, you will be able to take part in a psychic supper. This event will give you the chance to have a one to one reading and a nice supper. This is a ticketed event and you will have to book ahead of turning up. Tickets are 12 and can be bought from Malpas Spiritual Enlightenment Centre.

Valleys Gymnastics

Valleys Gymnastics Academy are hosting a pyjama day to raise money for Children in Need. So, if your child is attending a class at the academy today, make sure theyre ready with their PJs over their leotards.

This is happening at all their venues.

They are also able to make donations and bring in cans of food for the foodbank making it a double whammy of fundraising.

Do you have an event for Children in Need? Let us know and send us your pictures and you could be featured in the South Wales Argus.

Continue reading here:

Children in Need events across Gwent - South Wales Argus

"I want to congratulate our govt for readying Kartarpur, in record time, for Guru Nanak jee's 550th birthday celebrations," twitted Prime Minister Imran Khan. Image Credit: Twitter/ @ImranKhanPTI Highlights

As hope lays frail, darkness recedes when slivers of sunlight, splendid, proud, reach an arctic cave. The world moving towards its moral centre is a barefoot walk on a frozen expanse. It is still joyous.

Asia bibi, a poor Christian woman from the village Ittanwala in Punjab, arrested in 2009 on an allegation of blasphemy, was sentenced to death in 2010. Her life was a series of solitary confinements, her punishment based on an unproven, false accusation a challenge for a few human rights activists and conscientious lawyers, her release a taboo in a Pakistan where even mentioning her case placed a bullseye on your faith. Salmaan Taseers midday assassination in a public place was the deadly silencing of any future courageous voice rising against the blackness of the British-made blasphemy law, practised in Pakistan, that destroyed lives in the name of Allah and His prophet who require no human protection.

Many appeals failed. Several years passed. Asia bibi remained jailed, forgotten, hidden in the dark.

On October 31, 2018, two months after swearing-in of Imran Khan as the new prime minister of Pakistan, the Supreme Court, in a historic move, overturned Asia bibis conviction and death sentence. A nationwide protest, headed by self-appointed vigilantes of religion, swelled on the outrage of a blasphemer having been pardoned. Instead of jubilation that even the highest human court had found Asia bibi not guilty of any kind of blasphemy, hordes of men, duped on the sanctification of their intention, threatened harm if the decision remained unrevoked.

Prime Minister Khan, reiterating his absolute faith in Allah and His prophet, supported the Supreme Court verdict, and issued an ultimatum to those who threatened to unleash havoc in Pakistan misusing religious injunctions. He told them not to clash with the state.

Protests ended without any damage to life and property. The Supreme Court verdict and Khans stance brought a hint of solace amidst the lingering dismay and disappointment of Khan governments September 7 rescinding of its appointment of the world-renowned Princeton economist, Atif Rehman Mian, as an advisor to Khan-led Economic Advisory Council. Atif Mian, despite his impeccable educational and professional credentials, was removed, albeit much reluctantly, because a large section of Pakistan, ostensibly, had a fundamental issue with his faith. Atif Mian is an Ahmedi Muslim. Human beings have forcibly patented as their religious right what is only a divine prerogative: judging an individuals faith.

Kartarpur Corridor

On November 26, 2018, Prime Minister Khan, along with Chief of Army Staff Qamar Javed Bajwa, inaugurated the Kartarpur Corridor or Rahdari in the Narowal district of Punjab. The corridor linking Pakistans Kartarpur to Indias Gurdaspur opened the way for Sikh pilgrims to visit one of their holiest places, the shrine of Guru Nanak Dev Saheb. Celebrated as the residence where Guru Nanak is said to have spent the last eighteen years of his life, the Gurdwara Darbar Saheb in Kartarpur is as sacred to Sikhs as Mecca is to Muslims. Khan promised to open the corridor for the 550th birth anniversary of Guru Nanak Dev Saheb in November 2019.

The January of 2019 ended with the Supreme Court upholding its verdict of Asia Bibis release. Outrage whimpered in the background.

One road opens the way for another. In March 2019, the government of Pakistan stated its willingness to open the Sharda Temple Corridor in Pakistan Administered Jammu and Kashmir for Hindu pilgrims from Kashmir across the border and India.

In April 2019, the government announced restoration and reopening of Hindu temples that had been closed for prayer for decades. The restoration work, according to the Evacuee Trust Property Board, was to start with two historic Hindu temples in Sialkot and Peshawar.

In May 2019, Asia Bibi, despite strident noise about her release, was sent to Canada to join her family.

Speaking to a delegation of Thai Buddhist monks in October 2019, Pakistan Foreign Secretary Sohail Mahmood said: Pakistan is proud of its multicultural heritage, which has been assiduously preserved and promoted as the shared heritage of mankind. Thai Monk Most Venerable Arayawangso, reiterating Pakistans mission to realign its ethos vis--vis recognising and respecting sensibilities of followers of other faiths, stated: This sends a message to the world that peace existed on the land of Pakistan...This will be a gateway to peace and harmony.

Buddhist monks from South Korea visited the Bhamala Stupa in Haripur, Pakistan, earlier this month. Buddhist chief monks Dr Neung-her Sinim, Jeok Kyung and Jeong Wei prayed for peace in the region at their scared stupa. Speaking to Gulf News, Dr Neung said: Pakistanis and the world must realise the significance Bhamala holds for the spiritual community. Our ancestors chose this place. This is why we pray here for peace in the region and the world.

Earlier this week, PTI Central Secretary Information Ahmad Jawad announced the reopening of four hundred Hindu temples in Pakistan. He said: This development is being made in line with the longstanding demand of the Hindu community that their places of worship be restored to them.

On November 9, Indias Supreme Court announced the Ayodhya verdict. The verdict reopened, in all its bleeding horror, the memories of the enormity of the demolition of the centuries old Babri Masjid and its aftermath.

Landmark day

On November 9, Pakistan opened the Kartarpur Corridor. The day became another landmark in Pakistans rediscovered enlightenment and acceptance with generosity of spirit a fundamental tenet of humanity: inclusiveness. With the arrival of Sikh pilgrims from India, including former Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, the few-mile Kartarpur Corridor became the pathway to one of Sikhs holiest places. Today, the Guru Nanak Gurdwara is the magnificent symbol, resplendent in its white simplicity, of deep significance of religion working as a collective embrace of humanity, and not a divisive political tool.

A year ago, Prime Minister Khan made a promise to his Sikh friend and guest, Navjot Singh Sidhu, and all visiting Sikhs that Pakistan would open the Kartarpur Corridor for the 550th birth anniversary of Guru Nanak. Pakistan kept its promise.

Khan, speaking on the occasion of the opening of the Kartarpur Rahdari said: First of all, I congratulate the Sikh community on the 550th birth anniversary of Baba Guru Nanak and welcome you all... I am always so happy to see the Sikh community that has come here. God lives in the hearts of all of us. All the messengers who have come and gone only ever brought two messages, that of peace and justice.

Khan said: I am happy we could do this for you. Believe me, I had no idea of the importance this place holds; I found out a year ago. That Khan is the leader of a Pakistan that is inclusive, diverse, generous, compassionate. That is the Pakistan of Mohammad Ali Jinnahs vision, and the hope of millions of Pakistanis. That is my Pakistan.

And that is the Pakistan of all those Pakistanis who think of their neighbours like the bus driver Saddam Hussain does. His unrehearsed, glorious words to an Indian journalist on November 9, while driving a shuttle bus from the Kartarpur terminal to the Gurdwara, echo the collective sentiments of a Pakistan that believes in the power of religions, even in their differences, acting as a unifier.

Hussain said: My happiness is such it might be more than yours. My eyes have welled up with tears that you have come to your home, to your Gurus home. Allah knows. We have that feeling when we go for Haj. The way you have come, I swear I dont know how to describe it. I dont have words; I feel so much joy. Punjab has united again. May Allah keep you happy like you are now, and you keep visiting like you are now. Our arms are always open for you whenever you visit, sir.

Continued here:

With Kartarpur, Pakistan says: Our arms are always open for you whenever you visit - Gulf News

Second,Gaston reveals that Judeo-Christianitys ascendance was not powered by the liberalbelief that all religions should be equal in the eyes of a neutral government.Instead, Judeo-Christianity was most commonly the domain of fiery anti-secularists,who railed against any separation between church and state. Building off ideas developedin the interwar period, thinkers in this camp spent the 1940s and 1950s claimingthat religious teachings needed to dominate the public sphere. Limiting state supportfor religious schools or charities, they warned, would foster secularism, whichwould directly lead to nihilism and social anarchy. Indeed, in their minds, secularismwas the true core of totalitarianism; Hitler and Stalins regimes were notsimply oppressive, but were atheist plots to replace religious authority withsoulless states. Such anxieties even motivated thinkers later consideredprophets of tolerance, such as the influential Catholic theologian JohnCourtney Murray. While he vocally advocated for Catholic cooperation with otherfaiths and embraced religious liberty (a principle that the Catholic churchformally opposed until the 1960s), he also warned that limiting funding forreligious schools would send the United States down the path of Nazi Germanyand the Soviet Union. Judeo-Christianity, then, sometimes served as a tool ofanti-secular exclusion.

Thisexclusionary impulse only hardened after the U.S. intervention in Vietnam, aswriters began to understand Judeo-Christianity not only as a religioustradition, but as one with clear racial and sexual meanings. Up until the early1960s, progressive activists occasionally employed the term; Martin LutherKing, Jr., for one, claimed that Judeo-Christianity should engender racialequality. By the 1970s, however, anti-racist and anti-sexist activists condemnedthe concept as a source of Americas moral rot. Black radicals such as OssieDavis railed against white Western Judeo-Christian capitalist civilization. Feministwriter Mary Daly agreed, decrying in Beyond God the Father: Toward aPhilosophy of Feminist Liberation (1973) the history of antifeminism inthe Judeo-Christian heritage. Thinkers in this camp found little comfort intradition. Rather than providing the template for freedom, the United Statesalleged spiritual tenets had to be overthrown.

Conservatives,in response, doubled down on their insistence that the United States was an inherentlyreligious nation and appealed to Judeo-Christianity to challenge taxation andabortion. American values, wrote Secretary of Defense Elliot Richardson in1973, called for Judeo-Christian charity, not big government. By the 1980s,the term encapsulated the rights powerful cocktail of white resentment,sexism, and anti-welfare rage. Judeo-Christianity, writers implied, was morethan a specific variation of American evangelism; rather, it was a timelesstradition whose defense necessitated opposition to affirmative action, equalityfor women and sexual minorities, and redistributionist policies. Jerry Falwell,for example, in his best-selling booklet Listen, America! (1980), replacedhis older language of Christian nationalism with praise for traditional Judeo-Christian values concerning thefamily. That same year, Judeo-Christianity made its first appearance in aparty platform, as the Republicans swore to defend it. It would reappear there insubsequent elections, an epitaph for the terms anti-egalitarian flavor.

Inthe conclusion to her book, Gaston wonders if Judeo-Christianity is approachingthe end of its journey. In the decades since the terms emergence, after all, thenations religious and ideological composition has changed substantially, fosteringnew political languages. This shift is especially pronounced on the Americanleft, where political coalitions have expanded not only to include religiousgroups beyond Christianity and Judaism, but also the religiously unaffiliated(the so-called nones). Barack Obama was sensitive to this reality when hebecame the first president to celebrate American atheists and agnostics. Trump, Gaston argues, has similarlybroken with Republican precedent, measuring righteousness not through piety butthrough military and economic domination. While the president may utter somehollow paeans to Judeo-Christianity, these are merely bones he throws hisevangelical supporters and their anti-secular fixations.

Thoughthis may be true, Imagining Judeo-Christian America spends less time than it could* on the termsmore recent adoption on the radical right. Perhaps because Gaston is focused onexposing Judeo-Christianitys anti-secularist bent, she is sometimes less attunedto its entanglement with racial politics and to its use by avowedethno-nationalists. Few represent this transmutation better than Steve Bannon, Trumpsformer senior advisor and a significant figure in the global alt-right. Hardlya practicing Christian, Bannon has often claimed that societies strengths lay in theirethnic homogeneity. This is why, he argues, nationalists must smash the powerof globalism, epitomized by international organizations, finance, andmigration. For Bannon, however, this nationalist revolution also has ageopolitical aspect, best captured through a religious terminology. The whitenations, he explained in a recent interview, constitute the Judeo-Christian West,which should to come together with Russia to defeat their Muslim and Chineseopponents. Indeed, Judeo-Christianity has been a long-standing obsession forBannon, who nostalgically waxed about the long history of the Judeo-Christian Wests struggle against Islam in a 2014 speech to a Vatican conference organized byreactionary Catholics. So enchanted hewas with this concept that in 2018 he sought to establish a new center in Italy for nationalist and populist teachings, the Academyfor the Judeo-Christian West.

Theradical rights embrace of Judeo-Christianity is more than a linguistic tic. Inusing this terminology, the new right replicates its predecessors ambiguousfeelings about Judaism, simultaneously depicting Jews as villains and allies. Theradical right remains haunted by the specter of Jewish financial control, ananxiety dramatically embodied in the conspiracy theories swirling around GeorgeSoros. And as the murderer in the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting explainedin his violent manifesto, some also associate Jews with support for immigrationof non-whites, vilifying them as agents of white genocide. At the same time, Israeland Jews often loom large in the right-wing imagination as a powerful incarnationof Western values. Israels military clashes with Muslim neighbors and itsinsistence on preserving ethnic exclusivity, recently solidified in the 2018 nation state law declaring that the state belongs to Jewsalone, enchant the radical right. As the white supremacist Richard Spencer has gushed, Jews are, onceagain, at the vanguard, rethinking politics and sovereignty for the future,showing a path forward for Europeans. In all of this, the American right ishardly alone. Hungarys Viktor rban and Frances Marine Le Pen similarlytraffic in anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish global control while simultaneouslymusing on Judeo-Christian values and warmly embracing Israels BenjaminNetanyahu.

Thesedynamics matter not only when it comes to Judaisms status in American politics.They are part of the rights broader strategy to bolster hierarchies by using termsthat sound as if they foster egalitarianism. Freedom of religion, forexample, ostensibly a universal protection for worship, has been recentlyappropriated by American evangelicals in their crusade to protect Christianprayers in state-run events. The Trump Administration followed suit, and complementedits Muslim ban with the establishment of a special Religious Freedom TaskForce, whose goal was to defend conservative Christians right to discriminateagainst women and LGBTQ+ people (by protecting corporations and organizationsright to deny coverage for contraception and to fire individuals based onsexual orientation and gender identity). Similar dynamics have come into playwhen right-wing speakers have weaponized the right to free speech. In thehands of figures like Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro, free speech is mostly invokedto support the right to harass and insult women and people of color. Collegecampuses have drawn especially intense attention from conservatives, who, underthe banner of diversity of thought, demand spaces and resources for right-leaningfaculty and speakers. In the intellectual universe concocted by the Americanright, universities most urgent challenge is not to curtail crushing studentdebt, address savage budget cuts by legislators, or improve the representationof women and people of color; instead, it is to protect the opinions of the alreadyprivileged.

Inthis regard, Gastons brilliant book uncovers not only a fascinating history,but also a powerful template used in conservative politics today. She shows howeasily inclusive language can be mobilized for anti-egalitarian purposes. Bydoing so, her book further hints at the limited nature of many Americanconcepts of inclusion. The radical rights use of Judeo-Christianity, afterall, is not a brazen co-option or appropriation so much as it is an update of theterm, which has largely been used in an exclusionary way. A more egalitarianfuture cannot simply rely on reclaiming or rescuing historical concepts. Thereis little point on insisting that progressive agendas fulfill long-standingAmerican virtues, especially those that have become linguistic mainstays ofconservative politics. New realities are instead more likely to emerge by discardingsuch historical concepts altogether. And among the first terms to be retiredshould be Judeo-Christianity.

* The article originally stated that the book overlooks the terms more recent adoption on the radical right.

Go here to see the original:

The Rights Judeo-Christian Fixation - The New Republic

Viv Lynch: Mother Earth: The Legend of Aataentsic / flickr

When not dealing with dogmatic issues, the Christian faith allows for a great diversity of thought. This is why there are a variety of theological schools of thought, each which promote the basics of the faith, but otherwise differ radically from each other in various different ways.[1]

Christians can differ with each other on many of the characteristics which they predicate to creation as a whole, as well as to each particular object within creation. What might seem to be absolutely absurd to one Christian can seem to be perfectly true to another. Thus, for example, Christians can believe in the existence of alien life, but they are also free to deny it[2]. Each person will have their reasons for their beliefs, and each can be a perfectly orthodox Christian thinker despite the differences of their beliefs. Indeed, they can be wrong about such secondary things and still be perfectly sound in their Christian faith.

We find some medieval Christians believed that God has given intellectual life not only to humanity, but to the planets and stars in the heavens. Likewise, no one less than St. Augustine himself considered it possible that the Earth itself was alive, that is, that it had a soul of its own, allowing it to be treated as another sentient being of God. To be sure, Augustine was not certain, and left the question open, as to whether or not the Earth should be seen as having such life, but in his early works, there are indications that he accepted the notion of the world-soul, granting the Earth life. Thus, in his Immortality of the Soul, he said Hence, the body subsists through the soul and exists by the very fact that it is animated, whether universally, as is the world, or individually, as is each and everything that has life within the world.[3] When he reflected upon the matter further, he did not deny the possibility, but only came out agnostic about it:

But if this same beauty be understood as applying to all bodies, this opinion compels one to believe that this world itself is an animate being so that what in it imitates constancy is also transmitted to it through the soul by the supreme God. But that this world is an animate being, as Plato and numerous other philosophers thought, I have not been able to investigate by solid reasoning, nor have I found that I accept this idea on the authority of the Sacred Scriptures. Hence, something said by me, too, in the book, On the Immortality of the Soul, which can be interpreted in this way, I have noted was said rashly not because I maintain that this is false, but because I do not understand that it is true that the world is an animate being. For, assuredly, I do not doubt that it must be firmly maintained that this world is not God for us, whether it has any soul or no soul, because if it has a soul, He who created it is Our God; if it is not animated, it cannot be the God of anyone much less ours. [4]

What Augustine makes clear is that if someone were to believe the world is alive, that it has a soul, and so designed by a title like Mother Earth, this did not mean the Christian saw in it a replacement for God. They understood it to be a creature of God, though one worthy of respect because of the greatness God gave to it in its creation. Indeed, like Origen, they said we could consider the Earth itself to be an animal with some level of self-government:

Although the whole world is arranged into offices of different kinds, its condition, nevertheless, is not to be supposed as one of internal discrepancies and discordances; but as our one body is provided with many members, and is held together by one soul, so I am of opinion that the whole world also ought to be regarded as some huge and immense animal, which is kept together by the power and reason of God as by one soul.[5]

Later generations would take up similar ideas with the notion of a personified form of Nature, Natura, which could be (but does not have to be) seen as something separate from Mother Earth. Indeed, it is often through the notion of some world-soul, or Natura, that many Christians used to explain away any and all sense of rational activity from animals, for it would be said that such rational behavior came from the world-soul directing the actions of animals in the world.[6]

Looking beyond the Earth, St. Thomas Aquinas, looking upon the stars, suggested some intelligence existed behind the stars and their movement in the sky

Nor does it make any difference, as far as our present purpose is concerned, whether a heavenly body is moved by a conjoined intellectual substance which is its soul, or by a separate substance; nor whether each celestial body is moved immediately by God, or whether none is so moved, because all are moved through intermediary, created, intellectual substances; nor whether the first body alone is immediately moved by God, and the others through the mediation of created substancesprovided it is granted that celestial motion comes from intellectual substance. [7]

We might think it strange to consider the stars (and planets) to be living things, with wills and intellects of their own, but to the medieval mind, as well as to the ancient Christian mind, as well as to many of the philosophers, it seemed to be the most natural explanation for their movement. They were more connected with their natural good, being in the heavens, so their actions were more stable, more predictable. They loved God, and circled around in the heavens just as a holy soul will circle around God in eternity. Christians, then, could accept a cosmology which allowed for a great diversity of beings, indeed, of a great variety of intellectual beings, in the universe, some of which were far more stable in their relationship with God than humanity. But, as C.S. Lewis pointed out, this did not turn such creatures into gods to be worshiped in place of God. Indeed, they rarely were looked upon and invoked by the ordinary Christian, while the saints were:

We might expect that a universe so filled with shining superhuman creatures would be a danger to monotheism. Yet the danger to monotheism in the Middle Ages clearly came not from a cult of angels but from the cult of the Saints. Men when they prayed were not usually thinking of the Hierarchies and Intelligences. There was, not (I think) an opposition, but a dissociation between their religious life and all that. [8]

Now, it might seem strange to some Christians today to hear that many Christians believed in the existence of a spiritual substance lying behind the stars, or the Earth itself. This is because of the change of perspective which happened as a result of the Enlightenment. Many principles and beliefs which came after the Enlightenment have been so normative that many Christians today assume not only that they are true, but they are normative for the Christian faith. For with the Enlightenment has come the notion that animals do not have souls, a notion which many think is a Christian teaching, despite the fact it has been normative in the Christian tradition to teach they do. If animals do not have souls, then it is not hard to understand how and why the rest of the universe became dead, treated as if it were not alive. Anyone says contrary to this are treated as insane, if they come from the developed world, are as people holding non-Christian pagan beliefs, if they do not.

Nonetheless, as tradition shows, it is not Christianity which says we must reject the notion of Mother Earth. And though the Enlightenment might have at one time led to the ridicule of that notion, scientists are now considering the possibility that the interdependent relationship of all that exists on the Earth itself demonstrates some sort of life which can be attributed to it (via the Gaia hypothesis). Obviously what the scientists consider is not exactly the same thing as Christian metaphysicians, as science in general knows nothing of the notion of soul, and so what a scientist looks for to determine whether or not something is alive will differ from the metaphysical standard. But if science can determine something is alive, then, by that fact, it should be said to have a soul, for the most elementary notion of the soul (metaphysically) is that it is the life-force which makes something alive. So, what once was believed, then became ridiculed, now can be believed again, with greater reason than before. The radical metaphysical notion which was normalized by the Enlightenment has been brought into question, and so Christians, taking seriously the new insights of science can take seriously once again the question of Mother Earth and accept that there is some truth to the notion. In doing so, then, they can find themselves bridging the gap between themselves and indigenous societies which never lost sight of Mother Earth. Inculturation allows for Christianity thought to grow beyond the dead-ends of the past because it allows Christians to come in contact with those who did not follow those dead-ends, and so who were not corrupted by the implications they gave. Non-Western societies which did not fall for the worst parts of the Enlightenment, far from being primitive and worthy of ridicule, actually can help give back to Christianity a spirituality it lost due to modernity.

The Western tradition has dishonored, indeed, defiled the Earth. Those who have continued to hold the Earth in honor are spiritually more astute than those who have dishonored it. Now, it is time to recognize that we are called to honor the Earth, perhaps even to recognize Mother Earth (either as a symbol, or if we want, as a reality) and do so in a way which does not dishonor the creator, but instead, as a way to honor him as well. Those who would dismiss such a response to the Earth and call it idolatrous are only trying to justify their own sins against creation, and through creation, against God. Would they call it idolatrous if people honored them, showed them respect instead of abused them? Obviously not. Therefore, they know full well honoring something in creation, respecting it, does not go against God. It is clear that their argument is pure sophistry, the kind used to justify the unjustifiable.

The Christian faith allows for diverse opinions. We might not come to it with the same world view. We do not have to. Even if what someone else believes is odd and silly, so long as it does not contradict the faith itself, it is permissible. And if history has shown us anything, what some at one time think is silly and indefensible, ends up being the truth. Common sense more often than not is a cultural construct which often impedes the discernment of the truth. We do not have to agree with others, if we think they are wrong, but likewise, we must be careful and not condemn them for their beliefs if there is nothing in them which runs contrary to Christian teaching on faith or morals. For we must try to ascertain the view of others in the best light possible.

[1] Obvious examples include, but are not limited to, Augustinians, Thomists, Bonaventurians, and Scotists.

[2] So long as such life has not been encountered, obviously. Once it has, then it will be silly to deny its existence, just as it is now silly to accept a flat Earth.

[3] St. Augustine, The Immortality of the Soul in Writings of St. Augustine. Volume 2. Trans. Ludwig Schopp (New York: CIMA Publishing Company, 1947), 43-44.

[4] Saint Augustine, The Retractions. Trans, Mary Inez Bogan, RSM (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 1968), 47-48.

[5] Origen, De Principii in ANF(4):269.

[6] Nonetheless, belief in Mother Earth, or Natura, or the world-soul does not require this interpretation, that is, it does not necessitate we deny reason to animals, just as we do not deny it for ourselves.

[7] Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles. Book Three: Providence. Part I. trans. Vernon J. Bourke (Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1956), 93 [chapter 23].

[8] C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964; repr. 1988), 120.

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The World-Soul, Natura and Mother Earth - Patheos

Seattle may finally be ready for something new. The electoral victories of socialist Kshama Sawant, democratic socialist Tammy Morales and the rejection of all the corporate-backed candidates, except one, sets the table for policy changes. The decisive leftward swing on the council and the repudiation of all but one of the Amazon-backed candidates paves the way for major shifts in affordable housing, police accountability, climate policy, restorative justice, homeless services, rent control and more.

It may seem that a third term for Sawant maintains the status quo. This superficial understanding is precisely the narrative promoted by the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce and their candidates.

But, as J.R.R. Tolkiens Bilbo Baggins said, the third time pays for all. With this election, Sawant is no longer a council outlier. When the City Council is sworn in, she will be the longest-serving member and she will have strong allies. This election is a game-changer and a deal-sealer in our city politics.

A few years ago, the poorly branded head tax was unanimously adopted by the City Council as a way to build affordable housing by taxing big businesses. Amazon temporarily stopped construction on a building and reminded everyone they were going to build an alternative headquarters in a different city, scaring every councilmember but Sawant and Teresa Mosqueda into rescinding the tax.

In January, Amazon and the Chamber will face a City Council that has every reason to reinstate the policy with gusto (hopefully with a more appealing name and greater emphasis on targeting the big businesses that can afford it). Even Councilmember Lorena Gonzalez showed up at a rally at the Amazon spheres protesting the companys massive spending. The winds of change are no longer swirling in turbulent circles they are about to blow into laminar flow.

Becoming ready for something new takes more time than we wish. We are eager to embrace stark and clean change narratives, but that is not real life. Recovery communities teach us that relapse is usually part of recovery. When we wish to adopt habits of exercise, creative expression or spiritual practice, it takes multiple attempts before we succeed. The sacred texts of many religions tell stories of cyclical changes rather than linear ones. Odysseus takes a score of wrong turns on his journey. Siddhartha pursues dead ends to enlightenment before becoming the Buddha. Saint Peter is revealed as a fool, coward and doubter again and again on his way to becoming the rock on which the revolutionary Jesus movement would be built. Perseverance and the humility to evolve is at the heart of a real change narrative.

The lesson I am taking from this election is that change does not come in a single night, through a single action or through a single person. Change does not come even in a single year, by a single strategy or from a single movement. Transformation is a slow, rocky, gritty process, but it is not a fantasy. When the time is right, the heart is prepared and the table has been set, both soul and society may finally be ready for something new.

Rev. John Helmiere is the convener of Valley & Mountain-Hillman City.

Read the full Nov. 13 - 19 issue.

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Seattle City Council election results set the stage for transformative change - Real Change News

Mr. Toilet.

This is the second (and third) in a series of reviews by our New York correspondent Claire Baiz of entries in this yearsDoc NYC, the Big Apples and one of the worlds premier documentary festivals, running November 6-15.

* * *

MR. TOILET: THE WORLDS #2 MAN

Toilet is a spiritual room. Theres a man behind an opaque door, going about his business. Let go, the voice says. Connect to the Universe.

That voice belongs to Jack Sim. When we meet him, suffice it to say hes not conserving toilet paper.

Sim, a native of Singapore, is famous. Hes done a TED Talk. Hes won dozens of international awards, including a commendation by Britains Queen Elisabeth. Now hes a movie star.

Sim uses energetic humor to disarm people. Still, Sim knows this shit is serious: sanitation is perhaps the number one cause of death in the undeveloped world. Forty percent of earths population doesnt have access to a toilet. Its not just the disease, sanitation, and smell that rankle Sim its pollution and crime: rivers are defiled, and girls are raped every day simply because they dont have a place to go.

Mr. Toilet: The Worlds #2 Man, is an intimate portrait of a businessman-turned-activist who has dedicated the last 22 years of his life to something most of us dont want to talk about.

Its also the first feature-length documentary by Accelerator Lab grantee Lily Zepeda. The amount of time and resources Zepeda dedicated to defecation is brave especially for a new filmmaker. Even Sim complains that when it comes to philanthropic priorities, Shit is on the bottom.

Sanitation is Sims passion. Hes the founder of the WTO not the World Trade Organization but the World Toilet Organization, headquartered in a modest, crowded upstairs office in Singapore. Our job, one WTO staffer says, is to keep Jack focused. Sim is a fountain of ideas, a dangerous thing when it comes to toilets.

When Mr. Toilet starts out, the WTO has nine staffers, lots of decorated toilets and poop-shaped hats. By the end of the movie, some shit has hit the fan.

Theres more to this movie than social ills and cheap jokes.

This is the story of Sims difficult journey, a hard lesson in not giving up and the importance of turning our own lives into performance art.

Sims takes joy in realizing a creative vision, whether its paint on canvas, stickers on a public streetlight, or dodging poo piles beside train tracks.

Zepeda follows Sim from Singapore to rural China and Indias Andhra Pradesh province, where he works hard to make toilets sexy.

While she doesnt flinch from shovelfuls of human feces, Zepeda softens the story with effective animation. The most poignant moments in the film are when Zepeda captures the effervescent Sim as his bubbles disappear, and begin to ferment again.

My job isnt to build toilets, Sim says. My job is to motivate people to build their own toilets.

Especially in places where the need is urgent, toilets are a hard sell. Sim and his Indian counterpart, Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak, work to implement Prime Minister Modis promise to build toilets for the people of Andar Pradesh province. Sim and Pathak are given two years to install six million toilets (thats over 8,200 toilets per day).

Its a logistical nightmare, notwithstanding Indias bureaucracy and 5,000 years of cultural tradition that urges Indians to keep their homes clean and go outside. Now the government wants toilets IN the house?

Sims successes may be smaller than he hopes, but he always seems to build momentum. In a Q&A after the DOC NYC screening, Sims reported the Chinese government has promised to put toilets in all rural schools.

I appreciate Zepetas unflinching portrait and were all better off because Jack Sim gives a shit.

* * *

WE BELIEVE IN DINOSAURS

Why were there were baby dinosaurs on Noahs Ark? Because adult dinosaurs were too big.

We Believe in Dinosaurs asserts there were dinosaurs on the ark, but doesnt try to explain what happened to brontosaurus and triceratops after the ark went aground.

As far as we know, one creationist shrugs, they arent here anymore.

We Believe in Dinosaurs co-directors Monica Long Ross (The Believers, This Has Been to Space) and Clayton Brown (The Believers, The Tennessee Waltz) allow people to speak for themselves. It was never our intention, Ross says, to make fun or mock.

The documentary had its New York City premiere this week at DOC NYC, and will be released November 19 on iTunes. Its also scheduled to air as an episode of Independent Lens on Apple TV in February.

Ken Ham, the charismatic Australian CEO of Answers in Genesis (the other AIG), allowed these filmmakers extended access to the crown jewels of his empire: the Creationist Museum and the Ark Encounter, about 40 miles apart in Kentucky.

While We Believe in Dinosaurs doesnt look down on creationists, it doesnt look up either: you wont find Bill Nye busting a capillary, or Neil deGrasse Tyson patiently explaining carbon dating. Ross and Brown wisely limit passionate discord to locals.

Its Kentucky: its hard to tell creationists and Darwinists apart. Georgia Purdom, PhD, the very picture of prim professorship, decries the term Bible stories. These arent stories, Purdom says, theyre Biblical accounts.

After Purdom, at a fast food restaurant, we meet local paleontologist Dan Phelps. In a pleasant Kentucky drawl, Phelps explains his longtime, lonely battle against taxpayer-subsidized creationism.

Phelps does have some company. Theres a minister from Williamsburg, the town that expected and failed to benefit from the Ark Encounter, and the Tri-State Freethinkers (who are, frankly, a little easier to pick out of the crowd of creationists).

Spanning the divide is fellow Kentuckian David McMillan, who, after a cosmic enlightenment of sorts, went from teenage creationist to evolution blogger.

We Believe in Dinosaurs riles folks up, but it doesnt spew wet smoke. If the friction between creationists and scientists is the engine that drives the story, the films third rail is the conflict between public interest and personal freedom.

There are lots of creationist heels dug deep in the Kentucky bluegrass. They are not alone.

Thirty-eight percent of Americans believe God created man less than 10,000 years ago. Many believe Adam and Eve were created on the sixth day, the same day God made dinosaurs.

From the racial makeup portrayed in the film, it appears there are very few people of color in the creationist camp.

Creationism, believers say, has to be true, because the Bible says so. If only part of it is true, how do you know any of it is true? (This standard, I gather, is not applied to politicians.)

From the time they are children, creationists are offered inspiration and refutation. Ham prompts a grade-school assembly over a PA system, When people say dinosaurs lived millions of years ago, what do you say?

The children shout back in unison, Were you there?

One undeniable truth is the massive infrastructure that supports creationism. Answers in Genesis owns a distribution center that rivals the warehouse in Raiders of the Lost Ark. AIG sends out hundreds of boxes of educational materials to schools where creationism is taught, either exclusively, or in some public schools, alongside evolution.

After a lengthy court battle, soon-to-be-ex-Kentucky governor Matt Bevin, a creationist, ultimately declared the Ark Encounter a tourist attraction, allowing it to collect an $18.2 million tax break. For other purposes, local paleontologist Phelps complains, the group is considered a church.

The only effect the Ark Encounter has had on nearby Williamstown is the fifty-cent fee theyve been allowed to collect on every admission ticket (general admission is $48), to pay for increased EMT services. Businesses that ramped up for tourism, like Elmers General Store, were forced to close.

A testament to the films fairness can be found in audience reaction. At a post-screening Q&A in Connecticut, a creationist grilled the filmmakers at length. After some heated banter, the creationist admitted she enjoyed the show. After the New York City screening, one audience member, a science professor, expressed concern the documentary might be used as pro-creationist propaganda.

A mural inside the Ark depicts the horror of the Great Flood and asks, Does our sin-filled world deserve any less? If that happens, dont rush to Kentucky. This Ark doesnt float.

* * *

Images courtesy of Doc NYC and YouTube.

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Dispatches #2 and #3 from Doc NYC: Mr. Toilet: The World's #2 Man and We Believe in Dinosaurs - Bright Lights Film Journal

Not far from Puget Sound, at St. Mark Church in Shoreline, Washington, Mike Scarpelli regularly lights a five- or seven-day votive candle by the Sacred Heart statue and another votive candle before the statues of St. Joseph and the Blessed Mother on both sides of the sanctuary. He remembers as a child watching his grandmother and mother light votive candles and say prayers, always at the statue of Mary. I learned it was a special way to pray, in that case to Immaculate Mary, and also to ask for her intervention to God to hear and answer our prayers.

In Philadelphia, Vincentian Father Michael Carroll also uses candlelight to recall his loved ones in prayer.

Every time I go into a new church, I light a candle for my parents, he said. Its my custom and a way of remembering them and acknowledging them.

The votive candle also recalls some memorable pontifical moments of prayer, said Father Carroll, noting that Pope Emeritus Benedict, while visiting Ground Zero in New York City, prayed for the lost souls of the horrific Sept. 11 attack there and lit a large candle. Likewise, more recently, after the 9/11 memorial was completed, Pope Francis visited Ground Zero while a candle was lit at St. Patricks Cathedral in memory of the 9/11 victims and their families.

Neither Scarpelli, Father Carroll nor the Holy Fathers are alone in their fondness for votive candles.

Enduring Legacy

Father Carroll, current director of the Miraculous Medal Shrine in Philadelphia, said that from the 1940s to the 1960s, people lit approximately 2,500 candles every Monday during several Miraculous Medal novena services held throughout that day. After every service, the candles had to be moved to the downstairs Marian shrine chapel. Even with fewer novena services scheduled today, still approximately 400 candles are lit every Monday at the shrine.

Lighting votive candles and vigil lights is a strong tradition in the Church that began at least 1,800 years ago, when lights were burned in the catacombs at the tomb of martyrs as a sign of unity with them. The lights kept vigil; hence they were named vigil lights.

Fire and Prayer

Father Carroll points out that candles have long been recognized with prayer. Whenever the faithful light a candle and say a prayer before or after lighting it, he said, they are turning that lit candle into a continuation of our prayer as long as that candle is lit. It, too, keeps a vigil.

The word vigil comes from the Latin vigilia and means to keep watch. How? With light, explains Father Chris Alar of the Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception. The vigil candle we light for a period of time symbolizes how we as persons wish to remain present to the Lord in prayer even though we might leave the church and go to our own homes.

Scarpelli is comforted as he reflects on this. The light staying there as the candle is burning will continue to maintain your prayer to God.

Because the lit candle maintains that prayer, it is also called a votive candle. The terms vigil lights and votive candles or lights are basically interchangeable. The word votive comes from the Latin votum, meaning a promise or a prayer, indicating that a candle which we call a votive candle really represents our prayer before God, Father Alar said. When we light a candle, were basically giving a prayer intention. Its a physical sign of a spiritual prayer.

My prayer is in my heart, he explained. How do I show this internal prayer? The votive candle is the way we can express in a physical, tangible way our inward prayer. Our prayer is symbolized by the candle.

We dont light candles because God is going to be able to see and hear our prayer better, but because we need something visual to connect our body and our soul, he said. Even the Mass has this soul-body engagement when, for instance, we make the Sign of the Cross or kneel down.

By lighting the candle our prayer is physically represented, and we join our prayers to the light of Christ, explained Father Alar, allowing that light to burn on and on in our souls, even when we have left the church.

Thats also why these candles are official sacramentals, which, like the sacraments, are an external sign of an internal grace and involve the body and the spirit; although, unlike the seven sacraments, the Churchs sacramentals, which also include holy water and sacred images such as the crucifix, do not directly confer grace upon the faithful but prepare them to receive the graces of the sacraments (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1669-71).

This shows my intention, Father Alar added. This candle symbolizes the prayer.

A Candle for All Reasons

The faithful illuminate up vigil lights and votive candles for any number of reasons.

Everyone has an intention when they light the candle, noted Father Carroll. They may tell a person, I will light a candle for you. Thats an expression of I will say a prayer for you.

Hes even found that when the faithful tell loved ones whove grown cold in their faith that theyve lit a votive candle for their intention, those loved ones find consolation and peace in it.

Father Alar pointed out the common practice of lighting votive candles before a saints statue to express devotion to that saint, such as St. Rita, the paton saint of impossible causes. Yet most candles are placed before Jesus and Mary. When I light a candle before the Sacred Heart or in front of the Blessed Mother, Father Alar said, it shows my devotion to them, asking for their help.

Along with showing devotion to Our Lord, Our Blessed Mother and the saints, the faithful will also light a vigil candle asking for God or his saints intercession or expressing thanksgiving for a favor granted.

St. Mark Church has many places where people can take a quiet moment and can be in peace and prayer, said Veronica Olson, pastoral assistant for liturgy and parish life. The faithful regularly light votive candles placed by every image and work of art in the church, including in the Shrine to Divine Mercy alcove, before the Infant of Prague statue, at the Piet alcove, before the Sacred Heart image and Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Joseph statues, and before the painting of St. Thrse of Lisieux.

Everyone obviously prays in thanksgiving, Olson explained. We often see people kneeling and praying. We also see people having hardship and going through trials, some weeping, some for joy raising hands any kind of emotion. They take special moments to be in the church, praying outside of normal Mass times.

Scarpelli connects lighting the candles also to different events in life, like illness in family, or death, or happier occasions and you want to emphasize your prayers to God more deeply.

Similarly, at the National Shrine of Divine Mercy in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, visitors and pilgrims can lightseven-day votive candles at different locations, such as at the Lourdes Grotto and the Immaculate Conception Candle Shrine, Holy Family Shrine, Shrine of the Holy Innocents and at Our Lady of Mercy Candle Shrine and Oratory.

As director of the Association of Marian Helpers,Father Alar said he has seen lots of answered prayers reported by the people who have lit candles with great devotion. One case was a cure of cancer. One was a pregnancy for a woman who was told she could not have children. He told the Register he hears of these answered prayers on a regular basis.

The many candles burning in the votive light racks in shrines and parish churches have another uplifting message.

As Father Carroll explained, Youre not in the church alone; youre there with the prayers of others. We know we are never alone in our prayer, and the candles around us remind us of it.

Centuries-Old Tradition

In the Tradition of the Church, the candle is a sign of Christs presence, Father Carroll emphasized.

The presence of God is shown by light, noted Father Alar, explaining that in Scripture, God is symbolized by light, and both the Old Testament and Jewish tradition are full of references to candlelight.

Light shows Gods presence in Exodus (27:20-21) and Leviticus (24:2-4). The Jews always had candles lit in the temple and synagogue.The Talmud instructs a lit lamp to be at the Ark of the Covenant because the Ark held the Torah, which is Gods presence in his written word.

This is like what we do with the Blessed Sacrament today, Father Alar said. We look for the lit candle. It shows the presence of God in the tabernacle in the Eucharist the presence of the real Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of our God, Jesus Christ.

We also see this in the Pascal candle at the Easter vigil, when the priest says, Christ, our light. Our individual candles are lit from that Pascal candle, which symbolizes our light being united with the light of Christ.

Father Alar quoted Scripture to recall how Jesus revealed, I am the light of the world (John 8:12). Jesus made clear, I have come as light into the world (John 12:46). Christs words largely inform the tradition of candlelight as a symbol for the Savior of the world.

With this in mind, in the Middle Ages, a candles beeswax symbolized the purity of Jesus, its wick the human soul of Christ, and its light his divinity.

Father Alar associated this enlightenment to our lighting candles. This is very powerful, not the candle in and of itself. Its what is symbolizes: the light of Christ.

Light From Light

Father Alar concluded, The beauty of the votive candle is that the light signifies our prayer offered, united in faith going to the light of God. So with the light of faith, we basically ask Our Lord or a saint in prayer to help us. We ask the light be given to the Light, which is God.

In the last several years, some places have made a slight change with votive candles and vigil lights. Some parishes have replaced wax or paraffin candles with electric or battery-powered ones.

Fire safety is something were more conscious of, explained Father Carroll from the Miraculous Medal Shrine, which has switched to battery-operated candles. Prayers are the same, he assured. Its really the light rather than whether the light is electric or wax. Its the light, not the method for votive candles. This is not true of all candles, however, as the Church does specify, for instance in the case of the Paschal candle, that a candle cannot be electric and must consist at least in part of beeswax.

Father Alar concurred. Electric is an acceptable form of votive candle used in shrines for prayer intentions. The strength of the prayer is by the love with which you make it.

Joseph Pronechen is a Register staff writer.

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Lights of Faith: Candles Keep Vigil, Become Votive Offerings - National Catholic Register