Chuck Norris is living in northeastern New Mexico and claiming to be the Messiah and, according to state officials, has been having sex with his followers who know him as Michael Travesser. Not really. That’s Wayne Bent, 66, pastor of Lord Our Righteousness Church of Strong City, New Mexico, anointed as Messiah in the year 2000, seen here in Delta Force 2—sorry, I mean, in his picture on the church web site, which, by the way, is one of the more entertaining Whack Job Prophecy sites I’ve ever come across.

Yearning For Sanity Ranch

Now that we know the raid on the Yearning For Zion Ranch near Eldorado, Texas, was caused by a false allegation made by a person who lied about who she was and what she knew, aren’t there civil liberties protections that should kick in for members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints whose families have been torn apart? At the very least, if they want to do further criminal investigations, the children should be returned to their parents until charges are filed. It seems incredible that anyone should have to make this point, but the police are not allowed to seize 436 people without charges in order to make a case against one parent who, it turns out, is probably falsely accused. And the taking of DNA samples used to be dependent on a person’s consent. Apparently that protection has also flown out the window in this case of excessive Old West justice, even by West Texas standards. It doesn’t help that officials of the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services continue to make inflammatory claims such as “evidence of abuse” without producing a shred of evidence or submitting the findings to a court. Why aren’t more people bothered by the lack of judicial review? A court is the only place where the state would have to prove its right to snatch children and teenagers. A great deal is being made out of the issue of underage pregnancy, even though underage pregnancy has not been, up till now, grounds for removing a girl from her family. Pretty soon now, if we don’t adjudicate this, someone is going to start using the phrase “McMartin Day Care,” and that someone is likely to be me.

And God Created Brigitte

More evidence that we’ll never figure out the French: on June 3rd, Brigitte Bardot is expected to be found guilty for the fifth time of inciting racial hatred against Muslims, which is a crime in France. Things that we would just call nutty protected speech France gets all legalistic about, even though this is the same country that doesn’t think Christians (or any other religion) should be allowed to proselytize in the public square. Brigitte’s latest offense is a letter she sent to President Sarkozy accusing the Muslims of destroying France. We can’t let that kind of thing go unpunished or this headstrong 73-year-old might start dancing barefoot in the basement of a jazz club like she did in And God Created Woman. Does anyone think it’s ironic that the French feel the need to punish people for being rude and insulting?

Mumbledymouth Jesus

The Passion of the Christ, you may recall, was performed in Latin and Hebrew, but mainly in Aramaic, because Jesus and the disciples spoke Aramaic and those were the three languages spoken in Israel at the time of Christ. Since the town of Malula in Syria is one of the last remaining Aramaic-speaking enclaves anywhere in the world, the movie was shown there recently—and nobody could understand it! Partly this is because there were so many different dialects used in the movie, but mostly it was just because the pronunciation of the actors sucked.

He Should Have Made It Clear That He Intended to Shoot Non-Russians

This doesn’t make a lick of sense. Phillip H. Miles, pastor of Christ Community Church in Conway, South Carolina, is doing three years in a Moscow prison for bringing a single box of ammo for a deer rifle into Russia. It was a gift for a fellow pastor in Perm, in the Ural Mountains, where hunting is not only common but you can pretty much shoot anything, up to and including Chechens and Jews.

Who can resist Richard Dawkins in his underwear, rapping about atheism? Certainly not me.

That’s What I Call a Wedding

Just when you think the Chinese have become irredeemably hard-hearted about religion, they surprise you. The Ohel Rachel synagogue in Shanghai celebrated its first wedding in 60 years last month after intense negotiations between the government and Pan Guang, dean of the Center of Jewish Studies in that city. Even though Judaism is not recognized as a legal religion in China, the opening of trade, especially in Shanghai, has resulted in several thousand Jews being “stranded” there without any way to worship except in homes. As recently as 2004, Ohel Rachel was on the list of the 100 most endangered sites in the world, and it only survived at all after 1949 because it was useful for storage and as an auditorium. It’s still not clear whether the government will allow actual services there, but I like the Hebrew sign that Associated Press reporter Cara Anna found inside, one of the few vestiges of the original decoration still in place. “Be aware,” the sign reads, “in front of whom you’re standing.” If I were a Communist bureaucrat, that would scare the crap out of me.

Yes, It’s the First Televangelist Thriller!

Sometimes the news release is so good, I can’t really improve on it. From the official description of the new Christian thriller Forsaken by James David Jordan: “A unique love story wrapped in an action thriller, Forsaken is the first of a two-book series featuring Taylor Pasbury, a beautiful but troubled former Secret Service agent hired by the world’s most famous televangelist after he receives terrorist threats. Even as a high school kid, Taylor Pasbury knew that she was not like most other girls. Raised by a father who was a retired Special Forces officer, she grew up knowing how to camp, fish, shoot, and most of all, take care of herself. As a young adult she opens her own security agency following a controversial stint as the nation’s most celebrated Secret Service agent. When Simon Mason, the best known Christian on the planet, receives threats from Muslim terrorists, he hires Taylor to take charge of his security. Though Taylor is thrilled to receive the high-profile assignment, she has no idea that Simon already knows more about her than she could possibly imagine. Before Taylor’s first day on the job is over, the terrorists strike, making a nightmarish demand that requires Simon to choose between the two most important things in his life. Drawing on all of her hard-knock toughness and training, Taylor must face deadly extremists and a dark past as she fights to save Simon and his daughter. Along the way, she discovers that she is not the only one who has done things she would like to forget—and she is not the only one who understands that some things are more important than living.” I’ll bet the sex scenes are amazing.

Philatelist Licked

Our church-treasurer- of-the-week is Derek Klein, who embezzled $140,000 from St. Peter’s Church in Ridlington and St. Andrew’s Church in Bacton, both in Norfolk, England, then spent the money on gambling and—this is a new one for us—stamp collecting. He has a stamp collection weighing three tons that was seized by Judge Peter Jacobs of Norwich Crown Court during the 16 months Klein was serving in prison. Now that he’s free, he claims he can pay back all the money by selling his stamp collection—which includes a first day cover marking the silver jubilee of George V—in lots on Ebay. At first Judge Jacobs was skeptical and wanted to just seize the whole collection, especially since Klein had proven himself to be a liar of remarkable agility, but then he decided to give the guy five months to try, warning him that if he attempts to hide any of the proceeds, he’ll return to the pokey for a long long time. We ask again: what is it about church treasury money that proves so irresistible to nerds?

Pity the Animals

If we can believe our colleagues at the Moriel Ministries, the Justice Department was scrambling around prior to the Pope’s visit to make sure the pontiff didn’t get served with any legal summonses while he was here. (He has diplomatic immunity as a head of state.) Obviously there are a lot of victims of abuse who would like to haul his holy ass into court. Oh wait, you probably think we’re talking about the church scandals of the past six years. We were talking about the documentation proving “that no fewer than three popes knew of both widespread pedophilia and sex with animals by members of its clergy as early as 1960, and allowed it to continue, instructing the Roman Catholic hierarchy to protect sex criminal nuns and priests.” How do we get on these press-release lists in the first place? Actually this sounds like one for PETA.

An entire website devoted to fending off the Grassley Six subpoenas from the Senate Finance Committee? Who else but Kenneth Copeland himself could be behind Believers Stand United, which presents itself as a bastion of First Amendment principle in the face of a government assault on religious freedom? This thing is gonna be fun. The site is so slick you can style your hair with it, and the blog is written by Doug Wead, the official White House Pentecostal for both Bushes until he was asked to leave because he made secret recordings of his conversations with Bush fils. He’s sneaky, and we like that, because we are, too.

Now Who’s Being Bombastic?

Apparently Barack Obama didn’t hear the same speeches by Jeremiah Wright Jr. that I heard over the weekend. Campaigning in North Carolina, he called them “divisive and destructive,” said he was “outraged” and “saddened” by Wright’s “spectacle,” said he heard “a bunch of rants that aren’t grounded in truth,” and seemed especially upset by Wright’s comment that politicians will say anything, and will even disguise their real views, in order to get elected. This is such a commonplace idea about politicians that probably 99 percent of the public agrees with it, so Obama seemed to be saying he’s the only politician who does not hedge his bets. In other words, Wright is being thrown overboard, as he continues to be pummeled by the media for daring to defend himself. But he explained at the outset why he’s doing it: “Because on November 5th, no matter who wins the election, I’ll still be a pastor, and on January 22nd, no matter who becomes president, I’ll still be a pastor.” If the media is so outraged, why don’t they turn off his microphone? They could, you know. But they can’t, because the public wouldn’t have it.

Burn a Little Incense for Sister Krister

Krister Stendahl, who died on income tax day, was just about the most liberal theologian who ever lived, past or present. If it weren’t so unChristian to do so, Paige Patterson would be dancing up and down the steps of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in the knowledge that Stendahl is now safely in hell. As dean of the Harvard Divinity School in the sixties and seventies, and as one of the high brahmins in the World Council of Churches, this guy was so ecumenical that he probably would have found a place for Transgendered Ethical Satanists at that giant dinner table where God welcomes all his chosen (whoops! nobody is “chosen” anymore) people (whoops! “people” would leave out the animals and plants)—all his indiscriminately worthy-from-birth nature beings. Technically Stendahl was a Lutheran, but he was a Swedish Lutheran, which is like saying you’re an agnostic Unitarian. One of his principal achievements in life, in fact, was the disestablishment of the national Church of Sweden. At Harvard he was in favor of all the things you would expect—ordination of gays, non-gender-specific language in the scriptures, multiculturalism, feminism to the point of being called “Sister Krister” by his students, openness to the idea of intelligence on other planets, skepticism about the Catholic belief in resurrection of the body—and his scholarship was centered around creating a kinder, gentler Saint Paul. I hope they said a Viking prayer for him back in Stockholm. I guess an actual funeral pyre would be too much to hope for.

Nobody Is Listening

If the Dalai Lama is so non-violent, why isn’t the Tibetan resistance assuming a Gandhi-like aspect? In fact the opposite is occurring, with rabblerousers on both sides trying to spin history, stifle speech and, of course, disrupt the torch relay. (Edward Rothstein recently pointed out, by the way, that the torch relay began in 1936 at the behest of Leni Riefenstahl, the official Nazi film historian, as a way to establish a connection between ancient Athens and modern Germany for her 1938 film Olympia. Apparently China is comfortable with that tradition.) It seems like the sort of classic disconnect that leads to war. On one side China doesn’t understand that a little autonomy would probably satisfy everyone. Instead, their constant vilification of Tibetan motives is reaching into the very corporate boardrooms that they need if they’re going to maintain credibility this summer. On the other hand, supporters of the Lama think he’s a political leader (he’s not) who wants to lead a revolution (he doesn’t). I don’t think anybody realized how serious the Tibetophiles were until they showed off their recently acquired rappelling skills at the Golden Gate Bridge, apparently part of a coordinated strategy that’s been more than a year in the planning stages. If this goes much farther, we’ll be studying it in university classes as “the early causes of the Tibetan war.” That would be the one where the Tibetans get squashed like gnats. Europe continues to be much more aggressive than the U.S., with everybody now vowing to avoid the opening ceremonies, much to the disgust of teenaged children of dignitaries around the world.

After being defeated but claiming victory anyway in his anemic two-year boycott of Ford, Donny Wildmon of Tupelo is now leading his American Family Association into a new crusade against Marriott hotels, hoping he can pressure the Mormon board into eliminating pay-per-view adult movies from its 3,000 properties in 68 countries. Good luck, Donny. The Mormons have never had any problem with other people’s sin, they were the original Las Vegas land barons.

Would It Be a Hate Crime to Shoot This Guy?

Of all the people who make their living by being Biblically-based crackpots for the media, the Reverend Ted Pike of Clackamas, Oregon, occupies a special place as the proponent of the idea that the government is trying to make Christianity a hate crime. (Yes, that’s what I said.) He’s been riding this holy horse for about four years now, and here’s how the argument goes: The “evil Jews” who run the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith have succeeded in getting anti-Semitism classified as a hate crime in 45 states and have tried four times to get federal hate-crimes laws passed. (Pike takes credit for defeating them all four times.) As a result, any Christian who believes Christ was crucified by Jews can be imprisoned for stating that belief. In fact, according to a recent report by the “Office of Global Anti-Semitism” of the U.S. State Department, saying Jews are responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus is “classical anti-Semitism” (which has been defined by the courts as a crime), which means the U.S. government is trying to make being Christian a crime. There are so many things wrong with this idea—the basis of Pike’s books, videos, website, radio shows, and God only knows what other money-making ventures—that I think it’s hardly necessary to point them all out, but I’ll just note that there is no “Office of Global Anti-Semitism.” What Pike is referring to is a report on anti-semitism around the world that was requested by Congress and for which the State Department has a special envoy, also required by Congress. The envoy is solely concerned with anti-semitism in other countries! Why? Because we have Jewish Americans traveling abroad! I should also note that all hate-crimes laws involve the commission of an actual crime, not just saying “I hate you.” Even if Pike’s fairy tale were true, and stating that Jews killed Jesus was considered anti-semitic, you would need to be stabbing the person you were speaking to before it would become a crime. Finally, the current special envoy, Gregg Rickman, was appointed by Condoleezza Rice at the behest of that Jesus freak, George Bush.

Robin Hood Had Cooler Threads, Too

Catholic priest Robert Ascolese, better known as “Father Bob,” was rigging the fund-raising raffles at St. Joseph’s Church in Washington, New Jersey, so that all the “winners” were always out-of-towners like “Ezekiel Fleming” and “Arlene Bishop” and eventually a cool million dollars was embezzled from the scam. His parishioners are all defending him, though, because he was not enriching himself, but putting the money back into the church and school, like Robin Hood. The problem is, the tickets in his “Powerball” raffles went for a hundred bucks each. Now somebody might donate twenty bucks at a time to the church and the school, but the number of Ben Franklins you’re willing to peel off to support the church is probably enhanced quite a bit by the knowledge that you could possibly win some five-figure jackpots if you’re lucky. The Warren County prosecutor is inclined to be lenient with Father Bob, who is not remorseful at all. A local TV reporter reminded him of the commandment “Thou shalt not steal.” Father Bob shot back, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone!” Yeah, Bob, okay, I think Jesus is supposed to decide when to say that.

Jews Too Hip To Be Jewish?

I’ve never understood Kabbalah, and after reading Daphne Merkin’s 18-month odyssey through the intricacies of the new Madonna-approved version as taught at the Kabbalah Center in Los Angeles, I still don’t. But I did learn a few things, like the fact that the American movement was started by Philip and Karen Berg of Queens in the early nineties, that they deny any association with Judaism even though they have private meetings to parse ancient rabbinical texts, that they teach a form of prosperity gospel in the sense that they try to get members to constantly “give till it hurts,” that they don’t reveal how much money they take in or what they do with it, that there is an inner circle of initiates (about 200 people) who make most of the rules, that Madonna is indeed their number-one benefactor, that they believe in reincarnation and astrology, and that they probably have very little relation to the followers of the ancient Zohar, their master text. Madonna’s teacher, by the way, is Eitan Yardeni, the spiritual director of the London Kabbalah Center, whose previous career was teaching Israeli airmen how to launch Hawk missiles. “We’re much bigger than Jewish,” he told Merkin. “We’re here to touch souls all over the world, to give people universal tools to access the practical.” Okay, well, stop firing those Hawk missiles, that’s not a universal tool, is it?

When a tourist organization announced plans for the Alabama Wine Trail, connoisseurs all over the world started making reservations, because who can resist a fruity Tuscaloosa muscadine or a Rosa Parks Merlot, with that hint of Greyhound seat-cover aroma? Actually there are only eight wineries in Alabama, but that’s eight too many for the Baptist churches, who vow to fight the Wine Trail and defend the Bible, which states clearly that Jesus turned water into Welch’s Grape Juice, and that stuff he drank at the Last Supper was Grape Nehi. All of this drama is taking place, by the way, in northern Alabama, the setting of that great southern classic The Klansman, starring O.J. Simpson as the black liberation terrorist who takes Richard Burton and Lola Falana hostage (in a white Bronco!), much to the consternation of corrupt sheriff Lee Marvin and local Klan leader Cameron Mitchell, who think Richard Burton is too liberal and so he probably helped O.J. escape, even though Burton is supposedly fifth-generation northern Alabama gentry. Burton made the movie toward the end of his career, when the errors of his youth were starting to take a toll on his face and his ability to enunciate, but one thing is very clear from this performance, the only time Burton worked in northern Alabama: he would be in favor of the Wine Trail.

Satan Is One Thing, But Really

People with way too much time on their hands are alarmed that “under God” might be removed from the Pledge of Allegiance, thanks to the exertions of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (chief agent of Satan: Michael Newdow). Fortunately we have the American Center for Law & Justice (chief agent of godliness: Jay Sekulow), which is determined to out-lawyer the infidel opposition. These are the same people who spend years of their lives fighting the completely insane battle to restore school prayer. After at least six months of trying, they have about 7,600 names on their Internet petition to support the Committee to Protect “Under God.,” which is about 220,000 less than the number of names on the petition to stop Uwe Boll from making any more films.

Even Oprah Will Probably Take a Pass

All together now:
Thank God I was raped!
Thank God I have cancer!
Thank God my family was dysfunctional!
Thank God I have an eating disorder!
Thank God my child died!
Thank God my husband was an alcoholic!
Yes, these are real titles of real chapters in a real book, compiled by the annoyingly self-important John Castagnini—the first sentence on his homepage biography compares him to Leonardo da Vinci-- for what he’s certain will be the next best-seller, Thank God I, which he compares to Chicken Soup for the Soul. (I think not.) He even envisions Thank God I as not just one but a series of books, as “thousands of writers will reveal gut-wrenching accounts of how they transformed perceived crisis into blessings.” The only ones he names in his press release, however, are John Demartini, one of the “experts” in The Secret, and Janet Atwood, author of a book called The Passion Test. (Don’t ask.) The beauty of this concept is that, whereas most self-help get-rich schemes eventually peter out when after a period of time, the person doesn’t get help and doesn’t get rich, this one can be reinvigorated forever, because the opportunity to get rich and healthy is embedded in cancer, rape, death and drunkenness! Yes, you ended up in the gutter! Now you can thank God for that opportunity and blessing! The apostle Paul had an inkling that this would turn up when he wrote, “Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?” To which Castagnini and all other New Agers of his ilk say, “Yes, yes we should!” To which Paul said, “God forbid.”

Wow

Is there something we don’t understand about being a church bookkeeper? Here’s the latest case of embezzlement of mind-boggling proportions: Cheryl Lean Granger is accused of taking $320,000 out of the till of Newport Harbor Lutheran Church in Newport Beach, California, over a four-year period by simply writing checks (170 of them!) to her husband, a professor at the University of California-Irvine. Once they had enough money, the couple moved to New Hampshire, where she was eventually run to ground by the Orange County District Attorney’s office, working with John Embree, pastor of the 200-member congregation. This is about the 19th case like this so far this year. Churches have a worse track record in this area than casinos!

Ike and Tina Turn— … uh … I mean, Thomas Weeks and Juanita Bynum, the love/hate evangelist couple out of Atlanta, have both been ratcheting up the “ewwwww” factor as Bynum appeared on Divorce Court yesterday and Weeks returned to the pulpit and pimped his book, What Love Taught Me, which reportedly has details of her drinking and drug use. The couple were married in 2002 in one of the most lavish televised weddings since Princess Di’s, but have been lashing out at each other, then forgiving each other, ever since Weeks beat her up in a hotel parking lot last August. Divorce Court Judge Lynn Toler admitted she hadn’t heard of Bynum until producers, seeking ratings gold, suggested her as a guest on the show. They tried to get Weeks as well, but he declined, and added a few vague threats through his lawyer. Despite previous reports that she was on the verge of forgiving him again and seeking reconciliation, the former flight attendant and hairdresser told Toler the marriage is “done.” The Maury Povich Moment came when Bynum described her decision to leave: “I said to myself, ‘I love him, but I love me more.’” I think that’s just the way Jesus wrote it down, too.

Copeland Continues to Beg IRS for Briar Patch

The Grassley Six televangelists keep making this distinction between a) turning over documents to the Senate Finance Committee, as requested, and b) turning information over to the Internal Revenue Service instead. In several speeches, they’ve made the point that the IRS does have the right to audit them but that Congress does not, because of “our First Amendment rights,” in the words of John Copeland of Kenneth Copeland Ministries. I can’t imagine why anyone would go around daring the IRS to do an audit—has anyone noticed the dogged determination of, for example, the IRS agent who went after Barry Bonds?—but the distinction is specious anyway, because the Senate Finance Committee has oversight of the IRS. That’s their job, to check up on the IRS and make sure everyone who should be audited is being audited. Of the six ministries, it’s only Copeland and Creflo Dollar who have refused to cooperate. (Copeland answered 17 of 42 questions. Dollar answered zero.) Dollar was howling last week about “rendering unto Caesar” and suggesting that Grassley is on a witch hunt against “Word Faith” teaching, better known as prosperity gospel, better known as “Jesus wants us all to be rich.” The more likely reason Copeland Ministries doesn’t want to cooperate is that they believe an IRS audit will be secret—unlike anything they send to Congress—so they alerted the media on April 7th as they marched to the downtown Dallas federal courthouse, home of the IRS regional office, carrying a letter requesting an audit. (They apparently trust the IRS more than they trust the United States Postal Service.) Even the Dallas Morning News, not known for its consumer activism, said that enough is enough, and that Grassley should “lean even harder” on the ministries that resist.

Ben Stein Gets a B-Plus

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, the Ben Stein documentary on the Intelligent Design movement and the Darwinists who supposedly don’t play fair, grossed $3.2 million on 1,052 screens its opening weekend. Compared to a Hollywood blockbuster, this is nothing. Compared to a Michael Moore documentary, it’s respectable. Compared to a heavily promoted documentary like March of the Penguins, it sucks. Compared to what they spent on it, it’s a home run. That’s because Ben Stein, among many other things, is an economist and an investment advisor.

Communion Will Be Delayed in Southern Brazil

A Catholic priest attempting to set the world record for the longest party-balloon flight so he could make money to be used for a spiritual truck stop was missing off the southern coast of Brazil less than a day after taking off, even though his party balloons were found by rescuers, who assumed the priest would be able to stay alive because he was a trained survivalist with a GPS tracking device and a “buoyant chair.” Now. If you read that opening sentence again, you may understand why three people had to send this item to me before I stopped mistaking it for either a) a belated April Fool’s submission, b) a parody of Liberation Theology written by one of our satirists, or c) a fake email from any of the 30 or so people who just like to mess with me. It is, in fact, true. The Reverend Adelir Antonio di Carli had already done this once before, on January 13th, when he party-ballooned for four hours at 17,000 feet, but this time he wanted to go for 19 hours at 20,000 feet so that he could raise money for a “spiritual rest stop for truckers” in Paranagua, Brazil’s largest grain port. I’m not sure how extreme-sport party-ballooning translates into reals for church projects, but let’s hope the padre is okay because whatever priest might have to officiate at his funeral would be constantly flashing on the “Chuckles the Clown” episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

“Oh, what gallant men did we lose
Who never came back to get their shoes!”

Unfortunately, that’s only one of the groaning couplets in the children’s book called The Little Chapel That Stood, on sale even as we speak in the gift shop of St. Paul’s Chapel in Lower Manhattan. Yes, the Anglican church where George Washington once worshiped, and where Alexander Hamilton is buried, has joined the market for schlocky Ground Zero tourist souvenirs, of which this may be the worst, if for no other reason than they’re selling it in a city of writers. My favorite passage—and I promise this will be the last—runs as follows:

“But doom, doom was coming all the time;
Doom, doom, to a city fair and fine;
Doom, doom, was in the planes that climbed;
Doom, doom, and then the sirens whined.”

Okay, I’ll stop.

We Stop for Accidents

While reporting on the maniacal Internet ravings of Tom Cruise, we were directing people to the wrong Cruise parody. (Gawker.com, by the way, which has the original Cruise video, is still being threatened by Scientology lawyers.) The winner of the Cruise Scientology Parody Sweepstakes is a Dallas actor named Miles Fisher who either made himself look exactly like Cruise, or who does look exactly like Cruise, and Defamer.com has the entire outtake of the version he did for Superhero Movie. Fisher’s father, by the way, is the president of the Dallas Federal Reserve. That could have the Conspiracy Department at Scientology headquarters working overtime for weeks.

Episcopalians Gone Wild

We just can’t get enough of those wacky Episcopalians. The latest diocese to go up in flames is Pennsylvania, where Bishop Charles Bennison already had to deal with one of his priests turning into a Druid and then realizing the error of his ways—at Stonehenge perhaps?—and coming back to the Anglican communion. (Yes, we occasionally make things up, but that one is true.) Now they’re ready to lynch Bennison himself because 35 years ago he kept silent while his brother, a youth minister, carried on an affair with a 14-year-old girl in their California church. Meanwhile, bad news for the Archbishop of Canterbury from George Washington’s church in Virginia: the first group of Anglican churches to break away and join up with the Nigerians— because they disagree with the American ordination of a homosexual bishop in New Hampshire in 2003—got a favorable ruling from Fairfax County Circuit Judge Randy Bellows, indicating the breakaways are going to have a fair claim on taking all the buildings and property with them. They should really move now to commission an HBO reality series.

I Got Your Jesus Right Here, Dude

Ho hum, another Catholic art debate, this time in Vienna, where the Cathedral Museum across the street from venerable St. Stephan’s Cathedral sponsored an exhibition by Alfred Hrdlicka, the most revered artist in Austria. Hrdlicka, an avowed atheist, played some games with the Last Supper, doing a homosexual version of Leonardo’s famous painting, and offered up some crucifixion images that were less than orthodox, like the one in which a Roman soldier simultaneously beats Christ and squeezes his genitals. The excited media is calling this Catholicism’s version of the Muhammad cartoons controversy, but there are a couple of major differences. One is that nobody will riot or die as a result of this one. The second is that, if the same museum were to sponsor a piece of art showing someone squeezing Muhammad’s genitals, every government in the European Union would probably intervene to stop it. Islam, which sometimes tries to be fearsome, is fearsome these days. Catholicism, which was fearsome 600 years ago, is not.

Christian vegetarians—this is already funny, isn’t it?—Christian vegetarians are invoking scripture to prove that no one can believe in Christ and eat meat. The Garden of Eden was vegetarian, Isaiah said the new Israel would be vegetarian, but most importantly, “Jesus’ message is one of love and compassion, yet there is nothing loving or compassionate about factory farms and slaughterhouses, where billions of animals live miserable lives and die violent, bloody deaths”—all this so that we can “indulge our acquired taste for their flesh.” Of course, there’s that little problem of the Passover meal, which is lamb, and the fact that the Last Supper itself was a Passover meal, and then there’s the fact of the Temple sacrifices, which involved the “violent, bloody deaths” of quite a few rams, bullocks, goats and sheep. (They have answers for my objections on their website, including the contention that “there were many vegetarian Jews in Jesus’ day” and, as for animal sacrifice, “people today are not in a similar situation.” Obviously they’ve had quite a few arguments with observant Christians and Jews, since their FAQ is groaning under the weight of a thousand ripostes.) I would also point out that for the last 30 years the death of a cow in a slaughterhouse hasn’t been very violent or bloody—the executioner uses a staple-gun device that shoots a bolt into the base of the brain so that death is instantaneous because, among other things, that reduces adrenaline, which is not good for the meat. And just as a practical matter, many of us will give up many things for Jesus, but we won’t give up Whataburger. (For those of you living in states that don’t have Whataburger, you might as well become vegetarians anyway.)

These UCC Guys Are Hard to Figure Out

I’ve taken a couple of previous cracks at trying to figure out what the theological bottom line is for the United Church of Christ, the Cleveland-based denomination recently thrust into the limelight because of its largest congregation, Trinity United Church of Christ of Chicago, and its recently retired pastor Jeremiah Wright. Their lineage goes back to the Puritans, New England Congregationalism, both Great Awakenings, immigrant churches which were very anti-Catholic, various Civil War movements including abolitionism, and the Japanese Christians persecuted in the World War II internment camps, but when they defend themselves, they don’t call on these traditions very often, and they especially soft-pedal the Puritan angle. They’re more likely to tell you about “black liberation theology” as espoused in the 1970s by James H. Cone at Union Theological Seminary, or some sort of watered-down modern social gospel. But I’m such an outsider I still don’t know why the entire black clergy has taken such offense at the criticism of Wright—they’re still sneering from the pulpits about his “persecution”—and so sometimes I overlook the obvious. Maybe this is just one of those late-19th-century conglomerations of liberal theology that somehow survived Karl Barth and is kept barely alive by attaching itself to various social causes. The only reason I’m thinking this way is that I received this report, via email, from a recent graduate of an East Coast seminary who wishes to remain anonymous:

“In our school we referred to the UCC as ‘Unitarians Considering Christ.’ From what I could see the primary criteria to become a minister was to find a church that would support you and then find a church that would hire you. A number of students who were deemed ‘unordainable’ by other denominations would look for a field placement with a UCC church in the hopes that the church would eventually sponsor them for ordination. I met a few people who were truly gifted and denied ordination on the basis of their sexual orientation. They still felt called to ministry so they would often find a home with either UCC or MCC (Metropolitan Community Church). But most of the people who went this route have no business working with people, let alone preaching from the pulpit. In fact, the UCC won't even intervene when common sense dictates that an intervention is necessary. For example, a very disturbed woman on my dorm floor was being sponsored for ordination by her field placement (who was going to hire her). A number of us tried to intervene but were unsuccessful. This is a woman who would fake illnesses to get attention, not a personality trait you can have in someone who is going to be in charge of the spiritual health of others. The last I heard, her church imploded, she was fired and in an in-patient psych ward—that was about 10 years ago. So for the UCC headquarters to defend any UCC clergy member makes no sense.”

And that’s the other question I’ve had. Does the UCC believe in Baptist-style local church autonomy? If so, they should shut up about other Christians who criticize Wright.

It’s Pronounced “Gawd”

The Harvard University students who are bitching about the occasional Muslim call to prayer on campus and the segregation of sexes in the school gym to accommodate observant women are suggesting that the school should be secularized after the French model. To them I ask the questions: Was John Harvard or was he not an observant minister? Did not the nine graduates in the class of 1640 all become preachers of the gospel? Did the university not have as its original purpose the training of pastors? John Harvard would also be opposed to accommodating Muslims on campus, but rather less so than this shallow generation.

Don’t Tell Bob Larson

Sculptress Ariel Safdie says she created her Flying Spaghetti Monster deity and pressed the officials of Cumberland County, Tennessee, to allow her to put it up on the courthouse square to make a point about all those Ten Commandments controversies. We hear two cults are forming already—one to worship the monster, and one to cast out the demons in the monster-worshippers.

Highlights from the Pope’s visit:

When he arrived at Andrews Air Force Base, he said he recognized Jenna Bush from the YouTube video on underage drinking.

By Wednesday morning he was so impressed by the “cool secular vibe” on the White House South Lawn that he asked if he could drive the Popemobile to an area strip club that night for his 81st birthday.

In a speech to American bishops, he said condoms were okay but no “party packs.”

In a private meeting, the Pope and the President discussed the Palestinian situation and decided to “let ‘em just fight it out.”

At an evening prayer service at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, the Pope addressed the American sex abuse scandal among priests and bishops, saying that he could understand how the first 3,000 cases happened but really, people, “we should have noticed after that.”

After his first full day in the country, the Pope said the only American celebrity he really wanted to meet was Kathie Lee Gifford.

There were still some of those victims of pedophile priests hanging around on Thursday, so he laid hands on them. Not really.

The Pope’s speech to the presidents of Catholic colleges and universities brought out the only truly angry moment of the week when he seemed to sum up the woes of Catholic education, thundering, “How does Notre Dame go three and nine?”

Arriving in New York on Friday, the Pope finally changed some Euros into dollars because he knew people would expect tips.

Some Muslim school children were gathered along the parade route, so to reassure them that he doesn’t hate Islam, he asked them to spell “neocatechumenal” and then passed out free Doritos in the shape of his hat.

He expressed regret that he didn’t have time to run by the Church of the Ascension on the Upper West Side so he could hang with the laypeople running the gay and lesbian ministry and then close the sucker down.

Before flying home Sunday night, the Pope had 200 boxes of Krispy Kremes packed into a special container filled with dry ice and loaded by an Alitalia ground crew into a temperature-controlled compartment of the Popejet. You can’t get those in Rome.

Waterboarding Tastes Like Chicken

The Door is 100 percent opposed to waterboarding. We tried it one Sunday afternoon when we were bored, and Ole Anthony was the only guy who enjoyed the sensation of his own drowning. But we don’t understand all these students and professors at Boston College who invoke the tradition of the Jesuits as they try to get Attorney General Michael Mukasey disinvited as this year’s commencement speaker because he made some mealy-mouthed statements about possibly supporting waterboarding if he understood it correctly. If waterboarding is anti-Catholic, then quite a few Popes have some serious explaining to do in the afterlife. To be perfectly honest, we didn’t even know Boston College was Catholic, but we should have, because it was BC quarterback Doug Flutie who, on November 23, 1984, threw the ultimate Hail Mary pass.

Armenians Get Medieval on a Lone Greek Dropping In at the Tomb

Just when we thought the holiday season was going to pass without any fisticuffs between Armenians and Greeks at the Jerusalem holy sites, a riot of palm-frond-pummeling broke out over the weekend, with the Armenians claiming that a Greek priest invaded their turf just as they were entering the tomb of Christ for Orthodox Palm Sunday, so they had to dogpile him, push him to the ground, kick him, and then hold off police with their fronds. As previously reported, we’ve had inter-denominational smackdowns at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher every year since 2002, when the Greeks told the Armenians they couldn’t come into the tomb for the “sacred fire” miracle at Easter, even though the original 1852 agreement giving Greeks control of the tomb on that day had been relaxed through custom. This year the sacred fire was removed without incident, mainly because the Jerusalem Police showed up in force and made it clear that anybody roughhousing in a cassock would be arrested and the whole ceremony closed to the public. The police must have let down their guard a little bit, thinking the worst was over, and that’s when the lone wolf Greek priest—was he one man acting alone, or was it a conspiracy by Theofilos III, Greek Orthodox Patriarch in the Holy Land?—entered the Edicule, or tomb area, at the time guaranteed to annoy the aggressive Armenian clergy, who reacted with Old Testament wrath, generously applied.

Turkey Is Bipolar

One day the Turks are fighting over the right of Muslim women to wear the head scarf, the next the Supreme Court is hearing cases that would ban the ruling party forever because it’s “not secular enough.” So here’s an interesting question for the European Union: You told Turkey to get rid of its Islamic-influenced laws if they expect EU membership—what would you tell them if they make it illegal for anyone who believes in God to hold office? That position might be a little much even for Robespierre.

When they raided the West Texas retreat of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, wasn’t it more than a little strange that the buses used to remove more than 400 children living there were owned by the First Baptist Church of Eldorado, Texas? That’s a good way to start a mass police action orchestrated by the state ranked 47th in the nation in child-welfare spending: put children who have never been exposed to the outside world in buses marked with the names of their historical oppressors. There were obviously no Baptists stepping up to support the supposedly bedrock principle of the absolute autonomy of the local church. They obviously believe that there are situations when it’s perfectly proper for state authorities to stop what the church is doing, and one of those situations is polygamy, and another is arranged marriages of under-age girls. Warren Jeffs, leader of the sect, currently awaiting trial in Kingman, Arizona, is not doing anything that the Mormon leaders of the 19th century didn’t do, and those leaders are now regarded as saints because they were persecuted by a) police, and b) other churches. Ironic? If so, the irony went unnoticed by the swarming hordes of law enforcement officials who have yet to explain why they took so many people out of the compound: are they claiming that all 416 were being abused, that it was a virtual white slavery operation? If you get a report of abuse at Fort Hood, you don’t evacuate 30,000 people on the grounds that they all live at the same place. You do an investigation and you limit your extractions to the single housing unit involved. The cops ratcheted up the tension from the very first day, when they told the media “We’re preparing for the worst” after church leaders tried to discourage them from entering the church sanctuary. And yet all indications were that everyone was peaceful. What were they implying when they said they were guarding against a “Jonestown-type situation”? Whatever it was, I don’t think it’s in the police manual under “defusing the situation.” Meanwhile, they’ve established a refugee camp in San Angelo where you would assume that state welfare workers would show their long-standing preference for keeping children with their mothers and not handing them over to the thousands who are already asking if they can adopt. But you would assume wrong—as soon as the mothers started complaining about the treatment of their children, the mothers were kicked out and their cell phones were confiscated (so they couldn’t communicate with their children), then 27 of the teenage boys were shipped 400 miles to Cal Farley’s Boys Ranch, which is a reform school for troubled kids, even though there was no sign of these boys being troubled. There was even some trickery involved, according to one of the women who gave an interview to The Deseret News: the child welfare officials told the women “It’ll just be a few minutes, then you can come back,” as they separated the children from the moms. Then “when the door shut, oh, probably 50 policemen came out from behind and stood there all around us. And a lady read a court order and said: ‘You are to leave this building. Your children are ours.’ I said, ‘Can’t I even tell them goodbye?’” And, of course, the answer was, No, you can’t. Wouldn’t most child psychologists agree that going to the home of very sheltered children, snatching them away from their parents, loading them onto buses, and taking them to the place they’ve been warned about their entire lives (“the outside world”) is going to do more harm than good? More importantly, whatever happened to the presumption of innocence? One way to avoid having problems like “how to accommodate 350 lawyers at a single hearing” is to not arrest an entire village. Where’s the ACLU? Surely someone will come to the defense of people who have no advocates.

The Aga Khan Goes for the Lamborghini of Divorce Lawyers

Fiona Shackleton, the divorce lawyer who did such a good job for Paul McCartney that Heather Mills poured a pitcher of water over her head, has an even bigger client than the former Beatle—the Aga Khan, a man so rich he receives a tithe from every Ismaili Muslim in the world, now going through his second divorce after six years with a German princess named Begum. Since Shackleton’s fee for the McCartney divorce was $6 million, and since the Aga Khan is conservatively 20 times wealthier than McCartney, this could be the largest fee of any divorce case in history. Shackleton is unlikely to be impressed, however, since she has previously represented Prince Charles (against Princess Di), Prince Andrew, Princes William and Harry (unmarried, but still in need of a solicitor at times), and she also lives in a mansion behind Buckingham Palace, where her teenage daughters are so bored with their environment that they’ve been known to answer the phone at home and, if it happens to be the Prince of Wales, tell him to please call back later because they don’t have time to take a message. As to her own marriage, to retired army major Ian Shackleton, she says she works on it devotedly because “divorce is miserable” and “a courtroom is a barbaric venue in which to pick over the carcass of a failed marriage.”

Somebody Stop Ted Before It’s Too Late, His Testimony Could Take Days

Ted Turner, famous for his atheism and his own revised do-gooder version of the Ten Commandments, is teaming up with Lutherans (!) to fight malaria in Africa through Turner’s United Nations Foundation. It appears that, when it came right down to it, he needed some boots on the ground over there, and they have these species of humans called “missionaries” that are available for the grubby day-to-day. Turner’s ex-wife Jane Fonda converted to Christianity two years ago, and that didn’t turn out too well. The less said about Jane’s quotations from the apocryphal gospel of Thomas, and her description of Christ as “the first feminist,” the better. So let’s not encourage Ted, who claims he’s mellowed, too much.

God Is Great, God Is Good

Four months ago, when Mitt Romney made his “Don’t Fear the Mormon” speech, I thought we’d all agreed to delete religion from the presidential agenda. But there they were earlier this week, Hillary and Barack mouthing spiritual platitudes at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania, while Jim Wallis, Jon Meacham and Campbell Brown lobbed softball questions about the Big Guy. The real highlight wasn’t Hillary’s teary-eyed moment, as she waxed ecstatic over her saintly days in Methodist Youth Fellowship, nor was it Barack’s 97th defense of Jeremiah Wright Jr. as his pastor but not his guru. The real highlight came from John McCain: he didn’t show up.

Now that Muslim home-schooling is taking off, not to mention local cooperatives that sponsor private madrassas for Islamic studies, we’ll soon have at least six separate school systems in each district: public schools, Catholic schools, private “Christian” (Protestant) schools, Jewish schools, madrassas, and plain old home-schoolers, who are increasingly becoming a force in organized athletics. With this much balkanization, it’s gonna be tough fielding a football team, but dividing our youth into religiously-labeled gangs will make for some great basketball games. Unfortunately, the Jews won’t be able to sell t-shirts with divisive “insider” slogans on them, because of another new trend: Torah-based high schools that don’t allow “gossip.”

If You’re Gonna Be Scary, At Least Be Funny

Few preachers are more mesmerizing, in a sort of “Did he just say what I think he said?” way, than the Reverend James D. Manning of ATLAH World Missionary Church in Harlem. We first noticed Reverend Manning after his famous “Creflo Dollar Is a Times Square Pimp” sermon last fall, but he’s topping himself every week now, most recently with the sermon that’s come to be known by many names, but primarily either “Obama Is a Mack Daddy” or “54 Double D,” which refers to the bra size of the women Barack Obama supposedly hires to wear his T-shirts. Even though 1.6 million people have seen the sermon, most people don’t watch all the way to the end, when Manning tells his all-black audience what traitors they are for abandoning the Clintons, then thunders, “I’m your last hope! Farrakhan didn’t get it for you and Obama is an emissary of the devil. I’m your last hope!” Manning is a burglar and armed robber who became a Christian in prison in the seventies, then graduated from Union Theological Seminary in 1985 and turned Old Testament prophet: his current crusade is to encourage people in Harlem not to pay their rent so that the white developers will leave the neighborhood. He makes Jeremiah Wright look like a middle-class Swede.

The Dalai Lama Infected My Brain

China seems determined to press these conspiracy theories about the Dalai Lama, going so far as to manufacture fake confessions that even the editor of your local elementary school newspaper could see through. (Or maybe you believe that those shady Tibetans really will be sending Buddhist suicide squads to Beijing this summer.) The conspiracy charges—complete with allegations of finding virtual nuclear arsenals inside Tibetan monasteries—will all be played out in the quickie show trials this month and next, presumably so that they finish up long before the Olympics. They’re not fooling anyone, though, and they apparently don’t realize that, every time they issue a press release or imprison an activist, the anti-Olympics sentiment gets stronger and the protesters in other countries get bolder. The latest fad among troublemakers is to incorporate the five Olympic rings into your placard, transforming them into handcuffs, skulls, hangman’s nooses, peace signs—the permutations are endless and, let’s face it, everyone has PhotoShop. The very words “Beijing Olympics” have now become an all-purpose catch-phrase for any cause you might have—witness the Topeka, Kansas, activist who is holding a rally today that involves the Olympics, the Dalai Lama, Darfur, oil companies, corporate America, the Confucius Institute at Kansas University, police brutality, and Juneteenth, the holiday celebrating the Emancipation Proclamation, all in “the name of Christ.” So wouldn’t it be better for China if they just withdrew for a while and let the Lama get back into the Lotus position and satisfy all his speaking obligations in Marin County? The European press has been even harder on China than our own. They don’t even give the Chinese government the courtesy of printing their claims—reporters assume the government is lying when it says things like “our soldiers acted only in self-defense and only four people were wounded” and instead they spend their time documenting atrocities and identifying the Communist Party bureaucrats who are responsible for the ethnic repression going on in Tibet and, increasingly, all of western China. It doesn’t help that the Chinese were apparently caught by surprise by the initial uprising, causing them to overreact later as they attempted to stuff the cat back in the bag and the monk back in his monastery. Meanwhile, the silence from Washington is deafening, and why would anyone expect it to be any different? We’re the country that let China classify the Uighur Muslims, on China’s border with Pakistan, as international terrorists, so that the authorities could manage them more easily. This constant media focus, for both the Uighurs and the Tibetans, means that life will probably just get worse and worse for the ordinary person, as even many Tibetans now realize. The Dalai Lama claims that he’s never sought independence for Tibet, merely a form of regional autonomy, which is at odds with what true-believers in the United States are now saying. What did China expect, though, when they insisted on going through with the Olympic torch relay in Tibet itself, not to mention San Francisco? Since there was only that one chance for Americans to snatch the torch, human rights activists decided, “Hey, why don’t we just run our own torch?”, so now there will be an endless series of demonstrations unaffected by the athletes’ “loyalty oaths” requiring them to refrain from political display. It may have started with Tibet, but now it involves every human rights organization, every Uighur liberation group, and even those familiar crazies-without-portfolio, the Falun Gong. Are the Chinese masochists, or just that out of touch?

Thanks But No Thanks, Bob

Anglican vicar Robert Harrison of St. John’s Church in northwest London is worried that modern man is forgetting his traditional Bible stories—there’s actually a poll showing that only 12 percent of Brits know details of the Bethlehem narrative—so to help us out he’s written a book called The Must Know Stories in which Adam is obsessed with Eve’s nakedness, Goliath is an alcoholic, and Joseph has an aunt who’s constantly haranguing him about not being married to Mary. This trend has lasted about 50 years now—the practice of “spicing up” the Bible—and I think that, if we didn’t have proof before, we do now: time to retire it.

I was about to log onto the Internet to put in my regular weekly order for Fatima water, which is holy water from the place in Portugal where the Virgin Mary appeared to three shepherd children in 1917 and made the sun twirl in the sky and predicted the entire future history of the world, but I had this sudden thought that had never occurred to me before: how do they get the Fatima water from Fatima to Buffalo, which is the place that offers the free Fatima water? I’m now stricken with religious doubt, wondering whether, by traversing the vast ocean between Fatima and upstate New York, there’s the possibility that some of the Fatima water’s magical properties might be diluted. I’m not saying this is the case, but I would like some pastoral guidance on the subject.

How Now, Brown Bureaucrat?

I don’t believe that “unlawfully trespassing on the life of a cow” is an actual crime in the United Kingdom, but that’s one reason six Hindu monks gave for their protest march on the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which they claim illegally entered the Bhaktivedanta Manor temple in Hertfordshire and slaughtered a 13-year-old bovine known as “Mother Gangotri” in contravention of Hindi ritual and practice. At the time of Mother Gangotri’s murder, the monks were already outraged about the death of Shambo, a bull in West Wales that was put to death by the RSPCA after it was diagnosed with bovine tuberculosis. RSPCA officials, not accustomed to being besieged at their headquarters in Horsham, bristled at the idea that they had acted improperly, using the term “mercy killing” several times, probably to their disadvantage in any future dialogue with Hindus, who believe there can be no such thing as euthanasia where cows are concerned.

The Real Question Is: Does Buddha Surf?

Buddha lives in both Pasadena and Oakland at the same time. I’m talking, of course, about H.H. Master Wan Ko Yee, who is the actual reincarnation of Buddha. I got the press release the other day, and so my question was, yeah, I can see how Buddha would dig Pasadena, but what’s up with Oakland? Is there, like, a hip hop Buddha that we should know about? Since this is only the second time in 2,500 years that Buddha has manifested himself in human form (“according to leaders from all major sects of Buddhism worldwide”), he would be the most enlightened person we’ll ever meet in our lifetimes, right? And so, besides reading his book, which he was pimping at the Library of Congress, or looking at his sculpture, art, poetry, calligraphy or painting, or being healed by him (he does that, too), how can we get a clue as to what Oakland neighborhood to settle in where we can both a) be safe, and b) get karma-lized.? We would ask him directly, but he’s currently working on world peace.

North Korea Has the Bomb, South Korea Has the Gospel of Greed

The Korean church “miracle” is still a mystery to most people in the west. Yes, we understand that there’s a single Korean church with a membership of 500,000—well, no, we don’t, a half million people is so far beyond megachurch that it seems a new category. And yes, we understand that there’s a new Korean church in our own neighborhood—well, no, we don’t, because it’s 100 percent Korean, the services are conducted in Korean, we’ve never been inside, and now that we think of it, there are two Korean churches in our neighborhood, they’re sprouting every time a mainstream congregation abandons its building. And yes, we understand that most of these new Korean churches are pentecostal—well, no, we don’t, because it’s not any kind of pentecostalism that we’ve seen in America. One thing that’s a little scary about the Korean explosion, though, is that apparently the super-pastors at the super-churches have started discovering the prosperity gospel, along with all its attendant ills, such as tax evasion, concentrated wealth that can’t be traced, and autocratic behavior, lording it over widows and orphans who are compelled to tithe at every occasion. Pretty soon they’ll be able to pronounce the word “Gulfstream.”

Heather Veitch is a blonde ex-stripper who’s started a topless bar ministry in Las Vegas: she and her three-girl posse go to strip clubs and pay for lap dances, but they use the lap-dance time to evangelize the strippers instead. Heather calls herself the Pussycat Preacher and has just completed a film about her life that’s getting a few sneers from fundies and has actually endangered the Baptist affiliation of Veitch’s home church in Riverside, California. (Things seem to be patched up now, though.) Normally, given the opportunity to say some snarky things about a ministry that seems to have a lot of self-promotion attached to it, we would be all over this, but I just wanted an excuse to run Heather’s pictures. Heather, I feel sinful, come talk me out of it.

Muscular Christianity

When Russian “troublemakers” disappear anywhere in the world, everyone assumes the worst. But Anna Mikhalchuk, the 52-year-old artist who vanished from her Berlin apartment on Good Friday and hasn’t been seen since, is not your typical Russian dissident or renegade oligarch of the type that the Kremlin goes after. Her enemy is the Russian Orthodox Church, which has been steamed ever since 2003 when the Andrei Sakharov Museum in Moscow sponsored an exhibition called “Caution! Religion.” Church leaders called it blasphemous, and as soon as it opened, the museum was vandalized and ransacked, with most of the art works—including several of Mikhalchuk’s—being destroyed. But that wasn’t enough for the government. The museum director, a curator, and all of the artists were indicted in 2005 on charges of “inciting religious hatred.” The director and curator were convicted, the artists acquitted, but the publicity led to death threats that caused Mikhalchuk and her husband, a philosopher named Mikhail Ryklin, to move to Germany. Normally no one would suspect the church of foul play, but supporters of the Russian Orthodox Church include roving gangs of ultra-nationalist skinhead types who regard Orthodoxy as part of Russia’s historical greatness, and they’ve been known to regularly beat up homosexuals who gather too close to cathedrals. In other words, the church doesn’t have to be involved. In these strange times, all it takes is a few friends of the church. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has made beefing up the church one of his main priorities. In 2003 he visited New York to ask Metropolitan Laurus, leader of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, to come to Moscow for a possible reunion with the “mother church.” Since the New York church had been estranged from Moscow ever since 1917, it was an historic event when Laurus did go there last May and exchange kisses with Aleksei II, Patriarch of Moscow, in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. The reunion was never popular with Laurus’ lieutenants, though, some of whom thought that Putin represented the same type of leader they had fled when they ran from the Bolsheviks, and now that Laurus has passed away at a monastery in upstate New York, they’re likely to revisit the issue. The Mikhalchuk affair won’t help.

I’ll Have the Dead Lizard Tongue and a Latte, Por Favor

I’ve gotta start keeping up with my Bob Larson literature. I knew that witches and warlocks held black masses, but I didn’t realize they advertised them and held them on a schedule, as they apparently do in the town of Catemaco, Mexico, where, on the first Friday of every March, tourists gather for evocations of the devil, potions, charms, spells, and all kinds of mischief that the local priest, Tomas Alonso Martinez, shrugs off as the lies of hucksters trying to make a buck—not that different from the fortune tellers on the Atlantic City Boardwalk—but which the New York Times apparently takes seriously.

The Infant Jesus and Blackjack Don’t Mix

Here’s another nice Catholic lady, Beverly Houston of Chicago, caught filching cash from the parish church—Infant Jesus of Prague Catholic Church in Flossmoor—by simply … writing checks to herself. She was the church’s business manager, and she needed $250,000 for gambling in the Chicago-area riverboat casinos, which, incidentally, offer some of the worst odds of any casinos in the country. A routine audit in December resulted in her being reported to the Cook County prosecutor, which has her down for a potential 30 years in prison, and let’s hope she’s not at the Horseshoe in Hammond this weekend trying to “make back what I owe the church and then I’ll quit.”

The Vatican is so eager to make Benedict XVI look larger than life that they were a little upset when Osama bin Laden’s threats against the Pope weren’t taken more seriously. The reason may be that it was difficult to figure out just exactly what bin Laden was accusing the Pope of doing. The reference was in the midst of a rant about the Danish Muhammad cartoons, which the Pope had very little to do with. The usual chart-buster for Islamic hatred of the Pope is his 2006 speech in Regensburg in which he quotes a medieval Byzantine emperor as saying Islam is “evil and inhuman.” Islamic critics always pretend they don’t realize that the Pope was quoting someone else, and that the statement was not his own. Apparently “quotation” is one of those words, like “jihad,” that Islamic scholars can’t agree on a definition of. Evidence that the Pope can hold his own against Al Qaeda, though, came in the form of an addendum to his United States itinerary this week—he added two more meetings, both with New York Jews. Then he brusquely told President Bush that he wouldn’t be showing up at the White House dinner in his honor. It was as though he took an assertiveness training course or something. Is it just me, or does it seem like the media interest in this papal visit is much greater than that of the public at large? At least three magazines have devoted their covers to the Pope, and I’ve read all three of the accompanying articles plus the front-page New York Times takeout from Sunday, and I can tell you that the amount of new information is: zero. If they don’t have anything to add, why are they chattering so much?

Let Them Eat Matzoh

The Danbury federal prison for women cut back on Passover foods available this year to the 15 Jewish inmates, which means they’ll all have to survive for eight days on just five items: matzoh, grape juice, two kinds of chocolate and macaroons. Inmate Agnes Kole is suing because she says the system is retaliating against her for the lawsuit she filed last year, after prison officials reduced the amount that Jewish inmates could spend on Passover items from $290 to $100. Kole won that lawsuit, getting the higher figure restored, so to make it impossible to spend that much, the prison simply eliminated seven of the 12 items available, including the most popular ones: chicken, gefilte fish and smoked salmon. U.S. District Judge Janet C. Hall of Bridgeport, Connecticut, promises to rule in plenty of time for the beginning of Passover on the 19th, and she seemed to be favorable toward the inmates during preliminary arguments, but Jewish friends on the outside pointed out that there’s a very important reason to give the Jews the other foods: subsisting for eight days only on the five allowed kosher items will result in constipation of truly Biblical proportions.

Yes, She’s Pagan, and Yes, She’s Christian—What Am I Missing Here?

Am I the only person who finds the arguments about whether Harry Potter is Christian or pagan incredibly boring? Apparently Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has a resurrection theme and two key references to Christ in the climactic scene—in fact, almost direct quotes from scripture—and so everywhere she goes people ask J.K. Rowling if she’s Christian. Of course, James Dobson and the Pope have both already said that, regardless of whether she’s Christian or not, her books are decidedly pagan and dangerous. For the record, she was raised Anglican but now attends the Church of Scotland, which doesn’t matter, because pagan authors write pagan propaganda, and Christian authors write Christian propaganda, and real authors write books.

Tithe Your Social Security Number, Jesus Will Do the Rest

The Reverend Raymond Clayton of Grace Fellowship Church near Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania, was too lazy to preach to his congregation about the importance of giving money so that he could raise his own salary, so he just stole their identities. Clayton was eventually hauled into federal court in Williamsport and pled guilty to using Social Security numbers of his church members to obtain credit cards. He’ll do a year and a day in jail and make full restitution, even though all he was doing was trying to save time.

Now that the 77-year-old Pat Robertson has stepped down as head of the Christian Broadcasting Network and nepotized his son as his successor, we can start to assess just exactly what Robertson has wrought in his lifetime. Actually veteran Pat-watcher Bill Sizemore of theNorfolk Virginian-Pilot has already done that for us, putting everything you could ever want to know about Robertson’s entire career, the history of CBN, his groundbreaking700 Club program, his politics, his relationship with Jim Bakker, his founding of Regent University and use of it to infiltrate the Bush administration, his miracle diet products, and his hard-to-fathom ventures to extract diamonds and gold from Rwanda and Liberia into one easy-to-read article forThe Virginia Quarterly Review that is breathtaking in its ability to continuously top itself as a testament to one man’s self-delusion. For his efforts, Sizemore has been threatened with lawsuits and been prayed over by the man himself. (We’re not sure which is worse.) In his retirement Pat will presumably have more time to supervise his Founders Inn Resort and Flowering Almond Spa in Virginia Beach—they claim the name is spelled “Founders,” referring to the Founding Fathers, and not “Founder’s,” referring to Pat—which was recently plugging a Couples Rejuvenation Weekend Spa Package ($599 for two) that included complimentary champagne! Is this the old pre-salvation Courvoisier-sipping Pat, who had a self-described “sophisticated New York swingers apartment” on the coast of Staten Island in the 1950s, now reasserting himself in old age? At least he omitted champagne from the Babymoon Pamper Package ($399 for the two expectant parents) and replaced it with “sparkling cider,” lest he alarm any committed fetus-defenders. John Hagee would not approve of the alcohol, but he would be proud of Pat for turning over the entire hotel, including the restaurants, to rabbis from Brooklyn, who will completely kosherize the place and control it for 11 days and 10 nights for this year’s fanciest Passover event. They will be using only Non-Gebrokts, Shmurah Matzah and Cholov Yisrael, under the strictest supervision of Rabbi Avraham Juravel, with a large staff of mashgichim. I have no idea what any of that means, but I would like to caution Rabbi Juravel to be extremely careful in the section of the Pesach ceremony calledKos shel Eliyahu ha-Navi , in which a fifth cup of wine is poured for Elijah the Prophet and the door is flung open for Elijah to come inside: Pat is totally gonna claim that cup.

Their Ammo Is Out of Date, But They Do Have Plenty of Camouflage Bibles

Why would Campus Crusade for Christ International be raising money all the time to send Bibles to troops in Iraq? Are they under the impression that American troops live in a Bible-Free Zone of some sort? You can actually get a Bible from your chaplain, from the PX, or, for that matter, from the bookstore on the corner, and since American soldiers are extremely well paid, and since all of their salary is deferred, it shouldn’t put much of a dent in their budget even if they decided to buy a leather-bound gold-embossed large-print multi-language Bible signed by the Pope. Still, Campus Crusade sends out money appeals all the time so they can ship more “Rapid Deployment Kits,” each one consisting of a New Testament with a camouflage binding (so that when you carry your Bible into battle, a sniper won’t be able to draw a bead on it), a 90-day devotional (why test God? just stay alive for 90 days and you’ll get the gist of it), and a booklet titled “Would You Like to Know God Personally?” containing the same sorts of appeals that you could have picked up at the bus station on the day you shipped out. First of all, sending a New Testament (they’ve added Psalms and Proverbs) begs the question: Why don’t you send the part of the Bible that has Iraq in it? Would the Bible be too heavy if you were to send the whole thing? We do have some C-130J Super Hercules transports available to move large parcels in and out of the theater of combat. And second: you know who can’t get Bibles? The Iraqi troops! If you really wanna send some hard-to-find Bibles over there, you’re sending them in the wrong language. I’m surprised I have to point this out to an organization that has the word “International” in its name.

Hey, There Was Nothing on TV

The Abbey of the Holy Cross, 10 miles west of Vienna, signed a deal with Eminem’s record label, Universal, to release a CD of the monks chanting their prayers as they’ve done every day for the past 900 years. Universal had been looking for a good chant release ever since they noticed the success of the Xbox game Halo, which uses Gregorian chant on its soundtrack. So the London-based label put out an appeal on YouTube for “medieval chanters,” and the monks responded with a few riffs from Matins. Tom Lewis, Universal A&R manager, said, “They are, without question, the best we heard.” He did not explain, however, how Cistercian monks came to be surfing YouTube in the first place, or why such a hip record company would choose Gregorian chant over Pigorian chant.

Let the Muslim Guy Speak

Raed al-Saeed, the Saudi blogger who did a quickie rebuttal to Geert Wilders’Fitna calledSchism, deserves more support than he’s getting from the West, since his slapdash effort—taking words from the Jewish and Christian Bible and contrasting them with images of Christians at war, Christians engaging in violence, and Christians talking about war—is exactly the way weshould have this debate. Rather than calling for censorship, he entered the marketplace of ideas—isn’t that exactly what we want? Al-Saeed’s point—that you can take any holy book and make it look like an abomination—is actually more progressive than that of Geert Wilders, so there’s no excuse forSchism being banned by YouTube. As of yesterday the video was back up, but if you can’t find it, go to al-Saeed’s Arabic-language website and click on the first video you see. It’s crude, but the excerpts fromJesus Camp, with the children talking about being warriors against Islam, are very apt.

With a little over a week remaining until the release of Ben Stein’s Expelled, the atheist blogosphere is aswarm with pre-emptive strikes, including a long post by Richard Dawkins himself called “Lying for Jesus?” written after Dawkins flew to Minneapolis to see a screening of the film and witnessed the now notorious ejection from the theater of fellow Darwinist PZ Myers by Expelled producer Mark Mathis. Both Myers and Dawkins are interviewed by Stein in the film, but they claim they were shanghaied and their comments were taken out of context. How could you grant an interview to Ben Stein, long-time friend of James Dobson, Pat Robertson and others on the far religious right, and not know what you were getting into? There have been perhaps a hundred websites frequented by scientists that have taken notice of the film now. Other late-breaking reports from the “British Atheists Roaming the American Midwest” department has Christopher Hitchens showing up this week at Fountain Street Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to debate younger brother Peter Hitchens, a columnist for the Mail on Sunday. Christopher is an atheist, of course, while Peter is a faithful Anglican, and their topic is “The Existence of God.” It’s about time the Hitchens family decided that issue for us. Note to Christopher: if Ben Stein shows up, have him ejected!

The Pink Pig Video Was Better

Bill Keller, the whack-job Internet evangelist out of St. Petersburg, Florida, was promoting a “high tech cyber debate” with Oprah Winfrey yesterday, but it turned out to be a sloppy YouTube edit of the widely-circulated “Jesus is not the only answer” speech Oprah has made in the past, with inserts of the kinky-haired Keller nodding, grimacing, and interjecting his “Oprah, you ignorant slut” comments. In the past Keller has called Oprah a false prophet, a purveyor of “spiritual crack,” and a New Age “tool of Satan.” Keller is also the guy who produced a video featuring a talking pink stuffed pig named Muhammad called Muhammad the Muslim Pig. Unfortunately, he didn’t know how to actually spell Muhammad. We’re only spelling it correctly here so that nobody firebombs the office.

Jan Crouch to Haiti: You Do That Voodoo

Carol Williams of the Los Angeles Times went down to Haiti to find out just exactly what went so horribly wrong between Jan Crouch of the Trinity Broadcasting Network and the charismatic pastor who was building a children’s hospital there. Almost two years ago construction on the hospital abruptly stopped, after TBN had already spent $2.5 million on the project, and Archbishop Joel Jeune says the reason is simple. He went to Crouch to report that some Haitian boys who were guarding the construction site had reported homosexual advances by a TBN missionary. Crouch expressed outrage, not against the missionary, but against Jeune for making the accusation, and after that time all funding ceased. The Haitian government tried to bring the two sides together in February, but the meeting disintegrated into a near fistfight when TBN lawyer John Casoria (the nephew of Crouch) refused to accept overtures of Christian love and accused all the gathered ministers of ripping off TBN. With TBN insisting on title to the half completed building, and Jeune insisting on using it as a school until this is resolved, it looks like a virtual standoff that will eventually have to be sorted out by government officials and the notoriously unreliable Haitian courts. Jeune has known Crouch for 20 years, but claims that he didn’t realize until recently that she was wealthy. The irony of the world’s wealthiest Christian broadcasters getting all legalistic with the child orphans of the world’s poorest country was apparently lost on all parties.

Fie On Your Infidel Deli Items!

Indonesia blocked YouTube after students attacked the Dutch consulate in Medan to protest Geert Wilders’ film Fitna, whereas Malaysians limited themselves to boycotting Dutch grocery items, including the popular Dutch Lady Milk, which was pretty pissed at Wilders. Both countries created angry twisted faces suitable for Wilders’ next film.

John McCain has already won all his playoff games, so he has a long layoff while the other conference names its champion, and he’s using that vacation time trying to get into the parlors of megachurch leaders like John “Apocalypse Now” Hagee, the guy who thinks Catholics should be roasted on a spit. Hagee’s detestation of the Pope, however, is nothing compared to Rod Parsley’s contempt for Muslims, but since Parsley’s World Harvest Church sits right smack square in the middle of a key swing state (Ohio), McCain needs him more than he needs Hagee. Besides, a lot of the available religious leaders have been picked over—either declaring McCain unfit, like James Dobson, or cozying up to Mike Huckabee in a way that would make it awkward to switch now to McCain. So it was a major coup when McCain did get a Parsley endorsement, especially since Parsley has a proven track record and has gone on record as saying he intends to fight the IRS restriction against electioneering from the pulpit. Parsley is given the credit for delivering Ohio to Bush in 2004 through the efforts of his political organization, the Center for Moral Clarity, working in concert with Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, still regarded by Democrats as a vote thief. (Note to pastors worried about losing their tax exemption: set up a parallel political action committee, with the same management team, board of directors and membership as the church. That’s essentially what the Center for Moral Clarity is.) Among the things Parsley is morally clear about are the evils of abortion, homosexuality (“a veritable breeding ground of disease”), the media and Islam—the usual list—but one thing McCain might consider as he cozies up to Parsley is Parsley’s past connection to disbarred Georgia attorney Dale Allison, who traveled the circuit in the eighties and nineties teaching preachers how to fleece the flock and hide the money. Sarah Posner of The American Prospect submitted 15 detailed questions to Parsley about his relationship with Allison, and got the same answer to all 15: “We have not utilized Mr. Allison’s services in a decade and have no information regarding his personal or professional circumstances.” What we do know about Parsley is that he lives in a $1 million home, has only family members on his board of directors, and preaches the Word Faith prosperity gospel of Kenneth Copeland and Rhema Bible Institute. (Ministry Watch gives World Harvest Church a transparency rating of “F.”) In one of his sermons on Trinity Broadcasting Network, which is increasingly becoming the Word Faith Network, Parsley told his followers to burn their bills and give the money to him instead, as a seed vow that would free them from debt. In 1986 Parsley was caught running an unaccredited Bible college out of the basement of his church (while claiming accreditation, much to the later consternation of students who couldn’t transfer their credits). And Posner’s investigation also found plenty of examples of an autocratic leadership style that brooks no oversight, especially where the collection plate is concerned. Compared to this guy, Jeremiah Wright is a Cub Scout leader.

These People Are Starting To Make Romans Boring

The 98-year-old Olivet Baptist Church in Oklahoma City looks, from its building and website, just about as generically Baptist as you can get, and reminds me of many of the churches I attended as a kid. All the more strange then that Pastor Steve Kern’s wife, Sally Kern, started a firestorm of controversy that’s ricocheting nationally, throughout the gay community especially, because of a speech she gave to the Eagle Forum in which she called homosexuality “the biggest threat our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam.” It wouldn’t be such a big deal if Sally Kern were not an elected state representative, but now protesters are besieging the Capitol, she’s refusing to apologize, and it seems like this would be a good time for some face-to-face truth sessions in which, if she really does wanna “get down” with Romans 1, she has to do it in the same room with people who are openly gay. Wouldn’t you agree, Pastor Kern? Aren’t we all tired of the two sides of this issue talking among themselves, hurling epithets, and not doing what we’re called to do, which is to suck it up and expose our opinions to scrutiny, make ourselves weak, put down our cudgels and take up our crosses? Explicate the verse, in the open, and then explain what Paul meant if you want to, but then, more importantly, explain what you mean.

Gorby and Jesus

Ronald Reagan had always suspected that Mikhail Gorbachev was a closet Christian, apparently based on things the Russian leader revealed in private conversations, so everybody started claiming him for Christ last month after he was seen kneeling at the tomb of St. Francis of Assisi, where the saint’s remains and relics have been on display ever since Pope Pius VII had them dug up in 1818. (The saint had been peacefully entombed under the church at Assisi for almost 600 years before that, but he wasn’t sufficiently accessible to pilgrims.) Gorbachev spent a half hour in silent prayer with his daughter Irina at the tomb, but wasn’t recognized by any of the Franciscan friars or congregants gathered there. (So who reported this story in the first place? Catholic propagandists? Weirder things have happened.) It was two decades ago that, during a state visit to Moscow, Nancy Reagan publicly criticized the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg for keeping the Russian state’s most valuable icons and other religious works in a basement, insisting that they be brought out for her perusal, and Gorbachev’s wife Raisa grew indignant at what she regarded as the First Lady’s attempts to embarrass her husband. All the time the ladies were clawing each other’s eyes out, Reagan and Gorbachev were apparently standing in the corner, having a little gospel chat, and Reagan later told people that he thought Gorby was ripe for conversion. That turns out not to be the case. After the sighting in Assisi, Gorbachev said the speculation about his religion consisted of “fantasies” and that he remained an atheist with a mere tourist’s interest in religious sites. Especially incensed about the publicity was Alexei II, the Russian Orthodox patriarch, who assumes that if Gorbachev ever does convert, he’ll do it in Moscow and not at some foreign heretical outpost like Italy.

Goons in Rangoon Prick the Buddha Balloon

Myanmar tourism—yes, it exists—dropped by 70 percent after the Monk Riots last fall, further isolating the most isolated country in the world. The Nation Formerly Known As Burma was a backpacker’s delight going back to hippie times and running right up through the eighties, when the friends of Shirley MacLaine went to the thousand-year-old temples around Bagan to commune with reincarnated lotus-eaters, but the trickle of intrepid Buddhists slowed to a drip in the nineties after the military junta jailed Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Prize Winner who should be prime minister by now but instead sits under house arrest, encouraging a boycott of her country, since tourist dollars create foreign exchange for the regime. It probably doesn’t matter—the generals get their income from natural gas and the mining of precious stones—but a room in Mandalay is still cheaper than a room at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.

Around May 1st we’re gonna have to herd all the C.S. Lewis fanatics into a corral somewhere so that they aren’t assassinated by their families when they refuse to talk about anything other than the new Chronicles of Narnia movie that premieres on the 16th. Prince Caspian, judging by the lush trailer, augurs well to surpass the $740 million grossed by The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and don’t forget, there are five more in the series.

Without Walls Church Seems to Take Its Name Literally
It was perceived as a mini-scandal when Without Walls International Church in Tampa put its sanctuary up for sale a couple weeks ago, but after all, it is the church without walls! What’s dicey about the timing is that a) this is the church run by Randy and Paula White, currently under investigation by the Senate Finance Committee for possible misappropriation of church funds, b) as of August, the Whites are divorcing, and c) the board was not informed that the building was being put up for sale. The church sits on a 13.3-acre “campus” in the prime office-building region of Tampa, meaning it could bring about $30 million in a rational market, $10 million in a “dump it quick” market. So far the Whites have not expressed any interest in selling their $2.1 million waterfront Tampa home, or their $3.5 million condo on Park Avenue in New York. Increasingly Without Walls looks like it should be called Without Church. Of the six ministries under investigation by Senator Charles Grassley, this is the only one that seems to be falling apart, with ex-employees and contributors coming out of the woodwork to say that the Whites were extremely sloppy at best, predatory at worst, about the way they solicited money, directed it into their personal accounts, and neglected the truly needy in Tampa.

Inspiration Is Overrated
Of all the things that mass murderer Pekka Eric Auvinen could have worn on the front of his T-shirt when he wasted seven students, killed the headmistress and then turned the gun on himself last November 7th in Toronto, “Humanity Is Overrated” seems kind of mild. It was apparently troubling enough, however, for some concerned Ontarians to launch World Inspirational Day–the second Tuesday of June if you wanna write that down–for the wearing of positive T-shirt slogans like “Life Is Beautiful.” Yes, this is a Christian effort–how did you know?–and specifically the handiwork of Tanya Ricketts and Victoria-Giselle (no last name), who run Toronto’s cloyingly uplifting “inspirational apparel” firm Moo Sang & Co. They both went through some rocky times, but discovered that most of life’s challenges can be resolved with a silkscreened Happy Face. I know I was changed by mine. I no longer wanna kill the headmistress–just the inventor of the Happy Face. Fortunately he’s already dead.

The Dutch Get Brave All of a Sudden
The Netherlands couldn’t allow Geert Wilders to broadcast his film Fitna, but here’s how brave the Dutch are: they turned out en masse to heckle Johannes Heesters, a 104-year-old man making his first public appearance in 40 years, because, during World War II, he performed for the Nazis. Fortunately, no one was injured–I hear Heesters wields a wicked cane.

Will There Be Tongue-Talkin’ in the Desert?
The dedication of the “first church in Qatar” a couple of weeks ago was, of course, not the first church in Qatar. There were Christian congregations, and even monastic communities, all over the Arabian peninsula prior to the 6th century, not to mention Jewish congregations and the resident polytheists who were driven out of Medina by Muhammad. In fact, Muhammad’s wrath was vented specifically on the polytheists, not the other faiths of Abraham. This makes Wahhabism, as practiced in Saudi Arabia, not just an offense against freedom of worship–Christians and Jews are banned in the country–but a difficult belief to justify even within Islam. In any event, Our Lady of the Rosary in Doha–first church in the modern political entity known as Qatar–has no cross, no bell and no steeple, lest the resident Muslims be offended, and the architecturally impressive $15 million building looks like nothing so much as a giant Japanese hat, but if the United Arab Emirates want any real ecumenical brownie points, let’s put some pentecostal boots on the ground.

This Jeremiah Wright story just won’t die, will it? Yesterday the anchors on MSNBC were speculating about the fall campaign, in which the Republican Swift-boater types are expected to launch a series of smear ads using the YouTube clips of Wright railing against America. (Wait a minute, though—wasn’t the whole point of that Mitt Romney speech back in December that the religious views of the Mormon Mucketys should be off-limits for political discourse? Didn’t everyone clap Mitt on the back and tell him he had gotten rid of religious poop-flinging forever, and that it didn’t matter what his pastor believed?) Then the United Church of Christ home office in Cleveland took out a full-page ad in the New York Times defending itself against the “hurtful” words of recent weeks—to which I say, “What?????” I haven’t really seen any attacks on the UCC itself, just on the Reverend Wright and that one congregation. The UCC ad wants everybody to know that theirs is “a church of open ideas, extravagant welcome and evangelical courage”—whatever that means—and that they support “liberty in our pulpits.” Then they go into an absurdly abbreviated history of the denomination, emphasizing that they are “the people of the Mayflower” (which is true, sort of), and, more to the point, that they were abolitionists, friends of the Amistad captives, and the possessors of such multi-cultural distinctions as ordaining the first black (1785), ordaining the first woman (1853), and ordaining the first “openly” gay pastor (1972). (Not to be snarky—okay, I’m being snarky—but their conservative critics would say that it was precisely all that liberal theology from a watered-down gospel that caused all of the original denominations that make up UCC to wither and reach near extinction before they were brought together in the crazy-quilt of Americana that makes up the UCC today.) The more I read about the way the UCC defines itself, the more I wish they would mix in a little Jonathan Edwards with the Reinhold Niebuhr. After a while you start to think of them as little more than a weekly “Meet-Up” of Nation magazine readers. Add to this the fact that people have started to point out what Barack Obama wrote in his autobiography—that he first met Jeremiah Wright because a political operative told him it would “help your community organizing if you had a church home… . It doesn’t matter where really.” So Obama joined the biggest church on the South Side, not out of any faith decision, but because he needed it for his street cred. That’s not the kind of message that evangelicals, even the black evangelicals in his own church, really want to hear. Maybe what we’re really finding out from this whole thing is that Obama would rather be at a Nation Meet-Up.

No Tubing at Bible Camp

You probably don’t wanna hear about the finances of the Birmingham, Alabama, sewer system—and who can blame you?—but suffice it to say that all the financial markets are watching a drama that’s about to become one of the biggest municipal bankruptcies in American history, and the man in charge when all the financial hanky panky was going on was Jefferson County Commission President Larry P. Langford. When the Securities and Exchange Commission took Langford’s deposition last year, they asked him how he came to choose a man named William Blount to be the county’s investment banker on deals that resulted in the county buying all kinds of financial hedge instruments, called swaps and derivatives, that are now spiralling into the ozone in terms of monthly charges. His answer: Blount had agreed to donate money to send children to a Bible camp. Later, Blount and a man named Charles E. LeCroy, a managing director at JPMorgan Chase, complained in emails that Langford was “hitting us up” for contributions to a ministry. Let’s hope that the Bible camp for the kiddos isn’t located on either the Black Warrior River or the Cahaba River, because they’re both about to get a big infusion of raw sewage.

Polish Cosmology Triumphant

I had never heard of the Templeton Prize until I went to a conference where uber-atheist Richard Dawkins kept sneeringly referring to it as the award that sell-out scientists aspire to. Because of the vast sums of its endowment, the Templeton is actually more lucrative than the Nobel, but it’s tainted because it’s always awarded to someone who contributes to understanding between the worlds of science and religion. Dawkins doesn’t believe any such understanding is possible, that the two should be eternally at war, and so he must have been especially appalled this year when the $1.6 million prize went to Catholic priest Michael Heller, a Polish “cosmologist” at the Pontifical Academy of Theology in Krakow. What does a cosmologist do? In this case, he asks the question, “Does the universe need to have a cause?” Apparently Heller’s books deal with the issues involving gaps in scientific knowledge. He shoots down the lame arguments of the feeble-minded apologists who say “If science can’t explain it, then it must be God,” by answering, “Well, yes, it must be either God or sheer chance.” In other words, he doesn’t believe in using the Bible as a ninth-grade textbook, a position that must cause nervousness in, among others, the sitting Pope, who was busy Wednesday finding a verified miracle for Pope John Paul II so he could put him in the HOV lane to Sainthood…

You Repudiated Us First, So We Are Repudiating Your Repudiation

Bishop John-David Schofield has “repudiated the doctrine, discipline and worship of the Episcopal Church,” according to the document written up by the high hats to remove him from the San Joaquin Diocese in California. Schofield was the guy who led an entire diocese, not just a church or two, into an affiliation with the Province of the Southern Cone, which is based in Buenos Aires and is increasingly the affiliation of choice for dyspeptic heterosexual Episcopalians. At first blush the statement by the assembled bishops reads like a “wow, they really don’t like him,” but if you’ve followed the controversy at all, you know that it’s principally about real estate. Who gets the actual church buildings and the lucrative lots they’re built on? Presumably not the guys who replaced the liturgical music with Right Said Fred.

The Kansas Supreme Court gave Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka the green light to go ahead and picket military funerals with “God Hates Fags” signs. The Kansas legislature had tried to interfere with Fred’s ministry. It was probably some fags.

You Can’t Tell Your Preachers Without a Scorecard

The New York Times published a “culture wars” piece on street-corner preachers with amplified speakers who are terrifying neighborhoods in Washington, D.C., that once were black slums but now are being gentrified by whites, especially gays. The street preachers are “spreading the Gospel at volumes that city inspectors have measured, from 50 feet away, at up to 92 decibels.” But I think the Times is wrong, because the name of the Loudistas causing the commotion among the latte-drinkers is the Israelite School of Universal Practical Knowledge out of Philadelphia, and that can only mean one thing—not spreaders of the Gospel, but spreaders of the peculiar and elaborate philosophy of the so-called Black Hebrew Israelites. I’m familiar with these groups, which have several names due to several splits, because they also preach in Times Square, very loudly, and as one of the few white guys who occasionally stands in their line of sight, I can tell you for sure that they would not call what they believe “gospel.” Their goal, mixed up with a good dose of hatred of the white man in general, is to take back the Torah from the Europeans who stole it from its rightful owners, themselves, a group of Jews who fled Jerusalem in 70 A.D. when the Romans destroyed the Temple and then spent 1,500 years in West Africa, after which they were sold into slavery. I could tell you more, but suffice it to say: they are the Only Real Jews. White people calling themselves Jews are not actually Jews but are Khazars and Edomites. Whites are, in fact, forbidden from membership. Exodus and Deuteronomy are their texts. “Lost Tribes” is their mantra. And they use so many charts, graphs and timelines that it would take a particularly skilled Mormon to have any meaningful debate with them. Actually the Mormons have been getting a little rowdy of late, too—but I think the Mormons would still lose a “Lost Tribe” smackdown with the black Israelites. The “Israelite” Hebrews are not, by the way, related at all to the rare African-American Jewish congregation that turns up here and there, and the way you can tell the difference is that real black rabbis don’t exclude white people who want to join.

Sight Is Overrated

If you go to the house of a certain hotel owner near Erumeli, in the Kottayam District of India, and you stare continuously at the sun, you can see an apparition of the Virgin Mary. The image is apparently so transcendent that more than 50 people have lost their sight entirely by looking directly into the sun for hours at a time, but I’m sure it was worth it.

Does a Strict Reading of St. Paul Approve Wife-Beating?

Thomas W. Weeks III, the abusive husband of televangelist Juanita Bynum of Atlanta who married her on national TV in a 2002 million-dollar ceremony, got off with three years’ probation after he confessed to beating her up in a hotel parking lot. (Actually the technical results were: He was charged with choking, pushing and stomping. He pled guilty to a reduced charge of grabbing, throwing and kicking.) The anti-climactic events took place after Weeks’ grandfather pled with Bynum to forgive him—and she agreed, saying “I don’t believe my husband is a criminal.” Although she filed for divorce in September, there are now murmurs about the Ike and Tina Turner of Televangelism getting back together, thereby auguring a continuing soap opera for their various devotees, part of the T.D. Jakes Global Destiny empire of megachurches. But we’ll have to wait until he’s done his 200 hours of community service and gone to anger management class before we can ask him the question, “Are you still beating your wife?”

One of the most common whines you get from a certain type of evangelical is “Whyyyyyyy do people think all Christians are right-wingers? Myyyyyy church is different!” You know what? We don’t care. But maybe one reason it’s hard to take leftie evangelicals seriously is stories like this: The Episcopal Diocese of Maine called on the Archbishop of Canterbury to “denounce and abjure” the 1496 royal charter issued by King Henry VII to the explorer John Cabot, allowing Cabot to subdue infidels and seize their properties. Let’s see just how many things we can point out about this that are crazy:

     1) There was no Church of England in 1496.
     2) Church authorities didn’t have anything to do with the charter anyway.
     3) It was pro forma language included in virtually all grants given to explorers and was necessary for them to justify the trip economically.
     And perhaps most important of all ...
     4) It doesn’t matter anymore.
Okay, start whining.

The Receding Hairline—Now That’s Real

Some British twit gave Bob Larson a reality show,
The Real Exorcist, which means he can now use all those people who are pretending to be possessed in order to pretend to cast out demons from their bodies on a show that pretends to be real and, as a final irony, uses the actual word “real” in the title. Lovely.

Tony, Should I Be Worried?

I’ve been interested in pastor Tony Alamo for at least 20 years, ever since I bought a neon lime green jacket from him—this jacket looked like it was radioactive—at his downtown Nashville country/western clothing store where the late great Porter Waggoner used to shop. I got a lot of value out of the jacket, especially during a comedy gig at Charlie Goodnight’s in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I was ogled by three drunk matrons who thought I was Porter Waggoner, but that’s another story. Anyway, some of Alamo’s minions have been fanning out through the Port Authority Bus Terminal on 42nd Street and passing out those apocalyptic flyers (“BRACE YOURSELVES” warns the most recent one) that seem to be warning of the end of the world because of current events that were predicted in the Bible but which turn out, on closer inspection, to be the reverse. The essays are based on the expectation of events predicted in scripture from 2,000 years ago that have not, in fact, come true at any time during the last 2,000 years. At any rate, I never knew where Tony had his headquarters—at one time it was Fort Smith, Arkansas, then Nashville, and now he has Sunday services in Canyon Country, California, Texarkana, Texas, Fort Smith, Arkansas, and Elizabeth, New Jersey! (Whoa! What doesn’t belong in this picture?) When I met Tony, he was no spring chicken, although he dressed like the Vegasized Elvis, with dark glasses and carbon-black dyed hair, so I figured he had to be getting up there in years and that I would go check out his website to see if he was still preaching. WHAMMO! The first five headlines are:

False Accusers Against Tony Alamo

More false statements from the media

Pastor Alamo railroaded to prison

Hear a former federal agent confess

The Jesuit Oath

Okay, well, that fifth one is just classic Tony Alamo stuff, probably some conspiracy about how the Jesuits are gonna infiltrate the government. But the first four, I had to delve into the website and try to figure it out. I can't. It somehow involves a conspiracy by a homosexual owner of a drug-paraphernalia tattoo shop to frame Tony Alamo for "tax abuse" charges that resulted in a four-year prison term, but then Tony was not guilty on charges of threatening to kidnap a federal judge, and then there were some child abuse charges that were dropped by the California attorney general and, well, to tell you the truth, I got totally lost in the maze of what must have been a very exciting two decades for Tony, but I was heartened to find a "Certificate of Appreciation" for Tony and his ministry from the city of Fouke, Arkansas, the town best known for being the home of the Fouke Monster, immortalized in The Legend of Boggy Creek, which is much more reliable as a guide to the monster's behavior than the inferior Return to Boggy Creek, where the filmmakers engage in rank speculation, which is always bad, and which I will not resort to here.

Islamic Free-Speech-Lovers Attack

The site showing the Geert Wilders film Fitna was hacked and put out of commission yesterday. As of last night all it had was a window for viewing the movie and, oddly, a link to a Dutch porn site at the bottom of the screen. The Wikileaks page for the film was also shut down, but it was unclear whether that was due to hackers or the server just being overrun. This is the equivalent of the guys who show up at speeches with bullhorns to drown out the main event. It’s exactly the kind of reaction that Wilders wanted in order to make his point about the backwardness of Islam.

Some scientists at Johns Hopkins University said that, thanks to new data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe—not to be confused with either the Wilkinson Razor or the Anal Probe—the age of the universe can be computed as 13.73 billion years, with a margin of error plus or minus 120 million, which just confirms what Bishop Ussher told us 300 years ago—these scientists just won’t listen! The margin of error is actually plus or minus 13.72 billion, if you go by Ussher’s Biblical computation of the date of creation as October 23, 4004 B.C. Then there are the scientists at the University of Guanajuato and the University of Sussex who say that, in 7.59 billion years from now, Earth will be dragged from its orbit by the sun and plunge to its death in a cloud of vapors. Their margin of error is plus or minus 7.58 billion, because John Hagee has already told us that the Earth will be dragged from its orbit by the sun and plunge to its death in a cloud of vapors next fall.

Ben! Come Back! We’ll Set Up the Big-Screen!

We were crushed to find out that Ben Stein had a private advance screening of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed at Dallas Theological Seminary, better known as the fundamentalist Vatican, and couldn’t bother to stop by the Door offices, right there in the same neighborhood, and spread a little popcorn love. (According to Google maps, you can walk it—2.1 miles from their front door to ours in East Dallas.) The movie, which supposedly explodes Darwinism and “big science” and comes out in favor of “intelligent design” theory, is being carefully rolled out in advance of an April 18 general release by the same publicists who handled Passion of the Christ. Already they’ve had a renegade film critic slip into a screening uninvited and pan Stein as the equivalent of a Holocaust denier. Effusive in his praise, on the other hand, was Pat Robertson, who invited Stein onto The 700 Club where Stein, an economist by trade, launched into a rant about Bear Stearns that turned into a rant about American greed that turned into an excursion on the budget and the deficit and the weakness of the dollar. Darwin is responsible for all of it!

Islam Is Kicking Rome’s Ass

Muslims make up 19.2 percent of the world’s population, while Catholics—the traditional leader—come in second at 17.4 percent, according to an article in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano. This is the same newspaper that gave us an explanation for why Christians are losing the Spiritual Super Bowl to the Muslims, courtesy of Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti, the Vatican’s Executive Vice President/Sin. Girotti found some “new sins” to worry about, including cloning and genetic manipulation, because apparently all the Catholics in the world had already overcome the old ones, including, of course, pedophilia. In America, where polls show that the overwhelming number-one sin is adultery, we’re not even finished with the ones in Dante yet. But we’ll be able to familiarize ourselves with the new ones later this month when the Pope shows up for a six-day visit. To get us in the mood, the papal nuncio in Washington gave an interview to the New York Times in which he said, basically, that the Pope is not nearly as big an asshole as people think he is.

I Wouldn’t Piss These People Off, Rick

Embattled Arizona Congressman Rick Renzi is under federal indictment for wire fraud, insurance fraud, conspiracy, extortion and money laundering involving alleged real estate scams, but if you read down into the fine print, he’s also on the hook for ripping off several right-to-life organizations—the very organizations that give him a 100 percent approval rating on anti-abortion votes. Renzi, who has 12 children of his own, was running checks through his insurance brokerage firm, according to the indictment, but not paying the premiums for the clinics. When they realized their insurance had been canceled, he then produced fake certificates showing they were insured after all. And the reason he needed all this money? To run for Congress. Call it a right-to-run campaign.

The Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr. has been under more or less constant attack ever since his fiery sermons got onto YouTube and forced Barack Obama to distance himself from his pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago’s South Side. Last week Wright cancelled sermons in Tampa, Houston and Dallas, citing security concerns, and now Fox News has come out with a snarky dissection of the church’s arrangements for Wright’s retirement home in the tony suburb of Tinley Park, Illinois. The only eyebrow-raiser in the deal is the value of the house—$1.6 million for a four-bedroom, 10,340-square-foot spread—which seems to be at odds with Wright’s preaching against materialism. Meanwhile, the fact that one in ten people still believe that Obama is a Muslim indicates that nobody is paying that much attention to begin with. But at the State of the Black Church Summit in Dallas—one of the events where Wright had to cancel—there was lots of paranoid shouting about how the white man doesn’t respect the black church’s criticism, but one of the most powerful moments came when the Reverend Raphael G. Warnock, pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, addressed himself to the heresy that both blacks and whites can agree on: “Prosperity preachers would seem to suggest that Jesus died so that his disciples could live rich. Poverty is not a personal curse or a failure of faith or a sin, but a sign that the world is broken.” Warnock’s pulpit, by the way, is the pulpit made famous by Martin Luther King Jr. The bigger danger from Wright-gate is that Obama himself will become increasingly prone to theological observations, like his remark last week about everyone being “children of God” during a campaign stop in North Carolina. If you read what he said, it was a “works instead of faith” statement, even though he belongs to the United Church of Christ denomination, which is just about as St. Paul as you can get. I already get too many whack-job press releases every day, and if he keeps doing this, it can only get worse, so Barack, my man, my brother, when you get a religious question, go vague with the answer, okay? Promise me?

For Dallas Catholics, Theft Is the Answer

The “Virgin Mary as a stripper” artwork that was stolen from an exhibition at the University of Dallas was a little more elaborate than first reported. As described by its creator Joanna Gianulis, it was a woodcut print full of images contrasting “saint” with “sinner” and one of those images was the Virgin of Guadalupe as a stripper. University president Frank Lazarus made a lot of anguished hand-wringing statements—we want to respect artistic freedom while respecting the wishes of our Catholic student body blah blah blah—after the work was filched from an exhibit of works by Murray State University art students. (An exhibit of University of Dallas art had been on display at Murray State, too, sans swipage.) Lazarus’ concern should not be “Should we have taken it down or left it up?”—it should be “Who’s the goddamn thief? Bring it back or your ass is expelled.” And the attitude of Joanna Gianulis—who told the press she was upset because she felt she was “misunderstood”—should be, “Give me back my damn artwork.” That would be the Christian thing to do.

Now This Is Some Serious Theocracy Stuff

Every time an American evangelist declares for a political candidate, we have a bunch of tut-tutting commentary to the effect of “This could never happen in secular Europe.” Think again. In the recent Spanish elections the Catholic church waded in up to the hips in support of Mariano Rejoy, less out of affection for Rejoy than absolute detestation of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the socialist who pulled the troops out of Iraq and called for more secularism in Spain. I’m not talking about theoretical support here. The bishops of Spain actually published a document telling Catholics who to vote for. I can’t think of any Southern Baptist pastor, no matter how conservative, who’s ever stepped over that line, and in a recent survey of evangelical pastors, only one said he would endorse a candidate. There’s some evidence that the Spaniards resented the meddling, since the satanic socialist triumphed anyway.

Will the Dalai Be a Bad Boy in Beijing?

In many ways the Chinese government is right to criticize the western media. The New York Times has had a rotating tag team of reporters all over this story, even though it’s hard to figure out just exactly why the Dalai Lama is so important. If we were this concerned about every government-in-exile on the planet, we would have 30 stories a day from London and New York alone. And isn’t it a little strange that we seem to be so angry toward China about the Tibetan situation, which is a half century old at this point, while China’s being on the wrong side of the war in Darfur is not even on the radar? Meanwhile, China keeps hammering on two themes—a) that the Dalai Lama is a master manipulator who’s orchestrating civil unrest from abroad, and b) that the press ignores violence of Tibetans against ethnic Chinese and focuses entirely on the excesses of the Chinese police. The first claim is probably untrue, the second one probably true. New York Times reporter Jim Yardley was so extremely favorable toward the Dalai Lama that his coverage probably resulted in the Times being disinvited to the Lhasa press tour where some dissident monks staged a little uprising for the cameras. You have to wonder why the press seems to support independence or autonomy for Tibet—apparently so the Dalai Lama can restore theocracy—when they were so quick to let Muslims take Kosovo away from the Serbian Orthodox Christians who had regarded it as their spiritual homeland since the 14th century. Tibetan Buddhists are somehow politically correct in a way that the black-robed Serbian Orthodox priests are not, even though the most characteristic manifestations of Buddhism in the west are either Richard Gere-sponsored seminars at Radio City Music Hall or LSD-inspired theistic artists like Alex Grey, whose Chapel of Sacred Mirrors is a shrine to visionary art in New York’s ultra-hip Soho neighborhood. Still, China is terrified that the Dalai Lama is going to send some saffron-robed troublemakers to the summer Olympics, even though most of the attention he gets at his Dharmsala fastness is the direct result of Chinese paranoia. Can there be any more pathetic sign of panic than monasteries ringed with tanks and all-out offensives against YouTube? The Politburo was apparently so frantic that they scared India into cooperating with the repression, and there were signs that Nepal would fall obediently into line, despite evidence that the more you crack down, the more the protest spreads. After a week of head-bashing during which the Dalai Lama seemed remarkably restrained, despite Chinese officials calling him an agent provocateur, the grievances of the Tibetans had spread to four large western provinces representing almost a third of the land mass of a very big country, and expatriate Tibetans in other parts of the world were making themselves known. The Dalai Lama, seeing the protests growing increasingly violent, eventually threatened to resign as political head of the exiled Tibetans, apparently in an effort to retain whatever sliver of influence he might have left. Alas, it’s all in vain anyway. It will probably take about one more generation before native Tibetan Buddhists are a minority in the region of Tibet, as China is so afraid of the Dalai Lama “masterminding” a revolution that they’ve started trucking in other ethnic groups to wipe out the influence of Lama Lovers. After that, Tibet will be but a memory, since any attempt to rid Tibet of the other ethnic groups would constitute the crime of “ethnic cleansing” that the United Nations says can never occur again. You can move ‘em in, but you can’t move ‘em out—that was the lesson of Serbia and Kosovo. What’s being created in Tibet is a de jure Kosovo situation. And toward that end, China recently introduced the ultimate weapon—the most luxurious train in the world, a straight shot from Beijing to Lhasa that features enormous bedroom suites, living rooms and bathroom facilities, the kind of Orient Express experience that is so far beyond the means of most Chinese that it can have only one target—American “middle class millionaires” who will make Lhasa a tourist destination and devastate its culture within a single generation. Now that’s some forward thinking. Unfortunately, part of the recent unrest in Lhasa involved torching a tourist bus, and currently all foreigners are banned from Tibet anyway. Maybe the Tibetans are smarter than we think.

We still haven’t been able to find out whether it was a Greek priest or an Armenian priest who captured the sacred “miracle” fire last Saturday at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but what we do know is that the Jerusalem Police spent the entire previous week reading the riot act to all six Christian denominations who have rights within the church. They were given an ultimatum: they would either agree in advance as to exactly who was going into and out of the tomb, and in what order, or else no “civilians” would be allowed inside to witness the miracle. Among other things, the authorities are always worried about that many people carrying candles and reaching out to grab their piece of the Magic Fire as it breezes past in the procession. The church only has one exit, so it’s a recipe for a human bonfire exacerbated by a stampede. This year they ran dozens of firehoses into the building and assigned cops to hold the ends of the hoses so that presumably, at any moment, they could spray any Christian who caught on fire. As it turned out, the “miracle” occurred peacefully, with the Greeks and the Armenians refraining from fisticuffs. Perhaps wisely, the Jewish mediators refuse to reveal what “rules” were worked out as far as which priest went into the tomb first and, even more important, which priest came out first, holding the magic fire sent by Jesus to remind us that he hasn’t forgotten us, but if we quarrel, he’ll charcoal our respective asses.

This Shouldn’t Work But It Does

Several hundred prison inmates in orange jumpsuits from the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center in the Philippines perform a precision drill formation of a giant cross in the exercise yard that has an oddly affecting power. Yes, these are many of the same inmates who did the world’s largest dance version of Michael Jackon’s “Thriller,” which featured 1,500 dancers and has been viewed 12.6 million times on YouTube. But if you watch all the Cebu dance videos, about half of them have religious themes, even when they’re poking fun, which is not too surprising in what remains one of the world’s overwhelmingly Catholic countries.

Preserving Nunsense

Dr. David Snowdon of the University of Kentucky is collecting 678 brains of Catholic nuns in order to star on Forensic Files—not really, in order to study diseases of aging, including Alzheimer’s. To do this, he has the cooperation of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, a teaching order founded in Bavaria in 1833 that now has 5,500 members, including 3,200 in the United States. The project started in 1986 with nuns aged 75 and above, and now there are only 61 still alive, but in recent Associated Press interviews, they all seemed optimistic that they’d be sending their medulla oblongatas to the lab any day now.

This Is Not Kosher and Not Straight

The Kosher Compass—which always points toward Jerusalem—retails for 40 bucks, and when I first saw it, I thought it must be some elaborately calibrated GPS system. Actually you have to reset it every time you travel, which means it’s just an ordinary compass that always points north but has a pointer that can be manipulated to point to Jerusalem. There are so many guilt trips in the sales pitch that you’ll want one anyway, lest your prayer direction be a millimeter off. All points on the Kosher Compass lead to a 2,000 percent markup.

God Is One Letter Away From Gold

Has anyone noticed that, the longer the name of the church, the more likely the pastor will get into trouble? Hence the case of Onslow D. Ross, pastor of Reaching Souls Cathedral of Praise Apostolic Church off Rocky Creek Road in Macon, Georgia, who is currently on trial for more than 50 counts of bank fraud, embezzlement, bribery, and similar crimes associated with diversion of funds intended to repair the church roof, in order to repair his own wallet. As is often the case in such cases, the congregation is foursquare behind him. If he needed that roof check for some other purpose, then God must have told him to palm it.

James Carville, who’s getting more and more active in the Hillary Clinton campaign because she needs a bulldog, used “Judas” to describe New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson last week, after Richardson abandoned two decades of friendship with the Clintons to endorse Barack Obama, and there was a little flurry of name-calling on the Sunday talk shows as Richardson refused to comment and Carville refused to apologize and Clinton campaign manager Howard Wolfson implied that Carville should probably apologize, and everybody missed the main point, which is that “Judas” is a time-tested tried-and-true metaphor for any betrayal—so what’s the big deal?—but the larger implication of Carville’s comment was that Hillary Clinton is Jesus, and that’s just wrong, especially since she seems so desperate that yesterday she was attacking Obama for refusing to abandon his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, referencing that speech Obama made last week that was so popular that people already want to publish it in bound golden vellum and so anybody who says that what Obama should have done is to theatrically abandon his church is sort of saying that he should be more like, uh, Judas.

Woman, Thou Art Imbibing

It’s probably not a good idea to punch your wife in the face if you run a church with “Family” in the name, especially if your wife is the local spokesperson for Domestic Violence Awareness Week, so the arrest of pastor Markus Bishop of Faith Christian Family Church in Panama City, Florida, for socking pastorette Margie in the eye (on Sunday no less!) is only slightly mitigated by the fact that, by her own admission, she did throw wine in Bishop’s face, and we can only assume it was communion wine since it evoked such a strong response, but then again she claims that she only threw the wine after he called her a whore, but that could have been a reference to the whore of Babylon, totally unrelated to his immediate domestic situation. At any rate, this can’t make Kenneth Copeland happy, since the Reverend Bishop sits on the board of Kenneth Copeland Ministries, which is normally opposed to the mere drinking of wine, much less aggressive projectile vinicultural baptisms. The last time we checked, Bishop was promising a news conference to “tell his side of the story,” so maybe he just smacked her for being a lush, which would be doctrinally correct based on the Pastoral Epistles.

Who Will Give This Guy a Break? (Not Us.)

The Archbishop of Canterbury—the guy who spends six or seven hours a day answering the question “Hey, how do you feel about homo priests?”—has used the past month trying to back-pedal and soften and stress the nuances of his speech about introducing Shariah law into the British system, and many prominent blue noses have rallied to his defense, including Prime Minister Gordon Brown. It’s true that both his speeches—the original one, delivered to lawyers at the Inns of Court, and the followup, delivered for academics and fellow churchmen at Cambridge—were misunderstood and his intent was exaggerated. All he was suggesting is that it’s unfair to bar Shariah courts when, in both England and America, marital issues are already decided by Jewish bet din courts, Catholic courts, and the Institute for Christian Conciliation (for Protestants). I won’t go into all the similar nuances in Noah Feldman’s defense of Shariah in the Times Sunday Magazine—he argues basically that Shariah law is an improvement over Muslim autocracy—but I have a bone to pick with almost every apologist for Shariah. They always say, “Shariah is not what you think. The word means much more. The word can mean this, but it can also mean that.” This is the same thing they say about jihad—“you don’t understand the full meaning of the word.” So my question is, if every Arabic word is some kind of floating ephemeral philosophical concept that can be pushed and pulled this way and that, avoiding a definition, then how are we ever to engage in dialogue with the Muslim world? Are these apologists for Islam saying that the Islamic mind is itself incapable of defining terms? Because that would be a putdown of the Muslim world, right? Our own explanation: we still think the Archbishop of Canterbury is Cat Stevens in disguise.

Thank Goodness We’ll Get It Back

Joann Bolliger, the bookkeeper at St. Maurice Catholic Church in Dania Beach, Florida, filched $800,000 the old-fashioned way, with forged payroll checks and palming the petty cash. After she serves her 366 days in prison, she’ll be expected to “pay all the money back,” according to a Fort Lauderdale federal judge who apparently has a sense of humor about such things.

When Pope Benedict XVI hits the White House next month, the leaders of other religious faiths are all invited for croutons and iced tea, but the Sikhs won’t be showing up because the Secret Service won’t let them carry their ceremonial daggers under their togas. Hey, the Pope will also be hitting the Bronx, where every citizen carries a dagger in his loose-fitting waistband and few of them are ceremonial, so just send the Sikhs down there.

Cornbread Jesus Cleanses Matt’s Sins

Matt Snyders of Minneapolis was wondering what happens on a TEC Weekend, TEC being Catholic nomenclature for Teens Encountering Christ, the program founded in 1964 that is cloaked in secrecy but has a reputation for turning alcohol-, drug- and sex-obsessed youth into Jesus Zombies. Even though he was ten years older than the normal age for inductees, Snyders infiltrated a TEC weekend and spilled all the secrets in CityPages. To tell the truth, it doesn’t sound that different from any “teens for Jesus” immersion program, except for one truly weird moment when participants are herded down into a basement for a rarely performed ceremony called a “Eucharistic adoration,” featuring an elaborate device called a “monstrance” which is used to turn a hunk of cornbread into Jesus. It works: the kids are so scared by the cornbread-turned-Christ that they stop telling drunk stories and start confessing their masturbation habits, like all good Catholic kids should.

Short and Stout

The Malaysian woman jailed for worshipping a teapot was at the center of one of those “Shariah Law outrage!” stories, but it was just the most ludicrous of a whole series of aggressive measures taken against both Hindus and Christians in a country that nominally allows freedom of religion but routinely tries to Islamicize the culture, notably by making it illegal for a Muslim to convert to another religion. Hence the “apostasy” charge against the teapot-worshipper, who seemed like a kind middle-aged woman—short and stout, come to think of it—who was just trying to join an ecumenical group that had some odd iconography. They didn’t actually worship the teapot so much as use it as a piece of symbolic sculpture. Still, bulldozing crockery is an outrage. I’m telling Antiques Roadshow.

The Nice IRS Man Will Offer You Free Coffee, However

The Grassley Six televangelists who have been saying “It’s not the Senate’s business, it’s only the business of the IRS” would do well to ponder the fate of hottie gospel singer Yolanda Adams, hostess of a syndicated morning show and frequent performer at Christian events, who’s being summoned by tax agents to explain her 1040s going back seven years. They’re especially interested in finding out whether the income on her returns can account for her $2 million home in the Royal Oaks neighborhood of Houston, her Mercedes, her Range Rover, her $800,000 trust account, her $4.9 million in “personal holdings,” and her $1.5 million in jewelry. She got one of those letters: show up at 9 a.m., bring every document for the past seven years, and be prepared to stay until we’re finished. As I say, the televangelists should probably not be begging for one of those letters.

Twenty religious holidays were celebrated last Thursday and Friday in a convergence of the heavenly bodies that occurs once every—well, since it’s never occurred before, we don’t have the algorithm for it yet. Besides Good Friday, we had Purim, Narouz, Eid Milad an Nabi, Small Holi, Magha Puja, and a host of lesser holidays that were computed from a lunar calendar, a Gregorian calendar, a lunisolar (Jewish) calendar, a Julian calendar, an Indian calendar, a Chinese calendar, and a calendar from Scooter’s Auto Body in East Ogden, Utah, featuring French bikinis. For those of you who were whining about why Easter had to be so early, the reason is that, according to the algorithm of Oudin, which is an elaboration on the algorithm of Gauss, the month M and day D of Easter for any Gregorian year Y, with all variables being integers and the remainders of all divisions being dropped, is always

C = Y/100,
N = Y - 19 • (Y/19),
K = (C - 17)/25,
I = C - C/4 - (C - K)/3 + 19 • N + 15,
I = I - 30 • (I/30),
I = I - (I/28) • (1 - (I/28) • (29/(I + 1)) • ((21 - N)/11)),
J = Y + Y/4 + I + 2 - C + C/4,
J = J - 7 • (J/7),
L = I - J,
M = 3 + (L + 40)/44,
D = L + 28 - 31 • (M/4).

We explained this last year. How many times do we have to tell you this?

Skull-Busting Clerics Preserve the Traditions of Christ’s Tomb

We’re still awaiting word on who went into Christ’s tomb yesterday, a Greek or an Armenian, to get the Magic Fire and bring it out. Starting in 1852, the rule was that a Greek priest and an Armenian priest would go into the tomb together on Easter, find the fire that spontaneously appears by the intervention of the Holy Spirit, then carry it out to the oohs and aahs of the people. But then in 2002 the Greeks said they didn’t want the Armenians in there anymore. The Armenian priests weren’t contributing anything, and the only reason they were allowed to go in in the first place is that a Turkish sultan in Palestine made a stupid rule in 1852 taking away Greek rights. Every year since then has been settled by fistfight, sort of a shoving match, like two traders who want the same space on the floor of the stock exchange. The tomb is located underneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and that church is divided up into six areas that are in charge of various Christian denominations, but the ones who wanna tussle all the time are the Greeks and the Armenians. Just last month an Armenian procession had to pass by a Greek altar, and so the Armenian priest asked some Greek pilgrims to get out of the way. Greek monks were so offended that they dogpiled the Armenian cleric, screaming that he had no authority in their territory, and two monks ended up in an all-out fistfight that had to be broken up by Jerusalem police. This came just a few months after another brawl at the Church of the Nativity, with monks clubbing each other over the head with brooms after some Greeks tried to clean an Armenian-controlled area of that church. (Anybody attempting to clean is regarded as trying to exert a territorial claim.) Seven Greeks and two Armenians were hospitalized, indicating that, when things get nasty inside the sanctuary, the Armenians are generally able to bring more heavyweights, whereas the Greeks have to rely on quickness and evasive tactics. I personally favor sending the fattest monk available into the tomb, so that, if he’s attacked while carrying the Sacred Flame, he’ll have a low center of gravity and he can presumably absorb the blows while kicking opposing priests in the groin, thereby running a minimal risk of dropping the fire or letting it go out.

Suicide Converter

Meanwhile, if you were keeping score at the Vatican on Friday:

1) The Muslim and Arab Affairs Editor
2) at the most prestigious newspaper in Italy
3) converted to Christianity
4) during the biggest Easter vigil of the year
5) and was baptized
6) by the Pope
7) in front of millions of people
8) two days after Osama Bin Laden issued a fatwa
9) that included the Pope.

We probably could have saved time by painting a bull’s eye on the forehead of Magdi Allam, who will not be giving his testimony this Wednesday night at any Bible study groups in the Old Quarter.

Clean Up on Pew Five

Good Friday services at Mars Hill in Seattle have become grislier than Mortal Kombat in recent years, under the same theory that motivated Mel Gibson when he made Passion of the Christ: the more graphic the suffering, the more powerful the witness. This is horse hockey. Any horror director can tell you that there’s no relationship between the amount of gore and the power of the image. The only time blood on the screen—or, in Mars Hill’s case, on the stage—does its job is when it triggers an imaginative leap of empathy in the hearts of the audience, and they feel the pain of the victim. Easter pageant directors at all levels would be well advised to re-watch Ben-Hur, where the Passion is evoked without seeing the actual body of Christ at all. The physical punishment of Jesus means nothing if you don’t know the backstory—i.e., that a) it was undeserved, and b) we did it. Stop handing out blood squibs to amateurs.

Okay, call me crazy, but how weird is it that you have to sit through a thirty-second Citibank credit card commercial in order to listen to Osama bin Laden’s latest fireside chat? We were especially enthralled here at The Door, because bin Laden said that the sin of “mocking” (another word for that would be satire) is “a great and more serious tragedy” than all previous fighting between Muslims and the West, and so in the future “the reckoning for it will be more severe.” Yikes! Has anybody checked those old ADT motion detectors next to the copy machine? Does the deadbolt work? Apparently—and I’m not entirely sure about this—bin Laden was upset by the latest re-publication of the Danish Muhammad cartoons. And you gotta hand it to those Danish artists, they just keep coming back for more abuse. First they reprinted the cartoons, and now a Berlin art gallery has been shut down by the police because of satirical versions of the Kaaba shrine in Mecca, once again penned by Danes. It was hard to tell whether bin Laden was angry about the old outrage or the new, but somebody should tell him that Citibank owes him money. If you deliver the message, though, and you have blonde hair, make it clear that you’re Swedish or, better yet, Icelandic—as far as we know, the Icelanders haven’t yet offended Islam in any seriously mocking way.

Remember to Do Your Nails

Okay, important safety tips from the Philippines Ministry of Health: if you intend to drive nails through your hands at any time today, please a) get your tetanus shot, and b) sterilize your nails. It’s the simple things that can make the difference between a trip to the emergency room and a happy Bunny Day. Also, if you’re planning to get into the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City to see the image of the Virgin imprinted on the cloak of Juan Diego 500 years ago, then you should have started out weeks ago, making one of those pilgrimages where everyone crawls on their knees along the highways of Mexico. But if you just want to see the Stations of the Cross, you can stand out in the main plaza of La Villa de Guadalupe and there will be lots of priests and guys dressed up like Roman soldiers carrying a giant cross and figures of Christ and the Virgin Mary and a bunch of saints we can’t remember the names of. Our Easter processions in the United States are pathetic compared to this, and we invented special effects.

Good Copt, Bad Copt

In Egypt everyone has to register with the government as either a Muslim (89 percent of the population), a Christian (10 percent) or a Jew (1 percent), which makes it tough if you’re a Baha’i. Baha’i people have to play Religious Roulette and lie about it, pretending to be one of the Big Three, or else they won’t be able to register their children in school or open a bank account. Meanwhile, the courts have been getting tough on Coptic Orthodox Christian men who convert to Islam just long enough to divorce their wives, then convert back to Christianity, because the Coptic Church frowns on divorce. Actually, they don’t just frown on it, they forbid it entirely, which is causing shockwaves as far afield as Jersey City, New Jersey, where all the Egyptian Christians in America have congregated. In 1970, the first Coptic church in America, St. Mark’s, was founded there, and since then 14 more have been established, all of them in New Jersey. This has massive ramifications for the revival of the old heresy of the divine nature of the earthly Christ, not to mention ramifications for the revival of the old heresy of the divine nature of New Jersey.

This Could Have Pissed God Off Big-Time

No sooner had I reported on grumpy Hasidic rabbis squelching the happy feet of singer Lipa Schmeltzer than the Brooklyn Sanhedrin struck again, telling budding Hasid actor Abraham Karpen that he could not co-star in a short film with Natalie Portman, lest the goyim clamor for Karpen’s visage and he become a movie star while living in a community that bans film, television and the Internet. Abraham bid a tearful farewell to Natalie, and the director hired some schlemiel and dressed him in a black hat and a swallowtail coat. And calm was restored to Williamsburg.

Robert Skolrood, who died last month, was the original executive director of the National Legal Foundation, which people poke fun at because it was founded by Pat Robertson and is widely perceived to be a Religious Right think tank. It’s much more than that, and Skolrood was the staunchest defender of the First Amendment idea that religion is entitled to a place in the public square. This is the legal principle that separates the United States from the laicite laws of France and the constitution of the European Union, both of which promote removing all vestiges of religious speech from all public fora. Skolrood brought some silly cases into the courts—including a lot of those anti-gay-rights initiatives and Ten Commandments monument fiascos—but he was on target at least once in his life. In Westside Community Schools v. Mergens (1990), he successfully argued to the Supreme Court that students had the right to form religiously-based organizations on school campuses. To all those little Bible-study groups that gather by the flagpole and shriek a lot: look to the legacy of Skolrood, a passionate man who stood up one day in Washington and made your lame-ass Jesus T-shirts possible.

Fred Phelps Should Live Here

Anti-homosexual demonstrators in Dakar, Senegal, got so out of control, gathering at the Grande Mosque to throw stones and burn garbage, that they finally had to be broken up with tear gas. The riot started when a gossip magazine published photos of a gay marriage. Homosexuality is illegal in Senegal and, judging by the climate in the capital city, Stud Boy magazine won’t be sold there anytime soon.

Muslims Insist on Niceness

Muslims have been whining for almost two years now that the Pope disrespected them during a speech in Regensburg, Germany, that most of them never even bothered to read, and so now the Vatican has gone to the trouble and expense of setting up a “Catholic-Muslim Forum” that will meet periodically and stroke one another’s egos. (For the record, the Pope was quoting a 14th-century Byzantine emperor who said that Islam was “evil and inhuman.” The Pope didn’t say that himself, he just quoted the emperor. It’s been repeatedly pointed out that this was a quotation, not an opinion, and it was done within the rulebook of all academic quotations, which is that you have to cite exactly what was said before you can talk about it. Every Islamic scholar and cleric knows this, but they act like they don’t know it.) At any rate, what’s the deal with so many people of one particular faith insisting that other faiths respect them? Baal didn’t ask for any candles to be lit in Jupiter’s temple. Who gives a flying flip when a cleric from across the seas says he hates your faith? (Not that that’s what the Pope said.) Increasingly these ecumenical meetings seem like mutterings in a hospital ward full of spiritual anorexics, frightened that their nourishment is not sufficient, clamoring for witnesses, lest they die unnoticed.

Cool Hand Mordechai

The convicted felon and Hasidic rabbi—or is it convicted rabbi and Hasidic felon—Mordechai Samet is suing the Federal Bureau of Prisons because he doesn’t want to pray in his cell. Cells have toilets, making it a ritually unclean place, but prison rules preclude inmates from praying in common areas and the chapels aren’t open often enough for guys who are into Extreme Prayer. Shima Baradaran, a lawyer at Kirkland & Ellis in New York, is arguing the case for Rabbi Samet, who is doing 27 years for stealing $4 million, financial fraud, running a fake lottery, submitting false death claims to insurance companies, and defrauding banks with counterfeit checks—so he’s got lots to pray about as he marinates at the Otisville Correctional Facility in Otisville, New York, which, despite its name, does not allow inmates to check themselves in and out like Otis on The Andy Griffith Show. What got my attention about this lawsuit was the part about not allowing inmates to pray in common areas. That’s exactly what I would want them to be doing in common areas. It seems a lot less risky than, say, making fun of an inmate’s bald spot in the weight room.

Veteran Door contributor (and Salem, Oregon, cab driver) Bob Gersztyn claims that, after more than 100 acid trips, it was simple marijuana that caused Jesus to appear to him in a vision, so he would be one of the few people not surprised by the claim by Hebrew University psychology professor Benny Shanon that Moses had to be on drugs when he talked to God on Sinai and when he saw the burning bush. (This wasn’t just a pop culture news conference, by the way. Shanon published his findings in Time and Mind, a journal of philosophy.) Shanon, who used the psychotropic drug ayahuasca during a religious ceremony in Brazil in 1991, says that he believes Moses had access to drug mixtures taken from the bark of the acacia tree or from a Sinai plant called hamal, and that would explain how he was able to “see sounds.” It would also explain how Dr. Shanon was able to “retain tenure.”

Muslim Girls No Longer Turn Crimson in Crimson Gym

Harvard University announced a few women-only hours at the campus gym so that Muslim coeds can work out without letting men see their bare epidermis, but a few sexist patriarchal chauvinist neanderthal Muslim-hating bigots objected.

No Wild Dancing Without the Proper Beard and Hat

How could you not love a singer named Lipa Schmeltzer, if for no other reason than that he was named Lipa Schmeltzer? A popular Hasidic Jew who combines traditional dancing and singing with more modern styles, he was all set to go at Madison Square Garden on March 9th when 33 Orthodox rabbis lowered the boom on him. They published a letter in the newspaper Hamodia saying that the show would be damaging to young people and that its “ribaldry and lightheadedness” were attacks on orthodoxy. This had the effect of, for all intents and purposes, cancelling the concert. The promoter is out $700,000 and is scrambling to return advance ticket money. The rabbis are not talking, except to say that they were acting on behalf of Israeli rabbis who are opposed to Schmeltzer’s brand of singing and dancing. (And yet, don’t the rabbis themselves “dance in the spirit” while balancing chairs on their noses? I know I’ve seen that on the L’Chaim Telethon and it seems pretty ribald and lightheaded to me.) All kinds of New York Jews, both orthodox and non-, are chattering away about this Hasidic version of Footloose. And, meanwhile, Lipa Schmeltzer is worried about his mortgage and his future career. Awwwww, he seems like such a nice young Jewish boy.

Just Don’t Encourage Hillary to Start Speechifying About Methodism

This “justifying your faith” thing just won’t go away. Barack Obama—standing in the tourist corridor between Old City and Society Hill yesterday, the place where white men established the principles that led to the belated freedom of black men who later passed through on the underground railroad—did his best version of an “I Have a Dream” speech, but unfortunately Obama has proven that he’s no Kennedy and he’s certainly no King. At least he extended a small measure of support for his embattled pastor, Jeremiah Wright, whereas last Friday he had pretty much tossed him into a meat-grinder blogswarm. I still don’t buy this “white people can’t understand how black people talk among themselves,” because a) there are white people in Jeremiah Wright’s church, and b) if I can understand medieval Armenian theologians in translation, I can understand black liberation shouters in daishikis on the South Side of Chicago. We know exactly what he said and why he said it, we’re just trying to find out, Did he mean it?