June 28, 2007 | 6:26 pm

Bloomberg: ‘Short Jewish billionaire from New York’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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He’d probably be the most-qualified candidate running for president, certainly the best choice from New York. But Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s not in the race, remember?

The slow-burning fire was stoked last week when Bloomberg defected from the Republican party. By going independent, speculators speculated, he could galvanize those disgruntled conservative voters while snaking some of the Clinton and Obama vote. But no one really thinks he could win—unless the Protocoals of the Elders of Zion really are true—just that he’d make a boring race a lot more interesting.

The Forward’s Jennifer Siegel, whose work I find detailed and insightful, has this report about Bloomberg redefining the role of Jewish pol.

Bloomberg the mayor has transformed himself into a politician whom the vast majority of New York Jews can get behind, even though he does not present himself as a typically “Jewish” politician. It’s a characteristic that some say could prove beneficial if the mayor — who derides himself as “a short, Jewish billionaire from New York” — launches the independent bid for the White House that is suggested by his recent decision to quit the Republican Party.

“Bloomberg has never run away from who he is, but he’s not running around waving a lulav, and he’s not holding up a mezuza all day long,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic consultant who worked for Bloomberg’s opponent in 2001, Mark Green. “And why should he? It’s part of his identity, but it’s not way up front, nor is anything else.”

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“Mike Bloomberg is proud of being a Jew, but he’s a ‘WASH’ — a white, Anglo-Saxon Hebrew,” said Morris Offit, a partner of Bloomberg’s at Salomon Brothers. Offit has served with him on the boards of John Hopkins and The Jewish Museum. “Given his class and his secularity, he is a Jew, but in an ethnic and cultural sense.”

 

June 28, 2007 | 3:09 am

Take Jesus out to the ballgame

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Any sports fan has noticed athletes like to cross their chest or point to the heavens or take a knee after hitting a jack or scoring a touchdown or sinking a long putt or (fill in the blank). But it’s not often that you hear about sports organizations getting involved with religious expression.

Not like the Promise Keepers who used to pack football stadiums with tens of thousands of weeping men. But, like I wrote about two years ago with the Inland Empire 66ers, a class A team for the Dodgers, a faith night for fans. Church at the ball park. Or, as the Cardinals call it at Busch, Christian Family Day. The idea is spreading, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Baseball has been called an American religion. Its players are worshipped, its rules memorized and debated like Scripture, its fields tended like sacred ground.

“The great, old ballparks ... are spoken of with the awe generally reserved for the great cathedrals of Europe,” baseball historian Roberta Newman has written. “They are our Green Cathedrals.”

For 17 years, St. Louis’ Green Cathedral — Busch Stadium — and some of the gods who play there have hosted a group with a purpose higher than winning a pennant. They have come to the ballpark to win souls for Jesus Christ.

I’ve often wondered how many players are sincere when they give props to God, whether they are humble enough to believe their perfectly sculpted bodies and unreal talents come from someone beside themselves. I’m more cynical when it comes to business enterprises.

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June 27, 2007 | 11:09 am

‘The sacred secrets of Saddam’s super secret WMDs’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

This scary mention of the non-truths being propagated by those who are supposed to be bearers of the truth comes from The Revealer:

Why do people still believe Saddam had WMDs? Because Jesus tells them so. Well, not Jesus, but his modern disciples. Rod Parsley, a rising star of charismatic fundamentalism who’s had a heavy impact on national politics, features on his “Breakthrough” program tonight Dr. Perry Stone, an apocalypse scholar who claims top national security sources and Israelis assure him that inspectors discovered enough WMDs in Saddam’s bunkers before the war to destroy the world three times over.

Why didn’t he? Because he wanted to give them to his mortal enemy of Iran, using special airplanes—with the seats torn out to make room for more nukes! It’d be easy to dismiss this kookiness as just that were it not for Parsley’s flock—they’re ordinary Ohioans. His megachurch is one of the most racially-integrated in the country. His followers aren’t classic fundamentalists, but in large part people who might have been liberals once—before Pastor Parsley delivered them the news.

(Photo: Right Winged)

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June 26, 2007 | 10:46 pm

Dept. of No-Duh

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The Chicago Council on Global Affairs reported Tuesday that American interests would be better served if Muslims Americans were better integrated into society.

This is a group that is half-Muslim, half non-Muslim that came together because we believe that America is losing by not having the appropriate involvement of Muslim Americans in the civil discourse of politics,” said task force co-chair Lynn Martin, a former Republican congresswoman and secretary of labor in the George H.W. Bush administration. “This is not whiny. This is not about what’s wrong. What it says is, here are some potential solutions.”

Among them: expanded counterterrorism partnerships between Muslim Americans and law enforcement, development of a leadership network of prominent Muslim Americans to work with youth and serve as “community ambassadors,” building stronger Muslim American institutions and working with coalitions on common concerns like immigration and health care.

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June 26, 2007 | 3:53 pm

Gaza Christians ready to flee

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The Lebanese experiment of Muslims and Christians living and governing together appears to have failed. Now, with Hamas controlling the Gaza Strip, there is concern that Christians there will have no choice but to flee.

Broken crucifixes and shards from a Jesus statue have been swept up, but Gaza’s tiny Christian community says the violent warning sent by Islamic militants cannot be erased.

The ransacking of Gaza’s Catholic convent and an adjacent Rosary Sisters school during Hamas’ sweep to power this month broke more than wood and plaster: it signaled the end of a relatively peaceful, even if sometimes uneasy relationship between Gaza’s 1.4 million Muslims and 3,000 Christians.

Despite Hamas promises of protection, Christians fear more attacks, and some say they want to leave. Gaza’s flock has already been hit hard by emigration in recent years, and a new exodus could effectively wipe out one of the Arab world’s tiniest and oldest Christian communities.

“We don’t trust them (Hamas). Our time is coming,” said a Greek Orthodox Christian.

 

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June 26, 2007 | 2:29 pm

Santeria shortstop

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Few ball players want to talk about it, but Santeria is taking hold in the Major Leagues, according to the LA Times.

CHICAGO — On a shelf in the office of Chicago White Sox Manager Ozzie Guillen, mixed in among the family photos, the Roberto Clemente bobblehead and the Napoleon Dynamite figurine, are four small but intimidating religious icons.

“If you see my saints, you’ll be like ‘Golly, they’re ugly,’ ” Guillen had said before inviting a visitor to come in. “They’ve got blood. They’ve got feathers. You go to the Catholic church, the [saints] have got real nice clothes.

    “My religion, you see a lot of different things you never see.”

Guillen’s religion is Santeria, a largely misunderstood Afro-Cuba spiritual tradition that incorporates the worship of orisha — multidimensional beings who represent the forces of nature — with beliefs of the Yoruba and Bantu people of Africa and elements of Roman Catholicism. And Guillen, born in Venezuela, is one of a growing number of Latin American players, managers and coaches who are followers of the faith.

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Santeria — the name translates roughly as “the way of the saints” — has long been derided (think Pedro Cerrano, the character in the movie “Major League” who turns to the gods to get out of a batting slump) and dismissed in Judeo-Christian society as a primitive cult based solely on bloody animal sacrifices and voodoo, both of which it has. But the syncretic religion is much deeper than that, focused primarily on the worship of orisha, or saints, who govern a specific area of life.

“Santeria always was a religion that was persecuted,” said Miguel De La Torre, professor of social ethics at Denver’s Iliff School of Theology and author of “Santeria: The Beliefs and Rituals of a Growing Religion in America.”

“You had to keep it secret. For self-survival and to survive in this culture, you had to keep it secret because it was seen as a primitive religion. The U.S. culture has described Santeria as some type of a bloodletting evil religion. The media has really characterized Santeria as something that people from lower classes celebrate.”

Among the players willing to talk about practicing Santeria were Angels pitcher Francisco Rodriguez, Marlins third baseman Miguel Cabrera and White Sox pitcher Jose Contreras.

“It’s something beautiful,” said Contreras, who became a babalao, or Santeria high priest, before defecting from Cuba in 2002. “And it helps me a lot. It gives me peace and tranquillity, but more than that.”

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June 26, 2007 | 10:10 am

Mitt Romney: Draft dodger? Not quite

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

As the Vietnam War raged in the 1960s, Mitt Romney received a deferment from the draft as a Mormon “minister of religion” for the duration of his missionary work in France, which lasted two and a half years.

Before and after his missionary deferment, Romney also received nearly three years of deferments for his academic studies. When his deferments ended and he became eligible for military service in 1970, he drew a high number in the annual lottery that determined which young men were drafted. His high number ensured he was not drafted into the military.

The deferments for Mormon missionaries became increasingly controversial in the late 1960s, especially in Utah, leading the Mormon Church and the government to limit the number of church missionaries who could put off their military service. That agreement called for each church ward, or church district, to designate one male every six months to be exempted from potential duty for the duration of his missionary work.

Romney’s home state was Michigan, making his 4-D exemption as a missionary all but automatic because of the relatively small number of Mormon missionaries from that state.

That is a Web exclusive from part one of the Boston Globe’s ambitious seven-part series that began Sunday, “The Making of Mitt Romney.” Part two looks at Romney’s mission in France. So far, Romney’s Mormon faith has caused him a lot of grief as he seeks the Republican presidential nomination.

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June 26, 2007 | 12:07 am

The righteousness of prancing in your underpants

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

This post has very little to do with religion, save maybe what it says about the vulnerability of college students to be sucked into a clearly odd movement.

See, five years ago, I was a sophomore at UCLA when my friends and I began running around Westwood in our underwear. We called this finals week act of rebellion “Undie Run.” Some of my roommates hoped to start a tradition, but I don’t think anyone believed it would actually happen.

Wow. Were we wrong. Two weeks ago, what was once a 13-man jog up and down Glenrock Avenue was 8,000 to 9,000 students running from the apartments to Powell Library.

Last fall, I wrote about the origins of Undie Run and my astonishment at seeing what it had become. LAist has some insane photos from the spring run; they might not be appropriate for work.

(Pictured in the cowboy hat and bikini briefs is a former roommate, Mark Chipello.)

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June 25, 2007 | 4:51 pm

Salman Rushdie can’t catch a break

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Two decades after Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses earned him a death warrant in the Muslim world, the outspoken author gets knighted by the Queen of England. His PR outside the West, however, could use some help. In case you missed the Wall Street Journal this weekend, here’s a snippet:

Another Friday in Peshawar, Quetta and Karachi—and as if on cue, the hoarse, bearded and pyromaniacal pour out of the mosques into the streets armed with Union Jacks and effigies of Queen Elizabeth II, Tony Blair and the newly knighted Sir Salman Rushdie.

Having protested Danish cartoons and popish detours into Byzantine history to the point of exhaustion, the proverbial Muslim street is once again seething. Pakistan’s minister of religious affairs said Mr. Rushdie’s award justified suicide bombings, while a group of traders in Islamabad banded together to place a $140,000 bounty on his head. Fathi Sorour, the speaker of Egypt’s parliament, declared that, “Honoring someone who has offended the Muslim religion is a bigger error than the publication of caricatures attacking Prophet Muhammad.” Malaysian protesters besieged the British high commission (embassy) in Kuala Lumpur chanting, “Destroy Britain” and “Crush Salman Rushdie.” With the irony perhaps lost in translation, Iran, whose president thinks nothing of threatening to wipe Israel off the map, condemned the award and called it a clear sign of (that mysterious new ailment) “Islamophobia.”

For many of us, however, her majesty’s conferral is a welcome example of something that has grown exceedingly rare: British backbone. After years of kowtowing to every fundamentalist demand imaginable—from accommodating the burqa in schools and colleges to re-orienting prison toilets to face away from Mecca—the British seem to be saying enough is enough. Nobody expects Mr. Rushdie to be awarded the Nishan-e-Pakistan, the Collar of the Nile or Iran’s Islamic Republic Medal, but in Britain, as elsewhere in the civilized world, great novelists are honored for their work. A pinched view of the human condition or poorly imagined characters may harm your prospects. Blasphemy does not.

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June 25, 2007 | 10:23 am

Can a real Christian stop sinning?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The first question, actually, should be: What is a real Christian? Once that has been established, which might take a few millennia and several hundred denominational rifts—actually before that has been established, let’s move on.

Some Christians believe that when a person starts following Christ, they have the ability to stop sinning, not immediately, but eventually. This doctrine of entire sanctification, however, has thrown the 100-year-old Church of the Nazarene, which began here in L.A., into a “theological crisis.”

“A lot of the folks who have been around the church awhile thought of themselves as being characterized by things they don’t do: You don’t smoke, you don’t drink, you don’t go to dances, and in some parts of the denomination, you don’t wear makeup or go to clubs or some parts of society,” said Thomas Jay Oord, professor of theology and philosophy at Northwest Nazarene University in Nampa, Idaho, and co-author of Relational Holiness. “That kind of Christianity loses steam really quickly. It’s not something you can give your whole life to.”

That comment is from a short piece I have in next month’s Christianity Today, online now. Which brings us back to the headline question: Can a Christian really stop sinning?

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June 23, 2007 | 6:57 pm

Rudy’s priest: the accused pedophile

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

For those of us not hot on history, the past six years have taught us plenty about the follies of presidents rewarding political loyalists with high-office jobs. Hurricane Katrina. The reconstruction of Iraq. The U.S. attorneys debacle. (It seems there should be some way to blame LA City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo’s recent run on Bush favoritism, but, alas, there is not.)

Now think about this: Rudy Giuliani, who continues to lead the polls among Republican presidential candidates despite losing the support of most evangelicals, employs his childhood friend despite Grand Jury accusations that the man is a pedophile. Salon has the story:

Giuliani employs his childhood friend Monsignor Alan Placa as a consultant at Giuliani Partners despite a 2003 Suffolk County, N.Y., grand jury report that accuses Placa of sexually abusing children, as well as helping cover up the sexual abuse of children by other priests. Placa, who was part of a three-person team that handled allegations of abuse by clergy for the Diocese of Rockville Centre, is referred to as Priest F in the grand jury report. The report summarizes the testimony of multiple alleged victims of Priest F, and then notes, “Ironically, Priest F would later become instrumental in the development of Diocesan policy in response to allegations of sexual abuse of children by priests.”

Blogger Andrew Sullivan asks himself why Giuliani would affiliate with an alleged pedophile, even if charges weren’t pursued.

Because he was Giuliani’s childhood friend, best man at his first wedding, baptized his son, smoothed the way for his divorce annulment, and buried his mother. In Giuliani’s world, family is family. Loyalty is loyalty. And the children can go to hell.

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June 23, 2007 | 1:15 am

‘Have you prayed for bin Laden today?’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Wow, that’s a gut check, right? I found that headline on the Christianity Today homepage. It’s an interesting question that leads into a Q & A with a Mid East missionary about the crisis in the Palestinian territories and Christian relations with Islamic fundamentalists.

Why have there been so many suicide bombers in recent years?

I challenge the Hamas leaders about the suicide bombers, which I’m terribly, terribly opposed to. I’ve preached against it. I contended in the strongest terms when speaking with the Hamas leaders, and they said, “Brother Andrew, we agree with you. The Qur’an forbids suicide.” I said, “What is it that I see all around me?” They said, “But that is religious.” I said, “Of course, you make it a million times worse because now you have a million volunteers.”

There’s no way we can cope with or challenge that level of dedication. They believe in something, and they’re going to die for it. We fight [Islamic ideology] with bombs and armies. We’re doomed to lose that battle. We have to go back to the root causes. We have to listen, we have to understand, we have to talk, and then I think we can still make progress.

Speaking as a Christian, they are not our enemies. God loves the world. And in my new book, Secret Believers, we propose the question, “Have you prayed for bin Laden today?” That question should shock a lot of Christians. Of course we haven’t! That is why he is what he is. We have an evangelical black list of people we don’t want to see in heaven and put bin Laden on top. Saddam Hussein is probably second.

Well, Team America has taken care of the latter, and look where that’s gotten us. Who knows if we’re even still looking for bin Laden. You’d think U.S. intelligence would have spotted him streaking the White House lawn.

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