September 26, 2007 | 1:55 pm

Mitt Romney sits down with Christianity Today

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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We all know Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who is Mormon, could use some evangelical support. So it’s no wonder he chatted with my former editor at Christianity Today, who recently left to attend seminary. The Q&A went online this morning.

Many Christians voted for President Bush out of a feeling of faith kinship. Do you see any drawbacks to that type of voter affinity?

People should be able to vote for who they like on whatever basis they like. I try not to counsel my fellow Americans on how they make their decisions. I think by and large democracy works pretty well.

Many times, people are misinformed about a candidate or their positions, and that’s unfortunate. But if they have accurate, complete views, I say let them vote as they wish.

How are voters misinformed about you?

I just don’t think many people know me very well at this stage, and that’s to be expected. I’m a governor, and therefore not yet a national figure. I anticipate by the time the primary season rolls around next year that I will be very well known and will either be strongly supported or will be someone people don’t want to back. I’m pleased that I’m connecting with voters in the states where I’ve spoken most frequently—states like Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan, South Carolina, and Florida.

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But has your candidacy exposed differences between the two religions?

While the doctrines of my church are quite different from evangelical Christian doctrines, the values of our faiths are very much the same. I don’t know of a doctrinal difference that would suggest a different policy outcome or that would suggest that a President of my faith would lead in a different direction than President Bush, an evangelical Christian.

When I was governor here in Massachusetts, a number of Catholics wondered what it would mean to have a Mormon as a governor. After some time, one of the leading Catholics in our state remarked to my Catholic deputy chief of staff, “The best friend we have on Capitol Hill (Beacon Hill) is the Mormon governor, not the Catholic legislators.” He was joking a bit, but the value base that we share is so pronounced that the differences of doctrine really disappear.

Perhaps it’s difficult for some when two faiths have been in the battle place of ideas to say that we disagree on doctrine but share a very strong value base. It’s almost like a strong Republican and a strong Democrat have been battling for ideas in America for 50 years, and they suddenly find themselves in a foxhole fighting the Germans. They have no problem working with each other, because whether you’re a strong Democrat or a strong Republican, you share the same American hope for the future.

How do you answer evangelicals who want their President to have faith but not your faith?

It depends on what they worry about. Do they want agreement on doctrine, and does that really effect how someone leads as President? Or does someone want a President who shares values and will preserve the values and culture of America? That will only happen if people band together where we share common values.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I wish people wouldn’t vote for politicians based on their purported religious views. I’m fairly confident that Mitt Romney is a sincere Mormon; if not, he would have dropped the shtick a while ago because it’s been nothing but campaign baggage. But I’m very skeptical of other candidates who profess to be the flavor-of-the-decade brand of Christian. You know what I’d like this time around? A good president.

September 26, 2007 | 12:35 pm

Gay ‘Last Supper’ sparks outrage

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Say you are a God-fearing Christian, not puritanical but also not one to take blasphemy lightly. How would you feel about a gay festival promotion that depicts leather-clad men as Jesus and the Apostles partaking of the Last Supper?

I would find it ridiculous, but I wouldn’t get all worked up over it. I can’t speak for other Christians, though, who use some pretty loaded language in attacking the ad, which some liken to cartoons of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad.

On TownHall:

On September 30, a Sunday – the Lord’s Day in the Christian church – San Francisco will host the Folsom Street Fair, perhaps the most hedonistic event held in public in America. The fair is the San Francisco homosexual community’s annual celebration of promiscuity, sadomasochism and debauchery. The ad for this year’s fair mocks Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, with a half-naked beefcake Christ and disciples bedecked in all manner of leather and chains. The bread and wine of The Last Supper are replaced with sex toys.

From WorldNetDaily:

”Senator Larry Craig was arrested and driven out of the Senate for allegedly soliciting public ‘gay’ sex, yet during this event the city of San Francisco suspends the law and allows ‘gay’ men and women to parade the streets fully nude, many having sex – even group orgies – in broad daylight, while taxpayer-funded police officers look on and do absolutely nothing,” (said Concerned Women for America policy director Matt Barber).

Barber encouraged mainstream media to cover the event with cameras in hand.

“There’s an unbelievable news story here,” he said. “The Folsom Street Fair is reminiscent of biblical Sodom and Gomorrah, and the media should document exactly what the city of San Francisco is allowing to occur – in public – in the name of ‘tolerance.’”

Of course, Bill Donahue of the Catholic League had something to say.

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September 26, 2007 | 10:14 am

CBS Sports not aware of prayer

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

There was some discussion here recently over whether God cared about people praying for injured football player Kevin Everett. I said he does, and got some criticism for it. This morning, GetReligion takes issue with CBS’ lack of attention to the prayer circle going on Sunday while Houston Texans DT Cedric Killings laid motionless on the field.

The CBS announcers, filling the time-gap, commented on their hopes for Killings health and commented on the number of Texans players holding hands. There was no mention of the fact that the players were on their knees, in circles, holding hands with their heads bowed.

Apparently all the announcers saw at first was a bunch of players holding hands because it wasn’t until the very end that they mentioned that the players were likely praying for the recovery and health of Killings.

The AP comes right out and says what everyone else saw during this scary moment:

In a scene eerily reminiscent of the one played out in Buffalo two weeks earlier, the Colts and Houston found themselves unified in prayer as Texans defensive tackle Cedric Killings left the field strapped to a stretcher before resuming the game.

. . .

As part of the Texans’ “wedge” unit, the 310-pound Killings ran up the field at full speed, going head first to open a hole. Rookie receiver Roy Hall met him at about the Texans’ 15, turning his left shoulder slightly in an effort to break through and make the tackle as players are taught. Both dropped instantly to the ground, and while Hall eventually walked away, Killings did not.

. . .

It appears Killings and Hall will, fortunately, be all right.

Killings spent Sunday night in a Houston hospital with a neck injury and had feeling in his arms and legs. Hall walked briefly into the Colts locker room Monday wearing a bulky harness over his left shoulder, and Dungy said he expected Hall back within a few weeks.

 

The good news is that Killings has been able to stand in the hospital. For more good reporting on the situation, here’s the Houston Chronicle’s Richard Justice.

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September 26, 2007 | 12:12 am

That neighborhood racket is a bunch of atoning Jews

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The Jewish Journal is getting in the mood of 24/7, and today, instead of waiting until Thursday, uploaded Tom Tugend’s explanation of what went wrong Friday with LA bureaucrats’ Yom Kippur sin.

The scene was a Kol Nidrei service at Yeshivas Yavneh, a Hebrew academy run out of a former Tudor estate in Los Angeles’ pricey Hancock Park neighborhood, not far from the mayor’s official residence. After 8 p.m., two building inspectors showed up and told a congregant that it was closing time, but the 200 Orthodox Jews observing Yom Kippur refused to leave. Then the anger spread.

As word of the strange incident spread through the closely knit Orthodox community in Hancock Park, tempers and outrage rose.

The yeshivaworld.com Web site declared that the incident was “reminiscent of the cowardly sneak attack on Israel during the Yom Kippur War,” and quoted one woman worshipper, a wheelchair-bound Holocaust survivor, “I was frightened. I started crying. I don’t want to go to jail. I want to pray.”

By Sunday evening, top aides to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and City Councilman Tom LaBonge, joined by Councilman Jack Weiss, met with Orthodox community rabbis and officials of the offending department in City Hall for some hasty damage control.

On Monday evening, the mayor and two councilmen released a statement condemning the “outrageous intrusion” on erev Yom Kippur, “which caused great pain and anguish.”

This is not the first time Jews have clashed with their less-than-welcoming neighbors in the once WASPy Hancock Park. It’s also not the first time LA city officials have shown insensitivity when dealing with religious observance (remember that story I did about the cops allegedly tearing down a mezuzah at a pot pharmacy?).

(Hat tip: LAObserved)

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September 25, 2007 | 5:48 pm

My interview with Sy Hersh goes global

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

So my interview with Seymour Hersh brought 3,000 visitors to JewishJournal.com yesterday. LAObserved, Romenesko, Huffington Post and War and Piece all linked to it. My Web editor just called to say he heard it quoted on Nick Madigan’s “Minding the Media” program on KCRW this afternoon. Here’s a link to the transcript:

What will the journalism of the future look like? Will it continue to obsess over absurd, half-in-the-bag teenybopper celebrities, and insist on making up silly headlines to describe criminal sports figures and tin-pot dictators?

With fewer and fewer jobs available in traditional journalism, will aspiring reporters and editors dedicate their energy to the fluid, often irresponsible blogosphere, where opinion is king?

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In an interview with the Jewish Journal, another veteran journalist, Seymour M. Hersh, who is 70 and writes for the New Yorker, said he has embraced the new order.

  “There is an enormous change taking place in this country in journalism, and it is online,” said Hersh, who received a Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for uncovering the My Lai massacre.

  “I hate to tell this to The New York Times or The Washington Post,” he said. “We are going to have online newspapers, and they are going to be spectacular. And they are really going to cut into daily journalism.”

“We have a vibrant, new way of communicating in America,” Hersh said. “We haven’t come to terms with it. I don’t think much of a lot of the stuff that is out there. But there are a lot of people doing very, very good stuff.”

 

When I was learning the difference between a nut graph and a set-up and why “lede” is spelled so oddly, Hersh was a journalistic hero of mine. (I think I always related because of the glasses he wore.) What I found most interesting from our conversation was this bit of honesty:

JJ: You turned 70 this year. Why keep working so hard?

SH: I don’t work that hard. I write four or five pieces a year. Secondly, what do you want me to do? Play professional golf? I can’t do that. You do what you can do. And I’m in a funny spot because I have an ability to communicate with people I have known for a number of years. They trust me, and I trust them, so I keep on doing these little marginal stories.

JJ: That’s all they are? Marginal?

SH: With these stories, if they slow down or make people take a deep breath before they bomb Iran, that is a plus. But they are not going to stop anybody. This is a government that is unreachable by us, and that is very depressing. In terms of adding to the public debate, the stories are important. But not in terms of changing policy. I have no delusions about that.

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September 25, 2007 | 3:46 pm

God’s not dead, but is religion?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

My copy of UCLA Magazine, with my story about the intersection of God and grades on the cover, finally arrived in the mail today. Flipping through my story—the first thing all journalists do is turn to their story—I noticed a nugget from a sidebar that was worth discussion.

“The prediction made by some intellectuals at the end of the Second World War that by the year 2000 religion will have withered and only be a matter of personal interest to some folks—like some folks are Dodger fans and others are Orthodox Jews—that hypothesis has been thoroughly falsified,” claims Scott Bartchy, UCLA history professor and director of the College of Letters & Science’s interdepartmental Center for the Study of Religion. “The role of religion is enormous in current events.”

Forty-plus years ago, Time magazine asked whether God is dead? As Sun-Times religion columnist Cathleen Falsani noted three years ago in an award-winning story that pre-dated the divine presidential election of 2004, the answer has been a resounding no.

Standing around the watercooler or in line at Starbucks these days, conversation is just as likely to turn to early Christianity and whether the apostles spoke “street Aramaic” or a more formal version of the near-dead language, as it is to whether Tony and Carmella Soprano can repair their failing marriage.

A few channels away from HBO—on CNN, FoxNews or even Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show”—and in the newspaper each morning, competing factions wrestle with some of life’s most basic questions, including what a family is, what marriage is, what it means to be “under God,”  and whether life may be manufactured artificially.  In one way or another, God’s name is invoked in the battle to answer each of those questions.

God is in high-demand—in politics, music, court, film, books, even to a certain extent in fashion with “What Would Jesus Wear?” accessories, and the increasingly popular “Jesus is My Homeboy” T-shirts. About 40 percent of Americans today say they have attended services at a house of worship in the last week.

Well, I’ll forgive her for neglecting to mention the popularity and influence of The God Blog (three years before it went live) but, certainly, it seems that Nietzsche was wrong. Do you agree?

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September 25, 2007 | 2:24 pm

An ‘oasis of peace’ in Israel

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

NEVE SHALOM, ISRAEL—The music blared in Arabic as a knot of women twirled slowly around the bride-to-be. Well-dressed onlookers, some in traditional Muslim head scarves, clapped and swayed.

On this evening of celebration, the fireworks sizzled, sweets beckoned and jubilant guests congratulated the Arab bride’s parents with a double kiss and hearty “Mazel tov!”

Mazel tov?

“It’s very normal,” said Nava Sonnenschein, one of the Jews clapping at the edge of the dance circle. “For here.”

The usual rules of the Middle East often don’t apply in Neve Shalom, founded in the 1970s as a utopian village on a hilltop in Israel’s midsection. For nearly three decades, its inhabitants have sought to defy the polarizing tugs of politics and nationalism.

Though most Jews and Arabs in Israel are kept apart by segregated communities and long years of mutual mistrust, Neve Shalom and its 250 residents—half Jews, half Arab citizens of Israel—represent a living experiment in integration.

This was the lede of the Column One in today’s LA Times.

Neve Shalom’s residents, mostly left-leaning professionals and academics, have been tested by two Palestinian uprisings, war in Lebanon and a steep deterioration in relations between Jews and Arabs in Israel. At times, the two groups here triumphed over those divisive pressures. At others, they fell prey.

To much of the rest of Israel, Neve Shalom is a harmless if worthy novelty. But Jewish extremists once declared the Jews here traitors and sprinkled nails on the road to pop tires. The village’s Arab residents, who refer to themselves as Palestinian citizens of Israel, often are asked by fellow Arabs if they really believe that Jews can accept them as equals.

Neve Shalom, though, is not a novelty. There are many villages and towns in the north near Lebanon, like Acre (Akko), where Arab Israelis and Jewish Israelis live side by side.

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September 25, 2007 | 12:02 pm

“Older, Wiser Ex-Gay Movement’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Discussion of the “ex-gay” movement made some appearances on The God Blog this summer. Here’s a longer piece about the maturation of the movement from Christianity Today.

Since its beginnings in the 1970s, the ex-gay movement has engaged gay advocates in a battle of testimonies. Transformed ex-gay leaders are the best argument for their movement. Likewise, those who’ve left the ex-gay movement in despair and disgust are the best counterargument. The debate continued this June, when Exodus International held its 32nd annual conference in Irvine, California, featuring dozens of speakers and seminar leaders who have quit homosexuality. Down the road outside the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, a news conference featured three former Exodus leaders saying “ex-gay” is a delusion.

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An older, wiser ex-gay movement is certainly clearer about what it has to offer. Early hopes for instant healing have given way to belief that transformation occurs through a lifetime of discipleship.

Tanya Erzen, a professor at Ohio State University, spent 18 months studying New Hope Ministry, a live-in program led by the Worthens in San Rafael, California. Though unsympathetic to ex-gay goals, Erzen came to empathize with the people she met. In Straight to Jesus: Sexual and Christian Conversions in the Ex-Gay Movement, she describes their view of change.

“Ex-gays undergo a conversion process that has no endpoint, and they acknowledge that change encompasses desires, behavior, and identities that do not always align neatly or remain fixed,” she writes. “Ex-gay men and women are born-again religiously, and as part of that process, they consider themselves reconstituted sexually. … In the words of Curtis [one of the program’s participants], ‘Heterosexuality isn’t the goal; giving our hearts and being obedient to God is the goal.’ … Desires and attractions might linger for years, but they would emerge with new religious identities and the promise that faith and their relationships with one another and God would eventually transform them.”

Erzen’s point, I believe, is a valid one. It’s the reason scientists don’t believe in “ex-gay” therapy. If homosexuality is a genetic predisposition—and the Rev. Al Mohler is willing to admit that possibility—then how could Christian counseling affect it? Instead, working with the premise that God doesn’t approve of homosexuality (despite the perceived contradiction that he would have given people a desire he prohibits), the mission of these therapists should be to train their patients hearts more fervently on what they believe to be God’s desire for man. I’m sure there are plenty of people who disagree with this.

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September 25, 2007 | 1:31 am

Anti-Semitic Patriot Dames

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Sometimes, the best blog posts I could write are those I don’t because I keep waiting for the perfect moment when all my thoughts and the clutter on my desk will be aligned. Because that never happens, some of these stories fall by the wayside, which is what happened with the Patriot Dames.

These two Ohio sisters have a Web site where they like to propagate bigotry, and last month one of the sisters, Susan Purtee, got in trouble with her employer, the Columbus Police Department. It turned out city officials didn’t think it was appropriate for their employees to be attacking blacks and blaming Jews for the world’s problems. (Of course, the ADL agreed.)

There video ranting against Jews has been taken down from YouTube, which is too bad because it’s really a hoot. You can still see it at their Web site: Just click on the “download” button and then click on “Jews.” Here’s a sampling of what they say:

“We are going to investigate to see if the Jews are the problem in the United States, as they were in other countries. So if your feelings are going to get hurt, it’s best not to watch.”

The sisters than praise Sen. Joseph McCarthy as the greatest American from the 20th Century. They blame immoral Jews for the “filth” in the media that “pollutes” Americans.

“They started to tell us, the Gentiles, how to live. Because if we lived that way they would make a lot of money. ... It’s all about money.”

Not all Jews. Just those who follow Torah.

“We’re not talking about the Jews that live like normal regular people. But as long as you are a Jew, you have that thinking that everybody else is beneath you. ... We are nothing. We are dirt. We are people they can suck off of, the Gentiles. ... Mel Gibson was right. The fact this man can say what was on his mind, whether he was drunk or was straight. ... The Jews cause problems.”

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September 24, 2007 | 2:58 pm

Jewish authors date to Moses

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I’m a Michael Chabon fan—“Wonder Boys,” “Final Solution,” “Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” and, oh yeah, that Pulitzer-Prize winner I haven’t yet read. It was a treat, then, to see last week that the Jewish weekly in San Francisco, j., had a cover story on Chabon and his wife, best-selling author Ayelet Waldman.

Being a Jewish author “is a great tradition to be part of, stretching back to …” She pauses.

“Moses?” suggests Chabon.

“Moses,” states Waldman definitively, adding Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow and Mordecai Richler for good measure.

 

Bintel Blogger Daniel Treiman, though, notes a glaring gap in the j.’s story, which doesn’t touch the controversy surrounding “Yiddish Policemen’s”:

Critics — some more sober than others — have argued that the book is hostile to Israel. It’s a disappointing omission, given that some have already started casually referring (perhaps unfairly) to Chabon as an anti-Zionist. It would have been good to hear what Chabon has to say on this issue.

You know what I would also consider unfortunate? That an author is branded an anti-Zionist—which has become a synonym for anti-Semite—because they write a fictional account of the efforts to create Zion in a parallel reality.

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September 24, 2007 | 12:53 pm

Live from Tehran ... I mean Columbia U

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The New York Times’ City Room blog has live updates on Ahmadinejadathon.

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September 24, 2007 | 10:33 am

All Saints cleared by IRS

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Remember all that hub-bub in late 2005 when the Internal Revenue Service said it was investigating an anti-war sermon delivered at All Saints Episcopal in Pasadena? Well yesterday, congregants were told the liberal church is in the clear. Sort of.

The investigation is over, the church did not lose its tax-exempt status, but the IRS still said the speech—seen by some as supporting Kerry over Bush, which non-profits can’t do—was illegal. The LA Times reports that the rector wants a clarification and an apology. Good luck.

“To be sure, we are pleased that the IRS exam is over,” the Rev. J. Edwin Bacon Jr. said in his 9 a.m. sermon, which was interrupted several times by applause. “However, the main issue of protecting the freedom of this church and other religious communities to worship according to the dictates of their conscience and core values is far from accomplished.”

Bacon predicted that the vague, mixed message from the IRS after its nearly two-year investigation of the All Saints case would have a continued “chilling effect” on the freedom of clerics from all faiths to preach about moral values and significant social issues such as war and poverty.

Although the church no longer faces the imminent loss of its tax-exempt status, All Saints has “no more guidance about the IRS rules now than when we started this process,” the rector said. He said the church would continue its struggle with the IRS, which he said so far had cost the 3,500-member congregation about $200,000.

(A quick note: The next line of the article—“One of Southern California’s largest and most liberal congregations”—is so far from accurate its comical. All Saints is both prominent and liberal, but certainly its not at the extreme end of the spectrum. But more hyperbolic is the “largest” claim. In the era of 7-Eleven mega-churches, a 3,500-member congregation seems quaint.)

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