February 15, 2012 | 4:07 pm

Matisyahu Beard.0: the Jewish reggae star is bringing the beard back

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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Matisyahu and son, via his Twitter.

It’s been years since Jewish reggae artist Matisyahu was Lubavitch. And in December he dropped the Chasidic label, too. That came with a clear symbolic act: he shaved his glorious beard.

At the time he said:

I felt that in order to become a good person I needed rules—lots of them—or else I would somehow fall apart.  I am reclaiming myself.  Trusting my goodness and my divine mission

Fans were concerned that this was an indication of personal spiritual struggles. Maybe they’ll take peace in this news: Matisyahu is bringing the beard back. That much can be seen from the image (right) that he tweeted.

So why the change of heart? Did Matisyahu just need a change of pace? Or is he indicating another spiritual shift?

February 14, 2012 | 12:39 pm

Losing faith in religion blogs*

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Since The God Blog started almost five years ago, countless great religion blogs have launched. Some, like the DMN religion blog, are not what they used to be. Others have stopped posting altogether.

In the past two weeks, we lost a pair of good ones. (Update—add Belief Beat to the list.) First, the Seeker, which had already gone through one major transition, went looking elsewhere. Then yesterday it was Nicole Neroulias’ Belief Beat. Now today, Gary Stern of Blogging Religiously says that he’s “signing off”:

I’m too busy covering education these days to give this blog anywhere near the attention it deserves. Plus, I’ve been off the religion beat long enough that I no longer have the insight or sources to offer a “New York point of view” on religion news.

I know some people found this blog from my “Faithbeat” Twitter account. I set up that account while I was still covering religion full-time (and when I was writing a weekly column called “FaithBeat.”) I linked the Twitter account to my blog—but also intended to Tweet religion news. But then I lost the religion beat and the Twitter thing never got going.

The end of Blogging Religiously is even sadder if you think about how this reflects on ongoing changes in the news business.

It used to be that every newspaper had a weekly religion page and many had multiple reporters assigned to the religion beat. Then, just as religion pages were dying, newspapers (about a decade late) discovered blogs and many encouraged religion reporters to start religion blogs. When those papers later killed their religion beat, they often still had a newly assigned reporter who could keep up the religion blog.

But as Stern’s story shows, even that’s not sustainable in many situations.

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February 13, 2012 | 10:10 am

Jeremy Lin: Asian American Christian basketball star

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Jeremy Lin at the 2010 Golden State Warriors open practice. Photo by Wikipedia

Like so many Americans, I’ve been caught up in Lin-sanity. The numbers being put up by Knicks point guard Jeremy Lin are jaw-dropping.

And don’t call him Tim Tebow 2.0. He’s no gimmick; he’s a true point guard who absolutely savaged the Lakers on Friday night. The only real comparisons between Tebow and Lin are the time they’ve been eating up on Sportscenter and their openness about their Christian beliefs.

It’s been impossible to avoid race in the whole Jeremy Lin story. Announcers and commentators love to mention that he has a great basketball IQ—after all, he went to Harvard. But part of the subtext is: We didn’t know Asian Americans played sports. (Like Timothy Dalrymple in talking about Asian American stereotypes, I was pretty embarassed for the Knicks’ announcers in the above video.) Even when the stereotypes are absent, the simple fact is that Lin is one of only a few Asian Americans to play in the NBA.

That’s why Michael Luo of the New York Times writes that for an Asian American “the chants of “M.V.P.!” raining down on Lin at the Garden embody a surreal, Jackie Robinson-like moment.”

But to Luo, Lin’s Christianity is just as meaningful as his race. Luo writes:

The last time I felt anything resembling this was Yao Ming’s first season for the Rockets. I experienced a similar mix of pinch-me-am-I-dreaming befuddlement and chest-thumping pride when I traveled to Houston to do an article on him and heard an arena crowd singing his name, on Chinese New Year, no less. And, yes, I followed Tebow’s extraordinary ride this season, in part because of his faith. More than anything, though, I found the fierce emotions he incited on both sides of the religious divide depressing.

The feelings the Lin phenomenon instill in me are orders of magnitude greater because he is an Asian-American, like me, whose parents were immigrants to this country, like mine. He grew up, like me, in the United States, speaking English; his Chinese, like mine, could use improvement. He went to my alma mater. And, yes, he is a Christian, too, but with a brand of faith, shaped by his background, that I can relate to much better than many I have seen in the public arena.

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In the midst of his stellar run last week, I couldn’t help but reflect on Lin’s journey. A Bible verse that he has cited as a favorite came to mind, encouraging believers that “suffering produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.”

Read the rest here.

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February 12, 2012 | 10:04 pm

Meet the folks who are preparing for the apocalypse

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Doomsday Preppers. Photo by National Geographic Channel

Speaking of the end of the world, I’m sitting down to watch National Geographic’s “Doomsday Preppers.” I’m definitely not prepared—for the end of the world or for some of the apocalyptic scenarios I expect to encounter in this show. Supervolcano, anyone?

Who are the doomsday preppers? The Wall Street Journal reports:

The show looks at more than a dozen Americans who have turned building bullet-proof shelters, stocking up on several years’ worth of canned goods and mapping evacuation routes into a kind of pricey game of one-upmanship. Whoever wins may be the last man (or woman) standing – literally.

But in another sense, the preppers don’t think of what they do as a weekend pastime. They see an end coming – be it because of a depletion of all the world’s oil or a shifting of the planet’s axis or a meltdown of the stock market. As a result, they simply follow the old scouting motto: Be prepared.

“These are not just a handful of people living in the mountains. They’re everywhere,” says Michael Cascio, National Geographic Channel’s executive vice president of programming.

One line that I heard in the first five minutes of the show—and that I expect to hear again—was: “Some people think I’m crazy. I hope they’re right. I hope I am crazy. That would be the greatest thing in the world.”

I just hold out hope that I won’t have to worry about the end of the world. After all, I survived Y2K, Harold Camping and “2012”—not to mention the first six weeks of 2012.

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February 11, 2012 | 12:48 pm

If the world was ending ...

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

New trailer for “Seeking a Friend for the End of the World”.

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February 10, 2012 | 11:02 am

Obama backs down on contraception requirement for religious employers

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

President Obama talks about contraceptive care funding in the White House, Feb. 10. Photo by REUTERS/Larry Downing

President Obama has faced a lot of backlash from religious groups, particularly the Catholic Church, for a mandate that religious employers provide contraception to all employees via healthcare plans. Churches were exempted, but big religious employers like universities and hospitals were not.

The president is about to hold a press conference. Here are the talking points, courtesy of the White House:

Today, President Obama will announce that his Administration will implement a policy that accommodates religious liberty while protecting the health of women. Today, nearly 99 percent of all women have used contraception at some point in their lives, but more than half of all women between the ages of 18-34 struggle to afford it.
 
Under the new policy to be announced today, women will have free preventive care that includes contraceptive services no matter where she works.  The policy also ensures that if a woman works for religious employers with objections to providing contraceptive services as part of its health plan, the religious employer will not be required to provide contraception coverage, but her insurance company will be required to offer contraceptive care free of charge.
 
The new policy ensures women can get contraception without paying a co-pay and addresses important concerns raised by religious groups by ensuring that objecting religious employers will not have to provide contraceptive coverage or refer women to organizations that provide contraception.

That’s still not going to please the Catholic Church. But it does wash their hands of involvement.

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February 9, 2012 | 3:19 pm

Washington state Republican chokes up talking about gay marriage

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

More from the gay marriage beat.

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February 8, 2012 | 7:08 pm

Seventh-day Adventists celebrate 9th Circuit ruling on Prop. 8

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Julius Nam on speaking on Proposition 8. Photo from Youtube

Look at all those numbers in the headline. Better yet, look at my classmate and the editor-in-chief of the UCLA Law Review, Julius Nam, featured in this Patch article about why Seventh-day Adventists opposed Proposition 8 and are celebrating the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’s decision yesterday to affirm a district court ruling that the the voter-approved ban on gay marriage is unconstitutional.

Turns out that Julius, also an associate professor of religious studies at Loma Linda University, was a spokesperson for Adventists Against Prop. 8. That’s him in the above YouTube video from 2008, when he said:

“As a Christian minister, as a theologian, I am very concerned about the type of ads and kind of campaign that is going on among the four Proposition 8 groups,” Nam said in 2008 in response to the information being put out by the proposition’s proponents. “It must stop. You must stop the lies you are propagating. You must stop the scare tactics and the fear mongering that is going on. It does not reflect well on the religious principals that we want to uphold as Christians, as Jews, as Muslims, as Buddhists, as followers of the divine.”

The Patch story doesn’t appear to report any Adventist reaction from yesterday’s ruling. But I do know that Julius thought the Ninth Circuit’s ruling to be “a just, moral and righteous decision.”

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February 8, 2012 | 3:40 pm

‘Poster couple’ for same-sex marriage files for divorce

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

When California briefly legalized gay marriage in June 2008, Robin Tyler, a Jewish activist, and Diane Olson were among the first to be wed. They were among the original plaintiffs to sue the state, pre-Prop. 8, for prohibiting same-sex marriages, and Gloria Allred officiated their ceremony.

So, you would expect them to be celebrating on the heels of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirming of a lower court ruling that Prop. 8 is unconstitutional.

Instead, they are getting a divorce.

MSNBC, which called Tyler and Olson the “poster couple” for gay rights, reports:

“We’re human and we went through difficult times,” Tyler said. The marriage ran its course, she said.

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The right to marry wasn’t meant to guarantee that gay couples would live happily ever after, Tyler said, but to provide a basic human civil liberty.

Tyler said her marital problems were no different than if the two parties had been a man and woman. Gays and lesbians shouldn’t be held to a different standard when granted the same civil rights as everyone else, she said.

To quote my old boss paraphrasing Chris Rock, “gay couples deserve the right to be just as miserable as the rest of us.”

Not that I actually agree with the premise that marriage makes folks miserable.

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February 8, 2012 | 3:24 pm

With Mormonism on mute, Romney’s persona takes a hit

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The conventional wisdom is that many Republican voters are uncomfortable with Mitt Romney’s Mormonism. Call them old fashioned. But could it be that Romney would have a better shot and defeating President Obama if he turned up the volume on his life story, a story that Mormonism is interwoven throughout?

Frank Bruni writes in the New York Times that “Mitt’s Muffled Soul” is hurting his ability to connect with voters in a real and meaningful way. The guarded Romney, who is getting tripped up by his comments about the poor and those he’s fired, comes off as a more distant man who is out of touch with most Americans. But voters care about getting to know the real Romney, and that includes his Mormon faith.

Bruni writes:

His aloofness, guardedness and sporadic defensiveness: are these entwined with the experience of belonging to a minority tribe that has often been maligned and has operated in secret? Do his stamina and resilience as a candidate reflect his years of Mormon missionary work in France, during which he learned not to be daunted in the face of so much resistance that he won a mere 10 to 20 converts, according to “The Real Romney,” a biography published last month?

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“His church experience is, I think, one of the great humanizing influences in Mitt Romney’s life,” said Patrick Mason, a professor of Mormon studies at Claremont Graduate University. Mason noted that if Romney would embrace that side of himself, he could beat the rap that he’s never been exposed to hardship by recounting his missionary experience. “That’s usually a very spartan lifestyle, and by definition most of the people you’re talking to are going to be poor.”

Should Romney step up and be more open about his faith, or should he keep it on mute? It’s likely that none of this will matter until this summer. But come the campaign against Obama, Romney is going to need to humanize himself.

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February 7, 2012 | 10:15 pm

Bloggingheads: On Komen and the funding of Planned Parenthood

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway and Amy Sullivan debate the fun that was the Susan G. Komen funding of Planned Parenthood PR debacle.

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February 7, 2012 | 5:46 pm

Another nugget from the 9th Circuit’s Prop. 8 ruling

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

In affirming that the California voter-passed initiative banning same-sex marriage was unconstitutional, Judge Stephen Reinhardt, wrote for a 2-1 majority of a Ninth Circuit panel that the law served no other purpose than to discriminate:

Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples. The Constitution simply does not allow for “laws of this sort”

That rationale goes back to what I’ve been saying since I wrote this post in 2008:

on an issue like same-sex marriage, I don’t think it matters whether I believe God is bothered by homosexuality. Proposition 8 has to do with fundamental rights—limiting them, that is. Marriage, despite what we always hear, is not a religious convention. It is a cultural convention. And the words “sanctity of marriage,” to my mind, have more to do with tax breaks and hospital visitation than ordaining a relationship before God.

As an evangelical Christian—as someone who, uncomfortable as it is to sometimes say this, reads in the Bible that homosexuality is a “perversion”—I don’t believe it is the job of government to legislate based on religion. We’ve seen how that works out.

Proposition 8 was not about marriage—not about protecting a sacred ceremony—but how the government treats a certain class of Americans.

On an semi-related and coincidental note, Reinhardt is the father-in-law of Daniel Sokatch, former Progressive Jewish Alliance executive director and now head of the New Israel Fund.

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