June 23, 2007 | 6:57 pm

Rudy’s priest: the accused pedophile

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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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.

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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June 22, 2007 | 4:22 pm

Ferrari: Not a sin to need the speed

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Well, Ferrari, the other Italian pipeline to the divine, didn’t care too much for the Vatican’s Ten Commandments for drivers.

Turns out, according to Ferrari, that owners of the ultra-expensive, lust-driven sports cars simply spend more than a quarter million American because they like high-performance cars and don’t use them “as a means for outshining other people and arousing a feeling of envy,” which would violate the Fifth Commandment.

“Unless having fun has become a sin, I don’t believe it (to be wrong),” Amedeo Felisa told Reuters this week at an event celebrating Ferrari’s 60th anniversary in its hometown southeast of Milan.

I simply find it comical that his warranted a news story, no matter how short the story, not the car drivers—yes, I’m envious of their Enzo.

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June 22, 2007 | 9:34 am

Summer reading

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I’ll be getting a late start today, so for those also looking to not do anything productive until mid-morning, here’s some God Blog highlights from the past week:

Wikipedia if Bill O’Reilly wrote it

Holy Land hotties bare (almost) all for Israel

... while the Mid East burns

Dr. Death not a fan of God

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June 21, 2007 | 7:21 pm

If it’s racist, it ain’t anti-Semitic

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Remember that “Seinfeld” episode where George’s phone line gets crossed with a woman who goes by Donna Chang? Having called George, Jerry ends up spending a while on the phone with Donna Chang and decides to ask out this mystery woman. But when he shows up to the Chinese restaurant she suggested, he’s startled to see a plain Long Island blonde.

  DONNA
Did you think I was Chinese?..

  JERRY
Oh. No. Oh, you mean because of the “Chang”?

  DONNA
Actually, the family name wasn’t originally Chang.

  JERRY
I didn’t think so.

  DONNA
It used to be “Changstein.”

 

Well, I imagined a similar scenario just now as I leafed through the LA Times and saw an article about embattled San Francisco Supervisor Ed Jew. Jew, who is no yid, represents Frisco’s Chinatown. He is the board’s only Asian American.

I wonder if he dines out-of-towners at the House of Bagels.

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June 21, 2007 | 2:32 pm

Even Newton can’t predict the End Times

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Some Christians have an unhealthy fascination with Armageddon (even more unhealthy is a fascination with “Armageddon”). While some Christians, mindful of Jesus’ “thief in the night” comment, avoid dwelling on when the end will come, others have obsessed for centuries.

The Millerites believed the date would be Oct. 22, 1844. If you are reading this now, you understand why that is referred to as the Great Disappointment. Today, the Rapture Index—a synthesis of world events that some readers of Revelation say should precede the apocalypse —stands at 158, well below the all-time high of 182 two weeks after 9/11.

It turns out, though, that minds far greater have attempted to predict the End Days. Isaac Newton’s 300-year-old manuscripts, unveiled this week in Jerusalem, show one of the world’s greatest scientists tried his hand at some apocalyptic algebra.

In one manuscript from the early 1700s, Newton used the cryptic Book of Daniel to calculate the date for the apocalypse, reaching the conclusion that the world would end no earlier than 2060.

“It may end later, but I see no reason for its ending sooner,” Newton wrote. However, he added, “This I mention not to assert when the time of the end shall be, but to put a stop to the rash conjectures of fanciful men who are frequently predicting the time of the end, and by doing so bring the sacred prophesies into discredit as often as their predictions fail.”

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June 21, 2007 | 10:02 am

Global warming threatens sacred Hindu river

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

What did God mean when he established his covenant with Noah? “Never again will all life be cut off by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.” Clearly he didn’t mean massive flooding had lost its power to kill the masses, but He says a few verses later that “never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life.”

OK. Well, scientists and policy wonks are increasingly saying that climate change—which is not God’s doing but our own—is setting the stage for some cataclysmic future flooding.

Last week, I mentioned how Jewish leaders are beginning to frame global warming as a looming catastrophe for Israel. Then The Washington Post had this report on global warming’s indirect threat to millions upon millions more people.

VARANASI, India—With her eyes sealed, Ramedi cupped the murky water of the Ganges River in her hands, lifted them toward the sun, and prayed for her husband, her 15 grandchildren and her bad hip. She, like the rest of India’s 800 million Hindus, has absolute faith that the river she calls Ganga Ma can heal.

Around Ramedi, who like some Indians has only one name, people converged on the riverbank in the early morning, before the day’s heat set in. Women floated necklaces of marigolds on a boat of leaves, a dozen skinny boys soaped their hair as they bathed in their underwear, and a somber group of men carried a body to the banks of the river, a common ritual before the dead are cremated on wooden funeral pyres. To be cremated beside the Ganges, most here believe, brings salvation from the cycle of rebirth.

“Ganga Ma is everything to Hindus. It’s our chance to attain nirvana,” Ramedi said, emerging from the river, her peach-colored sari dripping along the shoreline.

But the prayer rituals carried out at the water’s edge may not last forever—or even another generation, according to scientists and meteorologists. The Himalayan source of Hinduism’s holiest river, they say, is drying up.

In this 3,000-year-old city known as the Jerusalem of India for its intense religious devotion, climate change could throw into turmoil something many devout Hindus thought was immutable: their most intimate religious traditions. The Gangotri glacier, which provides up to 70 percent of the water of the Ganges during the dry summer months, is shrinking at a rate of 40 yards a year, nearly twice as fast as two decades ago, scientists say.

“This may be the first place on Earth where global warming could hurt our very religion. We are becoming an endangered species of Hindus,” said Veer Bhadra Mishra, an engineer and director of the Varanasi-based Sankat Mochan Foundation, an organization that advocates for the preservation of the Ganges. “The melting glaciers are a terrible thing. We have to ask ourselves, who are the custodians of our culture if we can’t even help our beloved Ganga?”

 

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June 20, 2007 | 11:28 pm

The revered rebbe

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Thousands of Hasidim have gathered over the past two days at the New York grave of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Known as The Rebbe, Schneerson was the heir to the Chabad-Lubavitch movement. Some believed him to be the Moshiach that he taught his Lubavitcher followers to pray for.

He was sort of a big deal.

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June 20, 2007 | 4:37 pm

Can a minister put the fear of God in gang members?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

It appears LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa—who himself could use the fear of God—thinks so. Today he introduced the Rev. Jeff Carr as L.A.‘s first gang czar. Carr has been the COO of Sojourners, the Washington-based liberal evangelical organization run by Jim Wallis. For 17 years before that he led the Bresee Foundation, named for Church of the Nazarene founder Phineas Bresee, which ministers to L.A.‘s poor.

“I’ve been a minister my whole life and deeply rooted in my faith that calls me to deal with respect with every individual, to treat people as creative human beings with dignity,” Carr said. “I try to see the positive in every life, regardless of where they live, the color of their skin or the economic status.”

But with that, Carr said he brings a practical approach in dealing with young people.

“I tell them they have to get their tail in school and get a job,” Carr said. “I agree with (Father Gregory Boyle of HomeBoy Industries) that the best way to stop a bullet is with a job.”

 

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June 19, 2007 | 8:20 pm

Conservapedia: The wiki with a Fox News attitude

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The newest online encyclopedia is called Conservapedia. Its homepage includes daily Bible verses and historical quotes and offers breaking news, such as this tidbit today: “Democratic Congressional Approval Ratings Worse than Bush’s.”

It’s like Wikipedia, only through a conservative lens. Try searching for evolution, for example, and you’ll be redirected to “Theory of evolution” and informed that “a majority of the most prominent and vocal defenders of the naturalistic evolutionary position since World War II have been atheists.”

Conservapedia defines environmentalists as “people who profess concern about the environment” and notes that some would want to impose legal limits on the use of toilet paper.

Femininity? The quality of being “childlike, gentle, pretty, willowy, submissive.”

A hike in minimum wage is referred to as “a controversial manoeuvre that increases the incentive for young people to drop out of school.”

And the state of the economy under President Bush? Much better than the “liberal media” would have you think: “For example, during his term Exxon Mobile has posted the largest profit of any company in a single year, and executive salaries have greatly increased as well.”

With fewer than 12,000 entries and typos galore (the misspelling of Mobil above; the mayor of L.A. is referred to as “Anthony Varigoso”), Conservapedia isn’t about to supplant Wikipedia — which boasts 1.8 million articles in English alone.

But the all-volunteer site has several thousand active readers and writers. (Founder Andy) Schlafly encourages his students to use it as a reference, saying that the articles are more concise than those on Wikipedia. On the home page, just above the daily Bible verse, he tallies total views: 12.3 million and counting.

This story is from today’s LA Times, which garners reporter Stephanie Simon her third-straight day of getting mentioned on The God Blog.

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June 19, 2007 | 7:29 pm

The circumcision decision

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

As I noted last month, the story about how fewer American parents—even among the covenant people—are having their sons circumcised keeps popping up. Yesterday, CNN.com took a not-so-fresh scalpel to the ultimate evergreen story. This lede, however, deserves repeating:

On the eighth day of her son’s life, Julia Query welcomed friends and family to celebrate his birth and honor their Jewish heritage.

But there was no crying, no scalpel, no blood, no “mohel”—the person who traditionally performs ritual circumcisions in the Jewish faith. In fact, Elijah Rose’s “bris” differed markedly from the ceremony long used to initiate Jewish boys into a covenant with God: There was no circumcision.

“I knew before I was even pregnant that I would not circumcise,” said Query, 39, a San Francisco, California, filmmaker whose son was born in 2002. “It’s not like you’re just cutting a piece of paper off a pad—there’s no ‘cut here’ line. It’s not made to be cut off, and I would never, ever do that to my baby.”

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June 19, 2007 | 3:18 pm

Vatican: Drivers ‘shall not kill’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

People always say God has a good sense of humor. I heard the same about Pope Benedict XVI will he was elected two years ago. It’s hard to tell how tongue in cheek the Vatican’s just-issued Driver’s Ten Commandments are.

1. You shall not kill.

2. The road shall be for you a means of communion between people and not of mortal harm.

3. Courtesy, uprightness and prudence will help you deal with unforeseen events.

4. Be charitable and help your neighbor in need, especially victims of accidents.

5. Cars shall not be for you an expression of power and domination, and an occasion of sin.

6. Charitably convince the young and not so young not to drive when they are not in a fitting condition to do so.

7. Support the families of accident victims.

8. Bring guilty motorists and their victims together, at the appropriate time, so that they can undergo the liberating experience of forgiveness.

9. On the road, protect the more vulnerable party.

10. Feel responsible toward others.

 

The Vatican said the unusual document was needed because cars can be “an occasion of sin.”

“We know that as a consequence of transgressions and negligence, 1.2 million people die each year on the roads,” Martino said. “That’s a sad reality, and at the same time, a great challenge for society and the church.”

As Friendly Fire notes, the translation leaves something to be desired. The blog also offers three additional commandments:

11. Thou shall not apply make-up, talk on your cell phone, and eat a cheeseburger while trying to make a left-hand turn into four lanes of oncoming traffic.

12. Thou shall not drive 50 mph in the left lane.

13. Thou shall not scream at the motorist in front of you just because he or she had the good sense not to run that yellow light.

The Catholic Church’s mandates seem simple enough, but I’m not sure I can agree with, or by any means obey, 11 and 13. For some reason, perhaps connected, the report also covers hookers, abandoned children and the homeless.

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