One result of the Vatican’s attack on Catholic nun and theologian Sister Margaret Farley and her 2006 book Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics that I wrote about yesterday is that her book shot up in Amazon rankings from #142,982 to #16 just one day after the attacks began.
Frankly, I think I am a much harsher critic of the Catholic Church and the pope than Farley so I am appealing to the pope: Please, please, attack me and my books, as harshly and loudly as you can.
I got around to watching the new BBC series Sherlock, showing in the US as part of PBS’s Masterpiece Theater.
There have been many reconceptualizations of the iconic character of Sherlock Holmes, not all of them successful. The recent film version with Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude was a buddy action movie and I found the hyperactivity just barely tolerable. The 1980s and 90s BBC series with Jeremy Brett as Holmes and two different actors as Watson were perhaps the best of the lot so far, with Brett in particular capturing the edginess and nervous energy of Holmes.
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Sometime ago I wrote in a post titled God save us from the Queen my view that the British monarchy, like any other monarchy, is a feudal parasitic institution that should be abolished and that I am amazed that people in the US with its republican tradition pay so much attention to its absurdly excessive pageantry. [Read more…]
In February, a three-judge panel of the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in a 2-1 decision upheld the ruling of US District Court judge Vaughn Walker that Proposition 8 (that reversed the policy allowing same sex marriage in California) was unconstitutional. [Read more…]
There has been quite a bit of publicity about watching the transit of Venus across the Sun. Apparently for a few hours earlier this week, you could see a small black dot move across the face of the Sun. [Read more…]
More details on the sordid behavior of the Catholic Church hierarchy in covering up the sexual abuses cases by its clergy keep emerging. The latest is this revelation that the church paid priests accused of such abuse to leave. The church, of course, denies that this amounted to a secret payoff to keep the matter quiet by quietly getting rid of the priests rather than reporting them to the authorities. [Read more…]
McLeroy is a dentist who was on the Texas School Board. He was a creationist and was one of the key people pushing their agenda (as well as some other extreme right wing positions) on the schools and its textbooks. He was narrowly prevented from serving a second term. [Read more…]
I have been highlighting the many ways is people who are poor and/or nonwhite tend to be at the receiving end of harsher treatment from the police and other authorities if they run afoul of them for any reason when out in public. Now Matt Taibbi describes how New York City subjects them to harassment by the police even if they are not out in public but are inside their own apartment buildings. It is called the ‘Clean Halls’ program. [Read more…]
… and for people like him who try to use quantum physics and cosmology to argue for the existence of god. [Read more…]