For the historical record: Pope Francis. Vatican News. L’Osservatore Romano (English).
The NYPost handicaps the leading candidates.
Archive for the ‘Religion’ Category
Obit watch: April 21, 2025.
Monday, April 21st, 2025Obit watch: January 27, 2025.
Monday, January 27th, 2025Jan Shepard, actress.
Other credits include a lot of TV westerns, “Highway Patrol”, “The F.B.I.”, “G.E. True“, “TV Reader’s Digest” (????)…
…and “Mannix”. (“Another Final Exit“, season 1, episode 20. She was “Rose”.)
Arthur Blessitt. He was a preacher in LA in the late 1960s, and ran “a Christian coffeehouse adjacent to a strip club”.
One day, he heard God telling him to carry a cross on foot from Los Angeles…to New York City. So he did. But that was just the start.
It took him six months to walk across the country. When he was done, he returned to Los Angeles, only to receive — in his telling — orders from Jesus to take his journey global.
“Go!” Jesus told him, he recounted on his website. “I want you to go all the way.”
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Mr. Blessitt kept meticulous notes abroad, detailing how long his boot soles lasted (about 500 miles) and how often he was arrested (24 times). He visited every continent, including Antarctica, as well as war zones, disaster zones and many other places where he was liable to get shot at, beaten or arrested.
He climbed Mount Fuji in Japan, confronted angry baboons in Kenya and was nearly blown up by a terrorist bomb in Northern Ireland — all while carrying his cross. He is listed in Guinness World Records for the “longest ongoing pilgrimage.”
It took him nearly 40 years, but in 2008 he completed his quest to visit every country when he was permitted to enter the last, North Korea. His “trek” there was largely symbolic: Authorities let him carry his cross from the front door of his hotel to the street and back.
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His decades-long campaign made him a minor celebrity. Profiles invariably zeroed in on his combination of dogged perseverance and an aw-shucks approach to his task.
“You’d be amazed,” he told People magazine in 1978, “how much attention a man carrying a big wooden cross gets.”
Fiction has to be believable.
Friday, December 27th, 2024Mike the Musicologist sent this over to me. While WFLA is a Florida news site, the most unbelievable part of this story (to me, anyway) is that the events took place in Maryland, not Florida.
A man was arrested and charged after disrupting religious services at two Maryland Catholic churches on Christmas Eve, according to the St. Mary’s County Sherriff’s Office.
A release from SMCSO said that around 5 p.m. on Christmas Eve, Thomas Campbell Bolling Von Goetz, 56, entered Holy Angels Catholic Church during Mass. He then proceeded to disrupt the service by dropping an onion in the aisle.
A citizen who followed Von Goetz into the church ushered him outside where, SMCSO said, Von Goetz began pelting the individual with tangerines.
Onions and tangerines? I guess there are worse things than being pelted with tangerines.
But wait, there’s more!
Later Tuesday night, deputies were called to a similar disruption at St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church in Leonardtown during Midnight Mass. According to them, Von Goetz poured whiskey into the holy water and threatened parishioners who tried to intervene.
While being escorted from the building, Van Goetz attempted to strike church attendees with a whiskey bottle.
I don’t think this is what the Irish mean by “Uisce beatha“. Also, seems like a waste of both good whiskey and good holy water.
The gentleman in question is now facing a laundry list of charges, some of which I’ve never heard of before: “Obstructing a religious exercise”, “Religious crime against a group”.
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#137 in a series)
Saturday, December 21st, 2024Wow. Just wow.
You know, you go to church last night for the “Lessons and Carols” service (which, at my church, was a very nice service, but lightly attended). Then you go pick up your car from the repair shop (yes, Daddy spoke too soon. Fortunately, I have the reserves to cover it.)
Meanwhile, all heck breaks loose.
New York City’s second-highest-ranking police officer, who served as chief of department, abruptly resigned Friday night following allegations of sexual misconduct, according to the Police Department.
The former top chief, Jeffrey Maddrey, submitted his resignation and Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch accepted it Friday night, according to a statement from the department.
The NYPost broke the story. This being the Post, they go into more explicit detail.
And here’s a fun fact:
I am leaving a lot out of the Post story. You can go over there and read it if you want, but I warn you: the details are very explicit.
In the interest of fairness:
When she started to try to get away from Maddrey recently, Epps was outed on a list of high overtime earners in retaliation, Sanders said.
Epps was suspended for 30 days and is being investigated over the excessive overtime, police sources said.
Also in the interest of fairness:
Updated 12/23: And over the weekend, Miguel Iglesias, the Chief of Internal Affairs, was “relieved of his command and has notified the Department of his intent to retire”. The NYPost coverage is being played like it was an open secret within the department that Maddrey was a sex predator, and nobody – including IAD – was willing to do anything about it before now.
Obit watch: December 2, 2024.
Monday, December 2nd, 2024Hal Lindsey, of The Late Great Planet Earth fame. He was 95.
Mr. Lindsey took the book world by storm with “The Late Great Planet Earth,” released in 1970 by Zondervan, a small religious publisher in Grand Rapids, Mich. Written with C.C. Carlson (some Lindsey followers said it was ghostwritten by her), the book is a breezy blend of history and apocalyptic predictions based on biblical interpretations and actual events of the time.
An editor at Bantam Books thought the book, Mr. Lindsey’s first, had sales potential, so she acquired the mass-market paperback rights. “The Late Great Planet Earth” became the best-selling nonfiction book of the 1970s. By some estimates, it sold about 35 million copies by 1999, and was translated into about 50 languages.
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The Middle East, and Israel in particular, were central to Mr. Lindsey’s predictions. “The Late Great Planet Earth” was published just three years after Israel’s triumph in the Six-Day War of June 1967. Mr. Lindsey was on safe ground in predicting that Israel’s victory would not bring peace, but he envisioned events far worse than the violence and tensions that plague the region.
The book forecast a war that would end all wars, with a huge Russian army invading Israel by land and sea. The Russians were in turn expected to battle a horde of soldiers, led by the Chinese. Naturally, a conflict of this magnitude could not be contained.
World leaders would send armies to the Middle East to fight under the command of a Rome-based Antichrist against “the kings of the east.”
“Western Europe, the United States, Canada, South America and Australia will undoubtedly be represented,” Mr. Lindsey predicted, and the conflict would not be confined to the Middle East. Hundreds of millions of people would perish in the ashes of New York, London, Paris, Tokyo and other metropolises. Then, finally, the return of Jesus Christ would bring everlasting joy to the faithful and eternal dismay to those who refused to be saved, Mr. Lindsey wrote.
Melani McAlister, a professor of American studies at George Washington University who followed Mr. Lindsey’s career, said in an interview that she found Mr. Lindsey’s tone “weirdly gleeful” considering its central notion, “that there are going to be rivers of blood everywhere.”
“Dear boss: I was late for work this morning because rivers of blood were blocking my driveway.”
We had the book, but I never saw the movie. In double checking the dates on IMDB, I find that Norman Borlaug appears in it as himself. You know what that means, right?
Actually, the Oracle of Bacon claims “Norman Borlaug cannot be linked to Kevin Bacon using only feature films.” I think this is wrong, assuming you count “Earth” as a feature film. (I do.) “Orson Welles has a Bacon number of 2” and, since Welles was in “Earth” with Norman Borlaug, that would make his Bacon number 3, at the most. Right?
Marshall Brickman, Woody Allen collaborator.
Peter Westbrook, Olympic fencer.
A saber fencer with a graceful and agile style in an event reliant on ballistic thrusting and slashing maneuvers, Westbrook won 13 United States championships and qualified for every U.S. Olympic team from 1976 through 1996.
His Olympic medal, a bronze one, came in the individual saber competition at the 1984 Games in Los Angeles. He also served as flag-bearer for the American team at the closing ceremony of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and was inducted into the national fencing Hall of Fame in 1996.
Obit watch: October 17, 2024.
Thursday, October 17th, 2024Mitzi Gaynor. NYT (archived). IMDB.
I found this kind of interesting, in light of another obit from not that long ago:
Also interesting to me:
Ever wonder how the history of a particular musical would have been different if the producers had been able to cast their first choice, instead of “settling” for someone who came out of left field and blew everyone away? I do.
(Okay, to be fair, Gwen Verdon didn’t exactly come out of left field. She’d already won a Tony for “Can-Can”.)
NYT obit for Bob Yerkes. Noted here because:
1) This gives me a chance to thank jimmymcnulty for his comments on the previous obit. I agree: I think Mr. Yerkes would have been a great neighbor, and a swell guy to hang with.
(Also, thanks to FotB RoadRich and FotB cm smith for their comments on the late Mr. Armes in the same obit.)
B) I thought this was interesting, and it was sort of played down in the THR obit:
During his circus days, Mr. Yerkes became deeply religious — a turnabout from his childhood.
“I was reared in an unbelieving home,” he said in “Redeeming the Screens,” a 2016 book about religion in the entertainment industry. “As a young adult, I have to confess I read the Bible planning to denounce the truth of it, but I realized that it had to be inspired by God.”
He formed a Bible-reading group for circus performers. He later served on the board of the Christian Film & Television Commission, which bills itself as being “dedicated to redeeming the values of the mass media.”
Reminder.
Tuesday, August 27th, 2024Obit watch: July 19, 2024.
Friday, July 19th, 2024Bob Newhart. THR. Tributes. Appreciation. Variety.
…
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What do you think happens on the other side?
God has an incredible sense of humor, an unimaginable sense of humor. Just look around.
I’ve had this discussion – God is a punster and has a sense of humor – with people at my church, too. I think it it worth noting that he was a faithful Catholic, and was married to the same woman for 60 years. (Ginny Newhart passed away in 2023.)
One of the less-reputable over the air networks used to run “The Bob Newhart Show” and “Newhart” back to back in the afternoons, and I’d have both on while I worked. I think “TBNS” is just about perfect as a show, but, oddly, I didn’t like “Newhart” so much. I do remember watching and enjoying it first run, but not so much as an adult. My dislike for it now is mostly because I felt the show shifted focus away from Dick to Michael and Stephanie, and I really didn’t like those two characters. But when Bob was dominating the screen, it was a pretty good show.
It turns out one of my favorite “Newhart” episodes is available on the ‘Tube (until someone files a copyright strike): “Dick the Kid”, season 5, episode 3.
Dick has a case of writer’s block, so he goes off to work as a cowboy on a ranch. The comic element of this episode isn’t Dick’s ineptitude as a cowboy. Just the opposite: he’s so good at being a cowboy, he wins the respect of everyone. Even the toughest most macho of the cowboys breaks down when Dick goes back to the inn.
The world is a lesser place today.
Edited to add: per THR, CBS will be airing a tribute to Bob Newhart on July 22nd, but I don’t have a specific time yet.
Cheng Pei-pei, Chinese actress. IMDB.
Nguyen Phu Trong, Vietnamese Communist leader.
Obit watch: June 19, 2024.
Wednesday, June 19th, 2024Willie Mays. SF Chronicle (archived). ESPN.
The Awful Announcing blog has a link to a video tribute to Mr. Mays narrated by Jon Miller.
Neil Goldschmidt, former mayor of Portland and governor of Oregon. He seemed to have a promising political career (he was also transportation secretary under Jimmy Carter) but left office in 1990. There were a lot of rumors about his extramarital activities at the time.
In 2004, it came out that he’d been raping a teenage girl.
The statute of limitations on any criminal charges that might have been brought against Mr. Goldschmidt, including statutory rape, had expired decades earlier. The woman he abused later gave a series of interviews to Margie Boulé, a columnist for The Oregonian, describing her relationship with the mayor.
The woman said the abuse first began when she was 13, on her mother’s birthday. It virtually destroyed her, she said. She attempted suicide at age 15 and later become addicted to alcohol and cocaine. She died in 2011.
George R. Nethercutt Jr., former House member. He’s most famous for having defeated Thomas S. Foley, who was Speaker of the House at the time.
Paul Pressler. He was sort of a “power behind the throne” in the Southern Baptist Convention:
He was also involved in a messy sex scandal, which led to the Southern Baptist Convention distancing themselves from him.
Angela Bofill, R&B singer of the 1970s and 1980s.
Happy birthday to you…
Wednesday, May 29th, 2024Happy 150th birthday, G. K. Chesterton!
“The Innocence of Father Brown” on Project Gutenberg.
“You attacked reason,” said Father Brown. “It’s bad theology.”
Obit watch: November 22, 2023.
Wednesday, November 22nd, 2023Willie Hernández, relief pitcher for the Detroit Tigers. ESPN.
The left-handed Hernández had a 13-year career but is mostly known for his role as the closer on one of the most dominant teams in the past 40 years. The 1984 Tigers, led by Alan Trammell, Lou Whitaker and Jack Morris, opened 35-5 and cruised to the AL East title with a 104-58 mark before sweeping Kansas City in the AL Championship Series and beating San Diego in a five-games World Series.
Hernández had a 9-3 record and 32 saves in 33 chances in 1984, with a 1.92 ERA over 80 games and 140⅓ innings. He is among just 11 pitchers to win the Cy Young and MVP in the same year, edging Kansas City’s Dan Quisenberry for Cy Young in 1984 and Minnesota’s Kent Hrbek for MVP.
(Thanks to pigpen51 for the tip.)
Herbert Gold, novelist.
Carlton Pearson. I had not heard of him previously, but I find his story interesting. He was a prominent evangelist who ran a megachurch in Tulsa. He was a board member of Oral Roberts University. And then…
While watching a TV report in the 1990s on children starving during the Rwanda genocide, Bishop Pearson had an epiphany. He could not believe that God would consign innocent souls to hell who had not accepted Jesus Christ as savior before their deaths. He concluded that hell does not exist, except as earthly misery created by human beings; that God loves all mankind; and that everyone is already saved.
It was a view he shared in interviews and preached at his church, the Higher Dimensions Family Church, which he co-founded in 1981 and which grew into one of the largest in Tulsa, known for its multiracial pews in a city and a faith, evangelical Christianity, that was largely segregated.
“I believe that most people on planet Earth will go to heaven, because of Calvary, because of the unconditional love of God and the redemptive work of the cross, which is already accomplished,” Bishop Pearson told The Tulsa World in 2002, adding that he included Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists among the loved. “I’m re-evaluating everything,” he said.
This led to him being branded a heretic, leaving the denomination he’d been ordained in, and losing his megachurch.
Mr. Bogle, Bishop Pearson’s agent, said he often asked him about whether he regretted the loss of prestige, income and worshipers that followed his turning away from Pentecostal Christian orthodoxy.
“I said, ‘You’ve lost a lot of money, don’t you think you should have just shut up?’” Mr. Bogle said. “He would always say, ‘No, I don’t believe I made a mistake.’”
Bagatelle (#93)
Monday, August 21st, 2023Obit watch: July 18, 2023.
Tuesday, July 18th, 2023Harry G. Frankfurt, philosopher and author.
Professor Frankfurt’s major contribution to philosophy was a series of thematically interrelated papers, written from the 1960s through the 2000s, in which he situated the will — people’s motivating wants and desires — at the center of a unified vision of freedom, moral responsibility, personal identity and the sources of life’s meaning. For Professor Frankfurt, volition, more than reason or morality, was the defining aspect of the human condition.
Despite the ambition and inventiveness of this project — the philosopher Michael Bratman praised it as “powerful and exciting philosophy” of great “depth and fecundity” — Professor Frankfurt became best known for a single, irreverent paper largely unrelated to his life’s main work.
The paper, written in the mid-1980s under the same title as his eventual book, discussed what to his mind was a pervasive but underanalyzed feature of our culture: a form of dishonesty akin to lying but even less considerate of reality. Whereas the liar is at least mindful of the truth (if only to avoid it), the “bullshitter,” Professor Frankfurt wrote, is distinguished by his complete indifference to how things are.
Whether its purveyor is an advertiser, a political spin doctor or a cocktail-party blowhard, he argued, this form of dishonesty is rooted in a desire to make an impression on the listener, with no real interest in the underlying facts. “By virtue of this,” Professor Frankfurt concluded, “bullshit is the greater enemy of truth than lies are.”
That paper was republished as a book in 2005, On Bullshit (affiliate link), which became a best-seller. He also wrote On Truth (affiliate link) which seems to have been less successful.
For the record, and because Lawrence sent over an obit: Jane Birkin.
Over the weekend, my mother asked me: “How do you go from being a promising young journalist to being a swami?” I don’t have a good answer for that, but here’s the obit for Sally Kempton.
Robert Lieberman, director. Other credits include quite a few genre TV series, “Christmas in Tahoe”, “All I Want for Christmas”, and “Will: The Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy”.
Obit watch: June 8, 2023.
Thursday, June 8th, 2023George Winston, of Windham Hill fame.
…His 1994 record, “Forest,” won a Grammy Award for best new age album — a category that was relatively new at the time — and he was nominated four other times.
Those nominations were evidence of the range of his musical interests. Two — for “Plains” (1999) and “Montana: A Love Story” (2004) — were for best new age album, but he was also nominated for best recording for children for “The Velveteen Rabbit” (1984; Meryl Streep provided the narration) and for best pop instrumental album for “Night Divides the Day: The Music of the Doors” (2002).
Mr. Winston recorded two albums of the music of Vince Guaraldi, the jazz pianist best known for composing music for animated “Peanuts” television specials. In 2012, he released “George Winston: Harmonica Solos,” and in 1983 he created his own label, Dancing Cat Records, to record practitioners of Hawaiian slack-key guitar, a genre he particularly admired.
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Mr. Winston knew his music wasn’t for everyone, and he was self-deprecating about that.
“One person’s punk rock is another person’s singing ‘Om’ or playing harp,” he told The Santa Cruz Sentinel of California in 1982. “It’s all valid — everybody’s got their own path. I wouldn’t want to sit around and listen to me all day.”
NYT obit for The Iron Sheik (archived).
NYT obit for Barry Newman (archived).
Obit watch: May 1, 2023.
Monday, May 1st, 2023Rabbi Harold S. Kushner, author. (When Bad Things Happen to Good People and other books).
Detective Troy Patterson of the NYPD.
One night in 1990, three punks tried to hold Officer Patterson up. The robbery went bad, and Officer Patterson was shot in the head. He’d been in a vegetative state for the past 33 years.
Patterson was promoted to detective in 2016.
The three suspects — Vincent Robbins, Tracey Clark and Darien Crawford — were later arrested in the unprovoked shooting.
Robbins, now 53, was convicted of assault and attempted-robbery charges and sentenced to a prison term of five to 15 years. He was released in 2000, state records show.
Clark, the alleged gunman in the shooting, also went to trial in the case. The outcome of the case is not immediately available, nor are any details of the charges against Crawford.
Tim Bachman, of Bachman-Turner Overdrive. You may recall that his brother, Robbie, passed in January.
Mike Shannon, former player and later broadcaster for the St. Louis Cardinals.
John Stobart, artist.
A product of Britain’s Royal Academy of Art, Mr. Stobart moved to the United States in 1970, when conceptual art, Op Art and minimalism were riding high in the wake of Abstract Expressionism.
Affable, unassuming and unfailingly candid, Mr. Stobart would have none of it. “I’ve never bought it, and the general public has never bought it either,” he said of abstract art in an interview with The Boston Globe in 1986. “That’s a lot of baloney, that stuff.”
Instead, he conjured the past as a master of richly detailed historical works brimming with schooners, brigs and sloops, their sails flapping under moody clouds, with shore lights twinkling in the distance.
Working out of studios in the Boston area, Martha’s Vineyard and several other locations, Mr. Stobart, who lived in Medfield, Mass., employed the same taste for exhaustive historical detail as Patrick O’Brian, the prolific Anglo-Irish author known for his bracing tales of naval heroics.
He left no detail to chance, traveling to the locations he painted, consulting old daguerreotypes of harbors and ships and going out to sea on various watercraft to learn the most arcane points about their engineering and behavior on the water.
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The obit reproduces some of Mr. Stobart’s paintings. I’m probably a sucker for representational art, but I like what I see there, and would be happy to have an original Stobart on my wall.