Jezebel
leftovers
Posts Tagged “
God
”
The Devil Wears Prada, The Pope Wears Straight Jesus
The enduring image of the last Pope is of him in simple, white vestments and a white skullcap, but that ain't how Pope Benedict XVI rolls, as this picture demonstrates. Although the Vatican's newspaper L'Osservatore Romano claims that Benedict is just a simple guy, his style pointers (always wear something red!) are reverberating around the world. From his red loafers to his Christmas camauro, and his ermine-trimmed capes to his snazzy red summer hat, this Pope has a fashion sense all his own! But the Vatican mouthpiece says it best: "The pope, therefore, does not wear Prada, but Christ." Ewww, does anyone else get a weird "lady suit" from Silence of the Lambs image from that statement? (Click the picture for more of Benedict's fashion do's!) [WWLTV.com]
leftovers
good clean fun
Purity Balls: Ruining Young Girls One White Rose At A Time
Even the most open-minded person can see some other culture's ritual and think to herself, "Well that is just weird. And creepy. And weird." Which is how you may feel if you read the story in the New York Times about purity balls. And yes, there is a
sweet baby jesus
Earlier: Matt Lauer: 'Hey, Duggars, What's With All The J Names?'
Family Planning
Mom-To-17 Michelle Duggar Set To Birth Another Damn Baby
This morning on the Today show, Michelle Duggar, who has given birth to seventeen children, announced that she is pregnant. Again. One of her older sons practically gagged as he responded to the news, and her husband, Jim Bob, said the pregnancy was not planned: "We let the Lord decide," he explained. Oh, God. Anyway: The kids proceeded to shower Michelle with gifts; one daughter said, "My mom mentioned a while back that she really would like a pearl necklace." (Hey kid, maybe she didn't mean jewelry? Maybe it was a quiet plea to get the hubs to try spilling his seed somewhere not near her uterus?) When the same daughter explained that she bought an outfit as a gift because "My mom is usually pregnant," no one could contain their laughter. Clip above. (Oh, and the new baby's name will begin with a J, clearly. Any suggestions? Jennifer, Joshua, John David, Janna, Jill, Jessa, Jinger, Joseph, Josiah, Joy-Anna, Jedidiah, Jeremiah, Jason, James, Justin, Jackson, and Johannah are already taken.)Earlier: Matt Lauer: 'Hey, Duggars, What's With All The J Names?'
Family Planning
crappy hour
Who Would God Vote For? Probably the Fascists!
Not that I ever smoked, but I guess I'd start, too, if my house looked like that. But there are disasters all over the place today, from Hillary's wonderful comments on race to the innocent guy we held in Gitmo who decided that the terrorists were right about us to the Myanmar cyclone pictured. It's disaster day on Crappy Hour, as Moe takes a much-needed break and I take a moment away from Glamocracy to talk Texas, Hillary, terrorists, fascists and God with the Washington Independent's Attackerman, Spencer Ackerman. More »
clips
Related: Grace, Eventually: Thoughts On Faith [Amazon]
Anne Lamott Tells Stephen Colbert That God Is, In Fact, A 'She'
Writer Anne Lamott — whose 1994 book Bird by Bird is well-known and much-loved by millions of frustrated, (mostly female?) writers — appeared in all her dreadlocked-glory on last night's Colbert Report to plug her new book Grace, Eventually, and talk politics, Sunday school, Jeremiah Wright and the fact that God is a female. Strangely, she seemed to back away from that assertion after Colbert called her out on it, but she did get in a good dig at Dick Cheney and his ascension into Heaven. Clip above.Related: Grace, Eventually: Thoughts On Faith [Amazon]
god/delusion
Ayaan Hirsi Ali Vs. Irshad Manji: Which Infidel Would You Rather Have A Beer With?
Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji are two pals who were born Muslim and have spent the intervening few decades critiquing the religion's legacy of bad things. They've both written bestselling books and acquired British intellectual blowhard pundit advocates — Chris Hitchens backs Ali, Andrew Sullivan is more a Manji person — and today they're compared/contrasted in a New York Times piece that is sure to hit home for anyone who ever struggled with a baseless/stubborn/eroding belief in a Higher Power! See, Ali is an atheist; Manji is a Muslim. Like her boy Andrew Sullivan, Manji has clung to her faith even though she is gay and the institution deems that grounds for damnation; she roots her problems with Islam in "Arab tribal culture" and says the "Koran has the raw materials to be thoughtful and humane," while Hitchens "believes that it's a self-defeating exercise for a declared lesbian to try to bring about an Islamic Reformation." More »
Oh, Christ.
A man in Florida has been arrested for allegedly hitting his teenage daughter because she refused to pray. Apparently the 18-year-old returned fire by punching the father in the face. Meanwhile, his 16-year-old daughter, while attempting to hold her father back from fighting with her sister, was "accidentally" bitten on the finger by the father when her hands were on his face. For the love of God. Come on, people. [UPI]
and other nuances for which god did not create blogs
Harvard Virgin Leo Keliher Not As Horny As The Times Made It Sound
Remember Leo Keliher? He's that virgin I made fun of last week after the New York Times Magazine published his musings on why he felt it important to deny his ever-present lust. It was a really cheap shot, not that it isn't always a cheap shot with me, but it was a cheap shot because some of the things he said made me think about actually thinking about the whole thing — lust, desire, need, self-sacrifice, blah blah — for a few minutes before I took the whole "God grant me the wisdom/empathy/attention span to resist the overpowering urge to turn this whole story into an explicit doggy style church pew fantasy, but not just yet" route. Leo, the son of a child molester whose mom's second husband had left her for a woman 20 years younger, who had seen a lot of shit for someone barely born in the Reagan administration, seemed like an extraordinarily thoughtful person. I emailed to tell him that, and he emailed me back and I thought I'd share. More »
Oh, Christ.
Sister Barbara Markey, a Roman Catholic nun, has pleaded guilty of stealing from the Omaha Archdiocese and gambling the money away. Sister Barbara stole more than $1,500 and faces up to 20 years in prison when she is sentenced in July. This report doesn't say what she was gambling on, but we hope it wasn't something like dogfights. Jeez. [CNN]
Oh, Christ.
Did you know that the oldest Western religions had "mother" goddesses and not a male god, and that Christianity was similar in its early days? "Late medieval and Renaissance art often features the Virgin Mary, one breast exposed, nursing the baby Jesus," reports Utne. "The mother's breast is a symbol of God's love; her milk represents salvation." Then, after about 1750, naked breasts were either medical or erotic. Author Margaret R. Miles suggest we bring back the breast as it was: "In societies in which violence is rampant on the street and in the media, the nursing Virgin can perhaps communicate God's love to people in a way that a violent image, the image of one more sacrificial victim, cannot." Oh, and a footnote! The Vatican recently clarified that all Catholics baptized in the name of the creator, redeemer, and sanctifier—a popular gender-neutral alternative to father, son, and holy spirit—should be re-baptized using the proper male names for God. [Utne]
Publishers Weekly is reporting that a slew of books about sex are forthcoming from Christian publishers. You read that right: Christian publishers. Not surprisingly, the titles focus on embracing abstinence as a lifestyle. Grammy-award winning singer-songwriter Rebecca St. James's Pure is coming out this fall, and promises to "help young women with the struggle to remain virgins until marriage." James is 30, btw. Already-published chastity experts Nancy Leigh DeMoss (Lies Women Believe) and Dannah Gresh (And the Bride Wore White) are going after the younger promise ring-wearing set by co-authoring Lies Young Women Believe. How are these lies different than the ones their older sisters buy into? Are the lies just sent through MySpace messages now? The impure women of Jezebel can't wait to find out. [Publisher's Weekly]
lit chick
Judy Blume: Almost 70 But Forever Our Girl
Yesterday, London's Daily Telegraph printed an interview with Judy Blume, author of teen-fiction bibles Deenie, Tiger Eyes, Blubber, Forever and Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. Ms. Blume, who turns 70 years old next week (!!!), has sold 75 million copies of her novels worldwide, and taught girls — and boys — everywhere about periods, masturbation, sex and the roller coaster ride that is puberty. And though she has meant so much to millions of readers; she continues to be "one of the most banned writers in America", particularly because of the sexually-titillating and heart-meltingly sweet coming-of-age novel Forever. "Everybody has a Forever story," Ms. Blume says. "Everybody."Ms. Blume explains that she wrote Forever for her teenage daughter: "She asked me for a story about two nice kids who have sex without either of them having to die." More »
loose morality
How Do You Know If You're A Good Person?
What are morals? And why does generation after generation insist on infusing certain behaviors, whether they be eating pork or eating meat, cloning cows or cloning zygotes, driving pickups or buying Barbies at Wal-Mart, drinking or smoking, with the radioactive taint that is MORALITY? Why do the universal biological instincts we call "conscience" impel toddlers to offer you their drool-stained teddy bears when they see you cry, and yet adults, in the name of the universal moral order their consciences supposedly constructed, see fit to publicly flog other adults who allow said children to name their teddy bears "Mohammed"? What was up with Will Smith telling that newspaper he didn't think Hitler thought of himself as a terrible guy? And why the fuck are people so quick to misinterpret every goddamn thing someone says, as if they've been standing in the shadows for years, waiting for that deep-rooted innermost hatefulness to reveal itself? Why does righteousness so easily slide into immorality? And why does every experiment testing the universality of "morals" involve runaway tolleys? Is what we call "morality" just another example of of evolutionary biology, which is the new "socialization"? Can we blame Darwin for Bratz dolls, AND our moral opposition to the existence of Bratz dolls in our Wal-Mart stores? More »
please god no
Does Mike Huckabee Have What It Takes To Be The Next Worst Person In The World?
While governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee took tremendous pains to get the state to release a serial rapist who, once out, raped and murdered another woman. He did it against the protestations of victims, prosecutors, other legislators, the onetime acting governor Jim Guy Tucker he tried to pin it on — and now, it turns out, a flurry of letters from victims who'd been too scared to press or talked out of pressing charges, like one woman who had been raped while lying next to her three-year-old daughter in the seventies. The Huffington Post went public with the letters yesterday, and as usual with serial rape cases they all seem to run together in an endless cycle of terror, trauma, and the perversion of the criminal justice system that seems so ingeniously engineered to protect the interests of the most prolific, sociopathic sex criminals. So why'd he do it? Well, the rapist's most prominent victims was a distant cousin of Bill Clinton and the daughter of the prosecuting attorney who eventually sent the rapist, Wayne Dumond, to prison, so there was at the time a right-wing campaign to paint Dumond as wrongly accused, you know, because if she was related to Bill she was clearly a sex-addicted product of the vast free love hippie abortion conspiracy who was totally asking for it. More »
cougars at war
Katie Couric Is Going To Iraq And Various Other Axis Of Evil Destinations Tonight
Following many months of assuring the public she would not be, like, trying to get into any war zones or anything bombastic and un-mommyish like that, Katie Couric is headed to Iraq tonight presumably to ponder the enduring mystery of Why They Hate Us while simultaneously deflecting attention away from the equally-urgent dilemma of Why America Hates Katie Couric also oh yeah ratings. See, Christiane Amanpour's multi-part documentary series 'God's Warriors' just got unexpectedly good ones, which taught network executives the important lesson that non-geriatrics will watch news about the war if there is some attractive brunette cougar-like public figure is presenting it to them. More »
between the covers
'Justine' Magazine: Just Because We Haven't Heard Of It Doesn't Mean It Can't Rot Tween Souls
Just because we've never heard of teen magazine Justine before doesn't mean that we didn't want to learn all sorts of things about it from the good peeps at MediaPost's 'Magazine Rack'. After all, we were once teenage girls. And while our parents made YM forbidden — they said it was demeaning to women — we did pore over many a Seventeen. Which we think we stopped reading by the time we were, oh, 13? [What about 'Sassy'? -Ed.] Anyway, the times haven't changed much. In fact, if anything, the current crop of teen mags is even worse than the ones from the mid-80s, as everything one needs to know about Justine can be wrapped up in one terse statement:[C]rap transcends generational differencesMore »
i need a god damn job
How To Deal With The Wife Of Your Rock Star Crush
We usually try to forget that Paul Westerberg is married, which is why we avoided this CNN story on his wife's apparently great new memoir Petal Pushers even though it has inexplicably been characterized as "popular" for the past 48 hours on, like, the biggest news website and, hello, this shouldn't even be a big deal in Minnesota right now. So anyway, we read it. And were confused. Do we like Laurie Lindeen despite the fact she is married to the frontman of our favorite band (and by "our," we guess we mean the 767 of you who clicked on this). Well, there's this.Home life with Westerberg, who coaches son Johnny in baseball, is "swell," Lindeen says. "It hasn't always been. There's been a lot of challenges. But we're a family. And we are devoted to our son, and Paul's healthy right now. He quit drinking a couple of years ago — again — which was critical."More »
