Thirty years ago a Bishop could still hit the headlines by saying that he didn't believe that Jesus was born of a virgin. While this doctrine is still strongly held in some parts of the church it is rarely discussed outside of theological circles. Some want to point to the "truth" behind the idea while others regard it as irrational, quaint or damaging to our understanding of God, women and paternity.Ernie Rea and guests discuss the genesis of the idea of the Virgin Birth and explores its contemporary validity and value.
23 December 2016
BBC4: Can Pay Won't Pay
'Defeating the French was critical' - taxes were often levied to fight wars against the French but this didn't mean that people always paid them.
All through history people have wanted to get one over on the tax man. Whether it was the peasants of the 14th century who hid their fellow villagers to avoid the Poll Tax, homeowners in the 18th century who promised their votes to those tax collectors who would turn a blind eye to the window tax or the rich money men of the 1970s who would pay clever accountants to construct shell companies to avoid income tax. It has created a headache for governments throughout the ages. Paul Lewis looks at what can history tell us about what is a fair rate of tax, what will bring in the most revenue and asks when did paying your taxes become a moral issue.
VICE: How Sex Became a Four-Letter Word
This wasn't how I saw things as I entered adulthood in the 1970s, a decade marked by the erosion of American religious superstitions and, consequently, dramatically freer sexual attitudes. As the decade wore on, the difference between my generation's approach to sex and that of our parents began to seem more stark. History, I truly believed, was proof that things only get better in the long run. Especially for us gay men, for whom the 70s were a golden age, the last era in which we could have sex without fear. [...]
But as it ravaged our communities and finally put a damper on the sexual revelry in which we'd indulged, it also propelled an extraordinary cultural change. Families and close friends of those stricken were becoming more familiar with gay lifestyles than ever before; personal accounts of AIDS and its causes gave regular people a vivid glimpse of what it meant to be homosexual. It's indisputable that anti-gay bigotry still prevailed throughout the decade, but though it is rarely mentioned, AIDS played a large role in bringing gay people out of the closet and into the mainstream. [...]
One might have expected that AIDS would send us homosexuals crawling back into the shadows or hiding our lives from friends and family, but I believe the crisis forced so many to come out that the gay rights movement that followed would have been otherwise impossible. Of course, the rights we gained in the military and marriage and being allowed into public life might not be much of a consolation prize, considering the double-edged sword the plague represented. [...]
It's an attitude that reaches to the furthest corners of our society, well beyond homosexuality. Sex, in general, has become scarier to us than ever before. We are terrified by it, given it informs our discourse against molestation by priests and the libidos of our presidents. It is more and more referred to as a force that can steal freedom and oppress others. And for me—and many others, I believe—this new sexual repression has debunked the notion that human society always becomes more accepting of pleasure as time goes on.
The New York Review of Books: Crowding Around the Nativity
The Gospel of Luke says that the pregnant mother of Jesus could not find shelter in an inn, so she had no place to put down her newborn but in an animals’ food trough—phatne in Luke’s Greek, the word rightly translated as praesepium (Latin), krippe (German), crèche (French), presepe (Italian), manger or crib (English). They all mean food trough. Yet this humble picture of a homeless mother having this as her last resort is turned into grand theatrical displays in our annual crèche unveilings. In this celebratory setting, the vagrant woman has become queenly, she is receiving royalty, she is lit by angelic hoverings. The dirty trough has become a tidy little bed of straw.
Franciscans are supposed to have been the original patrons of crèches, since St. Francis, according to legend, created the first presepe to celebrate an outdoor Christmas Mass in 1223, giving it a populist air. Initially, the figures were life-size and the scene centered on the Holy Family, but during the Baroque period, the scale was vastly reduced while gaining complexity with the addition of peasants, horsemen, merchants, dogs, cows, goats, and even water buffalo. Actually, Jesuits in the seventeenth century used modeling figures and increasingly intricate architecture and illusionistic landscapes to stage the Nativity story as a teaching device, and some of their aristocratic patrons began to commission artists and architects to make grand examples of this playful new form for their palaces. The artistry involved reached a peak in eighteenth-century Naples, under the Bourbon kings, when the largest crèches would often fill several rooms and be continually added-to and rearranged to enhance the effect. The authentic presepi of that period still have the windblown drapery of the Jesuit-favored baroque period, and it is a great curatorial guessing game to identify which famous Neapolitan painter might be responsible for this or that figurine in the crèche. [...]
All Neapolitan presepi include contemporary figures and their pets, but only Chicago’s has its own villain—the innkeeper who turned the Holy Family away from his place. But while he scowls, musicians play and dance the tarantella for his merry customers, sounding their castanets and tambourine, while on a lower level men play cards, women nurse babies, dogs and cats prowl. On the right side of the scene, it may surprise people to see the classical statue of Hercules dug up in the baths of Caracalla in 1546, here enshrined as an alabaster miniature. But, like the elephant of Charles IV in Pittsburgh, the Hercules was a famous sight in eighteenth-century Naples, where king Ferdinand IV brought it from Rome in 1787. This was just another way of saying the Savior is born to us in every place and every time. But especially in Naples.
Quartz: How Russia surpassed Germany to become the racist ideal for Trump-loving white supremacists
Richard Spencer, the current face (and haircut) of US’s alt-right, believes Russia is the “sole white power in the world.” David Duke, meanwhile, believes Russia holds the “key to white survival.” And as Matthew Heimbach, head of the white nationalist Traditionalist Worker Party, recently said, Russian president Vladimir Putin is the “leader of the free world”—one who has helped morph Russia into an “axis for nationalists.”
For those Americans who are just now familiarizing themselves with Russia’s current political proclivities—due to the recent, high-profile Russian hacking allegations, say, or the brutal military campaign in Aleppo—Moscow’s transformation into a lodestar for America’s white supremacists is enough to cause whiplash. After all, just a few decades ago Moscow was a beacon for the far-left, and its influential Communist International provided material and organizational heft for those pushing Soviet-style autocracy around the world. Over the past few years, however, the Kremlin has cultivated those on the far-right end of the West’s political spectrum in the pursuit, as Heimbach told me, of reifying something approaching a “Traditionalist International.” [...]
Following the chaos of the Soviet dissolution in the 1990s, Putin’s kleptocracy has restored the state to domestic primacy. Moreover, Putin has positioned Russia as a leader for those in the West attempting to roll back liberal policies, from abortion and LGBT rights to dissolving the distance between church and state. Meanwhile, Moscow has been busily cultivating relationships with far-right groups in Europe, from radical right-wingers in Hungary to Marine LePen, one of the front-runners for the upcoming French presidency.
Slate: Lesbians and Key Rings: A Cultural Love Story
The beltside key ring is one of the most enduring sartorial symbols of lesbian culture, one of the few stereotypes of our kind that’s both inoffensive and true. Baby gays searching the internet for ways to find their people and send out lesbian vibes will learn that “the universal key chain signal for lesbians is the carabiner clip” and even straight people know it. When Pharrell Williams wore a sparkly yellow carabiner on his pants at the 2015 BET Awards, comedian Fortune Feimster joked that he’d picked up a lesbian’s keys. Kate McKinnon’s clichéd lesbian character in 2015’s Sisters has a whole collection of carabiners to her name. [...]
Both fashion and function are integral to the origin story of the key ring as lesbian flagging device. The style stems from the history of butch women being attracted to the masculine aesthetic of blue-collar jobs, and being shunted into such jobs because they didn’t fit the gender molds of the other career tracks—stewardess, waitress, secretary—available to women in generations past. (Lesbians were also more likely to have jobs in general in previous eras, as they didn’t have male spouses to breadwin and demand kept homes.) Without strict dress codes, women who worked as custodians, postal workers, and mechanics could stretch the boundaries of accepted gender presentations. They also needed easily accessible keys. [...]
Another root of the lesbian key ring tradition connects to kink culture and gay cruising. People involved in the leather scene used to (and sometimes still do) wear their keys clipped to their belt loops based on their sexual preferences: on the right side to indicate that the wearer is a bottom, and left if she’s a top. One oft-repeated theory says a Village Voice writer once jokingly suggested that gay men should dispense with this binary key system and develop a more complex system to reflect a broader taxonomy of sexual desire, thus sparking the creation of the hanky code.
CityLab: What Victorian England Tells Us About Pollution and Urban Development
That picture of the filth is accurate enough, but the unchecked pollution had a bigger negative economic impact than many realize, according to a new study from the U.K.’s National Bureau of Economic Research. Instead of being a necessary byproduct of wealth creation in the industrial era, that pollution actually stood in the way of economic development.
Heavy pollution caused by unregulated, inefficient coal burning probably hindered the growth of the most polluted cities, slowing down the pace of urban development as poor air quality both discouraged people from settling in cities and reduced productivity among ailing workers. Even more than a century later, where the Victorian factory town still forms a template for urbanism in new industrial superpowers like China and India, this is highly significant. [...]
Given that the way we imagine rapid development today still derives largely from the great industrial shocks of the Victorian era, the observations are significant. Consuming fuel may remain an integral part of heavy industrial production, but manufacturing might just work better and develop faster with cleaner, healthier conditions. There may be money in muck, but it seems that cleaning up after yourself may have always been the more profitable option.
Los Angeles Times: European Court strikes down Britain's sweeping surveillance law
The country is on the verge of adopting what critics say is the most extensive surveillance law to be adopted in the Western world. The Investigatory Powers Act, approved by Parliament last month, enables the British government to undertake the bulk interception of electronic communications of ordinary citizens.
More specifically, it requires Internet and phone companies to keep the records of every call made, online message sent and website visited by customers for 12 months. Public organizations would then be able access these communications, sometimes without a warrant, and also without the individual being made aware they were under surveillance.
The security services argue that mass surveillance of this scale is necessary in order to keep citizens safe during a time of heightened threats, global terrorist attacks and cyberwarfare. But human rights groups have long said that while some surveillance is necessary, the basic privacy of citizens should not be violated in the process.
Following a legal challenge, Britain's High Court found the surveillance law breached fundamental rights, but the government appealed and the case was referred to the European Court of Justice.
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