"At one point before she got married, however, she nearly became a nun."

"As a teen, she applied to join the convent and was accepted. Despite her hope for a large family, 'I just felt I had a vocation,' said Koller, explaining that she is a person of faith and a Catholic. It was her mother and then-boyfriend (who later became her husband of 66 years), who convinced her to get married instead and, in hindsight, she’s glad they did. Her family, she said, is her greatest source of pride. In 1942, Koller married William Koller, a World War II veteran.... The couple was not sure at first how many children they wanted, but once they got started, 'we just kept going,' Koller said, adding that her life was never lonely again."

From "She was an only child. Now she has 101 great-grandchildren. Growing up, Marguerite 'Peg' Koller’s wish was to have a big family. She got it in spades" in The Washington Post.

Why is The Washington Post publishing this story? Pure pro-natalism. How does this serve the WaPo agenda?

"Liz Pickard, an office worker from Denver, was raised Episcopalian, but discovered the story of Brigid on an earlier visit to Ireland."

"She came to Solas Bhride this year for a weeklong stay in its hermitage. 'I was searching for meaning and she gives so much meaning,' Ms. Pickard said. 'Right now, if you go down a certain road with religion, there’s a lot of pain caused by these people, but with Brigid, I think there’s a lot of kindness, and a lot of service and courage.' Two sisters, Georgina O Briain and Caragh Lawlor, sat in the calm of Solas Bhride’s central prayer space on Saint Brigid’s Day, quietly weaving rush crosses... 'Brigid was both Christian and pagan, a mix of the two, and while I’m not very religious, I am very spiritual, and she brings it together for me,' Ms. O Briain said.... Tellingly, Brigid’s Christian nuns maintained a pagan-style fire shrine on the grounds of her abbey, even after the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in the 12th century, in which the English monarchy imposed strict Roman Catholic doctrine on the independent-minded Celtic church of Brigid, Patrick and Columba — Irelands’ trio of patron saints...."

From "As Ireland’s Church Retreats, the Cult of a Female Saint Thrives/The cult of Saint Brigid, with its emphasis on nature and healing, and its shift away from the patriarchal faith of traditional Catholicism in Ireland, is attracting people from around the world" (NYT). 

I didn't know the legend: "Around the year 480... a freed slave named Brigid founded a convent under an oak in the east of Ireland. To feed her followers, she asked the King of Leinster, who ruled the area, for a grant of land. When the pagan king refused, she asked him to give her as much land as her cloak would cover. Thinking she was joking, he agreed. But when Brigid threw her cloak on the ground, it spread across 5,000 acres — creating the Curragh plains...."

Here's the Wikipedia article "Curragh." An excerpt:

There has been a permanent military presence in the curragh since 1856... Records of women, known as Wrens of the Curragh, who were paid for sex work by soldiers at the camp, go back to the 1840s.  They lived in 'nests' half-hollowed out of banks and ditches, which were covered in furze bushes....

Nowadays, the pagan-curious ex-Episcopalians traveling to commune with St. Brigid might gaze longingly at an "offbeat" Airbnb "nest" — a half-hollowed-out bank covered in furze bushes.

The "legally blind" 65-year-old woman who mountain bikes "along knifelike cliff edges where one false move would mean a 2,000-foot fall."

Profiled in the NYT, here: "At 65 and Legally Blind, ‘Sister Shred’ Has Never Met a Slope She Wouldn’t Ride/Kris Nordberg still loves rolling through rock gardens and shredding powder on her ski bike — sometimes, in a nun costume." 

She has pseudoxanthoma elasticum, a progressive genetic disorder, and "riding with her head turned to the side, she can use her peripheral vision to make out people ahead of her on the trail and shapes and colors."

When she encounters a particularly tricky section of a trail — for instance, a rock staircase with jagged boulders that could snag a front wheel and send a rider over a bike’s handlebars — she sometimes asks strangers for guidance. She carries a bright orange strap and politely asks other riders if they could use it to mark the path of least resistance.

The second-oldest person in the world just survived covid 19.

"A 116-year-old French nun who is believed to be the world’s second-oldest person has survived COVID-19 and is looking forward to celebrating her 117th birthday on Thursday" (Fox32).

"She didn’t ask me about her health, but about her habits," David Tavella, the communications manager for the [nun's] care home.... "For example, she wanted to know if meal or bedtime schedules would change. She showed no fear of the disease. On the other hand, she was very concerned about the other residents."

"The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday teachers at religious schools are foreclosed from bringing workplace discrimination cases against their employers."

"The 7-2 ruling said the lawsuits could not move forward due to the “ministerial exception” and court precedent, which has held the First Amendment protects religious institutions from some workplace discrimination complaints."

The Washington Times reports.

AND: A second case announced this morning — "In Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania, the justices upheld a federal rule exempting employers with religious or moral objections from providing contraceptive coverage to their employees under the Affordable Care Act." I'm seeing that announcement at SCOTUSblog. Thomas writes the majority opinion and there's also a concurring opinion by Kagan, who is joined by Breyer. Only Ginsburg and Sotomayor dissent. Full opinion here.

Excerpt from the majority opinion:

"Sister Harney found a book on the vows — poverty, obedience, chastity — that she had bought once but never read."

"'I saw Alan creeping around with his cellphone to take a picture of the cover, and then next time I saw it Sarah had been reading it and it was full of Post-it notes all over,' Sister Harney said. 'Millennials were looking at it like this is the glue. They were looking for the secret sauce of how we do this.' The sisters began to see that the millennials wanted a road map for life and ritual, rather than a belief system. On one of the first nights, Sister Judy Carle said, one of the young people casually asked the sisters, 'So, what’s your spiritual practice?' 'That’s the first question, not, "What do you believe?"' she said... 'So many of the millennials would say, "I’m looking for rituals"'... [The millennial Sarah Jane Bradley said,] 'It sounds like it’s about taking orders, but the sisters helped me see it’s about preparing the heart for dialogue and a deep internal listening for truth... The vows opened up this portal in which to really appreciate how countercultural the lives these sisters have led are.' It’s hard to adopt practices that stem from vows without belief...  For example, the millennials became interested in the idea of discernment, a process the sisters use to sift and orient options to more closely listen for God’s call. [The millennial Adam Horowitz said,] 'But now I’ve heard millennials saying they need to "discern what I’m up to this afternoon"... And it’s so important we don’t dilute it.'"

From "These Millennials Got New Roommates. They’re Nuns/A project called Nuns and Nones moved religion-free millennials into a convent" (NYT).

Comedy "doesn’t feel right anymore," says Lisa Lampanelli, who is quitting stand-up comedy.

She announced on Howard Stern's radio show a few days ago.

Lampanelli’s rise to prominence as a top-tier insult comic came in 2002 when she showcased her crass style at the Friars Club Roast honoring Chevy Chase. She has since become a fixture at those events, skewering everyone from President Trump to David Hasselhoff. While she plans to remain a member of the Friars Club, she said comedy “doesn’t feel right anymore” and she’s glad to leave the jokes to other comics.

“I’m not going to lie, I’d get off stage and I’d go ‘I hope that guy I made fun of was OK’ or ‘I hope that guy doesn’t feel like he didn’t know what he was in for,’” she confessed.

Here she is talking to Stern and saying her "message of including people through insults is getting lost, and now maybe, God forbid, I'm being misunderstood by different races, transgender people, gay people, even though I have love in my heart":



She wants to do something that has a "clear message to make people feel better about themselves." Her new routine has a big weight-loss theme (which, I don't know, does that deliver a clear message and help you feel better?):

“Do you spend much of your day obsessing about what you’re eating and how you’re eating it,” Lampanelli said. “Do you feel guilty about eating, hate yourself for eating what you enjoy, and cram down foods that are ‘good for you’?”

Well, she has too, Lampanelli said, and the workshop will provide participants with the tools they need to get them on a path to inner peace when it comes to food and body image. The workshop will use storytelling, sharing, meditation, journaling, brainstorming, deep listening and self-reflection.

For old time's sake, here she is roasting Donald Trump, and you can see him laughing at her insults:



Those were the days... before The Era of That's Not Funny kicked in.

I imagine that Lampanelli's move is influenced by the critical acclaim bestowed on Hannah Gadsby's show "Nanette." Here's the NYT last May:

Her self-mocking nebbish is a familiar persona, but there comes a moment when she drops and deconstructs it.... “Do you know what self-deprecation means coming from somebody who exists on the margins?” she asks. “It is not humility; it is humiliation.”...

[S]he explains that good stories have three parts (beginning, middle and end) while jokes require two (setup and punch line), which means that to end on a laugh, comics often need to cut off the most important and constructive element, where hindsight, perspective and catharsis exist.

“A joke is a question, artificially inseminated with tension,” she says, before explaining the mechanics of her job. “I make you all tense and then I cure it with a laugh. And you say: ‘Thanks for that, I was feeling a bit tense.’” Then in one of many tonal shifts, she raises her voice, irritated at the audience’s hypothetic gratitude: “But I made you tense!”

Then she points to the audience and back at her and quips, darkly: “This is an abusive relationship.”...

Beautiful squalor — in the name of a religion seen from a distance.

Is there something morally wrong with the NYT's photographic presentation of the nuns of Yarchen Gar? The America eye luxuriates in the exotic, subtle color...

The homes are patchworks of boards and thin metal sheets, with the occasional piece of plastic tarp covering a part of the roof or walls. Narrow lanes wind among them. Depending on the wind, the air can be thick with the smell of undrained sewage....

This "gar" — a Buddhist monastic encampment  — has grown up since 1985 from nothing. 10,000 human beings live like this. We're told Chinese officials are dismantling another gar, an even larger one. The text doesn't tell us to love the gars and hate the Chinese officials, but I feel that's what I'm being told, and I don't like this manipulation or the tendency of Americans to romanticize things like this, seen from afar.

A gar from afar.

"The Wisconsin nuns who have been praying nonstop since 1878."

"The La Crosse-based Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration claim to have been praying night and day for the ill and the suffering longer than anyone in the United States — since 11 a.m. on Aug. 1, 1878...."

The tradition of perpetual Eucharistic adoration — uninterrupted praying before what is believed to be the body of Christ — dates to 1226 in France, according to Sister Marlene Weisenbeck.... In La Crosse, the nuns estimate they’ve prayed for hundreds of thousands of people, including 150,000 in the last decade. “Sometimes it’s overwhelming with the pain that people have and the illnesses that they are suffering,” said Donna Benden, who is among 180 lay people known as “prayer partners” who help the 100 sisters. Benden prays from 7 a.m. to 8 a.m. every Wednesday before going to work.

Oh, brother.

"Men but not women get to preside at Mass. Men but never women wear the cassock of a cardinal, the vestments of a pope. Male clergy are typically called 'father,' which connotes authority. Women in religious orders are usually called 'sister,' which doesn’t."

Says Frank Bruni in the middle of a rant titled "Catholicism Undervalues Women."

Whatever else he may want to say about Catholics and women, there's no lack of parallelism in that father/sister terminology. Men in religious orders are called "brother," and female leaders of orders are called "mother."

"I questioned the morality of breaking into high-security nuclear sites: What if someone got shot?"

"What about the trauma a young security guard might experience after realizing that he or she had killed a nun rather than a terrorist? Sister Ardeth replied that nobody had been harmed in the more than thirty years since the first Plowshares, and that the Lord should be thanked for that. She betrayed no doubts. 'I will continue doing direct action for the rest of my life,' Sister Ardeth told me. 'If I can walk, you’ll find me out there.'"

From "Break-In at Y-12/How a handful of pacifists and nuns exposed the vulnerability of America’s nuclear-weapons sites," by Eric Schlosser (in The New Yorker).

NYT editors "perplex[ed]" by Justice Sotomayor's perception of a burden on religion in the requirement that some nuns "fill out paperwork."

The nuns don't want any connection — even a little paperwork — to contraception and seek an exemption. The source of religious exemptions is the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which requires relief from burdens on religion imposed by the federal government (unless those burdens are needed to serve a compelling interest). What is "perplexing" here?

The audacious complaint in this case is against the requirement that such groups sign a short form certifying that they have religious objections to providing coverage for contraceptive services, a copy of which would go to their third-party insurance administrator....

The certification requirement, an accommodation fashioned by the Obama administration to bolster the protection of religious exercise without depriving women of an important benefit, does not rise to a substantial burden.

That is, the burden upon which the nuns base their claim for religious accommodation was itself a religious accommodation.

Why didn't Congress simply write an exception to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act into the Affordable Care Act? The government would be home free. It wouldn't even have had to provide the certification work-around to accommodate the conscience of the nuns. The Free Exercise Clause of the Constitution doesn't require relief from burdens imposed by generally applicable laws that were not designed to target religion. The answer to the question is obvious: Congress scarcely squeezed the ACA through and couldn't bear any additional friction in the legislative process. RFRA was left as a source of future litigation, even as Congress made a show of catering to the young women who feel cared for when contraception is an entitlement.

Congress failed to deactivate RFRA, and the Democratic Party shored up power with its "war on women" rhetoric, and the result of those thoroughly political, tactical choices is that these nuns have a little legal ground to stand on.

I'm not perplexed at all.

"The government has lots of ways to deliver contraceptives to people... It doesn’t need to force nuns to participate."

"In their Supreme Court brief, the nuns said they faced ruinous fines if they failed to comply. They calculated that they would have to pay 'an annual fine of approximately $2.5 million — for an organization that cares for 69 elderly poor people and operates with an annual budget of approximately $6 million.'"

What they must do to avoid the fine is only to sign a certification allowing insurance companies to provide contraceptive coverage, but they are burdened by that intrusion on their religious principles.

"We are nuns. We rely on God and the angels to protect us."

"At the end, [the mob] paraded us like prisoners of war and hurled abuse at us as they led us from one alley to another without telling us where they were taking us."

I wasn't going to blog "18 Ways To Eat Hummus All Day Long"...

... as I idly scanned Buzzfeed headlines, but I see it's written by a "Buzzfeed fellow" named Spencer Althouse, and I'm always looking for new posts in the storied line collected under my "other Althouses" tag.

I'm 22, an identical twin, and I don't trust men who shave their armpits. Comedy writer, aspiring screenwriter, Academy Awards enthusiast.

So... there are 2 other Althouses.

Here's Spencer's collection of "The 31 Most Sinfully Sexy Nuns In Movie History." As the countdown continues, you become more and more sure that #1 is Audrey Hepburn in "The Nun's Story," but she's not.

E.J. Dionne asks "Does our presidential campaign lack a moral core?"

He purports to delve into the debate:

However you analyze it in electoral terms, the exchange between President Obama and Mitt Romney was most striking as a festival of technocratic mush — dueling studies mashed in with competing statistics. In many ways, the encounter offered voters the worst of all worlds: a great deal of indecipherable wonkery and remarkably little clarity about where each would lead the country.

However you analyze it? Well, I don't even have to check the debate transcript to remember a striking use of the word "moral." Let me get the exact quote from the transcript. Jim Lehrer had just asked "what are the differences between the two of you as to how you would go about tackling the deficit problem in this country?" And Mitt Romney said:

Good. I'm glad you raised that, and it's a -- it's a critical issue. I think it's not just an economic issue, I think it's a moral issue. I think it's, frankly, not moral for my generation to keep spending massively more than we take in, knowing those burdens are going to be passed on to the next generation and they're going to be paying the interest and the principal all their lives. And the amount of debt we're adding, at a trillion a year, is simply not moral.

But Dionne would like you to think of the debate is just a big indecipherable mush. And then the whole rest of his column is about — can you guess? — Nuns on the Bus! Because who's better than nuns "to remind us that our decisions in November have ethical consequences?" I'd say Mitt Romney was better, in his utterly clear statement quoted above, which is in no way "technocratic mush" or "insufferable wonkery," Mr. Dionne. But... hey! Look! Nuns! Nunnnnzzzz!

"Ah, Godspell. How you shaped our ’70s Catholic school childhoods by influencing an entire generation..."

"... of semi-closeted nuns to pick up their guitars and force us to learn half the songbook. Do they still have guitar masses? Or did all those Birkenstock’d nuns finally drop the veil and head off to the Lilith Fair?"

The first paragraph of Tom and Lorenzo's recap of the most recent episode of "Project Runway All Stars."

Are you watching this season? I am. I still can't tell you the names of the 2 people they've got in the Heidi and Tim positions, but they're doing a decent job helping us deal with being deprived of familiar things.

And, as long as I'm rummaging around at Tom and Lorenzo's, check out these stiletto-heeled ice skates.

"The recount for the state Supreme Court race has come to this: Votes from nuns have been thrown out."

Nuns! 

Yes, nuns.

Because the nuns did not follow the rules.

Because canvassers were unable to match the actual ballots to the voter, they took all 24 absentee ballots from the Town of Sumpter and randomly drew 18, which were then set aside and not counted. Of those ballots, Prosser had 14 while Kloppenburg had four.

Unfair to Kloppenburg! You just know all those rule-breaking nuns were Prosserites Prosserans.

"Why portray the king as a cross-dressing homosexual who shoots Protestants dressed as birds in his royal park for fun?"

"Because that's exactly as I saw him," answers Ken Russell, looking back 40 years at his truly outrageous film "The Devils."

Russell's film was adapted from Aldous Huxley's 1952 non-fiction novel The Devils of Loudon, as well as John Whiting's follow-up 1960 play The Devils. They were all inspired by the notorious case of supposed demonic possession in 17th-century France, in which a charismatic Catholic priest, Urbain Grandier, was accused of bewitching nuns. The accusation was trumped up by Richelieu as an excuse to destroy a Protestant stronghold....

Russell mentions he was inspired by one particular line in Huxley's book. "The exorcism of sister Jeanne," wrote Huxley, "was equivalent to rape in a public lavatory." Hence the film's vision of Loudon as a pristine, white-stone city and the convent as clad in white tiles.... Russell recalls the film's final shot: "The girl goes up the hill of broken bricks." The girl (Grandier's recently widowed wife) walks over Loudun's ruins into a landscape in which the only objects are posts topped by carriage wheels, on which Protestant corpses turn in the wind. "Polanski is said to have been inspired by that shot for the last scene of The Pianist," [says Russell's wife  Lisi Tribble].

Russell then suggests The Devils is a religious film that takes inspiration from his own Catholic faith. "It's about the degradation of religious principles," he says. "And about a sinner who becomes a saint."

I had a list of my 5 favorite films that remained the same 5 films for quite a few years, and "The Devils" on the list. What was the rest of the list? Can I remember? "Aguirre the Wrath of God," "My Dinner With Andre," "Mahler," and "It's a Gift." I have had the same 11 films on my Blogger profile list for a long time, maybe going all the way back to 2004. 3 of my old 5 favorites are still on the list. The 2 that are not are Ken Russell films. Ken Russell was really important back in the 1970s and 80s, and I've forgotten about him in the last 20 years. I wonder what sort of impression "The Devils" would make on me now. Or "Mahler." Or all those other fabulous Ken Russell movies we submerged ourselves in, in the isolation chamber of the movie theater.

A few scattered thoughts on the movie "Doubt."

1. For a movie full of nuns and priests, there was damned little religion in it. There were references to "mortal sin," and Bibles and crosses were displayed, but I don't think anyone ever mentioned God or Jesus. In church, at Christmas, the priest was saying "Happy Holidays." Now that was part of his character. He also wanted the Catholic school kids to sing some secular Christmas songs. The head nun had a big problem with that, but somehow managed to voice her disapproval without talking religion.

2. Unfortunately, having fought insomnia all last night, I kept slipping into little naps. Maybe it was all God, Jesus, and Mary when I was snoozing, but I think not.

3. Booger acting. I know many actors go for the tears-streaming-streaming-down face or the single tear welling up and finally dripping slowly down the cheek, but tears are the most pleasant of the bodily fluids. In "Doubt," one character goes for many long minutes with mucus flowing from her nostrils, even taking the path across the lips and into the mouth. It's kind of distracting! Not since "Blair Witch Project" have we seen such booger acting.

4. I kept trying to picture how the play was staged. Now, I've looked it up. From Ben Brantley's 2004 review: "The play unfolds mostly as a series of dialogues, punctuated by two monologues - sermons delivered by Father Flynn to his congregation on the subjects of doubt and gossip." That sounds better than the movie.

5. It wasn't bad. It had a tight script and some nice Streepage.

6. "I don't have an organized religious thing, but I have love in my life."

7. I'm seeing all the well-reviewed year-end movies, and there's an awful lot of wrong-age sex. "Doubt" is about a priest accused of molesting children. "Benjamin Button," with its backwards aging character, had scenes of an old man in love with a young girl and an old woman in love with a toddler. "The Reader" had a 36-year-old woman seducing a 15-year-old boy. "Milk" had a man in his 40s pursuing relationships with much younger (and more fragile) men. "Slumdog Millionaire" shows a young teenage girl being sold for sex. I say that Hollywood is delivering pedophiliac titillation with the deniability of artistic pretension.

8. "Doubt" works as a law movie. There are no lawyers or trials, but the subject of evidence is well-explored. There's an especially good illustration of the way a lie can be used to produce a reaction that constitutes relevant evidence.

9. We had a long discussion of the meaning of the little magnetic dancing ballerina the priest gives the boy.

ADDED: John Podhoretz gets it exactly right. Slightly spoilerish Excerpt"

[Writer-director John Patrick] Shanley's certitude about the lack of certitude in his play demonstrates why it was a mistake to put him at the helm of the movie version, since it proves he is an even worse interpreter of his own work than he is a director of it....

Doubt works not because the story is ambiguous, but because it is not ambiguous. It is, rather, a potent and unforgettable account of systemic injustice.

Podhoretz, like me, is not buying the bogus profundity of snot: "Viola Davis... may win an Oscar for best supporting actress largely because she goes without a tissue for a few minutes."