"There’s always trouble in the Church of England.... They’re always tying themselves in knots about something or other."

"But this is a big one, because they’ve decided that their whole operation is a festival of ableism and that their meek priests are not feeling very blessed at all. One, quoted in a new report called 'All Kinds of Minds,' says that the pressure of trying to appear 'typical' means that when he gets home after a hard day at work (me neither) he has to lie on the floor to literally ground himself.... [T]he report reckons that the pressure on vicars to be loud and interesting puts intolerable pressure on those who are 'neurodivergent.'..."

Writes Jeremy Clarkson, in "I know how to fill churches. Deconsecrate them/My idea to fill the pews would mean hiring out churches for parties — but a new report focuses instead on calming down neurodivergent vicars" (London Times).

Clarkson goes on to crack some jokes at the expense of the neurodivergent, but I didn't think the jokes were much good, so let's just read that article he linked to: "Church urged to embrace neurodivergent parishioners (and priests)/A report says the assumptions that preachers should be extroverts and worshippers must sit still were contributing to 'cultures of ableism.'"

"Born with male sex characteristics and raised as boys, the current group of bissus are feminine in appearance."

"Their sacred rituals embody both genders: the daggers represented masculinity; the colorful silks femininity. 'Within a bissu, both male and female exist, and that is perfection,' said Kahar Eka, 52, a senior bissu, who wore a distinctly male attire of a peci hat and trousers, a day after donning an elaborate headdress embedded with flowers...."

I'm reading "The Priests Revered in the Land of Five Genders/The bissus of South Sulawesi are considered a link between the earthly and celestial because they are thought to embody both male and female traits" (NYT).

Eka, who commonly goes by just one name, remembers feeling effeminate even as a young boy; but that sentiment was rejected by Eka’s father, a conservative Muslim. Growing up in Sulawesi, Eka often looked at the bissus and wondered why they were respected, but the calabai — or men who exhibited feminine traits — were bullied. The calling to be a bissu, Eka said, came in a fever dream.... 

"[T]he 44-year-old Austrian had started from Schmittenhöhe in the direction of Piesendorf. Above the Pinzgauer Hütte, she collided... with the Cessna piloted by a 28-year-old."

🚨 WATCH: A paraglider gets hit by a Cessna 172 near the Austrian town of Zell am See.

The paraglider was able to pull her rescue parachute and land safely shortly after the incident on Saturday.

According to police, the 44-year-old Austrian had started from Schmittenhöhe in… pic.twitter.com/HYQ7euRu57

— Breaking Aviation News & Videos (@aviationbrk) May 24, 2026

From the reactions at X:

1. "I assume the paraglider was not respecting the max altitude? or was it the cessna?"

2. "That pilot is a fucking moron. How could he not see a neon pink chute against that blue sky??? My take is he did it on purpose, wanted to get as close as possible to make it a 'stunt' but miscalculated. No other explanation."

3. "So shocking too me that nobody thanks Jesus or God in general when the survive something like this. My immediate reaction when landing would be to thank the good lord every breath and kiss the earth and just give him all the praise."

4. "@grok, can you translate what all she says in this video into English, please?" Answer:

Pelvic theology.

I'm noticing that striking and hilarious phrase for the first time as I encounter this essay in the NYT: "Pope Leo Chooses Social Justice Over Pelvic Theology."

This is by David Gibson, director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University, and I assume the headline represents his opinion, not something Leo is doing openly, using those words.

Let's read:

"Mr. Crofts and Mr. Seals, who as adherents of the Baha’i faith imbued their music with religious themes, started as a duo in 1969..."

"... and stayed together until 1980. They produced the jazzy, upbeat 'Diamond Girl,' the quirky, naturalistic 'Hummingbird,' the feathery, soulful 'Get Closer' and the wistful 'We May Never Pass This Way Again' — all reaching the Top 20 on the Billboard Hot 100. But it was 'Summer Breeze,' which peaked at No. 6, that proved the most lasting, with its memorable opening guitar lick, gentle melody and simple, reassuring refrain: 'Summer breeze makes me feel fine / Blowing through the jasmine in my mind.'... In a 2022 ranking of the greatest summer songs of all time, Rolling Stone magazine listed 'Summer Breeze' at No. 20. It described Seals & Crofts as one of the 'signature soft-rock groups' of the early 1970s...."

From "Dash Crofts, of the Soft-Rock Duo That Sang ‘Summer Breeze,’ Dies at 87/Seals & Crofts had a number of Billboard Top 20 songs in the 1970s before their chart topper brought them global fame" (NYT).

What were the Baha'i elements in this music? I hope it is not disrespectful to use A.I. to sketch out the beginning of an answer. Oh! It's much more extensive and explicit than I realized.

2 vertical panoramas of today's sunrise — one made by panning from low to high and the other from high to low.

First, look at the one where I began at the top, so that the iPhone sensed the light from a high spot in the sky:

That's the second shot I took, after I could see that beginning to pan from the bottom made everything too bright. So here's the first shot, which I've tinkered with a little to try to improve. I'm not happy about the rendering of the light and colors of the sunrise, but what's cool about it is that I discovered something that I had not seen at the time and that is not visible in the top-to-bottom panorama:

"Each morning, Shelly Shem Tov would enter her son’s empty bedroom and recite Chapter 20 from the biblical Book of Psalms, an ancient plea for deliverance."

"All the while she was unaware that her son, Omer Shem Tov, happened to be uttering the very same verses of Psalm 20 — 'May the Lord answer you on a day of distress.' He had adopted the same daily ritual about 130 feet underground, alone, in a Hamas tunnel in Gaza...."

From "Finding God, and Nietzsche, in the Hamas Tunnels of Gaza/How Omer Shem Tov, who was 20 years old and not particularly religious when taken hostage, survived 505 days in captivity" (NYT)(free-access link).

"A few days into his captivity, he said, he began to speak to God. He made vows. He began to bless whatever food he was given. And he had requests — some of which he believes were answered.... Some taken hostage said they found the will to go on in a motto they heard from Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli-American hostage, before he was killed by his captors. It was a version of a quotation... from the atheist German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and often echoed by Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor: 'He who has a why can bear with any how.'"

"Similar ice ridges appear elsewhere, including on Lake Mendota in Wisconsin."

I'm reading "In Japan, an Iceless Lake and an Absent God Sound an Ancient Warning/For centuries, residents in central Japan have chronicled a mysterious natural phenomenon in winter. They see its disappearance as a bad omen" (NYT).

First, people were awakened at night by a loud rumbling. Dawn broke to reveal its source: a long, narrow ridge of jagged ice that had mysteriously arisen across [Lake Suwa's] surface, meandering like the spiked back of a twisting dragon. 

This was the Miwatari, meaning the sacred crossing, which local belief held was left by a passing god of Japan’s native Shinto belief. 

Its appearance evoked feelings of awe but also reassurance among the residents, who ventured onto the ice to perform a ceremony honoring what they saw as a visitation from the supernatural. In the rare winters when the ice ridge did not appear, the god’s absence was viewed as a warning that the natural world was out of balance.... 

Only parishioners in their 60s or older remember when the Miwatari was still big enough to make a sound that could wake them at night. The last time an ice ridge formed, in 2018, it was barely six inches tall. “When I was child, the ice spikes rose higher than my height,” said Isao Nakazawa, 81, a retired auto company worker. “We knew when it appeared because it made a sound like a taiko drum, ‘Gon-gon-gon!’”

I've been out there observing our ice dragon, our sacred crossing, all winter for years on Lake Mendota. Here's a photo from January 18th:

I am deeply touched to see it connected to Shintoism. On March 6th, I happened to ask Grok: "If I wanted to become a Shintoist, would that even be possible? How would I do it? Is there a version of Shintoism available to the non-Japanese?"

But, of course, the NYT article is not inspired by nature's divine spirits. The devotion here is climate change.

"The question swirling around all the new believers was: Were they true believers? Or was their conversion mostly or entirely utilitarian..."

"... driven by a desire to push back against the forces of technology and secularism and wokeness and an increasingly militant Islam? Did they actually believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God and that he had died for our sins and was resurrected? Or did they think that was a nice story that we should tell ourselves because it encouraged people to treat each other better—because it was a kind of cultural bulwark? And did it really matter in the end? Andrew Sullivan, the writer and podcaster, suggested this might not be easy to answer. 'The feeling'—of believing—'will vary,' Sullivan, a Catholic, told me. 'Sometimes, there’s no feeling. Sometimes, you’re overwhelmed. The point really is to escape feeling as such—our emotions are not what prove anything. The genius of ritual is that it allows us not to articulate our feelings... It allows us to express our faith through an act.'"

From "How Intellectuals Found God/Almost 150 years after Nietzsche said ‘God is dead,’ some of our most important thinkers are getting religion. Peter Savodnik meets the new theists" (Free Press).

"Maybe what ails us is not our freedom per se, but something we mistake for freedom—being detached from family obligations, which are actually the demands that save us from egoism and despair."

Writes Catherine Pakaluk, author of book titled "Hannah’s Children," a book published by Regnery, "a publishing house known for its rightward bent."

The quote appears in the New Yorker article, a magazine publisher known for it's leftish bent, in an article titled "The Case for Having Lots of Kids/In 'Hannah’s Children,' an economist and mother of eight interviews highly educated women with large families—and examines the reasons for America’s declining fertility rate."

As Pakaluk writes, “My subjects described their choice to have many children as a deliberate rejection of an autonomous, customized, self-regarding lifestyle in favor of a way of life intentionally limited by the demands of motherhood.”

Some readers might find Pakaluk and her subjects overly judgmental toward other women. Pakaluk explains that this isn’t her intention. “My full and real view is that women with much smaller families or no children at all may share the purposes, values, and virtues of the women I interviewed, even though life did not hand them the same opportunities,” she writes.... This is a group that the cat-lady discourse seems to miss: women who don’t have the families they dream of, whether because of infertility or financial struggles or because they haven’t found the right partner....

Pakaluk clearly thinks that, as a culture, it is good to encourage young women to have families. The problem is how.... Her suggestion? Religion.... Her subjects describe their trust in God as one of their primary motivations for having a kid, and then another and another....

"Among Generation Z Christians... The men are staying in church, while the women are leaving at a remarkable clip...."

"[W]ithin Gen Z, almost 40 percent of women now describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated, compared with 34 percent of men.... In every other age group, men were more likely to be unaffiliated. That tracks with research that has shown that women have been consistently more religious than men, a finding so reliable that some scholars have characterized it as something like a universal human truth. The men and women of Gen Z are also on divergent trajectories in almost every facet of their lives, including education, sexuality and spirituality. Young women... came of age as the #MeToo movement... [a]nd the overturning of Roe v. Wade.... Childless young men are likelier than childless young women to say they want to become parents someday, by a margin of 12 percentage points.... For decades, many American churches and ministries have assumed that men... must be wooed into churchgoing and right living.... Pastors emphasized Jesus’s masculinity, and men’s ministries like Promise Keepers exhorted followers to embrace their roles as husbands and fathers...."

 
I'm reading "In a First Among Christians, Young Men Are More Religious Than Young Women/At Grace Church in Waco, Texas, the Generation Z gender divide can be seen in the pews. It has the potential to reshape both politics and family life" (NYT)(that's a gift link so you can read the whole thing and because there are a lot of great photographs of churchgoers).

In the comments over there, one man writes: "Could it be that these young men want a church that tells them they have the right to dominate women? And women don’t want a church like that? I wouldn’t want to be in that group of men in a church like that either. Not all men want it. They are not that insecure."

And one woman writes: "Young men are making themselves unmarriagable by buying into various cults of toxic masculinity and misogyny."

"The seventeenth-century friar Joseph of Cupertino flew so often, so extravagantly, so publicly, that he forced everyone around him..."

"... to confront the boundary between the inexplicable and the impossible... Crowds of people came to see the spectacle... So many came to see him that the friars had to remove tiles from the roof so the masses could watch him fly during the liturgy. He levitated constantly, understandably annoying his fellow friars—what with the shrieking, the soaring, the streaming crowds. He eventually annoyed the Inquisition, too, and was charged with feigned sanctity. He levitated on the way to his trial. The examiners gave him a stern warning, and the Inquisition would monitor him for the rest of his life.... Joseph understood his body as his medium. He starved it, whipped it, abused it violently for decades. Did he starve himself into lightness, with his diet of beans and rotting vegetables? According to hagiographers, when he was dying he called his body asino, or 'jackass.' During his final illness: 'The jackass has now begun to climb the mountain.' On the brink of death: 'The jackass has reached the top of the mountain. He can no longer move. He will have to leave his hide here.'..."

Writes Erin Maglaque in "Wings of Desire/A gullible new book raises the question of how we should interpret the history of the supernatural in early modernity" (NYRB). The book under review is "They Flew: A History of the Impossible" by Carlos M.N. Eire.

Maglaque continues:

Do you have to follow the instructions of the flight attendant if you're a Grammy nominee and the Lord is telling you to sing?

Answer below the fold.

"The American Civil War began in 1861, and people were 'dealing with so much death and warfare in unprecedented ways'..."

"... [said Mandi Shepp, 38, Lily Dale’s former library director and an archives coordinator at the State University of New York at Fredonia]. Many turned to Spiritualism to help cope with the mass sense of loss.... 'Spiritualism offers this very nice, comfortable ideology that these sons that were lost in battle aren’t really gone forever,' she said. In the 1870s, Spiritualists and Freethinkers camped out in what would become Lily Dale during the summertime.... The pursuit of mediumship was particularly appealing to women because 'it was a way for them to create independent careers for themselves and have a job at a time where it wasn’t really seen as a thing you could do,' said Ms. Shepp. Since women were already seen as 'the religious center of their household,' becoming a medium was more socially acceptable than following other career paths. Giving readings in public also allowed for women to speak independently and in front of audiences...."

 
From "This Community Welcomes Mediums, but First You Have to Prove Yourself/A lawsuit against the nonprofit that runs Lily Dale, a New York haven for Spiritualists, has put a spotlight on the hamlet where residents believe death does not exist" (NYT).

"Tonight the touch points are going to include your hand holding another hand, your back against somebody’s back, your hand on someone’s heart space..."

"... and their hands on your heart space, and you’re going to take turns leaning in and out of two long-held hugs."

Said Allie Hoffman, the founder of something called The Feels, quoted in "Extreme Eye Contact and Other Ways of Dating/Forget dinner and a movie: Let’s see if we can gaze into each other’s eyes for three minutes instead" (NYT).

When it was time to touch each other’s “heart space,” some laid their hands directly on the left side of their partner’s chest while others made contact with just the tips of their fingers. Somatic practices like meditation and eye gazing have long been incorporated in relationships.... The innovation here is attaching this mindfulness style to first-time romantic meet-ups....

I can't imagine volunteering (let alone paying) for this kind of thing. Here are the first 2 associations that sprang into my head.

1. In the James Whale movie "The Old Dark House" — which I watched on October 1st, the first day it became available on the Criterion Channel, part of a collection called "Pre-Code Horror" — the owner of the house suddenly lays her hand on her hand on the bare upper chest of the young Gloria Stuart:

"The more uncertain you are about your sense of self, the more likely you are to join a group, which can give you guidance on 'what to think, how to feel and how to behave'...."

Writes Jessica Grose, in "I’m Not a Joiner. Was I Born That Way?" (NYT), quoting a psychology professor who studies group behavior.

Grose mentions book clubs but her focus is on joining religious groups:

"Frankly it lies beyond science to prove the matter one way or the other. Science will not collapse..."

"... if some practitioners are convinced that occasionally there has been creative input in the long chain of being."

Said Owen Gingerich, quoted in "Owen Gingerich, Astronomer Who Saw God in the Cosmos, Dies at 93/He wrote and lectured widely, often on the theme that religion and science were not incompatible. He also chased down 600 copies of Copernicus’s landmark book" (NYT).

"The first in the procession to enter Westminster Abbey will be representatives from the Jewish, Sunni and Shiite Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, Bahai and Zoroastrian communities..."

"'During the service, four peers from the House of Lords — a Muslim, Hindu, Jew and Sikh — will hand to Charles objects of the royal regalia. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, a Hindu, will read from St. Paul’s letter to the Colossians.' At the ceremony’s end, the king will receive a 'spoken greeting in unison' — that is, not a prayer — from religious leaders of other faiths."

I'm reading "Latest coronation ‘update’ shows that the palace still doesn’t get it" (WaPo).

The quote I selected has nothing to do with the not "getting it" referenced in the headline. That has more to do with royalty in general. But I don't see how royalty itself is supposed to manifest that it "gets it." If you were royalty and you saw through to some utter absurdity or inequity, but you intended to keep your position, wouldn't you act exactly as though you didn't see it at all? 

"I've been having some crazy deja vu, because I'm an adult, 26, and, throughout childhood, I was called 'too feminine' and 'over the top,' and here I am now being called all those same things..."

"... but this time, it's from other adults. And if they're going to accuse me of anything, it should be that I'm a theater person, that I'm camp. But this is just my personality. And it always has been. What I'm struggling with most is that I grew up in a conservative family, and I'm extremely privileged because they still love me very much. And I grew up in the church, and I still have my faith, which I am really trying to hold onto right now. But I've always tried to love everyone — you know, people that make it really hard. I think it's okay to be frustrated with someone — confused. But what I'm struggling to understand is the need to dehumanize — to be cruel. I just think that's not great. You know, dehumanization has never fixed anything in history — ever."

Says Dylan Mulvaney, breaking a few weeks of silence and expressing a desire to continue speaking to the people who have liked and enjoyed her.

"The via negativa...is about recognizing that when you don’t know the right way forward, you might succeed by focusing on what you know to be wrong...."

"For example, after a weekend at the beach with your family, you can probably list the irritations far more easily than the pleasant aspects, even if on balance the trip was all right.... When you get home, you’ll have a list of things you experienced, and you can easily name the ones you didn’t like and don’t want to repeat next time (for example, bringing your brother-in-law). In contrast, the things you might add (such as a different guest, who, you hope, won’t get arrested) are hypothetical. Subtractive knowledge is practically guaranteed to lead to improvement, but additive knowledge is often just a guess. "

Writes Arthur C. Brooks in "Make a To-Don’t List/When you’re feeling stuck, focusing on the things you hate can help" (The Atlantic).

This is consistent with my adage Better than nothing is a high standard. And the famous saying Less is more. 

Brooks assures us that following the negative way does not make you a "negative person." I feel sorry for anyone who's governed by the fear of negativity. How cluttered your world must be!