a review of religion and media
Jo Piazza: If you have any doubt that Lady Gaga has cultivated both an aura of the sacred and a near cult-like following you weren’t inside the Jacob Javits Convention Center in Manhattan last week when the pop star famous for making it perfectly acceptable to dress in raw meat performed for the Robin Hood Foundation’s annual Gala. Continue Reading →
I am embarassed to admit this (really quite embarrassed) but I learned about Osama Bin laden’s assasination from Paris Hilton. I fell asleep at 10 pm on Sunday night and when I woke up in the morning I rolled over and opened my Twitter feed. There it was:
@ParisHilton: Just landed back in LA, so happy to hear the news of Osama bin Laden’s death. He was the face of terrorism and such .
Are you horrified yet? I have an excuse. As a celebrity journalist I’m allowed to have Paris Hilton on my Twitter feed. Lindsay Lohan and Kim Kardashian too, who also weighed in on the death of OBL.
@LindsayLohan: Go USA
@KimKardashian: Osama Bin Laden is dead!!! I can’t wait to hear President Obama’s announcement!!! Continue Reading →
I am embarassed to admit this (really quite embarrassed) but I learned about Osama Bin laden’s assasination from Paris Hilton. I fell asleep at 10 pm on Sunday night and when I woke up in the morning I rolled over and opened my Twitter feed. There it was:
@ParisHilton: Just landed back in LA, so happy to hear the news of Osama bin Laden’s death. He was the face of terrorism and such .
Are you horrified yet? I have an excuse. As a celebrity journalist I’m allowed to have Paris Hilton on my Twitter feed. Lindsay Lohan and Kim Kardashian too, who also weighed in on the death of OBL.
@LindsayLohan: Go USA
@KimKardashian: Osama Bin Laden is dead!!! I can’t wait to hear President Obama’s announcement!!! Continue Reading →
by Jo Piazza
Fedoras have made a comeback as of late. Their recent prominence in fashion is underscored by their function in the recent Matt Damon thriller “The Adjustment Bureau” where the hats imbue their wearers with mystical powers allowing them to circumnavigate from the West Side to the East Side of Manhattan by crossing through a single door and adjust a person’s destiny with a tip of their brow. Needless to say the door thing comes in handy since crossing midtown during rush hour can take at last 45 minutes.
But the fedora doesn’t provide the niftiest tricks of “The Adjustment Bureau.” The truly grand feat was disguising a film steeped in philosophical theology as a romantic thriller. Is it a romance? Sure? Thrilling? Sometimes. But more than both, it was a serious screed on the existence and interference of god in everyday life.
That predestination in the film is seen as an elaborate plan spelled out in a leather bound book created by someone called the Chairman and it’s dictums carried out by a stable of middle management minions in wash and wear suits does seem to make it an apt parable for our times. Continue Reading →
Read Revealer Jo Piazza’s latest on Gabriella Velardi Ward, a 63 year-old self-described Roman Catholic Woman Priest and her home church, Praxedis, at WSJ’s Metropolis Continue Reading →
Jo Piazza: This was a bad week to be a small survey on women religious, what with prime news real estate being filled with Egyptian unrest, Hollywood rehab and a snowpocalypse of epic proportions blanketing the Midwest.
But a small survey on women religious was indeed released this week, on Groundhog Day (better known in some circles as Church’s World Day for Consecrated Life), by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Georgetown-based Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate.
The survey gave a general overview of the women who professed their perpetual vows in religious life (became full-fledged sisters) in 2010 and was the first of its kind to evaluate a single year’s class of entering nuns. Of the 63% of orders who responded to the survey only 79 women took their final vows in the past year. Continue Reading →
by Jo Piazza
It’s been four months since the Peabody-winning public radio program formerly known as “Speaking of Faith” changed its title to the more universal and spacious, “On Being.” The number of listeners writing into the show to tell host Krista Tippett they mourn the loss of the word “faith” has tapered to one a week.
The semantic change wasn’t undertaken lightly. Names imbue things with meaning, something Tippett is keenly aware of. Play a game of free association with the words “faith” and “being” with a mixed group of believers and nonbelievers and the words conjure very different connotations on each side of the spiritual spectrum. Faith – god, church, mosque, worship. Being – exist, doing, Hamlet’s soliloquy. Tippett knew the name change wouldn’t be simple and when she advocated for it two years ago plenty of people thought she was crazy to hijack the name of a brand when that brand was chugging along perfectly well.
“I knew it was the right thing to do but in implementing it I realized what a big deal it was. It was messy and it was interesting,” Tippett recently told The Revealer during an interview about the change and its aftermath. Continue Reading →