Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
The Catholic church requires celibacy for its priests and nuns. But many find it hard to do so. While some are coerced into it, many of the sexual relations they have are voluntary and with both priests and parishioners.
Celibacy is seen as one of the most important sacrifices a priest or nun makes for the church. Nuns consider themselves married to Christ. Rather than taking a human spouse, they devote themselves to God. But many nuns face a daily challenge trying to keep their vows and their faith.
…According to a study conducted by Margaret Halstead and Lauro Halstead entitled “A Sexual Intimacy Survey of Former Nuns and Priests,” which was first carried out in 1978 and which has consistently confirmed results, including an update in 2018, more than half of all nuns say they knew of sexual activity going on in their convents. Some 44 percent of the most recently surveyed say they knew of sex between sisters, while 54 percent say they knew of sexual relationships between nuns and male members of the clergy. Just over a third say the nuns they knew were fooling around were doing so with lay people, including married men in the congregation.
One of the most valuable things I learned early on from psychologist Robert Boice who studied academic productivity was that a writer must write, every day. But most people find writing to not be appealing and it is easy to find excuses to not write because pretty much anything can seem more urgent and appealing (doing the laundry, cutting the grass, sorting paper clips) when compared to writing. Some also feel that inspiration has to strike for them to write.
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He tries to learn Australian slang and speak with their accent but in doing so is shocked to find that Australians do not use the word ‘shrimp’, either on their ‘barbies’ or anywhere else, and they don’t care much for Foster’s beer either.
Under normal conditions, the elections in the UK for their allocation of 73 seats in the 750-seat European parliament would not command much attention. But these are not normal times in the UK as it struggles to find a way out of the mess following the Brexit referendum, where they cannot seem to find a way to leave but also cannot agree on whether to stay. Calls for a second referendum abound but both major parties have been ambivalent on the issue, reflecting the ambivalence of those parties on whether leaving the EU is a good idea or not.
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A few nights ago I watched the 1968 documentary In the Year of the Pig by Emile de Antonio that recounts the story of the Vietnam war up to that year. It uses archival footage and since de Antonio is French, the documentary understandably spends more time on the French antecedents to US involvement than American documentaries usually do. For those of us who remember the history of that brutal war, the key landmarks are the 1954 Geneva accords, the 1956 defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu, the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk in 1963, the 1968 Tet offensive, and the final defeat of the US in 1975.
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An article in The Atlantic magazine sees a major generational divide opening up.
As a liberal graduate student and a conservative professor, we rarely see eye to eye on politics. Yet we agree that the generation war is the best frame for understanding the ways that the Democratic and Republican parties are diverging. The Democrats are rapidly becoming the party of the young, specifically the Millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) and Gen Z (born after 1996). The Republicans are leaning ever more heavily on retirees, particularly the Silent Generation (born before 1945). In the middle are the Gen Xers (born between 1965 and 1980), who are slowly inching leftward, and the Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964), who are slowly inching to the right.
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It comes from a political satire group in Australia on the eve of their elections to be held on May 18. It is part of their series called Honest Government Adverts. Hard as it is to believe, it looks like the Australian political leadership is as bad as the one we have here in its corruption, devotion to the oligarchy, climate change denials, lying, and religious pandering. (Language advisory)
Ryan Grim profiles New Jersey Democratic congressman Josh Gottheimer, who seems to see himself as a Democratic ‘centrist’ (which really means ‘right winger’) enforcer to keep the new young progressives in line, especially when it comes to their criticisms of Israel and Saudi Arabia and the big banks from whose lobbies he has received plenty of money. He is also disgustingly condescending towards the new crop of women progressives. He is closely associated with the ‘Problem Solvers Caucus’ and the dark-money group ‘No Labels’, all of whom are deep-pocketed neoliberal groups seeking to maintain the status quo by pretending to be above politics and only interested in pragmatic solutions.
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