Pretty sure this is the lightest the shelf has been in months (EDIT: It’s been a year.) I can make a significant dent in this next month if I’m disciplined about not spending a ton of money. LOL.
Tomorrow’s Monthly Reads is going to be insane.
Picking on church billboards is such low hanging fruit that it’s not even worth it most of the time, but I drove past this … message on my way home today, and I needed to preserve it. I may have the verbs slightly wrong (I was driving, after all) but the weird part is preserved correctly:
Trust in The Lord Delight in “ Commit to “
… with fucking quotation marks, just like that. The quotation marks were red, though.
Okay, no, not really, but as soon as I thought of the headline I couldn’t not use it. I was already going to Hell anyway; it’s not like that can get worse.(*)
Despite having been an atheist for literally my entire life, I frequently refer to myself as biologically Catholic; my parents both attended Catholic schools for at least part of their childhoods and while we were never regular churchgoers or even “Easter and Christmas” Catholics, I attended the occasional service with my grandparents and, of course, any weddings or funerals in the family were inevitably Catholic services, to say nothing of how religion affects a family’s general culture even when that family stops practicing the religion. I taught at a Catholic school for three years at the beginning of my career, and hung around at a part-time job at the parish for another year or so after that. One way or another, the Church fascinates me, with all of its plentiful warts, and Francis in particular has been a fascinating Pope, especially after his odious predecessor. I look forward to everyone on the Internet becoming an expert in the Conclave over the next week or two (note that I am already an expert on the Conclave, as someone who has been opining on religion in public for over a decade) and I am tantalized at the idea that this guy has a nonzero chance of becoming the next Pope:
I saw a decent article a few weeks ago, while Francis was hospitalized, about five or six of his most likely successors, and my recollection was that Cardinal Pizzaballa was actually one of the more progressive possibilities. Anything can happen once they head into that room; I’m fairly certain that Francis himself was a dark horse when he was named Pope, but I may be misremembering. It’s hard to imagine how the same crew of people that named Benedict XVI, plus eight years of cardinals he named, might have chosen someone nearly Benedict’s complete opposite, but it happened. Anyway, if I can find the article I’ll post it. The same part of me that enjoys reading about old-school political party conventions back when they actually chose the Presidential candidate rather than simply coronating him loves to read people speculating about the Conclave, which obviously doesn’t happen in public, so there’s a lot more people wantonly making shit up out there. Maybe I’ll pretend I’ve got an inside source! We’ll see.
At any rate, it would be nice if something happens in 2025 that doesn’t make things worse, so even if you aren’t a Catholic we can all hope that someone sane emerges after the smoke turns white. Onething not swinging further to the right this year would be great.
Really, the phrase “bisexual nun” was all I needed.
Here’s the thing about Gabriella Buba’s Saints of Storm and Sorrow: it’s one of those books where a lot of what I have to say about it is negative, but I’ve already pre-ordered the sequel, out this summer, and I’m genuinely looking forward to reading it. I lost some sleep to reading this book, and several times I had to force myself to put it down at the end of the night to go to bed. There’s something compelling and propulsive about Buba’s writing that ended up outweighing some of the things about this book that didn’t make sense or didn’t quite work, and I guess I just need you to keep that in mind while you’re reading this, because I want to talk about the weird stuff. I ended up four-starring this, but in a different mood I could have been talked into a three, and for most of the first half it was going to be a five. So one way or another it’s kind of all over the place, but the tl;dr to this whole post is that the book is well worth the time to read it even if there are some issues.
So here’s the thing. The main character, Lunurin, is a nun. She is also a priestess, quite possibly against her will, of a storm goddess called Aman Sinaya. Now, when I first read this in whatever blurb or online review I saw that caused me to order this, along with the phrase “bisexual nun” and the phrase “Filipino-inspired,” I assumed that this meant that this book wasn’t set on Earth.
And … technically, it isn’t? But it totally is. Lunurin is a Catholic nun. The bad guys are the Spaniards. They speak Spanish. They’re in the Philippines. I’m pretty sure the word “Catholic” never shows up, but … there is no attempt to be subtle here. Lunurin and her female love interest are both Catholic nuns, biracial and despised for being so, in a colonial atmosphere that is more or less identical to the Spaniards colonizing the Philippines. (Do you know any Filipinos? Ever notice how they all have Hispanic-sounding last names? There’s a reason for that.) And the book wants to get into the syncretism that happened whenever Catholicism ran into indigenous religion, which is a fascinating and complex subject, but if the colonized people can literally call down typhoons while being literally possessed by their gods, and Jesus … doesn’t do any of that? It kind of wreaks havoc on your worldbuilding. Christianity toppled, say, Norse religion, sure. But you know who the Norse didn’t have? Actual fucking Thor. And Lunurin can call down lightning by letting her hair down. And everyone just acts like Christianity is a reasonable alternative to that, just because the priests say so?
Nah.
I would kind of love for a book where Christian missionaries run into a religion that literally grants powers to its priesthood, but this isn’t that book and that’s not the story that Buba is interested in telling. She wants to start a book that is already past the colonization phase and so that’s what she gives us, and it’s not exactly the book’s fault that it sent my brain down all sorts of other pathways once I realized what was going on. There’s something to be said about having trouble accepting the basic premise, of course, but I’m a lifelong fantasy/sci-fi reader and suspending disbelief is something I’m good at. But I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t an issue.
Let’s see, what else? This is something that’s going to get fleshed out better in the sequels, I’m sure, but I never quite understood the relationships between any of the main characters. Two of them end up married, and I’m not sure either of them wanted it except one of them kinda did and the other sort of shrugs and rolls with it, and the nun female love interest is an absolute mess of a character, which is yet another complaint that may or may not represent a problem with the book. Messy people exist! But holy shit is Catalina a mess. She’s inconsistent, jealous and a religious fanatic (nun, remember) and there’s also a healthy degree of self-loathing going on as well as some internalized racial hatred, and … she’s realistic, in a lot of ways, I think, maybe? But that doesn’t automatically make her fun to read about.
There are a couple of explicit sex scenes that tonally really do not match the rest of the book, too, so be aware of that. This is not a romantasy by any stretch of the imagination, and I let that fool me into thinking that at no point would glistening cocks be involved. Or, well, one cock that glistens at least once. And, again, I’m not convinced that the people fucking actually like each other, or whether they’re trying to play each other, and it’s okay for the characters to not know each other’s motivations, and it’s okay for the characters to be inconsistent in their motivations, but I definitely don’t get them and I’m not convinced the author did either. The problem is that in this particular scenario complicated characters come off exactly the same as characters with no actual arc and no planning, and I genuinely can’t tell which one this is.
So yeah. Again, I’ve bought the sequel. Lunurin’s relationship with her actual goddess– as opposed to Jesus, who doesn’t seem to be real and doesn’t occupy a lot of her time despite the nunnery going on– is fascinating, and again, she doesn’t appear to like her very much, and while I have my problems with the setting as it currently exists, it’s got its positives just out of sheer originality. It may be that I’ll read book two and tap out for what I’m presuming will be a third book in the future (this may be a duology, I’m not sure) or I might shift into full-throated approval. We’ll see. But I’m giving this one a thumbs-up regardless, now that you’ve read all the caveats and quid pro quos and such.
It was White People Shut Up Day yesterday, and one of the absolutely great things about the fact that I’m no longer on Twitter is that I made it through the entire day without unwillingly encountering any idiot Republicans’ takes on Martin Luther King. I say this every year: the fastest way to find out how someone would have felt about Martin Luther King is to ask them how they feel about Jesse Jackson, or Al Sharpton, or, hell, Barack Obama, or if you’re feeling adventurous, Jeremiah Wright, if the person you’re talking to even knows who Jeremiah Wright is. Fully 62% of Americans held a negative view of King when he was killed, and that number had been increasing steadily for years as he moved away from civil rights and began talking more about poverty and the Vietnam war. White people hated Martin Luther King, and most of them would still hate him today if he were still around.
And, well, I don’t necessarily need to do a lot of talking up of a new biography about King to help you decide if you’re going to read it, do I? Probably not. I probably know more about the Civil Rights era than any other time in American history, and there hasn’t been a new major biography of King in ages, so there was little to no chance I wasn’t going to pick this up, and I know enough about the man’s life already that a bullshit take on him isn’t going to get past me easily.
(almost starts another paragraph with “and, well”)
Here’s the thing: for better or for worse, Jonathan Eig’s take on King is the most human I’ve ever seen him. At this point, fifty-five years and some change after his death, we’re bordering on historical Jesus level of mythologizing cruft around this man, and at certain points by treating King like a person Eig almost feels disrespectful. Like, if you aren’t already aware of some of his failures as a pastor and a person– chief among them that he was a massive horndog, cheating on his wife every chance that he got– this book is going to be shocking. I was aware that there were allegations that he’d plagiarized parts of his dissertation but I wasn’t aware just how comfortable he seemed to be with lifting other people’s work more or less whenever he felt the need to. And, perhaps most striking to me personally, he had enormous struggles with anxiety, depression, and imposter syndrome; Eig never comes out and says it directly but it’s hard to not form the opinion that part of the reason for all of the adultery was 1) a massive self-destructive streak and 2) sex, drinking and smoking being one of the few ways the man allowed himself to blow off steam.
I’m not justifying anything, mind you, but I’m also not especially interested in dwelling on his failures that much, particularly when it’s made clear that Coretta knew exactly what was going on and turned a blind eye.
The broad historical strokes of the man’s life are already well-known, and I suspect most Americans who have read even a single book about the Civil Rights movement or Black history in America specifically could do a half-decent job of tracing the major events. It’s as a psychological analysis that this book is interesting, and it’s also what makes this book depressing. Because thinking of MLK as a … person … really and genuinely does come off as kind of rude. It just feels funny. It’s well-written, and well-sourced, with a couple hundred pages of footnotes at the end, and I’m absolutely glad that I read it, but … damn. Y’know? Maybe you don’t. I dunno.
Look at how tired he looks on the cover. That’s absolutely not an accident.
I went looking, and this was the most heinous Sunday School graphic I could find. I’m sure there are worse ones out there, but this is good enough for me.
Some background, before I get to the actual reason I’m writing this: I am, if such a thing actually exists, biologically Catholic. What I mean by that is that my family on both sides is Catholic, and while I was not raised to be religious (and have, in fact, considered myself to be an atheist since about 2nd grade) the type of religion I am most familiar with is Catholicism, and I actually taught at a Catholic school for three years with no particular problems. I can fake Catholicism to a degree that I can’t with other religions, to say nothing of other forms of Christianity.
I also have undergraduate degrees in Religious Studies and Jewish Studies, and a Master’s degree in Biblical studies, with a concentration in the Old Testament.
This means that I don’t believe a single thing about your religion or your holy book and I know more about it than you do. Which is a dangerous combination, frankly.
My wife attended a Catholic school until high school, and went through all of the traditional accoutrements of growing up Catholic. We got married in a greenhouse with my best friend using her Universal Life Church ministry credential to officiate, so it … uh, didn’t stick? And honestly by now she might be more anti-Catholic than I am, to be honest. I’ve mellowed as I’ve gotten older, which seems weird to say but is actually true.
On the way home from his birthday shopping trip yesterday, the boy pipes up that he has a question for us. We agree to hear said question.
“What’s the name of the guy from the Bible again?”
I avoided having a stroke while driving out of sheer willpower, folks. My wife cracked up so hard she could barely breathe.
He meant Jesus, of course.
Christians (and I assume members of other religions, but I live in America, so it’s mostly Christian sources that I see this from) love to pretend that kids are somehow naturally religious and can sort of intuit the existence of God on their own, and my kid has been the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a pure refutation of that idea. He knows nothing about religion. We don’t go to church, we didn’t have him baptized (I was strapped, packed, and ready for that fight with my mother-in-law, and it never happened) and no one in the family is the type to pray before meals. He’s been to a couple of funerals, and I’m pretty sure that’s been his whole and entire exposure to religion, whether Christianity, Judaism or anything else. I think he has a vague conception that Jesus was generally a pretty nice guy but beyond that? He thinks Easter is a bunny holiday (my Mom always got him a basket, but that’s fallen away since she died) and Christmas is when your parents buy you presents. That’s it.
(For the record, if forced at gunpoint to join a religion, I would be a Muslim, but that’s an entire separate conversation.)
Anyway, a long lead-in to a pretty basic question: all of this has me wondering where exactly my responsibilities lie to at least give the kid a basic familiarity with at least some of the beliefs that nearly everyone he encounters throughout his day holds. Like, I’m not religious, and I don’t especially want him to be religious, but I’m also not entirely sure that I want him living in a pit of ignorance about what religion is, at least well enough that he can recognize some of the more culturally relevant Bible stories and maybe sketch out some of the differences between some of the major world religions. And that he doesn’t refer to Jesus as “the guy from the Bible” again. I was fervently hoping that he meant Moses; I don’t think he’s ever even heard of Moses.
(I also don’t want him to get a little bit older and get sucked into some sort of fundamentalist horseshit somehow because he doesn’t have any inoculation against it.)
I’ve always said my parents’ big mistake was throwing dinosaur books and Greek mythology at me before my grandmother got me a book of Bible stories; I couldn’t see why the Bible didn’t mention dinosaurs or why I should take these myths any more seriously than those myths, and absent any parental pressure to the contrary that was it for religion for me. Maybe I should toss a book of Bible stories at him to see how he reacts. I mean, other than ducking and getting out of the way.
The boy’s hair is getting into his eyes, and we have been threatening him with a haircut for a few weeks now, but higher-priority things keep getting in the way. This morning, as my wife is leaving to take the Great Old One to the vet for a check-up, she asks me if I can get his hair cut. Yes! I can do that, and for once we do not have ten thousand other things that need to be done today.
I call the place we’ve been using. Someone answers the phone.
“Hi, do you have appointments available this afternoon?” I ask.
“We’re open until three,” the person on the other side says.
That is … not what I asked, and something about her tone gets directly on a nerve for some reason. A moment or two of slightly confused but pointed questions reveals that yes, they’re more or less free all afternoon and I can pick whatever time I want, and I make an appointment for noon.
The correct response here, by the way, is something along the lines of “We’ve got open spots all afternoon, what time would you like to come in?” I feel like this isn’t a complicated interaction, y’know? Probably happens a few times a day, at least? I asked about appointments. If you’re wide open, say that. Don’t get snotty with me and tell me your hours as if they weren’t right there on the website I used to find your phone number.
We’ve been using this place for a while, because they’re nearby, reasonably priced, and kid-friendly. There has always been a bit of Jesusiness about the place, but it’s never been too terribly overwhelming; they sell shirts and the shirts have a Bible verse on them for some reason along with the logo of the barbershop. That’s been about it. I live in fucking Indiana; I’m used to it.
Today when I got there their front door had been redone to include the two images in the above picture, and, well, welcome to the Don’t Want None Won’t Be None zone, folks. If I were to deliberately design a logo for American Christofascism I could not do much better than a cross with a thin blue line graphic imposed on it. My rule for when I allow my politics to influence decisions that shouldn’t be political (like where should I get my kid’s hair cut once every two or three months) is that if you make sure I know where you stand, I’m going to judge you accordingly, and if you don’t, I’m not going to go looking for trouble. And these folks have now officially crossed a (thin, blue) line that makes it perfectly clear that my business isn’t wanted there, and they’re going to get what they want from here on out.
Now, note here that 1) I have never had any problem with any of the employees, and I’m not even certain who actually owns the place; and 2) I am perfectly willing to let this rule apply to me; I wear my politics on my sleeve around here and anyone who is, say, unwilling to buy my books because of that is absolutely encouraged to make that decision. Everyone is welcome to not spend their money on my work for whatever reason they like, regardless of what I might think of the reason. I don’t actually get to have a say here! It’s your money!
And, well, when it’s my money, if you’re gonna make sure I get greeted with Jesus and Blue Lives Matter before I walk into your place of business, well, I’m gonna keep on walking. Sorrynotsorry, I guess.
I sold nearly sixteen thousand moneydollars worth of furniture and furniture-related services and accessories at work today. The boy is at his grandparents’ so that he can do an egg hunt in the morning, because I’ll be damned if I’m going to allow any pagan bunny nonsense in my house. I am watching Into the Badlands with my wife and sipping on a very small bottle of moscato.
Yes, I am drinking the alcohols. Not many of them! But I never drink the alcohols so this is a bit of an event.
Happy Easter, if that’s your thing. I don’t have to work tomorrow, so … thanks, Jesus, I guess?
I have always been very ambivalent about Santa Claus. Hell, as a non-Christian I’m ambivalent enough about Christmas, so the idea that I’m compounding celebrating a holiday that’s supposed to be about the birth of a divine being who I don’t believe in with lying to my kid about a white dude who drops presents down the chimney just hasn’t ever sat well with me. I don’t like lying to my son– and yes, I think telling your kids about Santa is lying to them, unless you also want to explain why Santa seems to like wealthy white kids more than everybody else. But I’m not so opposed to the idea of Santa Claus that I’m stomping on it, so to speak. The position my wife and I have evolved over the years is that we simply don’t talk about Santa. My mom can tell the boy whatever she likes; he can absorb whatever messages about Santa he wants from the wider culture. Hell, I’ll even read A Visit from St. Nicholas to him on Christmas Eve if he wants, like my parents used to do with me. I let him read Captain Underpants and don’t make a big stink about him not being real; why should Santa be any different? My policy has simply been to neither confirm nor deny, and I don’t write “from Santa” on presents that we bought him– the “from” tag on all his presents is just left blank. He hasn’t seemed to notice that Santa seems to think he lives at his Grandma’s house. And we’ve never done the “go to the mall and sit on Santa’s lap” thing either. Which, honestly, as I’m typing this, I gotta admit I regret just a little bit.
So last week he told my wife that one of the kids in his class was telling everyone that Santa wasn’t real. My wife, caught by surprise, fell back on our usual “What do you think?” shtick and eventually he dropped it, or so we thought. This morning, as we were getting in the car to go to school, he ambushed me with the same question, and seemed frustrated that I reacted the same way. He is 6, and in kindergarten, just so you can properly contextualize this if you’d like.
And then he said something that really caught me by surprise, which was that he thought that this other kid was “ruining Christmas” and “taking all the fun out of everything” by telling the other kids that Santa wasn’t real. I pushed back on this as gently as I could– if Santa wasn’t real, does that mean that the tree and the lights and the presents and the cookies and the family stuff weren’t fun anymore? Surely the fat white guy isn’t the most important part, right? He didn’t answer, but I could see him thinking about it.
And then my reaction surprised me, because I found myself more than a little bit pissed at this kid, and by extension this kid’s parents. I think the family in question is at least nominally Muslim, as I’m pretty sure they’re ethnically Pakistani, but at any rate they’re from that area (the boy may or may not have been born here; I’m certain the parents weren’t) and while in general they’ve struck me as more or less secular people they’re definitely from an area where Christianity isn’t the majority religion. So, okay, your kid got raised with no Santa. You told him the truth. Cool. But maybe you go ahead and make sure your kid knows that showing everyone else the light isn’t so much the way to go? My son is friends with this kid, and he’s visibly upset with him for, again, “ruining Christmas.” And if my son decides that the boy is right about that, then I’m going to have a talk with him about not screwing the shit up for the other kids.
And I gotta admit, I’m thisclose to dropping an email to either my kid’s teacher or this other family (our school makes sure everyone has everyone else’s emails) and in the most polite way I can manage to phrase it suggesting that they tell this other kid to knock it off.
That’s probably in utter contradiction to everything in the first couple of paragraphs. Do I care? I dunno. I care enough that I wrote this to try and hash it out in my head, and I probably need to be talked out of contacting any of the other adults involved– which, again, I promise I’d do politely.
“Eventually ruining Christmas for him was my job, dammit” is not the most persuasive line of argument, after all.
I sold nearly sixteen thousand moneydollars worth of furniture and furniture-related services and accessories at work today. The boy is at his grandparents’ so that he can do an egg hunt in the morning, because I’ll be damned if I’m going to allow any pagan bunny nonsense in my house. I am watching Into the Badlands with my wife and sipping on a very small bottle of moscato.
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