Recorded just four days after the devastating bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, it became an instant classic, selling nearly a million copies to an overwhelmingly Black audience over the next decade.

Inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999 and the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress in 2004, “Peace Be Still”—the title track on a collaboration between the Angelic Choir of the First Baptist Church of Nutley, New Jersey, and the “King of Gospel,” James Cleveland—remains, to this day, an enduring cultural touchpoint for the ’60s. “No record ever,” wrote historian Anthony Heilbut, “neither Bing Crosby’s ‘White Christmas’ nor the Beatles’ ‘Abbey Road,’ has so blanketed its market.”

Of the thousands of gospel songs recorded in the early 1960s, how did “Peace Be Still” come to define its era? Was it a case of being the right song at the right moment? Were embers of emotion from the Birmingham blast hovering over the recording session that evening?

The cover of the album Peace Be Still, with artwork by Harvey Williams. The record’s title track defined an era of gospel music. Courtesy of Malaco Music Group.

That was my personal theory—that the song’s raw power was prompted by the terrorist attack. But when I interviewed Angelic Choir members, I discovered they saw things differently. They insisted that the bombing and other violent acts against African Americans did not govern their lives, nor their singing, that night. “We weren’t so disturbed that we couldn’t serve the Lord. We knew the Lord, and we were there to praise and lift up His name. That was the purpose,” one chorister, now in her 80s, told me. “So anything that happened anywhere else, we were just there to praise the Lord and thank Him that we were able to make it.”

Thank Him that we were able to make it. Therein lies the key to decoding “Peace Be Still”—gratitude to Jesus for helping his people overcome the winds and waves of oppression right there in Newark. In many ways, this sentiment speaks to gospel music writ large, which expresses the unflinching refusal of African Americans to surrender to life’s injustices, especially those incited by racial prejudice, and gratefulness to God for being their ultimate protector.

James Cleveland must have had this in mind when he recorded “Peace Be Still” in September 1963. By the time he began work on the record, the 31-year-old wunderkind from Chicago with a gravelly voice and a perfectionist streak had already amassed more than a decade’s worth of experience; a musician, singer, songwriter, and choir director, he’d done everything from steering Detroit’s Voices of Tabernacle to national acclaim for the album The Love of God to teaching a young Aretha Franklin to play piano.

His collaboration with the Angelic Choir came about thanks to a recording deal he signed with Savoy Records, an independent label with a rich gospel catalog, in 1960. The Rev. Lawrence Roberts, who was an executive at Savoy, also happened to be the pastor of First Baptist in Nutley and was responsible for organizing its choir, which sang in church every third Sunday in the early 1960s. When Cleveland approached Roberts to see if he would be open to letting him borrow the Angelic Choir for his recordings, Roberts agreed, but with one caveat: all sessions would have to take place in the church, where the choir members, who had little recording experience, would be more comfortable and their true essence could shine through.

Roberts’ stipulation proved wise: In 1962, Savoy and Cleveland recorded their first two albums with the Angelic Choir, captured during live, in-service recording sessions in the little wooden First Baptist Church. Both records, crackling with the spiritual electricity that arises between anointed gospel singers and excited congregants, exceeded expectations, won critical acclaim, and garnered big sales. The proceeds allowed the First Baptist Church to raze its wooden frame building and begin building a modern sanctuary.

Things had changed by the time Savoy authorized a third live volume in September 1963. Construction on the church still hadn’t wrapped, so the choir had to record in Trinity Temple Seventh-Day Adventist in Newark, where they were temporarily holding church services. Two key players from the original albums, Los Angeles choir director Thurston Frazier and organ prodigy (and future “fifth Beatle”) Billy Preston, were unable to make the September date. And the world was in turmoil. On August 28, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington, calling for civil rights and equal opportunity for Black Americans. Days later, on September 15, segregationists planted dynamite beneath the stairs of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church—killing four girls, injuring several others, and sending a devastating shockwave throughout the country. Places of worship had always been sanctuaries—literal and figurative—for Black people. Now even churches weren’t safe.

The Rev. James Cleveland was a gospel star before he worked on “Peace Be Still.” For decades after its release, he used the song to communicate his hopes for a better America. Courtesy of Malaco Music Group.

Nevertheless, the project proceeded. Cleveland, who had a reputation for deftly incorporating pop music techniques into gospel’s traditional core, selected “Peace Be Still” for the session after hearing a performance of Gwendolyn Cooper Lightner’s arrangement of the largely forgotten hymn in his newly adopted hometown of Los Angeles. Originally by Horatio Palmer and Mary Ann Baker, its lyrics were inspired by a New Testament story, chronicled in Mark 4:39. Jesus and his disciples were trapped on a boat during a storm: “And [Jesus] arose, and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, ‘Peace, be still.’ And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm.”

For First Baptist, Cleveland added a few touches. At the moment in the lyric when Jesus commands the storm to stop, the Angelic Choir’s full-throated, staccato singing drops abruptly from fortissimo (thunderingly loud) to pianissimo (a whisper). The plunge elicits interjections of delight from the live audience and several choir members. They repeat the dramatic technique once again, to more shouts. The result is nothing short of spectacular sacred theater.

Perhaps lacking confidence in the album’s sales potential due to the absence of Frazier and Preston, Savoy created little fanfare around Peace Be Still’s release. The label pressed a standard 3,000 copies of the album, following a sales forecast that turned out to be off by orders of magnitude. “Peace Be Still” lit up phones at radio stations nationwide. By the end of the decade, it had sold somewhere between 600,000 and 800,000 copies, a phenomenal achievement at a time when gospel albums were lucky to hit 50,000 in sales.

“Peace Be Still” launched the Angelic Choir on the road. The group sang the hymn at the Apollo Theater and on television. They sang it at the New York World’s Fair. With Roberts as director, the Angelic Choir and James Cleveland recorded nine albums of live gospel music between 1962 and 1969, earning two Grammy nominations.

“Peace Be Still”’s impact transcends its musical drama. Like folk spirituals, it communicates on multiple layers. There is the miracle of Jesus saving his disciples by commanding the storm to cease. Then there is the allegorical statement: Because it was still risky for African Americans to record protest songs, the Angelic Choir employed the Bible story as allegory to express their hope, through faith in Jesus and personal resilience, for an end to the trials that came with being Black in America.

“Peace Be Still” is but one prominent example of how gospel music celebrates God’s dominion over earthly ills and how, in the form of a loving, fatherly Jesus, he protects and heals his people. The Ward Singers’ 1950 hit “Surely God is Able,” Rosie Wallace’s 1963 single “God Cares,” and “I Have a Friend Above All Others,” sung by artists from the Soul Stirrers to Sam Cooke and Al Green, make the same case. And no matter how bad life becomes in the here and now, gospel enthusiasts are reminded that a heavenly home awaits where, as songwriter Rev. W. Herbert Brewster wrote in the mid-1940s, the faithful will “be drinking that ol’ healing water; and we gonna live on forever.”

Like most Black music, “Peace Be Still” has evolved from coded message to explicit commentary. In 1976, the Heaven Dee-Etts of Trenton, New Jersey, covered the song as “All I Need is Peace.”

On it, lead vocalist Mary Glanton prays for relief from life’s trials: “Sometimes, sometimes, sometimes, Lord, my pillow gets wet with tears.” On her 1983 cover, gospel singer Vanessa Bell Armstrong transforms the song into a daily devotional, calling for peace “in your home, on your job, late in the midnight hour” and “when you don’t know which way to turn.”

By the 1980s, James Cleveland was using “Peace Be Still” to communicate his hopes for improving race relations in America, even in the face of injustice; just a month after Cleveland’s death in February 1991, three Los Angeles police officers beat Rodney King after a high-speed chase. Their acquittal in April 1992 sparked five days of civil unrest in Los Angeles.

Leading up to the song’s dramatic climax is the disciples’ final desperate plea for Jesus to rescue them from destruction: “The winds and the waves shall obey thy will.” The danger of the wind and the waves represents different things, to different people, at different times. For some, it represents hunger or poverty, for others it is mental or physical anguish, and for others it is violence or discrimination. But listening to it today, “Peace Be Still” can still calm the soul whenever and wherever the storms of life are raging. Its performance evokes both a nostalgic yearning for the timeless lessons taught in the little wooden churches of yesterday and hope for a better tomorrow.

“I think ‘Peace Be Still’ has lasted all these years,” remarked the Reverend Dr. Stefanie Minatee, whose mother Pearl sang on the record, “because people are living in turbulent times and they are looking for something to hold onto.” Jacqui Watts-Greadington, a latter-day member of the Angelic Choir whose aunt, Bernadine Hankerson, sang with the choir in 1963, agrees. “I often say that when trouble comes, you think about songs like ‘Peace Be Still.’ Those are the songs that carry you through.”

The post The 1960s Gospel Hit That Defined a Genre and an Era appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Kubrick was, according to Frederic Raphael, who co-wrote the screenplay for Eyes Wide Shut (1999), “known to have said that he was not really a Jew, he just happened to have two Jewish parents.” Jewish by birth through both his mother, Sadie Gertrude Perveler, and his father, Jacob (also known as Jack or Jacques) Kubrick, the director was given by his parents a very typical first name for Jews born in that era. In addition, he steadfastly stuck to using that name in an industry where fellow Jews—at least the actors with whom he worked—had frequently changed them.

Born in 1928, Kubrick grew up in the heavily Jewish West Bronx, surrounded by Jewish neighbors and immigrants. The Bronx was, at that time, home to 250,000 Jews, from which Kubrick drew his early circle of childhood friends. His maternal grandmother spoke Yiddish; Kubrick adored Woody Allen’s Radio Days (1987), set in Rockaway Beach in Queens, identifying with the little boy, Joe, the film’s protagonist. The language of that film, and the tastes and smells it conjured up, were those of Kubrick’s childhood in the 1930s and 1940s.

However, as an assimilated American-Jewish family, the Kubricks were not religious. They practiced little, if any, Judaism. Jacob had changed his own Hebrew name to the more cosmopolitan Jack/Jacques. When asked once by an interviewer, “Did you have a religious upbringing?” Kubrick replied, “No, not at all.” His education was completely secular. He received no formal Jewish instruction and, as far as is known, never attended a synagogue or Hebrew School or was bar-mitzvahed. None of these things interested him.

Some collaborators have characterized Kubrick as a self-hating Jew. Dalton Trumbo, who wrote the screenplay for Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960), accused the director of being “a guy who is a Jew, and he’s a man who hates Jews. He has said to me that the Jews are responsible for their own persecutions because they have separated themselves from the rest of humanity.” In his memoir of working with Kubrick, Eyes Wide Open, Frederic Raphael claimed Kubrick said that Hitler had been “right about almost everything.”

Yet Kubrick’s Jewish identity was much more complex than these labels—and unproven assertions—suggest. Kubrick was more than just Jewish by birth; he was a Jew by culture and feeling. He was acutely aware of his Central and Eastern European Jewish origins—his ancestors emigrated from Poland, Austria, and Romania to the United States around 1900. This cultural inheritance deeply influenced Kubrick. He loved the Jewish literature of the region: Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, Jacob Schulz, Franz Kafka, Stefan Zweig. His father, who was a well-read man, owned an extensive personal library, which he encouraged his son to read, supplying an informal Jewish education during Kubrick’s childhood.

Kubrick’s lifelong interests manifested a Jewish sensibility. He was passionate about photography, chess, drumming, boxing, jazz, and filmmaking, all extraordinarily Jewish professions and pastimes in the 20th century. He married two Jewish women in succession (albeit in civil ceremonies), both daughters of first-generation European immigrants, Toba Metz and Ruth Sobotka.

Kubrick also can be described as a gastronomic Jew. He loved lox, bagels, salt beef, and pastrami. His long-time assistant, Tony Frewin, recalled, “I think of Stanley going to sleep at night dreaming of Carnegie Deli.” Kubrick objected that the nearest deli was miles away from his home north of London.

Unfortunately, he also experienced anti-Jewish prejudice. In an interview with Tachles, his third wife, Christiane Harlan, recalls how, “Early on, as a photojournalist for the magazine Look, he was confronted with anti-Semitism.” When traveling in the U.S. Southern states, he was barred from restaurants and hotels. Even in Vermont, he once was denied a table. Kubrick never, as far as we know, responded. He did not comment on it publicly or in any letter I have seen.

He also experienced it later when working in Hollywood, on Spartacus. “Get that little Jewboy from the Bronx off my crane,” grumbled veteran cinematographer Russell Metty. How Kubrick reacted in these instances is unknown, but it led him to further embrace his relationship with Tony Curtis, another Jewish Bronx native. No doubt, these experiences hardened him and lay in part behind his reason to relocate to England in the early 1960s to make Lolita (1962), where he lived until his death in 1999. But he never felt truly comfortable in certain social circles there, either. He was often invited to social events and refused to go.

Maybe this was because, as his brother-in-law and producer, Jan Harlan, said, “he knew he looked Jewish and his big beard emphasized this.” In the opinion of Arthur C. Clarke, who co-wrote the screenplay for 2001, the director’s full and untrimmed facial hair gave him the “aura of a Talmudic scholar” and the look of a “slightly cynical rabbi” that he retained for the rest of his life.

As a parent, his daughter Anya described him as “a very nice, good, rather Jewish father—probably overprotective.” The Kubricks always had a Christmas tree, and Kubrick also loved bacon. Although they did nothing Jewish, his eldest daughter, Katharina, said, “He did not deny his Jewishness, not at all. But given that he wanted to make a film about the Holocaust and researched it for years, I leave it to you to decide how he felt about his religion.”

Indeed, Kubrick read many books about the Holocaust throughout his career, and not only in preparation for his never-to-be-made Aryan Papers. This included Raul Hilberg and Primo Levi, whom he recommended to various collaborators, including Michael Herr and Brian Aldiss. He just could never complete the film he dreamed of making. When asked if he would adapt Albert Speer’s Inside the Third Reich, he said, “I don’t see how I could make it? … I’m Jewish….”

In the final analysis, Kubrick had no faith. In an interview with Playboy in 1968, he stated, “I don’t believe in any of Earth’s monotheistic religions.” His driver and handyman, Emilio D’Alessandro, recalled, “Stanley wasn’t particularly interested in religion, nor did he really understand religious fanaticism.” Yet, Jan Harlan says, he was “always taking a big bow to the great Unknowable.” Maybe this explains why the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for mourners, was performed at his funeral in 1999.

Nonetheless, if you watch Kubrick’s films often and closely enough, the Jewish moments will gradually rise to the surface. Private Sidney, played by Jewish actor Paul Mazursky in Kubrick’s first feature film Fear and Desire (1953), very much resembles the stereotypical Jewish soldier of so many World War II combat films. Davey Gordon, the boxing hero in Killer’s Kiss (1955), very much fits into that period of Jewish boxing movies. The Jewish loan shark played by Jay Adler in The Killing (1956) has a Jewish sensibility encapsulated by the Yiddish saying, “Man plans, God laughs.”

Kubrick’s two films with Kirk Douglas, Paths of Glory (1957) and Spartacus (1960), project the new 1950s creation of the macho-mensch character type. Douglas and his co-star Tony Curtis were both Jewish but had taken on non-Jewish names, seemingly playing non-Jewish characters. Kubrick’s two films with the British Jewish actor Peter Sellers—Lolita (1962) and Dr. Strangelove (1964)—were both imbued with a ’60s Jewish shtick of the type at which Lenny Bruce excelled. A poster of Lenny Bruce can be glimpsed in The Killing (as can a young Rodney Dangerfield, a Jewish comedian). Lolita also stars Jewish actress Shelley Winters, and there’s even a Jewish navigator in Dr. Strangelove. Both films have an underlying Holocaust theme.

Kubrick then made 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, a film rich with allusions to the Hebrew Bible, liturgy, and especially Jewish mysticism known as Kabbalah. His next two films also featured Jewish actors—Steven Berkoff and Aubrey Morris in A Clockwork Orange (1971), Berkoff again in the period film Barry Lyndon (1975), as well as Marissa Berenson and Ryan O’Neal, both of whom had Jewish ancestry. While the former film deals with the nature of free choice, a key Jewish tenet, the latter explores the interloper in WASP society, something that Jews confronted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in a host of countries. As a shabby-genteel Irishman, Barry Lyndon was clearly an interloper in 18th-century elite Anglo society. In Eyes Wide Shut, Dr. Bill Harford’s status as a party-crashing “outsider” is similarly based on social class, being out of his depth among the superrich elite in 1990s New York City. The protagonists of both Spartacus and A Clockwork Orange also fit into this interpretation of the outsider/anti-hero who disrupts the dominant social order.

While there was seemingly no one or nothing Jewish about The Shining (1980), adapted from Stephen King’s bestselling horror thriller, the story draws heavily upon Genesis 22, in which a father, the Jewish patriarch Abraham, seeks to sacrifice his son, Isaac, at the bidding of a higher power.

Full Metal Jacket (1987) perhaps comes closest of all Kubrick’s work to referencing the horrors of the Holocaust, in its depiction of how ordinary men can become hardened killers. In this Vietnam War drama, young boys are degraded and dehumanized in boot camp so they can kill with hard hearts in Vietnam.

And all of this was capped off by Eyes Wide Shut, an adaptation of Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle, a story that was Jewish to its very core but seemingly scrubbed clean of any trace—except for casting Sydney Pollack in a key role as Victor Ziegler, a rich, unsavory, and morally suspect Jewish businessman. Pollack, like Kubrick, was a Jewish director and his physiognomy added what might be described as a stereotypical Jewish “look.”

As alluded to above, the ritual of unmasking and expulsion which Dr. Bill undergoes is something that Jews metaphorically feared and actually underwent in European society.

Kubrick and his films were complicated and defied simple readings. We can read them as Jewish, but this is just one element to be added to the mix of interpretations that already exist and no doubt will keep coming in the future.

The post How Jewish Was Stanley Kubrick? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

California changes too fast. The new so quickly replaces the old. People come and go with a blur. I often feel like you can’t count on anything staying here anymore.

But you can count on the Modesto Girls.

These five sisters—my first cousins, once removed—have never had glamorous jobs. They didn’t get fancy educations. Little in life has come easy to them.

But they are always there when there’s work to be done, when my mom’s side of the family is in need, or just when you happen to need them. They are the people who come over to your house—and before you know it they’ve cleaned the place and cooked you a meal.

This California era is a time of out-migration, with more people departing California than coming into it. Much of my big extended California family has slowly melted away to Oregon, Washington, Nevada, or the Arizona side of the Colorado River. My Uncle Jerry even returned to Okemah, Oklahoma, from which his grandparents and parents fled during the Dust Bowl era.

But the Modesto Girls stay in Modesto.

As a matter of age, the Modesto Girls—that’s what the Southern California parts of the family call them—aren’t girls anymore. Indeed, they are the pillars of an improbably strong and large California family. And they remind me—through their example—that for all of California’s progressivism, the traditional clichés about faith and family remain at the heart of our life, at least in Stanislaus County.

Because their names are so similar, I often get them confused, so let’s see if I finally can keep them straight, at least for the purposes of this column.

Cathy, 69, built a family of four boys, 10 grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren, while working at flower shops and the Frito-Lay plant.

Carol, 66, who works as a caregiver, has four children and six grandchildren.

Corina, 63, a caregiver and bus driver, has three children and 19 grandchildren.

Carla, 61, a school bus driver for 25 years, has two daughters and two granddaughters.

Colleen, the baby, at 57, has three kids and seven grandchildren, and has worked in the health club business for years.

All told, that’s 16 children, 44 grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren.

And that doesn’t count their five brothers, who I will get to very soon, I promise.

The endurance of the Modesto Girls might be a miracle. Their upbringing was rough. Their parents, my Great Uncle Shelby and my Great Aunt Doris, were Okies who first came to Southern California as children. Family lore says that a judge in San Bernardino County gave Shelby, then 17 and accused of a store robbery, a choice of jail or marriage to Doris, then 15. He chose the latter.

They quickly started their family of 10 children, but life with Shelby, an alcoholic, was never stable. The family moved out of the Inland Empire and up to Modesto ostensibly because there was plenty of truck-driving work there, and because Shelby liked the peace and fishing of Tuolumne River. The real reason was that to put some distance between Shelby and trouble. He even adopted a new nickname, Jack, which he once instructed me to use in the event there were any sheriffs around.

Modesto couldn’t cure Shelby. He moved the family 17 times, mostly around the unincorporated parts of west Modesto. He continued to have run-ins with the law. Shelby’s demons fell hardest on the five brothers. Two, the twins Larry and Gary, died young.

But the family persevered. Aunt Doris helped support the family with jobs in the canneries and as a housekeeper at City Hospital. The other three brothers persevered and built strong lives. Wes, a cabinetmaker, has seven children and 11 grandchildren. Mike and Keith have a tree service business together.

The Modesto Girls’ brothers, Keith (front left), Wes (in cowboy hat), and Mike. Courtesy of Joe Mathews.

A few siblings left Modesto for a while, but like the swallows who returned to San Juan Capistrano, the Humphreys always fly back to the northern San Joaquin Valley.

“I guess we are pretty unusual,” Carla told me at a recent family reunion. “We’re all in Modesto. We talk to each other every day. We tease each other, and we’re always fighting with each other.”

They also celebrate with each other, play dominoes together, and send their kids and grandkids to some of the same schools. And in a family of caregivers, they take care of each other, quite literally moving into each other’s houses to care for elderly or infirm relatives.

They also worship together.

This is the secret of their survival. The Modesto Girls will tell you that they wouldn’t have gotten through the difficulties of their family and life if they hadn’t become Jehovah’s Witnesses. Their church has connected them to the Bible, to God, and even more deeply to each other.

They knock on doors weekly, and are struck by the poverty and isolation of families in and around Modesto. They also bring their carts, with Jehovah’s-Witness literature, to public places, like the county courthouse downtown. They work together to help with relief after natural disasters. They often travel together—sometimes arguing over who will drive—to church meetings and worship in the Bay Area or Sacramento or elsewhere. Their brothers, their children, and their grandchildren are part of the church.

They describe the church, with witnesses worldwide, as connecting them globally. They’ve been to the East Coast to the headquarters; in fact, their mother, Doris, was only able to see the country later in her life because of trips she made to church headquarters and church events.

The Modesto Girls, as Jehovah’s Witnesses, don’t celebrate national holidays or birthdays, so if we want to see them—and we always do—we hold family reunions. The Modesto Girls inevitably come (their brothers should come more!) making the long drive down to Southern California without complaint. Then, they are the life of the party, offering reports on Modesto (the Gallo Center for the Arts just keeps getting better, they say) and other tales. (I enjoyed some recent ones about an in-law who cleaned the house of the parents of Modesto native and Star Wars creator George Lucas.)

The only thing better than a family reunion with the Modesto Girls is going to Modesto to see them. All you have to do is show up at one of the girls’ homes, and before long their siblings and relatives appear, with stories to share.

When some recent reporting took me to Modesto, I ended up staying the night at Carla’s house, and by breakfast time, two brothers and three of the sisters had assembled at the table, along with big piles of pancakes and bacon. They talked humorously about recent events, and offered wild, half-baked ideas like Keith’s belief that you can cure diabetes through sprinting.

On this morning, they also talked about Uncle Shelby’s penchant for keeping large packs of animals. He once had a flock of turkeys, and later a collection of pigs, who were kept in line by a very mean boar named Big Red. My cousins have strong stomachs—they could eat the bacon even while talking about the time Shelby ordered the pigs slaughtered. The storytelling can feel competitive, as if this were an Olympics for who can tell the most “white trash” tale.

I asked my usual question: Why do you all stay here in Modesto? Economically, it’s not the easy choice: Modesto, despite its geographic proximity to the Bay Area, has been getting poorer; housing prices have yet to return to their pre-recession levels.

Their answer is always the same: The Modesto Girls stay in Modesto because that is where their family is. And is anything more important than that?

Also, quipped Cathy, “Is there any other town that would take us?”

The post The Modesto Girls are a Family Miracle appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

America, I offer myself today to our country so that we might restore a sense of decency, kindness, propriety, perspective, respect, groundedness, community, morality, and—yes—a fear of God.

I can lead this righteous crusade of restoration for one reason:

I come from Los Angeles.

I hear you laughing, but I am not trying to be funny—not even in a darkly ironic Big Lebowski way.

But I can understand you thinking of such a candidacy as a joke. I’m a mayor, not a governor or senator (though my city has more people than 22 states). And I know that Los Angeles is a city that people love to hate—a modern Sodom, fake, superficial, and cynical.

Now, L.A. can be all of those things. (On the cynicism charge, our guilty plea includes having greenlighted 10 The Fast and the Furious films.)

But fundamentally, L.A. is grounded in something else, something that America needs more than ever. All of today’s American crises—around Trump, democracy, environment, economy, social mobility, immigration—are really part of one larger crisis of faith.

And, believe it or not, Los Angeles is the American capital of faith.

I hear the howls—aren’t you just a bunch of godless liberals? Well, liberal, mostly (though L.A. did produce a number of Trump’s most hateful aides). But godless? Hell, no. God may live in heaven, but he has a second home in the City of Angels.

I’m talking about more than Cecil B. DeMille’s, The Ten Commandments. For a century, Southern California has been our country’s cradle of new religions. In the early decades of the 20th century, L.A. provided a platform for the preaching of Charles Fuller, Bob Shuler, and Aimee Semple McPherson. We birthed Pentecostalism during the Azusa Street Revival, and established the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. And that’s the just the Christian side of the story.

The 1940 Works Progress Administration’s guide to the city reported: “The multiplicity and diversity of faiths that flourish in the aptly named City of Angels probably cannot be duplicated in any other city on earth.”

It still can’t. After the Second World War, Los Angeles was the site of Billy Graham’s first great evangelistic crusade. Then Southern Californians pioneered the megachurch movement, with the Crystal Cathedral and Calvary Chapel, and eventually Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church—all in Orange County. Today, the religious revival continues with big churches like super-diverse Oasis and millennial-friendly Mosaic. And we are home to major houses of worship for every significant world religion—and dozens of lesser-known faiths.

No one does God bigger than us.

Why all this fervor? Because, even though Angelenos might look like life’s winners, with our pretty faces and whitened teeth, our region is the world’s biggest collection of losers.

We are people, or descendants of people, who lost at politics, commerce, love, family, or religion someplace else. Indeed, my own diverse ancestry—I’m Jewish, Italian, and Mexican—is really just different flavors of loss. L.A. has grown more through busts than booms —we’re the people who stuck around after the collapses of railroads, agriculture, oil, and aerospace.

We would never have made it through terrible times without Job’s faith that, somehow, everything will turn out all right. Heck, the traffic is so bad that we can’t make it to work without saying “Hail Marys” or “Allāhu akbar!”

There are three strong L.A. faiths—a welcoming spirit, a can-do spirit, and a fear of God’s judgment—that have grown weak in the rest of the country. A Los Angeles presidency would seek to restore all three. Here is a religious text for each.

“When the alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” Leviticus 19:33

Through riots, serial killers, and Prop. 13, L.A. has retained its first faith—a welcoming spirit. We love visitors, and we’ve learned to appreciate immigrants, who make our neighborhoods safer and more vital, buy our homes when we retire and die, invent new things, make new art, and join our families. We know that when we protect immigrants we are protecting ourselves.

This country needs more of what immigrants bring. When I go and see Midwestern towns that are shrinking, my first instinct as an Angeleno is to say, “You folks could sure use more immigration.”

I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. Phillippians 4:13

I don’t often quote St. Paul, but that’s one famous expression of the can-do spirit. And it can be hard to do anything in California, between the expense and the regulation (I would add the unions and the environmentalists to the list of obstacles, but I need their endorsements).

Still, our city does. You may think we’re just a car culture, but we are investing billions over the next 50 years—through multiple sales taxes that our people themselves overwhelmingly approved—to build a new transit system with new rail lines. We’ve made our city dramatically safer, reviving South L.A., rebuilding our schools, transforming downtown, and bringing huge new resources to one of our most stubborn problems, homelessness.

And if L.A. can do all this, there’s no earthly or divine reason that the United States should be unable to tackle its big problems.

“His judgment cometh, and that right soon.”

OK, that’s not from the Bible, the Torah or the Koran. It’s from The Shawshank Redemption. But it’s fitting. We Angelenos profoundly fear God’s power to destroy us.

The apocalypse is nigh here. We know that we are one great fire, one mudslide, one earthquake away from the end. The English writer and Angeleno Christopher Isherwood once described the message our dangerous natural landscape sends us: “You are perfectly welcome during your short visit. Everything is at your disposal. Only, I must warn you, if things go wrong … don’t cry to me for safety. There is no home here. There is no security in your mansions or your fortresses, your family vaults or your banks or your double beds. Understand this fact, and you will be free. Accept it, and you will be happy.”

That is the spirit our country needs. Don’t deny climate change—fight it and mitigate it, as we do. As mayor, I promised to reduce the temperature by three degrees. Seriously.

I know we elect people, not spirits, as presidents. And I have as many faults as the ground beneath L.A. Angelenos will tell you that I’m way too cautious, and afraid of conflict. They may have a point. But when you look at President Trump, caution and conflict-aversion don’t sound so bad, do they?

And I’m not as cool as California’s other presidential wannabe, Kamala Harris. But you know something? She’s from San Francisco, but a couple of years ago, she got married and moved to L.A. I appreciate her showing such faith in our city—and in me.

L.A. is all about faith—a faith in the brighter future that the U.S. is losing. As Aimee Semple McPherson once preached at the Angelus Temple in Echo Park: “With God, I can do all things! But with God and you, and the people who you can interest, by the grace of God, we’re gonna cover the world!”

My fellow Americans, let’s get this country back to that spirit! Let’s get this country back to God! And let’s get this country back to Los Angeles!

The post O Ye of Little Faith in Los Angeles! Eric Garcetti Has a Message For You. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The giant was a magnificent sight: A stone man naked in repose, seemingly at peace. It could hardly have been hyperbole when a newspaper reporter wrote: “Men left work, women caught up their babies, and children in all numbers hurried to the scene where the interest of that little community centered” (The Lafayette Wonder, 1869). This creature became known variously as the Cardiff Giant, the Onondaga Giant, and the Goliath of Cardiff. It has become an enduring icon of Americans’ enthusiasm for hoaxes that confirm faith over science.

Newell recognized the commercial potential of his fascinating discovery. By the next day he had obtained and erected a circus tent over the remains of the giant, hired a carnival barker to serve as his docent, and began charging people 25 cents for a peek at the remains. Virtually overnight he transformed his farm into a multi-tiered tourist operation. Newell’s wife sold sandwiches and cider, and if you needed a ride from the train station to the farm, he could supply that as well. For a fee. People came in droves, producing a far more substantial income for Newell than farming ever could.

And Newell wasn’t the only one who benefitted from the presence of the giant. Cardiff was a tiny village, incapable of supplying the necessities of a burgeoning tourist trade. Nearby Syracuse had hotels, restaurants, and other amenities for visitors, and its businessmen recognized the economic potential of the giant in Cardiff when their receipts began to rise. When circus impresario P.T. Barnum offered Newell more than $30,000 (approximately $500,000 today) to purchase the giant outright, they were understandably concerned. A consortium of local men stepped up, paying Newell that much for only a three-quarter interest in the giant, ensuring that the specimen would remain local. Along with that gigantic inflow of cash, Newell continued to earn a quarter for every dollar made in ticket sales.

But what accounted for the booming popularity of the Giant? The going story, especially popular among theologians, was that the Cardiff Giant was a fossilized representative of a group of creatures mentioned in the Bible, the Nephilim. (“There were giants in the Earth in those days…” Genesis 6:4). So the Cardiff Giant provided proof of the existence of these biblical giants, and by extension literal proof of other Biblical stories.

Not everyone agreed, however. Scientists noted that the raw material from which the giant was made was gypsum, a soft rock wholly unlike that of any genuine petrification and one that would not last very long in the acidic soil of the Newell farm. Othniel C. Marsh, a well-known paleontologist at the Yale Peabody Museum, wrote a letter to the Syracuse Daily Journal on Nov. 30, 1869: “It is of very recent origin and a most decided humbug …” University of Pennsylvania geologist J.F. Boynton concurred, suggesting, based on erosion rates, that the statue could not have been ensconced in the soil of the Newell farm for much more than a year before its claimed discovery.

Excavation of the “Cardiff Giant” in 1869.

The testimony of well-respected scientists quelled the fervor of some. However, it wasn’t until a shadowy figure emerged to confess to the hoax that belief in the Cardiff Giant evaporated. That figure was George Hull, a relative of Stub Newell.

Hull was a Binghamton, New York cigar manufacturer and an inveterate atheist. While on a visit to his daughter in Iowa, Hull was talking with a minister there about biblical inerrancy when the conversation turned to the story of David and Goliath. The minister maintained that, indeed, there had been a ten-foot-tall champion of the Philistines and that the Bible said so. Hull, while dismissive of a story he considered twaddle, nevertheless wondered if there might be a buck to be made from rubes who would pay to see “evidence” for the past existence of such a giant. In a confession printed in the Ithaca Daily Journal in 1898—nearly three decades after the Cardiff Giant’s discovery—Hull said this conversation was inspiration for the hoax.

He explained that he’d purchased a small tract of land in Iowa, from which he extracted a block of gypsum. He then had the stone shipped to a stonecutter in Chicago to sculpt the giant according to his specifications. Upon its completion, Hull shipped the sculpture to Cardiff and with his cousin Newell planted it in the ground late in 1868, almost exactly one year before its “discovery.” The timeline of Hull’s confession almost exactly matched the geologist Boynton’s calculation. Allowing it to steep in the soil for a year provided time for the stone to weather, bestowing it with a patina of antiquity. At the agreed upon moment, Newell hired laborers to dig the well exactly where he knew they would encounter the giant petrified man from before Noah’s flood.

In truth, the Cardiff Giant wasn’t that convincing a humbug, so why were people so interested in believing in it? 1869 was a contentious time for science and religion. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species had been published just 10 years earlier, creating an ongoing discussion about theories of evolution. The study of fossils and historical geology was further challenging biblical creation stories. There was no room in the emerging scientific consensus for Adam and Eve, Noah, or, for that matter, an ancient race of giants—yet here was a discovery that defied that.

And the Cardiff Giant spoke to a deeper American myth. Consider the man apparently behind its discovery: farmer Stub Newell. Not a scientist, and without a college degree, he had made a discovery that contradicted the viewpoint of scientists. There were giants in the Earth in those days and, if there had been giants, maybe Genesis was as much history book as holy scripture. In this, Stub Newell represents the very American trope of the amateur who, despite the naysaying of the credentialed class, makes a discovery that ostensibly changes what we know about the world.

The Cardiff giant lived on even after its unmasking. After P. T. Barnum failed to purchase Newell’s giant, he had a replica made, which he exhibited as the real thing. Barnum’s version was a fake of a fake! Amused, Mark Twain was inspired to write a short story about all this. Titled “A Ghost Story,” Twain has the spirit of the Cardiff Giant haunting the hotel across the street from where its body is callously being displayed. But there’s a problem; as a result of his own naiveté and confusion, the Giant is actually haunting P.T. Barnum’s fake. The humbug had been humbugged.

Once interest in the Giant waned, a newspaper editor in Iowa purchased the fraudulent fossil. He kept it as a conversation piece in his basement where it was photographed for a 1939 National Geographic spread on the Hawkeye State. Soon thereafter the Giant was returned to, if not the scene of the crime, at least nearby, where he now rests in peace, finally, at the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, New York.

The post The Monster That Stoked Americans’ Devotion to Faith Over Science appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The evening’s moderator, documentarian Jody Hassett Sanchez, raised the question of whether artists illustrating religious scenes for the elites’ manuscripts or for more widespread consumption within churches were true believers or merely manipulators, hired to inspire certain emotions and reinforce the authority of church doctrine.

Filmmaker Michael Tolkin asserted that the intent of the artist is secondary to the intent of the imagery’s audience. For example, he cited the four different reactions to his 1991 movie The Rapture: “People either said it was religious propaganda and that’s why they loved it; it was religious propaganda and that’s why they hated it; it was an attack on religion and that’s why they loved it; or it was an attack on religion and that’s why they hated it.”

University of Southern California medieval historian Lisa Bitel is the author of Our Lady of the Rock, which examines the apparition of the Virgin Mary to the same woman on the 13th day of every month in the Mojave Desert. She is struck by the contemporary thirst not only to experience such miracles, but to witness the religious experiences of others. And so she was fascinated by the crowds that would come together every month to watch this woman see the Virgin in real time.

“And so there I was, watching these people watch someone else seeing the Virgin,” she said.

Leonard Norman Primiano, a religious studies scholar at Cabrini University in Philadelphia, stressed the great interplay between High Church depictions of the divine and those that appear in the vernacular, and how they each inform the other. “Your kitsch can be your sacred,” he said, pointing to two different people in the audience. That first person might walk down Broadway in downtown L.A. and pick up what he thinks is some tremendous religious “kitsch” that was never intended to be ironic.

At the same time, there is a great deal of fluidity not only between high art and the vernacular, but between classic Christian traditions and today’s spiritual imagery. Primiano compared a 1430 manuscript illustration of St. Francis receiving the stigmata to the endless stigmata representations you can find today on YouTube. The same motifs are handed down through the generations, even if today’s YouTubers are (according to Primiano) “visually illiterate,” having decoupled the images from their original content. But, Primiano also noted, the appropriation of spiritual images and traditions across secular and religious realms has always existed. “The Christians got the angels from the Etruscans,” he said.

Hassett Sanchez posited that the boundaries between the material world and the otherworldly were far more porous in the Middle Ages than today. So much more about life and their world was utterly mysterious, so people were more credulous about the supernatural.

But that doesn’t mean that people in our more scientific age have moved on from craving the supernatural. As Zócalo’s publisher suggested during the audience question-and-answer period, perhaps we now crave intimacy with apparitions and the supernatural for the opposite reasons medieval Christians might have—because so much in our lives is otherwise routine, predictable, known.

Bitel agreed that the craving is there, even as “the institutional bonds of our spirituality have loosened.” A Pew poll shows that 42 percent of Americans say they’ve changed religion.

To another question from the audience, on whether testimonials as an art form grew in popularity as a result of rising skepticism in society, Primiano reminded the audience that doubters are not a modern creation. “Remember,” he said, “Thomas the Doubter had to touch Jesus’ wounds to believe.”

So where does this yearning come from? Primiano recounted a recent trip to Mexico to find folk artists depicting miracles in their daily lives. A painting by one artist showed a standoff between the Virgin de Guadalupe and Donald Trump, with an American flag and scenes of Philadelphia (in Primiano’s honor) in between them.

Tolkin agreed with his fellow panelists that the yearning for spiritual experiences, coming from our “terror about our fate,” is not diminishing, though he encouraged the audience to embrace a broader definition and understanding of the religious. For Tolkin himself, seeing The Godfather in the 1970s in a crowded theater in Vermont, after waiting in line for hours, was a “religious communal experience.” And so, too, is attending the Burning Man Festival in the desert, which he has done for a number of years.

Such experiences don’t have to come at the expense of more traditional religious experiences. For Tolkin, one of the most compelling reasons to go to Burning Man is for the Sabbath services there. He explained feeling “the amplification of intensity” experienced with hundreds of other people—who are anonymous to you—on a Friday night in the desert, in the Jewish month of introspection, with the most beautiful of music. “There are naked women running around, too, everyone is weeping, and it breaks down the heart,” he said. It’s “a religious experience and a vision of paradise.”

But it’s perhaps even more elemental than that. When another audience member asked about how secularization alters our relationship to spiritual imagery, Bitel seemed to sum up the consensus on stage: “Religion is like lint in your pocket, it doesn’t go away.”

The post Even Godless Hipsters Love the Stigmata appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It was the pithiest articulation I’d ever heard of the challenge that has consumed most of my adult life.

Since I was in my early teens, I have felt that God was calling me to be a Catholic priest. But I’m a woman, and the Roman Catholic Church refuses to ordain women. Not exactly an auspicious set-up.

Nevertheless, I spent the bulk of my time in high school and college acting as if I were preparing to be priest. For years on end, I studied theology, philosophy, liturgy, ethics, and New Testament Greek.

I even earned the ordination degree, called the master of divinity, at Yale Divinity School, a traditionally Protestant seminary with a student body that was one-eighth Catholic. Most of my Catholic classmates were 20-somethings called to serve the church, but eliminated from the running because they were women, married men, or openly gay or lesbian.

The degree did eventually secure me a job as pastoral associate and director of faith formation at a progressive parish in New York City. Decades ago, when the church was still flush with clergy, that position would have been reserved for a priest. My primary duty was preparing children and young adults to receive the sacraments, but I myself would not be able to perform the rituals for which I prepared them—baptism, confession, marriage, and Holy Communion. Even this parish community, which took risks and worked overtime to welcome people marginalized by the church and society (LGBT people, women, the disabled, and the homeless, among others), could not elude this church law.

I had an education and experience equal to many priests, as well as a deep desire to serve the church, but my female body, according to official church teaching, made my longing to be a priest illegitimate.

The argument really is that basic. The church teaches that women cannot be priests because they cannot “image Christ.” That is, Jesus had a male body and women’s bodies are not a reflection of the male body. It’s a cosmic catch-22: The body God gave women makes God incapable of working through women.

In July 2013, just months after he was elected to the papacy, Pope Francis reaffirmed the church’s ban on women’s ordination during a press conference on the papal plane. “On the ordination of women, the church has spoken and said no,” he said plainly. “John Paul II, in a definitive formulation, said that door is closed.”

This “definitive formulation” to which Francis refers is the “Theology of the Body,” a teaching first developed by Pope John Paul II in 1979. The late pope argued that though women and men are equal in worth and dignity, their physical and anatomical differences are evidence that God intends them to have different roles and purposes. God designed men and women to complement each other, and their genders dictate their distinct purposes in both church and society.

In 1994, John Paul II declared, as close to the point of infallibility as doctrinally possible, that women would forever be banned from the Roman Catholic priesthood, and that “this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.” In the three years since his election, Francis has repeatedly reasserted Pope John Paul II’s theology of the body and his ban on women’s ordination.

With all of the hot-buttons issues that remain contentious in the church (contraception, a married male priesthood, gay and lesbian inclusion), nothing exacts swift and severe punishment like discussion of ordaining women. Priests who have advocated for women’s equality have been defrocked and excommunicated, and nuns who have spoken out have been silenced or denied access to sacraments.

Even under Pope Francis, fear still runs high. At the September 2015 Women’s Ordination Worldwide meeting held in Philadelphia, yet another priest was banned from celebrating the sacraments at his parish because he appeared on one of the conference’s panels.

A vigil held in 2012 by the Women’s Ordination Conference outside Washington D.C.’s Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle.

So, why don’t I—and other women called to be priests—just leave? Get ordained in a church that looks or feels or smells like Catholicism?

Many women feel that the Catholic Church is their home and that Catholic tradition so shaped their identities that they could not leave Catholicism any more than they could leave being black or Puerto Rican or Italian-American.

For me, and I’m sure for other women, there is also a theological reality to why I call myself Catholic. The Catholic tradition teaches that the finite is capable of the infinite and that grace perfects nature. It’s an academic and churchy way of saying that God is present in all of the experiences, people, and objects we encounter in creation. Since the sacred can be discovered anywhere, we are called to be “co-creators”—visible signs of God’s presence in all of our actions and relationships. I love these beliefs. They help me make meaning of my life every day.

In fact, this theology helps explain Pope Francis’s remarkable popularity. In countless, videos, photos, and tweets, people around the world can see Francis embracing the sick and suffering, washing the feet of the imprisoned, taking selfies with young people. He seems to see the glory of God alive in every person, regardless of how broken or desolate a person might be.

But even Francis’ sacramental vision cannot imagine God working through women as priests.

I share Pope Francis’ deep commitment to lifting up the poor and oppressed. And that commitment is one of the main reasons that I continue the fight for women’s equality in the church in my writing and my public speaking. There are global ramifications to the struggle for women’s equality in the church, particularly for women who suffer disproportionately from poverty, violence, and oppression. Most of these sufferings are rooted in women’s inequality. In most cases the Roman Catholic Church did not create these afflictions, but its doctrine on women serves to reinforce them.

How can women ever achieve true empowerment when their religious leaders declare that women are not entitled to equal religious or spiritual authority? How will women ever see true equality when the church’s hierarchy teaches that a woman’s body is inadequate and invalid when it comes to possessing certain forms of power?

The Roman Catholic Church, with its billion members and its rock-star pope, could have an extraordinary impact on improving the dignity, worth, and equality of women, especially in nations where women are dominated and devalued by the oppressive forces of patriarchal culture.

Unfortunately, Pope Francis, who proclaimed this year that the church should open the doors of mercy to all people, continues to keep a lock on the door that bars women from answering God’s call.

It would be hard to calculate the losses that have resulted from the Pope’s position. Hundreds of parishes have been consolidated or closed because of a lack of priests—while highly educated, well-trained, talented Catholic woman endure the humiliation of sitting idle and powerless. Perhaps saddest of all, countless Catholic communities lose the chance to be ministered to by the women who could have been some of their best priests.

The post God Calls My Name, but the Church Won’t Let Me Answer appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.