The Sultan of Sokoto and President General of the Jamaatu Nasril Islam, Alhaji Saad Abubakar, has declared special fasting and prayer over the Coronavirus outbreak in Nigeria.

Abubakar urged Muslims to offer special prayers and fast in a bid to contain further spread of the disease in Nigeria.

Recall that the Nigerian government, through the Minister of Health, Osagie Ehanire had confirmed the outbreak of the disease in Nigeria.

However, the Sultan appealed to Imams to enlighten Muslims about the disease and how to prevent it during their daily prayers in their various mosques across the country.

In a statement signed by JNIs Secretary-General, Dr. Khalid Abubakar Aliyu, the monarch said all agencies, particularly the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control should ensure they discharged their duties appropriately.

The statement reads: We are worried and concerned about the spate of the deadly coronavirus (Covid-19) and disturbed by the threat it poses to life.

Apart from China, where the infection of the virus started, it spreads geometrically to other countries in the world, ranging from Europe, America, Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Nigeria inclusive.

Each country is taking measures in curbing the plague of the Coronavirus, by quarantining the suspiciously infected in order to avoid its spread, while the infected are being treated in special medical facilities.

All Jumaah (Friday prayers) and five daily congregational prayers Imams should mount strong advocacy and enlightenment campaign against the scourge and the epidemic nature of the coronavirus.

They should include in their sermons and preaching the imperatives of taking serious precautionary measures of personal hygiene.

JNI calls on all Jumaah and five daily congregational prayer Imams to engage in special prayers during their sermons, preaching and other sessions for Allahs quick intervention in wiping away the coronavirus outbreak and all other diseases bedeviling humanity.

JNI calls on the government at all levels, especially the agencies charged with the responsibility of protecting the health of the citizenry, particularly the NCDC, to do the needful in protecting the health of the citizenry.

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Coronavirus: Sultan of Sokoto goes spiritual, tells Imams action to take - Daily Post Nigeria

WASHINGTON, March 2, 2020 /PRNewswire/ --Today, a grassroots group of religious liberty advocates held a rally in front of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia and outside of the D.C. Commission on Judicial Disabilities and Tenure (CJDT) to demand that Judge Laura A. Cordero not be reappointed as an Associate Judge of the Superior Court, adding their voices to the thousands of individual comments that were submitted to the CJDT by citizens and affected parties who are calling for her tenure to end.

In comments to the CJDT, which will determine whether Judge Cordero should be reappointed upon the expiration of her current term on June 27, 2020, concerned advocates described how Judge Cordero's previous legal decisions in a case before the Superior Court make her unqualified for reappointment. Judge Cordero's 2018 summary judgment decision in The Family Federation for World Peace and Unification International v. Hyun Jin Preston Moon violated the First Amendment and set a dangerous judicial precedent that impedes religious freedom and the independent governance and management of Washington, D.C. non-profit organizations. Judge Cordero disregarded thousands of pages of evidence that showed indisputable proof of an ongoing religious schism within the Unification movement.

"Judge Laura Cordero's summary judgement ruling has serious implications for religious freedom and the independence of non-profits, and make her severely unqualified to serve as a judge of the D.C. Superior Court," said Rev. Howard Self, who led today's demonstration. "Judge Cordero not only denied the defendants their right to due process but completely ignored the First Amendment in issuing her ruling for this case involving the D.C. non-profit UCI. Her short-sighted and uninformed decision threatens all board-governed non-profits based in Washington, D.C. and all Americans who are granted the right to freedom of religion. For that reason, she should not be reappointed."

In 2013, Judge Anita Josey-Herring, the first presiding judge in the case, signed a motion to dismiss the case, The Family Federation for World Peace and Unification International v. Hyun Jin Preston Moon, under the doctrine of religious abstention. That ruling was appealed, and in December 2015, the D.C. Court of Appeals agreed to reopen the case to allow for discovery, writing that, "going forward, if it becomes apparent to the trial court that this dispute does in fact turn on matters of doctrinal interpretation or church governance, the trial court may grant summary judgment to avoid excessive entanglement with religion."

In October 2018, Judge Cordero issued a summary judgment ruling, scant months after being assigned to the near decade-long case. Judge Cordero's 2018 summary judgment decision violated the First Amendment by enabling a secular court to make a religious interpretation of the Unification movement's theology, history, administration, and polity amid an ongoing schism. In making her summary judgment ruling, Judge Cordero determined not only Rev. Sun Myung Moon's successor, but the purpose and organization of an established religious movement with millions of followers around the world.

"I joined this Right To Believe campaign because I can no longer silently suffer as the court infringes on my sacred freedom as a human being and as an American citizen," said Naomi Yakawich, a 27-year old member of the Unification movement who expressed outrage at Judge Cordero's intervention in matters pertaining to her faith. "I wrote a letter now over a year ago to Judge Cordero of the D.C. Superior Court to respectfully urge her to consider the negative consequences of her decision to take sides in the religious dispute between Family Federation and Dr. Hyun Jin Moon. Judge Cordero ignored the clear evidence provided and has essentially taken one religious group's theology over another, deciding which view she deems right and which she deems wrong and to be punished. As a person of faith, as an American citizen, and as a human being with fundamental rights given by my Creator, I am speaking out to protect not only my freedom, but that of all people to practice their faith. Just as I have no right to infringe on another person's path to spiritual enlightenment, Judge Cordero had no right to dismiss my faith practices as valid or invalid."

The CJDT is accepting comments on Judge Cordero's reappointment from members of the Bar, representatives of the court system, and the general public through March 2, 2020. Grassroots advocates are calling on Judge Jennifer Anderson, who now presides over The Family Federation for World Peace and Unification International v. Hyun Jin Preston Moon, to dismiss the case on religious grounds.

To learn more about the grassroots movement to protect religious freedom, visit RighttoBelieve.org.

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Thousands of Grassroots Religious Freedom Advocates Submit Comments to Urge D.C. Commission on Judicial Disabilities and Tenure Not to Reappoint Judge...

March 8 is International Womens Day, part of the celebration of March as Womens History Month. This weeks clergy discuss the contributions women have made in their faith traditions, in contemporary timesand in their own congregations.

The Rev. Paul Downing

Pastor, St. Paul's Evangelical Lutheran Church, Port Jefferson Station

If I were to answer that my wife is among the most important women in myfaith tradition, you might think I was pandering. Yet,the important women in our tradition are indeed those in church on Sunday making worship, ministry and community happen.

An adage says, This is our grandmothers faith. The majority of active participants are women and thankfully, in our Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, women now have access to any and all leadership roles. This year we commemorate 50 years since the first womens ordination, and 40 years for women of color, though more progress in equality of opportunity is needed. Our current national bishop is a woman.

The importance of women of faith goes all the way back through Hebrew biblical witness, including the likes of Sarah, Rebekah, Leah, Rachel, Miriam, Esther, Naomi, Ruth and Rahab, to New Testament figures like Mary Magdalene (the Apostle to the Apostles), Mary and Martha of Bethany, Elisabeth, Mary the mother of Jesus, Tabitha, Lydia, Priscilla and Phoebe.

Although Scripture is written in the language of patriarchy, women are there, in between the lines, going unnamed yet providing examples of faith and leadership, or providing for ministry. Brave widows and maidens refusing to marryin a time when women were considered incapable of managing wealth, supported the early church out of their own means, even the ministry of Jesus himself.

Anu Jain of Jericho

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Executive board member, Jain Center of America in Elmhurst, Queens

In Jain tradition, there are many women who played an important role in the history of Jainism. Among them are the 16 Satis, the 16 Great Virtuous Women. These women had a very strong history of braveness, tolerance and fighting in their own way without harming anyone. Jains define these Satisin ways that invoke the ideology of a womans fidelity and moral strength. Trishla, the mother of our religions reviver and reorganizer, Lord Mahavira, visualized 14 such dreams that allowed her to give birth to the Lord Mahavira.

Another example is the nunMahasati Chandanbala, who played an important role in Lord Mahaviras path of spiritual enlightenment and moksha, the transcendent state attained as a result of the release from the cycle of rebirth. The Satis set an example for the thousands of Jain womenwho follow their path toward spiritual enlightenment.

Modern families are teaching moral lessons to their children by reciting the exemplary life stories of the Great Virtuous Women. Jains believe that by thinking about these women during meditation and including their principles in day-to-day life, theycan achieve a successful day and a prominent place in society. The Satis are truly a strong pillar of Jainism.

Isma H. Chaudhry

Board of trustees chair, Islamic Center of Long Island, Westbury

In Islamic teachings, women and men are created with the same spiritual nature and are equally responsible for their actions, and thus they can expect the same reward for their righteous behavior.

From an Islamic perspective, the roles of men and women are complementary and cooperative rather than competitive. Some of the inspiring women in Islam are academics, scholars, entrepreneurs and businesswomen, dating as far back as the inception of Islam in the seventh century. The Quran declares that men and women are equal in the eyes of God; men and women were created to be equal parts of a pair. (51:49)

There are 24 females mentioned in the Quran that serve as role models of moral and social strength, including Elizabeth, wife of Zakariya. There is a chapter in the Quran that talks about the righteousness and challenges faced by Mary, the essence of virtue, mother of Prophet Jesus. Hawaa (Eve) is a symbol of equality, Umm-Musa (the Mother of Moses), exemplifies the nurturing spirit. Bilqis (Queen of Sheba), is a wise leader.

Islam alsorecognizes womens roles in business and the sciences. Khadija, Prophet Muhammads wife, was the CEO of her own company; Umm Hani Maryam, was a theologian and a scholar. In 859 AD, Fatima al-Fihri founded a university in Morocco. The 19th and 20th centuries have seen numerous noteworthy and famous female Muslim scientists, leaders and heads of state.

DO YOU HAVE QUESTIONS youd like Newsday to ask the clergy? Email them to LILife@newsday.com.

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Asking the Clergy: Important women in your faith tradition - Newsday

Fran Drescher. On Fran: Manolo Blahnik pumps, at manoloblahnik.com. Wolford stockings, at saks.com. Chopard earrings, at 709 Madison Ave. Arm, at left: David Yurman ring, at 5 E. 57th St. De Beers bracelet, at 716 Madison Ave. Arm, at right: Cartier ring, available by appointment at 653 Fifth Ave. Chopard bracelet. Foot, at right: Jimmy Choo shoe, at jimmychoo.com. Photo: Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari

What you first need to understand is that I learned joie de vivre from The Nanny. Literally, as in the phrase: It sneaked into the theme song to describe the stock-in-trade of the flashy girl from Flushing, as the Nanny was, and as Fran Drescher, its star and creator, was. Ann Hampton Callaway wrote that song for her and did its jazzy performance, a stepping-stone on the way to writing hits for Barbra Streisand, which, if youre a Jewish girl from the boroughs, as Drescher is, is a little like saying Callaway wrote for some little yeshiva Yentl before ascending, pen in hand, to work for G-d Herself.

The joy of Fran! The Jewish girl onscreen who wasnt a meeskite but a bombshell, who turned what could have been a career-killer a face that could launch a thousand ships paired with a voice that could sink them and made it, through gale-force charm, a selling point, a calling card. Thirty years worth of journalists have struggled to describe her nasal whinny. I like Los Angeles magazines version: the voice of a Bloomies perfume spritzer in heat. Teachers told her to lose it, and she tried. But when she trained it out of herself, she lost her whole personality and spoke at a snails pace. She remembers drawling her way through an audition for a part in an epic television drama and losing out to Jane Seymour. They said to my manager, You know, she did fine, but she talked too slow, and its only an 18-hour miniseries, Drescher says. So that was kind of the end of that.

If you are of the generation that grew up on Drescher those of us who were impressionable, and often latchkey, kids during her nannying days, from 1993 to 1999 it is more than a little surreal to find yourself suddenly in communication with her, like meeting a former babysitter years later, each of you older, wiser, and a little wider, the dynamics of your relationship subtly changed. At 62, Drescher is both a whole new woman a cancer survivor with a foundation to advocate for early detection, prevention, and policy; a marijuana evangelist; and a fiery political opinionator with a snappy anti-capitalist bent and exactly the one you feel you know. Her text messages are spangled with kiss-print emoji. She loves an espresso martini, the height of 90s elegance.

Michael Kors Collection dress, at michaelkors.com; Balenciaga shoes, at 620 Madison Ave.; Cartier ring, at cartier.com; David Webb ring, at 942 Madison Ave. Photo: Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari

Back home on the Upper West Side after a stop at a Columbus Avenue bodega for $186 worth of fresh flowers, which she arranges and distributes across a number of vases, Drescher has quick-changed into a terrycloth robe and UGGs, a diamond tennis bracelet on her wrist, while her ever-present assistant, Jordan, lights a fire in the living-room hearth. Dreschers company is called Uh-Oh Productions, and emails from Jordan, dispatches from and about Fran, have been popping up on my phone for days as simply Uh-Oh.

Drescher spends most of her time in Malibu, where she has a house on the ocean and a regular table at Nobu. But she keeps an apartment in New York in an Arts and Craftsstyle building just off the park, where she once shared a wall with Madonna. Here, among rattan chairs and Asian antiques, most of which predate her in the apartment she bought it furnished from a decorator Drescher lives softly, a star in temporary residence. Framed photos of her with potentates Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden grace a side table. (She hasnt yet chosen a 2020 candidate, though fans who have been stoked by her anti-capitalist sallies may be surprised to hear that, while shes Bernie-curious, I do like Amy, and I do think that Joe has a lot of experience.) In the kitchen is a framed cover of New York Dog magazine featuring Drescher with Esther, one of her late, beloved Pomeranians. Esthers predecessor Chester was a guest star on The Nanny.

The line between her lives onscreen and off can feel blurry. When a phone call from her mother interrupts for a few minutes a periodontal appointment is discussed I have to remind myself that the person on the other end is Sylvia Drescher, whom I have never seen, not Sylvia Fine, her Nanny equivalent on the plastic-covered couch. Fran isnt Fran Fine, the door-to-door makeup saleswoman turned nanny to three sad, spoiled, Anglo-American scamps and their blustery British father (Mistuhhh Sheffield!), but her characters tend to be avatars of their creator. Most of them, she points out, are called Fran. I have the good fortune of being recognizable, she says. For people to roll out the red carpet for me wherever I go in the world, its such heaven. Sometimes people say, I dont like Paris. Theyre not nice to me. And its like, Really? Im like Jerry Lewis there. She is Une Nounou dEnfer A Nanny From Hell, as the show was titled in France and La Tata, as it was called in Italy. The Nanny has been syndicated and adapted around the world, both dubbed in its original version and recast in remakes. In more than 25 years, it has never not been showing somewhere.

The Fran Generation is now grown up, and its members have carried Drescher with them. I watched a lot of TV as a kid, at night when my parents were working, says Broad Citys Ilana Glazer, one of Dreschers spiritual descendants. Fran as the nanny was like my nanny. Glazer cast and directed her on an episode of Broad City as her characters aunt. I have watched so many hours, every episode of the show, says Glazer. She makes up part of the structure of my brain.

The Nanny was very formative, says Rachel Bloom, the Emmy-winning composer, lyricist, and star of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, who is working with Drescher on a Nanny musical headed to Broadway. Dan Levy, a producer and writer for the ABC show The Goldbergs, created a Fran Dreschertype mother figure in his new NBC sitcom, Indebted, which premiered last month; he told every development executive that hed pictured Fran Drescher in the part and then, bowing to Occams razor, cast Fran Drescher. Indebted gives Drescher her first starring network role in years, and one, she says with relief, that her elderly parents in Florida and their friends can find in the newspaper TV listings. She is even working on a cabaret act that will take her to Caf Carlyle in New York, the first in its history, said Carlyles Jennifer Cooke, that will not include singing.

Its worth asking why, 21 years after the end of The Nanny, were still in her thrall. Its not just that those who are overwhelmed by the chaos of the internet which is to say, all of us see the feel-good sitcoms of the 90s as sort of a cultural balm, much of it accessible now, ironically enough, on the internet. (The Nanny remains confoundingly hard to stream, though it is a mark of digital glut that I discovered the first two seasons are available on something called the Roku Channel, which it turns out I have.) Its also Drescher herself. The Nannys rags-to-riches story which is also her rags-to-riches story gave us a Borscht Belt Maria von Trapp with an exuberance, even a vulgarity, that wasnt an obstacle to overcome. It was the whole point. She was gorgeous, she was clever, she was outer-borough middle class she fairly honked. Drescher is not unapprised of the singularity of Fran. I was never going to have Meryl Streeps career, she says. I was going to have Fran Dreschers career, and thats what I did.

Marc Jacobs dress, at marcjacobs.com; Lagos ring, at lagos.com. Photo: Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari

She couldnt have had anyone elses. She made her film debut coming on to John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. Hey, are you as good in bed as you are on that dance floor? is her adenoidal purr, and he leads her there, her proprietary hand on his polyester ass. She kicked around in some other movies; she did pilots for TV. But she realized early on that shed have to make her own opportunities. You can still see a few episodes of the last sitcom she did before breaking out, the now-forgotten Princesses, on YouTube: She and Julie Hagerty and the 60s model Twiggy shack up together as wacky roommates with wildly divergent styles. But the show failed to catch on. On TV, a New York Flavor May Be Poison, ran the headline in the New York Times.

After its cancellation, Drescher wound up on an international flight with Jeff Sagansky, then-president of entertainment at CBS. Seizing her chance, she buttonholed him. I thought, Thank you, Lord, and I ran into the bathroom to put some makeup on, she says. I remember the movie was startingback then, everybody watched the same movie and it was The Prince of Tides with Barbra Streisand. And he said, Oh, I want to watch this. Its my favorite. And I thought to myself, Oh, this guy is so ripe for me. She told him that, because of her voice, networks had always gotten her wrong. She wasnt sitcom seasoning. She was the main course.

Sagansky agreed to a meeting and eventually to what would become The Nanny, the idea Drescher and her then-husband, now-out gay ex-husband, and now-and-forever writing partner, Peter Marc Jacobson, came up with for her. It was sparked by her experience schlepping Twiggys daughter, Carly, around London. Theyd spent years working as frustrated actors in L.A. and suddenly had the chance to write their own ticket. The studio brought in Prudence Fraser and Robert Sternin to help guide the writing process, but Drescher was doing stories every single day, Jacobson says. We were so young, I think we did things that if I was getting into it now Id be afraid to do. Who brings Yiddish into a CBS eight-oclock show in 1993?

But the gamble worked. The Nanny was a major hit and, with it, Drescher, who had been a bit player for Milo Forman and a standout as a brassy publicist in Spinal Tap, became not only a star but a durable icon. A New York flavor, no longer poison, was now a bragging right. The New York Times: For Queens, a Place in the Sun; Hollywood Is Suddenly Zooming In, With a Vengeance. Queenss other most famous modern export, Donald J. Trump, was a frequent punch line and onetime guest star. They were once two comic actors, one playing a souped-up fantasy version of her younger self, the other playing a souped-up, fantasy version of his father. Now they are president and guru, sitting on the opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. He bellows with inchoate rage. Drescher remains a foghorn of joy.

Giorgio Armani gown and wrap, similar styles at armani.com; Lisa Shaub Fine Millinery hat, similar styles at 134 Orchard St.; Chopard earring, at 709 Madison Ave. Photo: Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari

Drescher likes to point out that, until the show aired, there hadnt been a Jewish actress playing a Jewish main character on an American comedy for decades not since Molly Goldberg, the echt Jewish mama of early broadcasting, appeared on CBS in the late 1940s. (Rhoda, the canonical sassy Jewish gal of 70s TV, was played by Valerie Harper, who wasnt.) The Nanny was the only show where someone being Jewish was a major part of the show, Bloom says. Youd think thered be a lot more shows where people were overtly Jewish, considering the disproportionate amount of Jewish people writing and creating shows. But theres this idea of We dont want to alienate Middle America.

Drescher and Jacobson based Fran Fine on the young Fran and insisted on her being Jewish even when a major conglomerate offered to sponsor the show provided Fran be rewritten as Italian. We thought about it because we knew it was our big break, Drescher says, and we didnt want to be difficult. But I thought of Neil Simon because he said, Write what you know. I didnt know Italian like I know Jewish. So I mustered up my chutzpah and told them Fran Fine must be Jewish. And they said, Okay.

There were occasional complaints that Nanny Fine and her Queens clan a domineering, guilt-tripping Jewish mother and a yenta grandmother, Yetta, named after Dreschers grandmother didnt represent the best of Jewish womanhood. The L.A. Times published an opinion piece to this effect, then Dreschers rebuttal. But the archetype she incarnated was both hyperspecific and hyperrelatable if not in its details, then in its values to women, and non-women, used to being told to turn it down. The shock of The Nanny was not only the Judaism, Bloom says. It was being too much, being loud, being different. It was a lot of things that I hadnt seen before.

Since The Nanny, Drescher has never fallen out of the cultural mainstream, though she has, project by project, drifted toward the outer boroughs of the television landscape. There was Living With Fran, on the now-defunct WB, about a Fran who juggles family and a younger boyfriend (20056). Then Happily Divorced, on TV Land, about a Fran still living with her newly out, newly gay ex-husband (201113), another show she created with Jacobson. After their divorce, they didnt speak for a year he hadnt wanted to get divorced and was angry. Theyve since come back together professionally and personally, and theyre both single again now. I always used to joke and say if I do have a relationship, theyre going to have to be happy sitting, when were 70 watching The Nanny on television, between me and Fran, he says.

Her life hasnt all been sitcom rosy. Ive been very candid about my personal life, she says. She has written two memoirs (fun fact: Fran loves Phish). The second, Cancer Schmancer, details her fight to correctly diagnose and ultimately beat uterine cancer. Dreschers relationship after Jacobson, with a producer on The Nanny, ended following her cancer treatment, and a second marriage, to the tech entrepreneur Shiva Ayyadurai, ended in divorce. Ayyadurai is internet infamous for his claim that he invented email, though he sued Gawker for its posts debunking the claim, a suit the company settled for $750,000; he also ran unsuccessfully against Elizabeth Warren for a Massachusetts Senate seat. In my second marriage, we were together for three years. The first year was bliss, the second year was agony and ecstasy, and the third year was just agony, and I said, Enough, Drescher has said. Some of her flowers go into vases they received as wedding gifts. She underwent a hysterectomy as part of her cancer treatment and never had kids. I think I would have been a good mom, she says, and sometimes I think I kind of missed out on that.

Photo: Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari

That makes Indebteds Debbie, a doting grandmother and a frisky mate to a graying husband (Steven Weber), a different type of Drescher character and a slightly bittersweet one as well. On the show, Debbie hovers over Adam Pally and Abby Elliott, who play its central characters, a youngish married couple who are tending to both their own kids and their regressing, neo-adolescent parents. Drescher took care to insert enough Fran into the character to make it her own; early scripts, she said, made Debbie more of a traditional, hectoring mother-in-law type. Im not that actress. I cannot get away with that, she says. Im a star. People are tuning in to see who theyre used to seeing. You want to get some heavy character actress, older woman, to be this pain in the ass in the house and have this, you know, antagonistic relationship with the daughter-in-law like they did in Everybody Loves Raymond, be my guest. But thats not me. Drescher turned out to be a bright spot in Indebteds otherwise rough rollout. Reviews so far have been grim. The exception is Drescher, whom Variety singled out as the only person who seems to be trying, in a performance that is a reminder of an old-fashioned sitcom sparkle.

Old-fashioned may be a tell. The show is a sitcom in the kid-friendly, yuks-and-shticks mold (multi-camera, guffawing studio audience), which has not fared well critically in the age of single-cam auteurs and HBO gore. It is the safest of network TV. I think were going to see them coming back, Drescher says. Her characters are lovable and stylish; unlike most Emmy bait, she is proudly, unapologetically uncontroversial. (You cant sit down with your family and watch Game of Thrones, Bloom says. I mean, Im sure some people do. I wouldnt recommend it.) Family-friendly fare syndicates, and it performs worldwide. Drescher is living proof. From the studio standpoint, thats where the money is, she says. Sony has done very well by The Nanny. I mean, something that is this popular a quarter of a century later, thats pretty decent.

Pretty decent has made Drescher a wealthy woman. She loves to work, she says, but she doesnt have to. I dont need the money, she says.And if you dont need the money, that takes a little bit of fire out of your belly. But stardom agrees with her, and shows like Indebted offer, if they catch on, a pathway back to the televised mainstream. Drescher has already made her peace with whatever the shows fate may be. As a Buddhist or a Bu-Jew, which is more to the point of what I am, really balance is a big part of your daily practice, she says. And I try and find balance in everything. I never forget where I come from. And inside, Im still a chubby girl from Queens, anyway.

Dolce & Gabbana jacket, vest, and pants, at dolcegabbana.it; Shannon Phillips hat, at nethats.com; Ren Caovilla shoes, at renecaovilla.com; bow tie, made by Lucy Payne. Photo: Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari

The commissary at The Wing does not offer espresso martinis, but for Drescher, they are inclined to make an exception. So it was that on a recent Tuesday night, a few empty glasses were on a side table, drained but for the telltale damp coffee beans. Drescher was on hand to screen the pilot episode of Indebted for a crowd of 200 and hold a Q&A after. She is one of The Wings presiding spirits; Fran Fine has a phone booth named in her honor there. (Fellow honorees include Ramona Quimby and Lisa Simpson.) Audrey Gelman, The Wings co-founder (smart, ambitious, Jewish) loves Fran Drescher (smart, ambitious, Jewish). Im crying ok, she wrote on Instagram when they met.

But the crowd at The Wing testified that Frans appeal is not limited to those most categorically similar to her. The too-muchness of The Nanny, from Frans wardrobe of leopard, sequins, and skintight to her clarion call, didnt alienate Middle America: America, and the world, ate it up. Her appeal cut across age, race, and creed. Shanae Brown, who runs the Instagram account @WhatFranWore, which is dedicated to tracking down and identifying Fran Fines outfits for an audience of almost 300,000, isnt a young, Jewish striver from the city. Shes a 30-year-old Jamaican patient-care technician living in Atlanta.

Brown doesnt wear the sequined vests, the hourglass cocktail dresses, the Todd Oldham and Moschino and Ferr and, Lord have mercy, Allen Schwartz that Fran Fine did. But then neither does Fran Drescher. The shows costumes were a fantasy creation, a TV-land exaggeration, by the costume designer Brenda Cooper, who won an Emmy for her efforts. The studio, Jacobson recalled, originally pushed for Fran to wear T-shirts and jeans in an effort to be relatable; he and Drescher doubled down on the brights, even making the sets a polite, neutral cream to make the costumes pop. What they telegraphed was an irrepressible presence. She was such a strong person, Brown said in an interview. She was kind of this irreverent woman who didnt care what people thought about her. I feel like thats the energy we have now. Brown has occasionally tried posting the outfits of another 1990s TV heroine, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, but she didnt get the response Fran has.

At The Wing, the crowd laughed politely through Indebted, then roared for Dreschers onstage Q&A. Afterward, she took questions from the audience.

Im not going to stand, because I think if I stand, Im going to pass out, said a young woman up front when handed the microphone. Youre such a hero of mine. I grew up watching you; Ive seen every episode a million times. I cant believe Im in the same room as you. Thank you so much for all the work youve put out into the world. She went on, While Im not Jewish, Im Latina, to see a woman really use her ethnicity, especially in the 90s, meant so much, and I really resonated with it so much.

After her, a young man rare for The Wing but never for Fran with sunglasses perched on his close-cropped skull, was briefer. I went through a lot of trauma in high school, he said, quavering. And watching you really got me through a lot.

Before the event ended, Drescher led the room in a recitation of the mantra a spiritual adviser once taught her: I love you, Fran, she was to repeat to herself. I know how wonderful you are. Its Fran and Fran till the end of time. She encouraged everyone to insert their own name to self-love their way to spiritual enlightenment, but the response that came back still echoed with Frans.

*This article appears in the March 2, 2020, issue ofNew York Magazine. Subscribe Now!

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The Joy of Fran - The Cut

By Latoya Newman Feb 29, 2020

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LIFESTYLE - A KATHAK dance festival aimed primarily at preserving and advancing the art form was held recently in Durban.

The Kala Darshan Institute of Classical Music and Dance, in association with the Aryan Benevolent Home (ABH) and the Arya Yuvak Sabha, will host the Kathak Mahotsav Festival presented the event at the Pattundeen Theatre at the ABH in Chatsworth.

Kathak is a classical dance form with its origins in the temples of North India.

Manesh Maharaj, the festivals director, said the event strove to inspire students and artists to embrace unity and camaraderie and to preserve the sanctity and authenticity of Kathak.

Aside from Kathak being an integral part of Indian culture and identity, it is a potent medium to help steer the student towards a spiritual path and guide them towards a righteous lifestyle. Kathak as an Indian classical dance style is a form of worship and is steeped in divinity. It helps the dancer realise the self and, ultimately, God.

In Hinduism it is regarded as one of the many paths to attain moksha or salvation. Audiences experiencing a Kathak performance come for spiritual enlightenment through this sacred art form as the Kathak dancer becomes the medium between the material and the spiritual.

The audience leaves the theatre feeling elevated and spiritually healed. This directly impacts on ones lifestyle within society as one aspires to adopt a spiritual path (through peace, harmony, unity and love) and aims to steer away from negative voices.

Maharaj, a performer and teacher of the art, said the younger generation were showing a keen interest in studying Kathak.

This is supported and encouraged by their parents and families. It is due to festivals like Kathak Mahotsav that young students are inspired to work harder to become proficient someday, and it is the responsibility of teachers and performers to be productive by creating platforms and affording spaces to talented, hard-working students, said Maharaj.

Kathak has a bright future in South Africa as long as we keep the interest alive by preserving it through teaching and performances.

The artists performing at the festival included Kranthi Singh, Kirti Ravjee, Shika Harrypaul and Maharaj.

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Preserving the art of Kathak - Independent Online

FLORENCE Local theater director David Hope has known for years that the Bible and its spiritual truths has inspired many a Broadway stage production.

He even came across that affirmation in a book called, "You've Got To Have A Dream: The Message of the Musical," written by Scottish theologian, Ian Bradley.

After reading the book, Hope said he knew at some point he wanted to direct a concert that would show the public, "that some of the most beautiful, inspiring and comforting music ever written for the Broadway stage has as its core message many of the scriptural truths found in the Bible."

So he set out to create that concert featuring 12 beloved songs from 10 classic Broadway musicals.

Those selections will be performed by a 50-voice choir from across the Shoals at 7 p.m. Saturday, at Woodmont Baptist Church, Florence.

The Bible On Broadway event is free to the public and, according to Hope, packs enjoyment for the whole family.

"To my knowledge, a concert of this type has never been done in northwest Alabama," Hope said.

Some of the song selections from the various productions include "Climb Every Mountain," "You'll Never Walk Alone," "One Hand One Heart" (from "West Side Story"), "Sabath Prayer" ("Fiddler on the Roof") and "Children of Eden." A 10-piece orchestra will accompany.

As a special treat for the audience, the closing number which is also the finale to "Le Miserables," "Bring Him Home," will feature special guest Taylor Lamm who played the leading role of Jean Valjean, in the Summer Stock production several years ago.

According to Hope, most people don't immediately associate the Bible with Broadway musicals.

"... if we look a little deeper and really examine the plots and lyrics of the songs that move the plots, we find that over and over Biblical truths serve as the foundation for the message in the songs and very often the entire musical."

One of Hope's favorite examples, and one of the musicals with the strongest spiritual references is "Les Miserables," with its 31 references to God, six references to Jesus, eight mentions of Heaven, four mentions of the soul and explicit illusions to Calvary, the passion and blood of Christ, sacrifice, salvation and sainthood.

"The entire premise of the show is the love and mercy of God and the redemption of man," Hope said.

He said such a concert could only come to fruition with a talented team to work with.

Gene Anne Gifford is the project's vocal director and Becky Foster is musical director and accompanist.

Foster said she enjoys being a part of something that so many people love.

"People love musicals and this is free, so it has a real nucleus to spread across the Shoals," she said. "It's naturally a variety in that there are several musicals involved and the references in some selections may be really surprising to people. And, they're being performed by some really amazing, talented singers."

Soloists include Tammy McCollister, Jill Gatlin, Carol Johns, Mikayla Camp, Salina Fugate, Ann-Marie Patrick, Suzanne Mills, Josh Davis, Joey Wright and Tanner Rhodes.

Choir member Sandra Vetters said the show is timely and unique.

"This is music that many of us have known for 50 years or more and David wants the music to resonate with people today and it does," Vetters said. "This is truly educating people from all over through various community and church choirs and just individuals who love to sing. It's a diverse and well trained group.

It's such a marvelous idea and we've worked to create a broad appeal. It's been so inspiring and is going to be a true gift to the community."

Hope said his desire for the show is one of enlightenment for his audience, "to the bridge between the entertaining world of musical theater and the world of theology and spiritual experience."

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Who Knew? The Bible Really IS On Broadway - Times Daily

Public discourses in Lautoka and Suva

Venkat RamanAuckland, March 2, 2020

Fijians seeking self-realisation and true happiness can look forward to esteemed enlightenment in the presence of Brahmarishi (also Brahmrishi) Vishvasant Guruvanand, the Spiritual Leader, who simplifies Vedanta and philosophy of life for easy assimilation.

The Schedule

The Master of Vedas will address two public meetings, the first of which will be held today (Tuesday, March 3, 2020) at 7 pm at Girmit Centre in Lautoka (located at Kings Road).

The meeting will be held on Thursday, March 5, 2020 at 7 pm at the FMF Foods Limited (formerly Flour Mills of Fiji Limited) Gymnasium, located at Laucala Bay Road in Suva.

A cross-section of Fijis population is expected to attend the discourses, during which the Brahmarishi would how to lead a meaningful life and more important, sans depression.

Guruvanand has just concluded a four-day visit to Auckland which saw more than 1500 people listening to his speeches at Ram Mandir in West Auckland and Bhartiya Mandir in Central Auckland.

Teachings par excellence

To the world that is often misguided with increasing tensions and tendencies towards suicide and homicide, Gurudevs teachings are palliatives.

Here is a sample: In the tapestry of life, weave a story that is so inspiring and so meaningful that posterity can say with pride that you were indeed the heir of the Santana Dharma, the eternal Dharma of the great Masters of the past. Your thoughts and actions today are indelible links that connect the great shining past and the glorious future unfolding of the Divine Life, of which you are an integral part.

According to scores of disciples, reciting his name with the Mantra Om Guruvanand Namah, provides divine relaxation to the mind.

The name of this beautiful mantra itself gives the mission thatGuruji wants to fulfil from his inspiring and influential presence, which is Awareness and Peace. I owe my major improvements, success, frame of mind, vision and level of thinking to Guruji, an Auckland based devotee said.

The Brahmarishi advises people to live a beautiful life- so beautiful that its fragrance eternally permeates and pervades the memory of fellow sojourners in the journey of life.

You have to shake to take out dirt from a cloth. Similarly, dance and rejoice in front of Mata Rani and take out all your karmas and be happy. Leave all your tensions there and go home fresh with happiness, he said.

About Brahmarishis

Brahmarishis are revered as sons of God, selfless protectors, persons of the greatest ability, and propagators of the highest human values.

They are Divine Flames dedicating their lives to the cause and welfare of humankind.

They teach in a language understood by common people and consider service to humanity as the greatest religion.

The teachings of Brahmarishi Guruvanand are well founded on tenets of innate goodness of every person, transcending barriers of race, religion, language and other man-made barriers.

He believes that everyone has something to contribute to the progress and prosperity of the human race as a whole.

Live in the now, do not seek faults in others and improve yourself. Your faith will make heaven come to you. Follow your religion or your God or your own Guru. Believe in him with full devotion. Live with happiness and not for happiness. Happiness is in small things. Love your family and always spread smile, he says.

Gurudev, the Pacifist

If you were to listen to the speeches of Gurudev, you would instantly like him and his belief that religion is not based on rituals and rites but on love, peace, harmony and understanding among people. He radiates grace and kindness. At each private meetings, many have found answers to questions that have daunted them since long.

The Brahmarishi holds several degrees including M Tech from IIT Kharagpur (equivalent to MIT and Harvard in USA); PhD in Astrology; and Masters in Sanskrit, Vedas, and Jyotish.

He was Honorary Principal and Professor at various academic institutions including Banaras Hindu University. With a background in Science, it is natural that he looks for ways to bring the scientific mentality and the spiritualism in creative dialogue.

With his life transformative spiritual message, he inspires, empowers, keeps people informed and engages them to move forward in their spiritual quest.

The Brahmrishi Ashram situated in Tirupati, is endowed with beauty, tranquillity and peace.

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Brahmarishi Guruvanand on three-day visit to Fiji - Indian NewsLink

The painter shares the challenging, hopeful books that helped her through personal crisis.

Winding, veering off, looping back around, and accelerating forward: such is the pattern of life. Our plans and ambitions morph, often leaving us utterly uprooted andwith timeredirected towards another path. Artist Shannon Cartier Lucy knows this full well. Upon the burgeoning of her career in the early aughts, personal crises compelled her to leave New York City and the art world behind, moving home to Nashville to become a licensed psychotherapist. Her return has coincided with a shift to realism, and her latest exhibitHome is a Crossword Puzzle I Cant Solveembraces figuration. On view now at Lubov in New York through March 8th, the exhibit encapsulates the absurdity and frailty of everyday domestic life.

Given her exploration of the quietly chaotic, it is fitting that Lucy is fascinated by literature that deep dives into human movement through suffering and hope. Here, the artist provides Document with a spiritually-inclined booklist that questions what exactly it means to be lost and found.

Theres no narrowness, no specific condition for feeling lostwhether it be heartbreak, a violent storm, addiction, or near-death experience, she comments. Beyond culture or religious belief, one thing all human beings share is pain. This collection of books touches on the deeply and widely felt imaginative yearning that heralds changea crisis, a breakdown, a leaning toward something bigger, a desire for relief, for joy, and for our life to have true meaning.

A Confession by Leo TolstoyWell-known author of Anna Karenina shares a heart-felt account of his midlife crisis and subsequent spiritual awakening. Plagued by meaninglessness during a period of his life marked by great notoriety, wealth, and success, the writer claimed: Life felt like a stupid joke being played on me. Yet, through meticulous self-examination, he finds a way to come out the other side.

Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil This is a truly inspiring book of aphorisms by the French philosopher and mystic that was compiled posthumously. Weil speaks to fellow tragic figures stripped bare by the absurdity of life.

Essays and Fictions by Brad Phillips An author in perpetual state of what Simone Weil called decreation, Phillips offers a painfully sincere and disarming collection of autobiographical fiction.

I had experienced the psychiatrically rare psychogenic fugue state. [From Wikipedia] Dissociative fugue: a rare psychiatric disorder characterized by amnesia for personal identity and other qualifying characteristics of individualityCheck, and check!

A Prayer Journal by Flannery OConnor OConnor, a southern gothic novelist known for her grotesque short stories, compiled notebooks of short prayers during the time of writing her famed novel Wiseblood.

My mind is in a little box, dear god, down inside other boxes and on and on. There is little air in my box. Dear God, please give me as much air as it is not presumptuous to ask for. Please let some light shine out of all things around me so that I can. Oh dear god, I want to write a novel, a good novel.

Diary of a Country Priest by George Bernanos Shame, self-hate, feelings of inferiority, and suicide are frequent motifs in Bernanos fiction. Diary is a compelling yet heartbreaking portrayal of an innocent and extremely vulnerable man who always thinks hes failing. But in spite of his torturous self-condemnation, the priest surrenders to good and evil and finds his hard-won enlightenment. Were left with three words: all is grace.

Book of Hours by Rainer Rilke Rilkes collection of poems were written spontaneously as prayers to the divine for a secular world. The writing is more relevant than ever considering the current state of human affairs.

The poor, the outcasts, the homeless ones each one profound in his humbleness and without fear of humiliating himself and because of that truly pious.

Going Sane: Maps of happiness by Adam Phillips Sanity becomes part of an extensive vocabulary of reassurance for the danger of our vulnerability and the ever-elusive yet default position we aspire to. In a world of dysfunction and chaos, sanity has been the pose of those who want to keep things the same. Sanity, therefore, is not something we were born with but something we painfully acquire.

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Shannon Cartier Lucy's 7-book guide to turning pain into positive growth - Document Journal

Eighteen-year-old Jay Singh trundled through the snow one cold winters day in his vain attempt to sell insurances door to door.

Cold, exasperated, and with a hole in the sole of his right shoe, he called his mother to ask her an all-important question.

Frustrated at the futility of that moment, Jay awaited his mothers reply as one thirstily awaits the wisdom of a prophet.

To his disappointment, his mother sighed deeply, but had no answer to his question.

Jay, now an adult whos moved on substantially since that dark moment, gave me permission to share the snippet of his story, relayed this to me in our first coaching session. I listened, engrossed whilst awaiting the answer to the nail-biting question which has kept human beings awake for thousands of years.

After all, this question tends to be running in the background of our minds without us even realising, often reawakened when life throws the unexpected and we taste loss or failure. We spend years in therapy ruminating over it, going over the minutia of life and as an end to the hopelessness, seek deeper answers to affirm why we still choose to be here.

Why each morning we totter out of bed, mustering enough energy to discover what life has chosen to throw at us that day.

Were gifted this time on earth and are born into a family nucleus (whatever this looks like) given a name, certain character traits and as a bonus, given a certainje ne sais quoithat we spend our lives attempting to discover. As we navigate the bridge between life and death, we encounter a multitude of experiences good and bad, but the end destination is still the same for everyone.

So why is it not just enough to survive without seeking to discover a deeper layer?

There is something intrinsically within us that needs to understand why we should invest another second of being immersed in a game we dont even understand. When were born, we become like the pieces placed on a chessboard, we dont understand the game were about to play, let alone what our next move should be. The rules havent been explained yet were asked to live, procreate and die by a universal premise we are not that clear about.

So we spend our lives asking questions, in our feeble attempt to understand why life often doesnt follow any set of rules or order.

Religions and cults throughout generations have seduced their followers through this very premise, whilst promising the golden answer. In the olden days, the payback for understanding this was of a more spiritual nature, disciples were assured that discovering the answer would take them on a fast track to heaven.

In this day and age, success gurus have taken on a similar position of authority. Not necessarily promising heaven, as this is no longer seductive enough for this generation. Instead, promising wealth, fame and success, which encourages followers to embark on a treasure hunt to desperately find their unique purpose, the ultimate goal. Once they find it, they will know why they were placed on this earth. Success, fame and happiness will follow.

The only thing this leads to is a huge expectation followed by a severe bout of disappointment.

Yet people are encouraged to exist by squeezing the life out of everything they do in a vain attempt to discover the answer to the deeper question.

I was recently speaking to a 90-year-old Holocaust survivor.

As a young girl in Poland, she asked herself what life was all about when she was detained by the Nazis and her parents perished in the gas chambers. In the darkness that enveloped her life in the concentration camps, where she constantly balanced between life and death, she never found the answer.

Once the camps were liberated after the war ended, instead of waiting for the answer to be revealed, she created the meaning by which she lived.

If she was unable to find the answer after living through one of the most utterly despicable acts of the 20th century, what hope is there for us to find the answer, as we sit back in our comfortable homes enjoying the trappings of society.

The ones who offer more enlightenment are those who have died for a few seconds and in coming back to life, have tales of wisdom to impart. Anita Moorjani, the author of Dying to be me died momentarily and was able to taste the afterlife, allowing her to return with a beautiful reflection on what she discovered about the meaning of life;

I saw my life intricately woven into everything Id known so far. I began to understand that while I may have only been a thread, I was integral to the overall finished picture.

I learned that my only purpose in life is to be a full expression of myself. To love myself to the core of my being. And to share my heart and soul with the world without fear. I realised that the peace and love humankind craves resides inside each and every on of us, and we can access it anytime.

I discovered one of lifes greatest truths: Heaven is not a destination; its a state of being.

The answer is not out there but within you and therefore this means reframing the question.

Go within and listen carefully to the answer.

Are you tenacious, caring, lazy, compassionate, creative, domineering, controlling or fussy? There are multiplicious character traits, and you can find your own fit.

What do you personally regard as sacred, important, valuable or meaningful?

Perhaps its love, laughter, spirituality, friendships, relationships, peace, learning, experiences or travel.

Youre a masterful creator, since all human beings are, then go ahead and create the components you want in your life. Grasp the elements that bring the most meaning and dynamic energy, the places and things that make you feel the most alive. The universe wont deliver that for you, this is up to you.

Allow the question to evolve as you transition through different stages of life as this will take a different form depending on which stage youre in.

When we engage with life and slow down, we discover the meaning of each moment and what we are here to do gently becomes revealed.

Questions have a purpose, and we believe that they need an answer (often immediately), but at times we need to surrender to the idea that we dont need to have all the answers to live a purposeful, meaningful life.

We then stop asking What is life about? because life is both simple and complex simultaneously, and to expect the answer to such a global question is to elevate ourselves above human status. We then become desperately needy in our quest to find the answer and this prevents us from living life with ease, fun and serenity.

If this article resonated with you, check out my latest bookLook Inside: Stop Seeking Start Livingavailable on Amazon.

If you want to connect with me to share insights from this article, I would love to hear from you. Send a message via e-mail to [emailprotected]

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What's Life All About Anyway? - Thrive Global

Sonoya Mizuno in DevsPicture: Miya Mizuno (FX)TV ReviewsAll of our TV opinions in a single handy place.

On the core of FXs Devs, an eight-part restricted sequence from visionary filmmaker Alex Garland, is an age-old query, one whichs been contemplated by philosophers and laypeople alike for millennia: Does free will truly exist? Or is life simply an infinite chain of reactions, a kaleidoscopic turning of causes into results?

In case youre fearful about simply having had the sequence spoiled for you, dont bethe above are takeaways from the primary hour or two of the sequence, not the tip of the final episode. Garland also teased his deterministic themes at New York Comedian-Con final October. Even the trailers include the log line Nothing ever occurs and not using a motive. And whereas there have been the standard caveats and embargoes from FX about plot specifics in pre-air protection, as soon as the clock begins on the season, Devs is surprisingly forthcoming in regards to the particulars of its mysteries. The sequence most summary, most advanced concepts are inexorably linked to its motion, which necessitates a sure degree of transparency in its storytelling.

B-

Sonoya Mizuno, Nick Offerman, Jin Ha, Alison Capsule, Karl Glusman, Zach Grenier, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Cailee Spaeny, Janet Mock

Thursday, March 5 at three a.m. Japanese with back-to-back episodes on FX on Hulu

Hour-long tech thriller; full restricted sequence watched for evaluation

And theres the rub, for each the viewer and Lily Chan (Sonoya Mizuno, in her third collaboration with Garland), a pc programmer for tech big Amaya. When you be taught to acknowledge what constitutes a bread crumb in Devs storytelling, youll be able to select to comply with that path towards enlightenment. The identical principally goes for Lily, who should be taught to take managementor not less than, grapple with the phantasm of itin her quickly increasing world, one which spins out from her day by day routine in Silicon Valley to incorporate espionage, synthetic intelligence, quantum mechanics, and a few uncomfortable truths. As soon as shes down the rabbit gap, although, Lily rapidly learns that essentially the most startling revelations are sometimes essentially the most painful.

The inciting incident comes straight from procedurals and pulp novelsthe disappearance of a cherished one, on this case, Lilys boyfriend, Sergei (Karl Glusman), a man-made intelligence coder and her co-worker. Within the premiere, Sergei makes a breakthrough that impresses Forest, the CEO of Amaya, a person who speaks in Zen koans when hes not munching on undressed greens. Performed by Nick Offerman in a variation on his cultured woodsman persona, Forest comes throughout as each an unassuming tech nerd and charismatic cult chief. Reasonably than lord over Northern California like a Bond villain, this billionaire lives in a home on a public road (which, provided that that is San Francisco, might be nonetheless fairly costly) and drives an outdated station wagon to work.

This juxtaposition is likely one of the few instances Devs actively subverts expectations. In any other case, Garland, who wrote and directed each episode, restrains himself to only a handful of narrative curveballs. As a substitute of huge revelations, he provides extra layers that should improve our understanding of the philosophical issues hes laid out; the image isnt expanded a lot as introduced into sharper focus. Lest we neglect simply how massive these questions are, Devs is stuffed with stretches of expository dialogue that function crash programs in quantum physics and determinism; theres no such factor as a taciturn genius on this model of Silicon Valley. Forests right-hand girl, Katie (Alison Capsule), turns into simply as liable to speechifying as hes. Even the engineers whore lower off from the remainder of the world whereas at work within the enigmatic Devs division wish to hold one another knowledgeable of their progress, which results in what can solely be described as name-checking interpretations of quantum mechanics and theories which have formed our understanding of the bodily world.

The pacing is as deliberate because the writing, with the story transferring determinedly from one chapter to the subsequent. The intense tone not often lets up, as humor doesnt look like one of many potentialities in a narrative that insists that something that may occur, will occur. Nonetheless, Devs is rarely uninteresting, simply maybe too beholden to its guiding rules. The forged engages even when Garlands text-heavy exploration of consciousness and predetermination doesnt. Offerman each charms and frightens as Forest, who at one level performs Frisbee with a would-be adversary. In her first flip as a sequence lead, Mizuno captivates within the function of somebody whos given each motive to query their understanding of actuality, but by no means succumbs to doubt. The place she demonstrated a balletic physicality in her earlier appearances in Garlands work, right here Mizuno focuses on elocution to convey her characters shifting feelings. The extra conflicted Lily turns into, the extra deliberate her speech, till every syllable is as fraught because the high-minded ideas Devs introduces at an everyday clip.

Garland had centuries of literature, a number of disciplines (brushing up in your gestaltism couldnt harm), and even just a few branches of physics to attract from in cultivating his interpretations of immutable legal guidelines and human nature. That analysis is the inspiration of Devs as a lot as Garlands personal oeuvre. The affect of the sterile, however not bland environs of Ex Machinas Blue Ebook and the gorgeous, unnatural (to this world) phenomenon on the heart of Annihilation will be seen and felt all through Garlands restricted sequence. However with Devs, he goals for a mix of those sensibilities: the natural and the technological, the mounted and the transmutable, the divine and the earthbound. Garland makes use of spiritual iconography in methods each delicate and overt, however is most profitable in setting an more and more foreboding temper. San Franciscos bustling life is concentrated on the Amaya compound (impressed by the Google campus); its in any other case depicted as a ghost city with a literal pall over it. Music composers Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow (The Bugs) frequently shatter the calm with their rating. Garland hasnt neglected a factor in setting up the setting of his techno thriller. Its the story inside it that struggles to be cohesive and compelling.

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Alex Garland builds a meticulous thriller within the restrained, overstuffed Devs - BingePost

THE BIRTH OF GOD

And What It Can Mean for Us

James Ishmael Ford

As you may know I am now teaching a class in the Buddhist chaplaincy program at the University of the West. It has been an amazing experience. It has also pushed me in a lot of areas. Not least, the fact that of the thirteen people in the class, five are Buddhist monastics. Three are nuns from China. Another is a nun from Korea. And the fifth is a monk from Bangladesh by way of Sri Lanka. Half of the balance of the class were raised Buddhist within Chinese cultural contexts.

My job is teaching a survey course in Abrahamic texts, the sacred scriptures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The need is for potential Buddhist chaplains to have a sympathetic sense of the dominant religions in North America and the West. And, as I said, these are people who are not from the West. So, television and movies not withstanding they do not get many things which we think of as just the way things are.

For instance. As I prepared for the class, I realized I probably needed to start with the idea of God. Here in the West God is such a pervasive idea, and so emotionally charged, that most people either believe in God or dont believe in God. And it can be hard to move away from that dichotomy.

But in fact, it isnt how things actually are. In that class a lot of my students belong to a whole different category, which is what is this God of which you speak? They dont have a clue. And the question is asked with no particular emotion attached to it. Just no clear idea of what the word is supposed to point to. The God of the Abrahamic traditions, the God of Judaism, the God of Christianity, and the God of Islam. No really solid reference point.

So, God. While there are different understandings here and there, especially between Judaism and Islam on one side and Christianity on the other, they are all based in very similar belief (or in reaction, non-belief) in a deity with human-like characteristics, that has created the world, intervenes here and there on occasion, and at some point will end it all. In Christianity and Islam, the deity will then judge humans on how they lived or what they believed, with rewards or punishments dealt out accordingly. In Judaism end times are a bit murkier, but generally doesnt feature any lakes of fire. With these tweaks, that God.

St Thomas Aquinas, the great fourteenth Catholic philosopher believed that the idea of God was simply self-evident. I believe the larger majority of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, would agree. This is part of why they often find atheists pernicious and even question if they are so out of touch with that self-evident reality, whether they are even trustworthy enough to serve on juries. If you cant be trusted with the evidence before your eyes, how can you be trusted in other matters of extreme importance?

But the truth of the matter is that it isnt obvious. And, actually, there is no clear analog to the Western idea of God in the other religions of the world. Yes, there are ideas of overarching, connecting, principles in other religions. The idea of Brahman in Hinduism, for instance. Theres also Shangdi, the first ancestor, or maybe closer, Tian, or Heaven in indigenous Chinese religions. I also think of the Wakan Tanka in Sioux religion, Gitche Manitou among the Algonquian, and with differences, within numerous other Native American communities, where there is a more animistic and sometimes mystical force which in modernity is often collapsed as the Great Spirit. But with any digging at all, none of these things are in fact particularly like the God of the Bible and Quran.

So, no, actually the idea of God as conceived here in the West is not self-evident.

I have a seat of the pants understanding of an evolutionary story of God, the birth and growth of God. But, for the class, I needed to review some details. And, along the way, I learned some things. And, well, it seemed to me you might find a helpful pointer or two on your own spiritual paths if I were to share that with you. So, today, lets look at that, the birth of God, the God of the West, and what that God might mean for us, children of the post enlightenment, post-modern, really the post-post-modern world. For us, in a time of dis-belief and quest. What can God mean for you and me?

Me, where I started was with the non-human animal world. There are elements that we can discern as religious-like in some animal behaviors. Of course, there is nothing to suggest non-human animals believe in God or gods, or many of the other things one associates with religions, like praying, or worshiping. But they do do things that we associate with human religions.

For instance, many animals engage in ritual behaviors. Jane Goodall, as an example, observes how chimpanzees appear to dance when they come upon waterfalls and do something similar at the beginning of rainstorms. Many animals also appear to observe funeral rites. In preparing for the class I watched a video clip of elephants doing what certainly looked like a ritual of mourning for one of their own. One could say animals may not be religious, but some sure look to be spiritual.

For humans we see archeological evidences of similar behaviors as far back as maybe a hundred thousand years, with grave sites that include what are called grave goods such as tools and ornaments. And how in many places there is evidence that corpses were covered in flowers. This is true with both our main line of evolution and our closest cousins the Neanderthals. As an aside and as regards the other great interbreeding human population with our main line, the Denisovans. We just havent, so far, found much physical evidence of their cultures. But there is no compelling reason to assume they or the as yet unnamed but genetically identified fourth group of early interbreeding humans, did not also share these behaviors. These spiritual if not quite yet religious behaviors can reasonably be assumed to be common to us all.

While theres no evidence of belief in some idea of a supreme being, there are strong suggestions of spiritualities as pretty basic to who we are as humans. By this I mean there seems to be some common sense among humans of mystery and connections that extend beyond the bare phenomenon of life and the reality of death.

From here it seems important to look at hunter gatherer religious views. The nineteenth century anthropologist, Edward Tylor coined the term animism to address his observations. The term has been worked and reworked in the years following based upon further research as well as noting hidden biases in interpretation among those early Western ethnographers.

The first observation was how in these cultures pretty much across the globe everything is seen as animated. Everything possesses a spirit or spirit. At the beginning Professor Tyler, the first professor of Anthropology at Oxford, thought animism was a confusion between animals and plants and inanimate things. He felt this weak sense of categories was an obviously mistaken view, but one common, it appears, to all early humans. And this confusion of categories would also be a building block of later organized religions.

Contemporary Anthropologist Nurit Bird-David speaks for a shift in interpretation, suggesting instead how animism is a relational epistemology. Epistemology is a five-dollar word meaning how we know things. So, an expensive term, but worth it. It calls us to notice such things as how we know things. So, specifically, animism is an approach to life that is centered in our relationships. It is a world filled with subjects rather than objects. Everything is relational. Lets put a pin in that. Well revisit this before were done.

But, mostly, it just means things change. Over time in history various things got clustered together to form religions as we understand them today. And as we attempt to unravel that part of human cultures we see as religious we see several things.

Probably the most offensive of those various things making up religion for many of us in modernity, could be called crowd control. It has to do with that aspect of religion which is all about culture and specifically the preservation and transmission of culture over time. While it is very important to the coherence of a culture, it has an enormously conservative aspect. It clearly defines who is in and who is out. And while from the inside it offers comfort, to anyone on the outside, any kind of outside, it can be deadly.

But theres a lot more in that bag that is religion. Theres also religion as the repository of ethics. The place we go for guidance on how to act in this world. Still another thing that has been part of religion since forever has been healing. Even today prayer and rites to facilitate the healing of body and mind are common currency of religions. And, most importantly, at least from my perspective, is how religion is about meaning and purpose in life. These four different things, and no doubt some others, are bound up together and sometimes are near impossible to unravel from each other.

With that we come to the arc of religion in the Near East. With agriculture religious institutions began to emerge. Here we find, as with other agriculturally based cultures, the emergence of gods. Gods are nonhuman entities that have power, and with whom we humans interact.

Among a small group of people in the hilly areas of Canaan some were peasants, others escaped slaves, and including among them some who had escaped bondage in Egypt, all gradually began to see themselves as a people. They felt different than other Canaanites. And they began to tell stories about themselves as part of the evolution of that sub-culture. Actually two different traditions of these stories would be gathered together. This occurred in two stages. With the first stage we get that sense of a coherent people. It becomes historical about a thousand years before the common era when a kingdom was gathered by someone named David. And then his son Solomon consolidated the kingdom and built from a small town a fairly grand capital, Jerusalem. Here is the first birthing of Israel.

Their kingdom didnt last long. First it broke into two kingdoms. Then not all that much later the Babylonians swept through the region and carried away the intellectual remains of that group. There in the sixth century before our common era by the waters of Babylon, people began a second editing of the stories. When the Babylonians were themselves conquered these captives were allowed to return to their homeland. They returned with a book that largely is the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. Plus a few more books largely consisting of mythic histories.

A really interesting thing in the archeological record is that before the Babylonian captivity the Israelites were in practice not monotheists. They talked a good game. But in practice they were a form of Henotheists where one believes in many gods, but one deity is more important. People frequently covered bases with offerings of various sorts to many other gods. The archeological record is littered with statuettes of gods in Israel. Also, just an interesting tidbit, during this period before Babylon there is evidence that showed this primary God sometimes was portrayed as having a wife.

The newly created Bible mashed a lot of things together. At the beginning those two different story traditions. The earliest stratas god was sometimes nothing more than a storm deity, and at other times something fierce, A deity who demanded sacrifices and exercised astonishing punishments on those who strayed in any of several directions. But, in the editing process, actually we have a name for the principal editor, Ezra, he and his team came up with a rather different god.

And thats the God we know, the one who created and sustains the world. The one who worked in mysterious ways. Definitely a god not to be messed with. But, something more. They introduced a god that had those elements, but was vastly different than had been conceived of before. Something compelling. Now there was a God as intimate with the world as a kiss.

And in the re-established Israel the archeological record shows no statuettes or evidences of any other gods. Now there was only one God. And according to this new Bible this God that wasnt just their God. Although they did have a special covenant. But now this was a God of the whole world. A God that represents love and forgiveness and most of all, it was a God of Hope.

In this sad, sad world, a God many find compelling.

Maybe not self-evident. But this God has touched many hearts.

Me, I find myself returning to that earliest idea of how the world works, and particularly that idea of finding our meaning in a world where we are not objects to each other, but that we relate subjectively. That is where each of us is meaningful just because we exist.

If we dig into it, it makes a certain sense. We are in fact created out of each other. And by we, I mean us, you and me, the humans. But, also, the animals. And also, the plants. And also, the seemingly inanimate world. Through strands of cause and effect we are created, and we create. Dr Kings single garment of destiny. We look deeply and discover how rich and truly mysterious we and the world are.

And while we humans may have created that God which represents this deeper and ancient sense of connection, it is our attempt to capture something true about who we are, and what this world is.

So, for my class, and maybe for all of us, some sympathy for the tradition is worthy.

And theres more to this, as well. Not only does God have a birth, but God is growing. Now were encountering ever richer nuances of what that greater of which we are a part might be. As simply two examples of many, Vedanta and Buddhism each offer perspectives on reality that are already reshaping Western understandings of ultimacy, and with that of God.

We know humans are a dangerous lot. But, when we open our hearts, and notice the connections, then we are also something else.

In the traditions of the west, we become the children of God.

May we be worthy of that name.

Amen.

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THE BIRTH OF GOD And What It Can Mean for Us - Patheos

How spirituality exists in America today

Over time, religious thinking in the United States dissolved and sequestered itself to places of worship, cults and personalized practice. A swelling irreligious attitude has manifested itself since the 1990s, with 18% of the population identifying as not religious or spiritual, 27% not religious but spiritual and 26% completely irreligious.

Today, discussions of spirituality and the immaterial aspects of the mind exist exclusively in academic disciplines, most notably motivational and cognitive-behavioral psychology and philosophy. Weve dug ourselves into an array of assumptions about human behavior, falsely introduced by pop psychology. These assumptions come in the form of self-help books, myths like the learning styles, generalizing personality tests and that smiling in the mirror makes you happier. Pop psychology comes from the replication crisis, where a lot of replicated experiments get different results. Shoddy research methods are pretty common as well the barrier to entry for psychology research is low in comparison to something like medicine.

This research colonized public conjecture surrounding mental wellness, childhood/adolescent psychology, and pedagogy. It also created an ideological disjunct between us and our unlabeled selves a dislocation between knowledge and mysticism.

The language of this kind of thinking uses terms like trauma, manifestation, emotional intelligence, toxicity and mindfulness, and revolves around the notion of an inner child and a higher self. In the U.S., meditation apps and and classes are on the rise, boasting these perspectives on psychology and creating a Western gaze upon Eastern expressions of spirituality.

Psychology has always been on our minds, but it took a while to become the kind of academically rigorous, medicalized, diagnosis-adherent supplement to Western medicine it is today. Weve always questioned our inner labyrinths through literature, poetry, music, theology, philosophy and a range of other disciplines. At the core of all human creation, thinking and organization, there are always invisible motivations.

Every human culture developed alongside the notion of the supernatural and the invisible. While it is difficult to define the development and trajectory of human spiritual practice, its easy to see that spirituality is a cornerstone of human life. But spirituality is simple. Its the notion of immateriality, of a mind separate from body and a lot of people in the postmodern world seem to be missing it.

After the rationalism-high of the European Enlightenment, and the scientific method finished sowing radical skepticism about the Churchs canon, philosophers boasted that God is dead, and made other damning premonitions about the future of human life after dogmatic religion crumbled. During the psychoanalysis boom at the turn of the 20th century, the influence of traditional religion further degraded and the psychiatrist Carl Jung identified a spiritual problem of the Modern Individual widespread feelings of inadequacy and aimlessness that are a product of the spiritual void religion left behind. The death of God was a warning against profound uncertainty.

In this irreligious, anti-spiritual, scientific method-adherent society, were experiencing a resurgence in spiritual thought, one that sometimes feels like a desperate yearning for new spiritualities. Were in a heyday for astrology, reformed religion and personalized spirituality. Through desperation, weve developed a new, customized melting-pot spirituality. Organized religion and personalized spirituality differ in their accountability, sense of community and dogmatic rigor. Gabi Abro, a digital artist and spiritualist, embodies this kind of neo-religion, and how it intersects with meme culture.

Personalized spirituality? Why?

The structure and accountability in organized religion can do wonders for some, yet be restrictive and limiting for others, Gabi said. Organized religion also boasts a shared, definite experience, which can limit the potential for ones abilities and exploration. Personalized spirituality can become too free-form, even lazy for some, yet liberating and ideal for others. I believe in personalized spirituality with structure.

For Gabi, this means borrowing structure from existing, established religions and modifying it to ones circumstances. That is where I believe balance is found, she said. Exploration is key. I think you only find out what you need by trying different forms of spiritual practice out.

New age spirituality can feel pretentious, even mocking of older spiritual traditions. But theres a pleasant rhythm to it it can manifest itself in monthly challenges that easily mobilize people into a single, ritual task. Specifically the No Fap November, challenge, or no- masturbation- November challenge. The challenge is geared towards men and grounded in the incorrect belief that retaining your sperm repurposes its life force back into your spirit. The truth is, sperm doesnt carry life force, and abstinence doesnt send it anywhere else. Examples like these prove that were hard-wired for ritual and yearn towards our former allegiance to self-improvement grounded in faithfulness.

The fact that @sighswoon has 100 thousand followers and 428 subscribers to her paywalled content proves the same. It shows us that spiritual language is compelling and profitable.

My current expression of spirituality is playful, explorative, and aspirational, Gabi said. I believe that following globalization and the internet, we have more knowledge and awareness of spiritual practices from all around the world. There are truths and flaws in every single one. Passed down research.

Gabis Instagram page, @sighswoon, is an expedition into this kind of neo-spirituality, and representative of our creative habit of collaging information from the past to create something new. Gabi believes in the hunt for a new spirituality. A spirituality that compliments the digital the new modes of communication and massive media upheavals. This new spirituality will use all the leftover information from spiritual leaders to create a new model, something possibly not as rigorous or rigid. Something that caters to our current society, in her words.

@sighswoons Instagram acts as a self-help forum, where she creates a positive language with the invisible, and independently monetizes her content through Patreon. She offers advice, her takes on astrology and insight into other spiritual trends. Her spirituality is an eclectic mix, borrowing dictums from East Asian philosophies, Western mysticism and cognitive, maybe even pop psychology.

Exploring Gabi Abrao, @sighswoon and the language of memes

People discover their spirituality in many ways some people use psychedelic drugs, some abide by religious dogma and some just want to achieve ritual stillness, a reprieve from the chaos of the workweek. For Gabi, her spirituality came from a sense of in-betweenness from her Austro-Brazilian heritage and mobility.

I believe being born in Los Angeles to immigrant parents informs many of the themes in my work first, a sense of in-betweenness one feels when she does not fully belong to one culture or country, to have three languages in the house, she said. I believe this informs my interest in all that is shapeshifting, ever-changing, in-between, unknown. Also, my father is a very spiritual man who centers mysticism and spirituality over all else. This informs my desire for the mystical, the invisible my fascination with it.

Creating a language with the invisible is a deeply powerful goal, and her obsession with it manifests itself in various visual and textual projects. In a recent art project called Relationships With The Ether, individuals sent Gabi images of themselves with an ex-lover, the ex cut out and replaced with an image of clouds in the sky. The project emphasizes that the feelings our exes give us are so nuanced and ever-changing, and that their presence turns into this open space up for interpretation, she said. The point is to emphasize invisibility, or all immaterial aspects of relationships and mind.

Her expression of self-help through humorous memes demonstrates her philosophy on comedy itself, and an appreciation for quickness, accessibility and stealthy penetration. Humor is very important to her. Its a great release to me, and so necessary to grow and navigate this wild life, she said. There are so many paradoxes, so many surprises, so many ways we play tricks on ourselves and others. There is a lot of nonsense and confusion to living, I think laughter is one of the main ways to release it.

Beyond the humorous substance of memes, she maintains deep appreciation for their form as well. Theyre accessible, quick, funny, she said. They sneak into your feed and your consciousness effortlessly! They always feel like they are from a friend because they are the inside jokes of the internet. You feel like youre in on something when you understand a meme or enjoy it, like a club. Its nice. Memes push you to simplify an idea with help from a comical, visual aid.

She professed this equation for further understanding: simple text + visual aid = accessible.

The language of self- help and wellness can be airy and presumptuous, but Gabis work democratizes it through the literal accessibility of Instagrams content, and conceptual accessibility of memes and Instagram.

Instagram and memes often get dismissed as cultural tokens. Like film in the 60s, Instagrams newness (and the volume of content it holds) sometimes tricks us into overlooking its cultural value, tTo quote an article in The Outline. But @sighswoon is a performance, a statement towards the dismissal of past spiritual authorities through memes. Self-help through this new format helps simplify difficult thoughts into one-liners, and reassures through brevity. Its almost like the power of journaling negative thoughts. It simplifies nebulous feelings and creates intense relatability between Gabi and her audience.

Like most artists, her process involves obsession and attachment to a simple idea. But unlike most artists, her work manifests itself just as simply as the original idea existed.

After studying conceptual art at Santa Monica University, Gabi is now 25, living in L.A. and learning Portugese to ground her ethereal linguistic toolbox in reality. Shes trying to see where this reconnection to her Brazilian citizenship will take her. Its all been very inspiring and riveting for her.

Advice and recommendations from Gabi

Well close off with art and aphorisms, to extend some self-help and to paint a clearer picture of some of the books and musicians that help lead her creative thinking to fruition.

Gabi defines our relationship with technology with the notion of a cyborg. This is by no means a condemnation she recommends we accept and appreciate our technology. An example she gave is using our GPS to get somewhere and then hugging the loved ones at our destination. The use of navigation services represents our reliance on our technological side, and the emotions we feel once weve expended the technology and gotten there represents our humanity. To reconcile this sort of neophobia against cyborgitude, she said we should understand that all technology, including the internet, was invented by humans and is maintained by humans, she said. It is an extension of humanity, a tool. An alien species didnt arrive on earth and force any of this on us, we created it, collectively, little by little. And thats beautiful. It is human to evolve, to create, to push boundaries. And we are experiencing this every day, in real time.

But we should also be careful of the pitfalls to digital life. The digital age makes things move very quickly trends, attention, influences, calls to action it can be a very emotional and stressful experience, this overload of info, she said. I think it is more important than ever to ground yourself in what and who you love, what you trust, because our generation will give you new things to obsess over every single day if we arent careful. With grounding, with a strong sense of self, all this information can be channeled into wonderful personal projects and opportunities for growth and entertainment.

If you want to know Gabi better an album and two books to check out, in her words:

The Jungle is The Only Way Out by Mereba is an incredible album that came out in 2019 and was an absolute gift to my life. I find this album to access emotions to everything I find interesting about being alive now spirituality, romantic confusion, self-empowerment, a new momentum, the need for freedom in all of it. Even the sound feels digital-meet-earth. I highly recommend the whole album.Plus, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra is my #1 book for lifestyle and mindset.And lastly, Sculptures for the Blind by Lenka Clayton is a wonderful book that discusses pretty much everything I am interested in through the medium of an art sculpture it discusses perceived value, varying perceptions, the invisible stories that exist in objects and transactions.

Originally posted here:

The non-linearity of modern spirituality/the changing language of self-help: a conversation with Gabi Abro - The Stony Brook Press

So close to Delhi, nothing quite prepares you for the first view of Mangar Bani.

Motoring down the Gurgaon-Faridabad highway with dusty scrub vegetation on both sides of the arid landscape, a sacred grove in the midst of the mining-scarred Northern Aravalli leopard wildlife corridor seems like the most unlikely discovery.

The thought of a local patron saint holding sway over a fragile ecosystem only a few miles away recedes further as you ride past a huge mound of garbage where scavenger birds flap over the putrid dump of city waste.

Turning into an undisturbed patch of forest cover where the pastoral Gujjar community has for centuries worshipped Gudariya Babathe patron saint of Mangar Bania stark whitewashed temple built over a cave stands as a testament to his magical powers.

Local stories abound that the loin-cloth-wearing sage attained enlightenment in this forest cave over five centuries ago. He was so popular among Gujjar herdsmen that they zealously protected the forest as a sacred grove. Not a leaf was touched nor any animal allowed to graze in the forest for they feared it could draw the wrath of their patron saint.

The villagers spoke of how a few nomads from Rajasthan once took their camels to graze on the abundant dhau shrubs only to see them drop dead soon after. Even those who collected wood for construction and firewood or hunted animals, paid a price for their misdeeds.

Driven by the fear of retribution and in reverence of the sacred spirit, the pastoral community agreed to pacify Gudariya Baba by protecting the forest.

The power of the story threaded to the cult of this local saint guarded the Mangar Bani from external forces for centuries. And even though the villagers secured the natural habitat through religious beliefs, the system itself was grounded in secular benefits for the entire ecosystem such as preserving animal life, plant and water resources.

Mangar Bani was part of the legacy of nature conservation since time immemorial when patches of forest called sacred groves were protected by rural communities through deeply-entrenched spiritual values, which nurtured the forest and protected its biodiversity.

But the ancient values of nature conservation are now increasingly being rebuked as primitive superstition in the face of land grabs and commercial interests, as well as neo-liberal conservation efforts rooted in market-oriented policies.

In 2013, local communities rallied against Vedantas mining project in Odisha after the Supreme Court recognised the religious rights of tribals over the Niyamgiri sacred groves. But the state government made little effort to map the sacred groves in the region.

Again, a determined struggle by the indigenous people of Mendha in the Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra led to the passage of the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act of 2006. The local communities not only asserted their forest rights but also obtained the right to manage a stone quarry that was threatening a sacred site through remarkable leadership provided by a womens cooperative society.

But whats glossed over is that organised Hinduism has subsumed many of these forests that were dedicated to folk deities represented aniconically. While some of these local gods have been absorbed into the Hindu pantheon, the centre of rituals has also moved from nature-worship to building of temples in honor of pan-Indian nationalist deities.

The case of Mangar Bani is no different.

From behind a rock-face scribbled with Hindu imagery, rises a temple dedicated to Lord Rama and his consort Sita. An idol of Lord Hanuman is located on the rear end of the temple. A cemented Nandi mothering her calf is in the periphery, in what seems to be an expansion project to consolidate pan-Indian Hinduisms footprint in the sacred grove.

(A cemented Nandi near the Ram Sita Temple in Mangar Bani.)

Around the site is also strewn smaller Hindu temples, and Hindu imagery on rock-faces and at the base of large trees. Hindu festivals are celebrated with fanfare, which has prompted some local Gujjars to believe the cult of Gudariya Baba has diminished in importance.

While the indigenous community has not lost faith in the local sage, religious iconography has taken centre stage. Even reverence towards the forest has declined with the march of modernisation and alternation of traditional social systems that protected the sacred grove.

Since the 1980s, real estate firms in Gurgaon have built up large land banks in the Aravallis and are hoping for dilution of environmental safeguards. Nearly 3,800 acres of Aravalli common land in the Mangar village alone has been privatised despite the area being forested.

As market forces gain strength, spiritual beliefs alone arent sufficient to protect the Mangar Bani from assaults by powerful commercial, political and religious interests. Not only is positive policy important to supplement faith, but theres also a need to empower the local community so they can push back against forces that seek to transform or destroy their sacred belief system rooted in the natural habitat.

(Priyadarshini Sen is an Independent Journalist based in India. She writes for India and US-based media)

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Protecting Mangar Bani: Theres A Need To Empower Local Community To Save Sacred Grove - Outlook India

The late summer sky above Basel is clear blue and endless. It stretches over elegant, pastel and slate low-rise buildings still steeped in old-world, picture book charm, community gardens nestled within apartment blocks and the Rhine river that slakes underneath arched stone bridges. Gothic cathedrals rise above the skyline, their steeples like insectoid antennae hoping to catch a whiff of celestial static.

Sitting in a spacious, artisan caf in his picturesque hometown, Schammasch frontman and mastermind C.S.R has more than enough reason to be positive. The three full-length releases since the bands formation in 2009 have grown ever more ambitious from 2010s turbulent, black metal-steeped debut, Sic Lvceat Lvx, through to 2014s expansive, double album follow-up, Contradiction, to 2016s triple-album magnum opus, Triangle.

Not only are Schammasch visually striking, adorned in exquisitely embroidered cowls and black-and-metallic facepaint like a devout, mystic sect but, at the behest of C.S.R, theyve charted a personal, if somewhat cryptic odyssey of enlightenment thats marked them out as one of the most sonically arresting, genre-transcending and spiritually elevating bands to have emerged from the underground in recent years.

Theres certainly not very much danger in living here, says the frontman, when asked why Swiss bands from Samael and Triptykon through to post-metallers Abraham, metal-sampling industrialists The Young Gods, spectral black metallers Darkspace and even pop pranksters Yello are so naturally geared towards sonic grandeur.

I felt empty. There was nothing else to say.

The majority of the people live very comfortable lives, and also very predictable ones. Maybe that takes away the rawness within the music, but it makes space for something else, which for other bands wouldnt be within reach.

After the universal acclaim for Triangle, the high-profile tours supporting Batushka and fellow Basel-ites Zeal & Ardor, and the landmark set at 2017s Roadburn festival where Schammasch played all 100 minutes of that album in full, C.S.R ought to have been contemplating his next step with renewed confidence. The reality turned out to be very different.

With a new album, Hearts Of No Light, imminent, this is C.S.Rs sole face-to-face interview, an undertaking approached with a mixture of diligence and trepidation, as if hes trying to tune into and translate an internal frequency whose natural resonance isnt the spoken word.

I just felt very empty after Triangle was done, he says carefully, outlining the Hades-esque path that revealed itself in the albums wake. I had a feeling of, I said everything and theres nothing else to say. I just really didnt have a clue where to go and in which direction to go from there, especially from a thematic point of view. That put a lot of pressure on me, because its a pretty shitty feeling.

As an interim project, Schammasch had released an experimental EP, The Maldoror Chants: Hermaphrodite a lateral step inspired by an 1869 poetic novel, Les Chants de Maldoror, by French proto-surrealist writer Comte de Lautramont.

It offered an opportunity for creative recovery from the understandably intense Triangle sessions, but it was the attempt to chart the next stage for the band that left him asking hard questions of himself.

Once I really looked into this situation and looked into the fact that I felt this way, the frontman recalls, suddenly something evolved out of that feeling. I reached a point where, if youre honest about certain things towards yourself, then you can go on from there, instead of just walking into the same wall again and again.

To find a way forward, C.S.R found a clue in his past. Having abandoned his first band, Totenwinter a black metal band with the Chernobyl disaster as its central theme (I was very fascinated by how it got handled and what it did to people. I saw it as a perfect representation of what of what humanity does to the planet, and to itself as well) he spent a year in a shitty grunge band before reaching an epiphany.

I realised it was never going to go anywhere, and that it didnt do anything valuable for me or [anyone] else, he says. Thats what the starting point for Schammasch was, basically, which was the exact opposite of what I was doing.

That willingness to destroy in order to rebuild was alluded to in the opening title track for Contradiction, its first lines a quote from Aleister Crowley: Worship what youve burned, burn what youve worshipped.

Its a very interesting formula to live by, says C.S.R, because it makes you question the things you do and the things you believe in. Everybody gets stuck at one point. Everybody gets trapped within their own dogmas, so burning them down is destructive, but it can also be the most constructive thing you can do to reinvent yourself every time and start from a new point.

Triangles three discs were representations of separate yet connected states of being: the acceptance of death, the balance between the physical and spiritual worlds, and the ultimate liberation of the soul, free from the demands of the ego. Looming over the next horizon, however, was a reality check.

The overall goal or message of that album was always a very positive one and a very hopeful one, says C.S.R. Everything about Hearts Of No Light is the exact opposite of that. I feel like a lot of what Id been trying to reach with Triangle, Id nowadays look upon as illusions, or dead ends even.

"That might sound quite negative, but its just more honest than negative. There is a much more sober view on the new album. I think Ive just given up on certain things that I was trying to explore or reach within the Triangle cosmos, which kind of led nowhere, or they didnt lead towards the goal I wanted to achieve back then.

So was it a state of enlightenment that he had been aiming for up to that point?

Absolutely. And during the process of making the new album, I came to realise that a state of enlightenment is quite a vague goal. Nowadays, Im discovering a much more earthly, realistic view, ever since I started to really dive into this feeling of emptiness, and really embrace that.

"For a long time I tried to fight that idea. I was pushing it away and not wanting to realise that this emptiness is the starting point for creating a new cosmos within a new work of art. Its the first time I really felt this emotion while working in this band. It was tough to really accept.

Running at a relatively restrained 67 minutes, Hearts Of No Light is recognisably Schammasch, but this time around the surging, exquisitely wrought, Behemoth-pacing will to power and the apocalyptic knife-edge drama that roils throughout the album finds no oases of elevating calm.

The atmospheric way stations A Bridge Ablaze and the closing Innermost, Lowermost Abyss are states of elegant, awe-inspiring purgatory, beautiful to apprehend yet uncertain in their fate. Darker and more fevered than anything they have released before, the albums soul-scourging scope leaves you feeling like more than ever is at stake.

If there is one moment of succour, its the track A Paradigm Of Beauty. Amid reverberating, post-punk-infused riffs, C.S.Rs vocals turn from a gathering-stormcloud bellow to wracked eulogy: In the midst of burning ruins / Your light was never seen before a calling to a divine spark.

Thats absolutely what Im trying to say in that song, he agrees, that there is divinity in creativity. Im telling it to myself as well, because pretty much everything else on the album is putting the process of creation into a negative and destructive light.

"You have to let go of a lot of things, like your picture of what the album should have become and all the expectations you have towards yourself. Something in you dies during that process as well, and at the same time something gets born.

That seeming negativity reaches its apotheosis in the albums haunting final track, which is, as C.S.R puts it, a representation of the endless fall of man. Is there an ultimate benefit to reaching that point?

Well, you certainly let go of something by putting it into expression. It wasnt done because it was a constructive thing to do, it was the necessary point to end the album, which is the absolute lowest point where you could go. Its not necessarily a negative or a depressed state. Its just an honest state and a sober state, where Im not under any illusions.

Hearts Of No Light may not be brimming with PMA, but its a necessary and enthralling step in both Schammaschs and C.S.Rs personal evolution a willingness to give oneself to the cycle of death and rebirth, and submit yourself to all the self-examination that entails.

Honesty is a difficult thing, he concludes. Youve got to destroy a lot of your own self, your own ego, your idea of who you think you are, and its a very painful but very rewarding process as well. Because the more you get rid of these shells, the freer you are in terms of what you can become.

Hearts Of No Light is out now via Prosthetic and available to order on Vinyl, CD or MP3.

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Schammasch: Aleister Crowley and the destructive yet divine nature of creation - Louder

It is this very frequency of vibration that attracts certain things and situations toward you and this is called the Law of Attraction which all of us are very well aware of. The law of attraction exists only because the presence or the power of vibration is strongly felt by everything that has a capacity to perceive things around them.

It is through our senses that we catch the frequency of things and people around us. This also explains why we feel happy and motivated in a place of worship while low and depressed in a graveyard. It is the frequency of vibrations which strongly influences our thoughts and mind and vice versa.

The Power of Attraction exists only because the Law of Vibration is playing around all the time. So technically, the Law of Vibration is important than the Law of Attraction, and rest of the things just follow.

You can very easilytest theLaw of Vibration.As mentioned earlier that the frequency of vibration is induced by feelings. Go ahead and think of something that makes you feel happy and positive. Now go to a party or a bar with this feeling.

When you are happy and positive you smile effortlessly and happy people always attract others around them, especially those who at that time are vibrating with a lower frequency. You will be surprised to see howpeople will surround you in a matter of moments. You can also try to be grumpy and you will stand in the same party/bar- alone in a corner.

Tune in

After knowing what we do now, we can make this law of vibration work for us and take advantage of it. Simply put- lets tune in! If you are not feeling positive or motivated it means that at that moment you are vibrating with a lower frequency, realise the fact and go ahead and tune in with a person or something that has a higher frequency of vibration than yours at that moment in time. You would in no time be filled with positive thoughts and a feel-good feeling.

You could go to a park or amidst nature and stand or sit near a tree. Nature is always vibrating with positivity and has high levels of vibrations. No wonder that the seekers always head towards the nature in its raw form for enlightenment and deeper understanding in spirituality.

Another way to change your frequency of vibration is music. Different kinds of music can get you into different kinds of vibrations. Music has tremendous power to do that. Time and again, it has proven its healing and therapeutic qualities.

Be in the Range

Every vibration has a radius of its existence. Some people who have extremely low vibrations do not radiate at all. Beware of such people as the sullenness might get the better of you. On the other hand, some people radiate very strongly and influence whoever is directly or even indirectly connected with them.

Many leaders, spiritual gurus we know in history have been a source of influence not only in their immediate vicinity but globally. The reason behind their huge followings is that they vibrate with higher vibrations and are full of positive thoughts for everyone. In their proximity, one is bound to feel elevated.

So, if you wonder why your life doesnt change and there always seems to be stagnancy, make the law of vibration work for you and try to change your frequency to higher levels and unveil a new beginning.

The universe doesnt hear what you are saying; it only feels the vibration you are offering

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From your frequency to another -- how do the laws of attraction work? - Free Press Journal

About 48 hours ago, William Barr, the Attorney General of the United States, delivered the keynote address at the 2020 National Religious Broadcasters Convention in Nashville at the Opryland complex. As many of you know, Barr has been the subject of heavy barrage in Washington and from The White House. In the last two weeks, over 2,000 Department of Justice types have, in a written plea, begged him to step down and over 1,000 Federal justices have gathered in an emergency session.

Yet what he said in his speech to the broadcasters group on Wednesday is of such monumental importance to me, and you the reader, that I am going to suggest you stop reading this right now until you can come back, when it is quiet and youve got 10 or 15 minutes to spare, because this should not be a quick read. We are including Barrs complete speech, not selected snippets by some left-leaning news editor because it is too long. You need to read and digest this in its entirety because it explains quite well why so many of us are unhappy in America right now.

We no longer disagree we hate one another. We no longer have those wonderful conversations where we calmly discuss our differences and seek common ground. This is why Congress and our Senate are equally repulsive to liberals and conservatives alike. For instance, I think Republican Senate candidate Bill Hagerty is the most dangerous man on the Nov. 3 ballot and here is why: He is so blindly bidden to President Trump there is no way he can represent a state where a full half loathe the President for his often crass behavior but who deserve to be properly and compassionately represented.

Please, you can name no Democrat Senator or member of Congress who would dare sit and talk to such a one-sided bureaucrat. The truth is President Trump has achieved mighty things but hatred, especially when untethered, is totally blind. The Attorney General tells us precisely what has been encouraged (?) to occur and my hope is that we can recognize our personal faults, find compromise, and understanding, to become a better unified source for our all-inclusive future.

The reason todays story is one of my longest is because it is important, in my view, for me to give you some background to start. First, there is a synopsis taken directly from Wikipedia, which I believe gives the best unbiased view of what has happened in Washington within just the last 26 days leading to Attorney Generals address on Wednesday. In Barrs comments, youll note three factions that have been allowed to collide and cheapen the common good. Finally, there is a postscript you must read, this two days after the President has sued the New York Times, and how the Times editorial page outlandishly blames the president for the horrifying coronavirus that is now threatening the world.

One last thing before we get going. Michael Bloomberg, a Democrat on the presidential ticket, was slandered earlier this week in Chattanooga by the bumbling Hagerty as Mini-Mike, the slur in reference to his 5-foot-8 stature. Every moron knows Bloomberg has had absolutely nothing to do with how tall he became, but the somber truth is at last report he has given Johns Hopkins over a billion (with a b) to better the human condition. I most certainly disagree with Bloombergs election promises, and his extremely liberal stance, but I am intrigued by the fact this son of a dairy farm bookkeeper, whose mom was a bank teller, has ascended to become the ninth-richest person in the world, with a net worth estimated to be well over $60 billion.

Please! This man alone has given away $8.2 billion in philanthropy. What made him endure three terms as Mayor of New York City. He has something to share. The question then is not have you, but would you if given the circumstance? Rather than hate him because of his stripe, lets instead picture and then encourage what he has within him to teach us.

No, Bloomberg will never become president the position never becomes some masterpiece to be bought like some museum painting but unless we embrace his achievements and sit to talk with this all-giving guy though our differences and reach a compromise position as human beings, we lose a national treasure and continue our wandering in the dark. This is Barrs point and we must get our nation and its people to return to our True North.

* * *

NOT FROM MAINSTREAM MEDIA BUT, INSTEAD, FROM WIKIPEDIA

FOR BACKGROUND: Seeking to give you an unbiased version of what has occurred in Washington in just the last four weeks yes, just in this February this account comes from Wikipedia, The Free Dictionary. Those with doubt should go to the William Barr page on Wikipedia, where youll find every fact is attributed. Here is what was written:

- - -

President Trump directly referenced Barr in the Justice Department's intercession in recommending a lighter sentence for Trump's associate and old friend Roger Stone. Trump's tweet stated: "Congratulations to Attorney General Bill Barr for taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have even been brought."

Initially, four career prosecutors had recommended that Stone serve a jail term of between seven to nine years. A Trump tweet followed: "Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice!" - after which the Department recommended an unspecified jail term. The Department claimed that this later decision was made without consulting the White House. The prosecutors resigned from the case as a result, with one choosing to leave the Department.

Barr in turn said Trump had not asked him to step in, but noted that Trump's tweets and public comments make it impossible for the attorney general to do his job. "I think its time to stop the tweeting about Department of Justice criminal cases," Barr said.

Barr's rebuke of Trump's use of Twitter for interference in DOJ matters was seen as a rare departure from his usual unwavering support of the president. Barr's comments followed criticism of the department for its poor handling of the sentencing of Roger Stone after DOJ actions seen as favorable to Trump and his allies. Days later, more than 2,000 former DOJ employees signed a letter calling for Barr's resignation.

The Federal Judges Association of over 1,000 federal jurists called an emergency meeting for February 18 to discuss their concerns about the intervention of Trump and Justice Department officials in politically-sensitive cases. Despite Barr's rebuke of Trump, days later the president resumed denouncing the prosecutors, the judge, and the jury foreperson in the Stone case, while acknowledging that his comments made Barr's job harder. After granting several pardons, Trump also labelled himself as the country's "chief law enforcement officer", a description usually reserved for the attorney general.

* * *

WILLIAM BARRS REMARKS AT THE NATIONAL RELIGIOUS BROADCASTERS CONVENTION IN NASHVILLE, TN.

(NOTE: This is a flash transcript of the Attorney General Barrs remarks on Wednesday, February 26, 2020.)

We live at a time when religion long an essential pillar of our society is being driven from the public square. Thank God we have the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) to counter that effort. Since its creation in 1944, it has reached, and continues to reach, people from all backgrounds on a variety of platforms.

Your members courageously affirm that entertainment and moral education are not mutually exclusive. You have boldly shown that media can serve higher ends: the safeguarding of faith as well as the cultivation of the classical virtues of the mind and heart that maintain our republican experiment in self-governance. As such, NRBs members offer an alternative and essential platform for believers and non-believers alike.

Now, I trust that everyone has noticed the current intensity and pervasiveness of politics in our lives. It has infiltrated and overtaken nearly every aspect of life: sports, entertainment, apparel, technology of course, religion too even our eating habits.

Politics is everywhere. It is omnipresent. Why is that?

It seems to me that the passionate political divisions of today result from a conflict between two fundamentally different visions of the individual and his relationship to the state. One vision undergirds the political system we call liberal democracy, which limits government and gives priority to preserving personal liberty. The other vision propels a form of totalitarian democracy, which seeks to submerge the individual in a collectivist agenda. It subverts individual freedom in favor of elite conceptions about what best serves the collective.

In my view, liberal democracy has reached its fullest expression in the Anglo-American political system. This system is responsible for unprecedented human freedom and progress. We providentially enjoy its blessings today.

The wellsprings of this system are found in Augustinian Christianity. According to St. Augustine, man lives simultaneously in two realms. Each individual is a unique creation of God with a transcendent end and eternal life in the City of God. We are created to love our Creator in this world and become united with him in eternity. As Augustine writes in his Confessions, You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.

At the same time, while we work toward our eternal destiny, we live in the temporal world the City of Man. But this world is a fallen one. Man is stubbornly imperfect and prone to prey upon his fellow man. Unless there is a temporal authority capable of restraining the wicked an authority with power here on earth the wicked men would overwhelm the good ones and there could be no peace.

In the ancient Greek tradition, the state was a positive moral agency whose purpose was to define for men what was good and make them so. Augustinian Christianity sharply departed from that conception. It saw the state as a necessary evil, with the limited function of keeping the peace here on earth.

These foundational ideas gradually evolved into our current conceptions of individual dignity, personal liberty, limited government, and the separation of church and state. This process took hundreds of years and involved the amalgamation of many different influences, including those associated with Anglo-Saxon folkways, the common law, the experiences of the English Civil War, the political thought of the English Whigs, the moderate Enlightenment, the American Revolution, and the foundation of the American Republic in 1789.

What has resulted from these centuries of experience is a system that takes man and society as they actually exist. Precisely because it recognizes that man is imperfect, it does not try to use the coercive power of the state to recreate man or society wholesale. It tends to trust, not in revolutionary designs, but in common virtues, customs, and institutions that were refined over long periods of time. It puts its faith in the accumulated wisdom of the ages over the revolutionary innovations of those who aspire to be, what Edmund Burke called, the physician of the state.

Liberal democracy recognizes that preserving broad personal freedom, including the freedom to pursue ones own spiritual life and destiny, best comports with the true nature and dignity of man. It also recognizes that man is happiest in his voluntary associations, not coerced ones, and must be left free to participate in civil society, by which I mean the range of collective endeavors outside the sphere of politics.

The state is not the same as the voluntary associations that make up civil society. To the contrary, it is the apparatus of coercive power. Under our system of liberal democracy, the role of government is not to forcibly remake man and society. The government has the far more modest purpose of preserving the proper balance of personal freedom and order necessary for a healthy civil society to develop and individual humans to flourish.

But just as our robust vision of liberal democracy came to fruition in 1789, another conflicting vision was taking shape. This has been referred to as totalitarian democracy. Its prophet was Rousseau, and its first fruit was the French Revolution. In the two centuries since, totalitarian democratic movements of both the right and the left have appeared.

Totalitarian democracy is based on the idea that man is naturally good, but has been corrupted by existing societal customs, conventions, and institutions. The path to perfection is to tear down these artifices and restore human society to its natural condition.

This form of democracy is messianic in that it postulates a preordained, perfect scheme of things to which men will be inexorably led. Its goals are earthly and they are urgent. Although totalitarian democracy is democratic in form, it requires an all-knowing elite to guide the masses toward their determined end, and that elite relies on whipping up mass enthusiasm to preserve its power and achieve its goals.

Totalitarian democracy is almost always secular and materialistic, and its adherents tend to treat politics as a substitute for religion. Their sacred mission is to use the coercive power of the state to remake man and society according to an abstract ideal of perfection. The virtue of any individual is defined by whether they are aligned with the program. Whatever means used are justified because, by definition, they will quicken the pace of mankinds progress toward perfection.

As one political scientist has noted, while liberal democracy conceives of people relating on many different planes of existence, totalitarian democracy recognizes only one plane of existence, the political. All is subsumed within a single project to use the power of the state to perfect mankind rather than limit the state to protecting our freedom to find our own ends. It is increasingly, as Mussolini memorably said, All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.

While many factors have contributed to the polarized politics of today, I think one significant reason our politics has become so intense and so ill-tempered is that some in the so-called progressive movement have broken away from the fold of liberal democracy to pursue a society more in line with the thinking of Rousseau than that of our nations Founders. That has played a major role in our politics becoming less like a disagreement within a family, and more like a blood feud between two different clans.

Over the past few decades, those further to the left have increasingly identified themselves as progressives rather than liberals. And some of these self-proclaimed progressives have become increasingly militant and totalitarian in their style. While they seek power through the democratic process, their policy agenda has become more aggressively collectivist, socialist, and explicitly revolutionary.

The crux of the progressive program is to use the public purse to provide ever-increasing benefits to the public and to, thereby, build a permanent constituency of supporters who are also dependents. They want able-bodied citizens to become more dependent, subject to greater control, and increasingly supportive of dependency. The tacit goal of this project is to convert all of us into 25-year-olds living in the governments basement, focusing our energies on obtaining a larger allowance rather than getting a job and moving out.

Political philosophers since Aristotle have worried that democracies are vulnerable to just this form of corruption. Probably the greatest chronicler of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, foresaw that American democracy would be susceptible to this evolution. As he described it, our society was vulnerable to a soft despotism wherein the majority would gradually let itself be taken care of by the state much like dependent children.

Yet this process would be slow and imperceptible. The tyranny that results, Tocqueville wrote, does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them; it rarely forces action, but it constantly opposes your acting; it does not destroy, it prevents birth; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally it reduces (the people) to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

It would be totalitarianism beneath a veneer of democratic choice. As Tocqueville summed it up: By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master and then relapse into it again.

Historically, our country has relied on a number of bulwarks against this slide toward despotism, each of which has been essential in preserving the liberty that has defined our democracy. Today, I would like to discuss three institutions that have served this vital purpose: religion, the decentralization of government power, and the free press.

The sad fact is that all three have eroded in recent decades. At the end of the day, if we are to preserve our liberal democracy from the meretricious appeal of socialism and the strain of progressivism I have described, we must turn our attention to revivifying these vital institutions.

LET ME FIRST ADDRESS RELIGION

As I discussed in a speech I gave last fall at Notre Dame, while the Framers believed that religion and government should be separate spheres, they also firmly believed that religion was indispensable to sustaining our free system of government. As John Adams put it: We have no government armed with the power which is capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.

Tocqueville was especially emphatic on this score. He believed that religion was democracys most powerful antidote to any tendency toward a tyrannical majority hijacking the system for despotic ends.

How does religion protect against majoritarian tyranny? In the first place, it allows us to limit the role of government by cultivating internal moral values in the people that are powerful enough to restrain individual rapacity without resort to the states coercive power.

Experience teaches that, to be strong enough to control willful human beings, moral values must be based on authority independent of mans will. In other words, they must flow from a transcendent Supreme Being. Men are far likelier to obey rules that come from God than to abide by the abstract outcome of an ad hoc utilitarian calculus.

These fixed moral limits did not just apply to individuals, but to political majorities as well. According to Tocqueville, in America, religion has instilled a deep sense that there are immovable moral limits on what a majority can impose on the minority. It was due to the influence of religion in America, he explained, that no one dared to advance the maxim that everything is permitted in the interest of society.

Thus, as one scholar observes, Tocqueville concluded that democracy requires citizens who believe that the rules of morality and hence the rights of their fellow citizens are not merely convenient fictions, wholly dependent on the will of men, but are instead rooted in the immutable transcendent truth.

Thus, it is safe to give the people power to rule, but only if they believe there are moral limits on their power. Tocquevilles call to preserve this moral system is not, as scholars have explained, a rejection of pluralism; it is an effort to preserve the moral and religious foundation on which a successful pluralism can exist.

There is another way in which religion tends to temper the passion and intensity of political disputes. Messianic secular movements have a natural tendency to hubris. Their goal is to achieve paradise in the here and now. Those who participate in these movements believe their goals are so noble, they tend to see their opponents as evil and believe that any means necessary to achieve their objectives are justified. That is why the most militant agents for change are entirely comfortable demonizing their opponents and are all too ready to destroy those opponents in any way they can.

This is not to deny that religion can also lead to self-righteousness. Of course it can. But religion usually has a built-in antidote to hubris in the form of sharp warnings against presumption. In the case of Christianity, Christ repeatedly warned against self-righteousness:

First cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brothers eye.

Judge not, that ye be not judged.

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. And so on.

Indeed, the very essence of Christs message counsels for modesty and restraint in secular politics. The mission is not to make new men or transform the world through the coercive power of the state. On the contrary, the central idea is that the right way to transform the world is for each of us to focus on morally transforming ourselves.

Thus, unlike those who see the line between good and evil as running between them and their opponents, the Christian outlook is expressed by Solzhenitsyns observation that the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.

Religion also tempers the acrimony of our politics by making clear that what happens here on earth is only transient not eternal. Remember, Man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.

Unfortunately, this vital moderating force in our society has declined over the past several decades. In recent years, we have seen the steady erosion of religion and its benevolent influence.

Some of this has been caused by the misinterpretation of the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of our Constitution by our courts. Instead of recognizing the benefits of religion to a healthy society and seeking to accommodate religion, we seem to have adopted the posture of official hostility to religion. That is directly contrary to the Framers views. As Dr. Benjamin Rush wrote in 1798: The only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be laid in religion. Without it there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments.

While most everyone agrees that we must have separation of Church and State, this does not require that we drive religion from the public square and affirmatively use government power to promote a culture of disbelief. As Tocqueville would have predicted, this weakening of religion is contributing to ill-temper in our political life.

The next essential check on despotism I would like to discuss is

DECENTRALIZATION OF GOVERNMENT POWER

Both Tocqueville and James Madison believed that the first step toward tyranny in a democracy was the formation of a consolidated and galvanized national majority, sufficiently roused by a common idea to ride roughshod over an opposing minority. Both men thought that decentralization of power reflected in the American system of federalism would help prevent the coalescence of such an energized national majority.

As we all know, under our federal system, individuals are subject to two sovereigns: the national government, and their state government.

The Framers believed in the principle of subsidiarity that is, that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest competent authority that was closest to the people. That is the level of government at which the individual was most empowered. It is where he or she could play the largest role and have the most direct involvement. The Framers conceived that the vast majority of collective decision-making by the people about their affairs would be done at the state and local level.

The federal government was supposed to be a government of limited powers. It was primarily supposed to handle two things that had to be achieved at the national level: first, conducting foreign relations and providing for the national defense and, second, integrating economic affairs across the states so we could have a single national economy.

The Framers included the Commerce Clause for this second purpose, but that provision has since ballooned far beyond its original understanding. Nowadays, it is hard to tell whether a particular measure is regulating commerce to promote integration of the nations commerce, or whether it is simply an effort by the national government to regulate a domestic matter within a state.

Sadly, most restrictions on federal power under the Commerce Clause have broken down. Virtually any federal measure can be justified no matter how much it invades the prerogatives of the states. As a result, the federal government is now directly governing the country as one monolithic entity with over 300 million people.

I believe that the destruction of federalism is another source of the extreme discontent in our contemporary political life. We have come to believe that we should have one national solution for every problem in society. You have a problem? Let us fix it in Washington, DC. One size fits all.

The Framers would have seen a one-size-fits-all government for hundreds of millions of diverse citizens as being utterly unworkable and a straight road to tyranny. That is because they recognized that not every community is exactly the same. What works in Brooklyn might not be a good fit for Birmingham. The federal system allows for this diversity. It also enables people who do not like a certain system to move to a different one. It is easier to run away from a local tyranny than a national one. If people do not like the rule in a state, they can vote with their feet and move.

But if it is one size fits all if every congressional enactment or Supreme Court decision establishes a single rule for every American then the stakes are very high as to what that rule is. When you take a controversial issue about which there are passionate views on both sides, such as abortion, and say we are going to have one rule nationwide, it is a recipe for bitter conflict over that rule. And when that rule must govern widely-divergent communities, the conflict is between combatants who often do not even comprehend their opponents perspective.

The result is our current acrimonious politics. And because the rules that result from these struggles are then imposed from outside by a remote central government, they further undercut a sense of community and give rise to alienation.

In short, we have lost the idea of diversity in this country real diversity, where communities can coexist and adopt different approaches to things. That, too, erodes an important check on despotism.

Now, finally, let me turn to

THE FREEDOM OF HE PRESS

In addition to religion and the decentralization of government power, the free press was an institution that Tocqueville believed would serve as a check on the despotic tendency of democracy.

This was not because Tocqueville believed that the American press did a particularly good job elevating the publics understanding and discourse. On the contrary, he generally took a dimmer view. As Tocqueville put it: The characteristics of the American journalist consist in an open and coarse appeal to the passions of the populace; and he habitually abandons the principles of political science to assail the characters of individuals, to track them into private life, and disclose all their weaknesses and errors.

Tocquevilles view was that a free press did not so much perform a positive good, as prevent an evil. It achieved this precisely because it was highly fragmented and reflected a wide diversity of voices. In that sense, a free and diverse press provided another form of decentralization of power that, as long as it remained diverse, made it difficult to galvanize a consolidated national majority.

In 19th-century America, the press was so fragmented that the power of any one organ was small. The multiplicity of newspapers, even in one city, cultivated a wide variety of views and localized opinion. Tocqueville contrasted this to the situation he saw in Europe, where news outlets were consolidated in major urban centers, such that a few voices were capable of influencing the opinions of the entire country.

When the diverse organs of the press begin to advance along the same track, wrote Tocqueville, their influence becomes almost irresistible in the long term, and public opinion, struck always from the same side, ends by yielding under their blows.

Today in the United States, the corporate or mainstream press is massively consolidated. And it has become remarkably monolithic in viewpoint, at the same time that an increasing number of journalists see themselves less as objective reporters of the facts, and more as agents of change. These developments have given the press an unprecedented ability to mobilize a broad segment of the public on a national scale and direct that opinion in a particular direction.

When the entire press advances along the same track, as Tocqueville put it, the relationship between the press and the energized majority becomes mutually reinforcing. Not only does it become easier for the press to mobilize a majority, but the mobilized majority becomes more powerful and overweening with the press as its ally.

This is not a positive cycle, and I think it is fair to say that it puts the press role as a breakwater for the tyranny of the majority in jeopardy. The key to restoring the press in that vital role is to cultivate a greater diversity of voices in the media.

That is where you come in. You are one of the last holdouts in the consolidation of organs and viewpoints of the press. It is, therefore, essential that you continue your work and continue to supply the people with diverse, divergent perspectives on the news of the day. And in this secular age, it is especially vital that your religious perspective is voiced.

So where does that leave us? It might not seem like it, but I am actually an optimist, and I believe that identifying the problem is the first step in correcting it. Our nations greatest days lie ahead, but only if we can alter our course and pay heed to the lessons of the past.

This means fostering a culture that is truly pluralistic. It means all viewpoints must be treated fairly not simply the viewpoints favored by our cultural elites. And it especially means giving our respect to religion as a vital pillar of our society. Religion is something we should celebrate, not disparage.

This also means working to devolve democratic choice to the lowest possible level. While the wizards in Washington might think they know best, the reality is that there is no unified best for every community and every person in our vast country. The solution to social ills is not to exhaust ourselves devising the perfect rule for everyone; it is to let our villages, cities, and states set the rules for their communities. That allows people with principled disagreements to peaceably coexist, and prevents politics from becoming zero-sum nationwide.

And finally, this means encouraging diverse voices to speak out whether on television, over the radio, or in print. When Tocqueville visited America, there was scarcely a hamlet which has not its own newspaper. We need to get back to that. We need to support local journalism and local voices, and each of you needs to continue the great work you are doing.

In sum, your voices and your perspectives are essential to reversing the different trends I have discussed today. I look forward to working together to restore the separate spheres that have long sustained our society. It is not too late to stem the tide, but we need to get to work.

Thank you all for the opportunity to talk with you today.

* * *

POSTSCRIPT: THE LEGAL AFFAIRS OF DONALD TRUMP

An analysis by USA Today published in June 2016 found that over the previous three decades, Donald Trump and his businesses have been involved in 3,500 legal cases in U.S. federal courts and state court, an unprecedented number for a U.S. presidential candidate. Of the 3,500 suits, Trump or one of his companies were plaintiffs in 1,900; defendants in 1,450; and bankruptcy, third party, or other in 150. Trump was named in at least 169 suits in federal court. Over 150 other cases were in the Seventeenth Judicial Circuit Court of Florida since 1983. In about 500 cases, judges dismissed plaintiffs' claims against Trump. In hundreds more, cases ended with the available public record unclear about the resolution. Where there was a clear resolution, Trump won 451 times, and lost 38.

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Roy Exum: AG Barr: What Has Happened To Us? - The Chattanoogan

Hello, friend. Im knocking on your door today to ask whether you have accepted the free market as your personal savior. If you havent, Im here to share the good news.

I am, obviously, riffing on the latest talking point from the nationalist conservatives, who have formed a new think tank based on the complaint that American politics is dominated by free-market fundamentalism. Please try not to laugh.

Its not just that this is a ridiculous straw manadvocates of the free market have spent our entire lives being ignored by politicians. Its the fact that this is a sneering way of implying that confidence in markets is a form of dangerous dogmatism. It is an attempt to portray free-market economics as some kind of fanatical leap of faith, rather than a body of knowledge grounded in observation of the remarkable achievements of capitalism over the centuriesnot to mention the failure of every other system.

Its an attempt to accuse somebody else of dogmatism, while they are the ones closing their minds to the evidence.

The most remarkable fact of the last two centuries is the conquest of poverty. We adopted a system of property rights and largely free, unregulated marketsfirst in the America and Western Europe, later in Asia and elsewhereand instead of a hellscape of poverty and oppression, we got this:

We got a vast increase in wealth and the hitherto unknown phenomenon of mass prosperity, in which the majority of people are able to provide themselves not just with the bare necessities of life, but with things that had previously been considered luxuries.

And not only do we have more and better stuff. We also put in a lot less work for it. A mechanized economy no longer runs on heavy physical labor, working hours have dropped, and there are now more white-collar jobs than blue-collar jobs. I say that, not to run down blue-collar jobs, but to point out that the average person has a lot more options, and if you dont want to work with your hands, you probably dont have to.

I was only half-joking when I described the market as your personal savior. Free markets have saved you, individually, from a life of poverty and drudgery. Capitalism has saved you from the hopelessness of a constant struggle with hunger and the limited opportunities of a world in which the vast majority of people were required to toil long hours in the fields just to survive.

No, economics is not the only source of meaning in life. But it is one important source of meaning; consider how much of our lives we spend on our work and careers. And in providing us with wealth and leisure time, economic progress makes all the other sources of meaning easier to access and pursue. Im going to recommend one more time that everyone read Steven Pinkers book Enlightenment Now. I dont agree with all of his conclusions, but he exhaustively demonstrates the vast improvement in human life over the past two centuries. That improvement is most easily measured in terms of increased wealth, but wealth leads to improvements that have an intellectual, psychological, and spiritual dimension: more education, more leisure time, greater access to art, less violence, even an increase in average IQ.

Your life under capitalism is not just wealthier, its richer in every sense. Or at least the free market has made it possible for you to fill your life with things that are meaningful. If you are not doing so, thats your choice. It is not something imposed on you by market forces, which have actually worked to provide you with more options in life, not fewer.

And did I mention the failure of the other systems? Various utopian schemes have been adopted over the years that were supposed to deliver all of these benefits, but without the nuisances of money, prices, markets, and the freedom to trade. They have all failed. A society that consistently rejects the mechanisms of the marketplace ends up like Venezuela, which crashed from relative prosperity to destitute poverty in a surprisingly short period of time.

The people who sneer about free-market fundamentalism are not Bernie Bros itching to run the camps in the Glorious Peoples Republic. Some of them are conservatives who merely want to chisel away at markets here and there in the hope that just a tiny bit more government regulation will make America great again.

There is a sense in which free-marketers are fundamentalist: we start from fundamental principles learned through centuries of observation and experience. These principles of economics warn us about the limited knowledge of central planners and authoritarians, the unintended consequences of supposedly well-meaning regulations, and the intended consequences of hucksters looking to use political pressure to prop up their pet projects.

Thats what leads us to this latest broadside against free markets, which comes from Oren Cass, who is a conservative advocate of industrial policy, which means, in practice, that he wants the government to put its thumbs on the economic scales only piecemeal, depending on which industries and companies the guy in charge wants to help or punish. What Cass is advocating, in other words, is a form of crony capitalism: Free markets for everybodyexcept politically-connected insiders, who get the markets rigged in their favor.

We have a certain amount of experience to show us how honestly and impartially such favors are doled out.

If we want to talk about the fundamentals of the free market, we should note that free-market economics were born and adopted as part of a system of political freedom and individual rights, and the earliest advocates of laissez-faire were also crusaders against corruption and oppression.

The moral principle behind markets is the idea that free people should be able to make their own choices about how they live and what they buy, rather than having preferences pushed down on them from above by populist politicians or arrogant technocratsor those, like the nationalist conservatives, who manage the trick of being both of these things at the same time.

The fundamentalism behind free markets is the suspicion the alternative requires coercion, rather than free choice, as the organizing principle of human affairs. This is what the nationalists are really after. When they rail against free-market fundamentalism, what they really mean is: Dont raise any moral qualms about my favored form of coercion.

If the point of condemning free-market fundamentalists is that many conservatives arent comfortable rejecting all government controlshow can they imagine that they are in any immediate danger on that score? I would gladly spend time with them in Libertarian Debate Club arguing against every last form of government regulation, making the case for private roads, and showing how we could totally fund the government without any taxes. But those arent the debates were going to be having any time soon.

Instead, our debates are going to be about how to pay for massive entitlement programs when they go bankrupt and how to deal with the (allegedly) unintended consequences of the latest poorly thought-out scheme to shut down trade or take over an industry. Our current problems arise from far too little regard for the fundamentals of the free market.

Advocates of the free market know that it will take a long time to get to our Promised Land, and weve given up expecting the laissez-faire utopia in our lifetimes. We would be happy just to see more humility on the part of would-be planners about the brilliance of their schemes. We would like them to recognize that their plan to raise the wages of Uber drivers might just end up putting a whole bunch of free-lancers out of work, or that their plot to use tariffs to revive factory jobs might actually result in a manufacturing recession.

All we ask is that you make a little room in your hearts for the good news about markets and capitalism. Economic policy should start, not with a sneering dismissal of the free market, but with a recognition that capitalism has brought us to a very high level of freedom and prosperity, one unprecedented in all of human history.

It has raised us up out of bondage and made us great among the nations of the earth. And we should not be too eager to sin against it.

Here endeth the lesson.

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Have You Accepted the Free Market as Your Personal Savior? - The Bulwark

Raining in the Mountain (1979)

Director: King HuCast: Feng Hsu, Sun Yueh, Shih ChunRun time: 121 minutesFormat: Dual Format (Blu-ray and DVD)Language: Mandarin with optional English subtitlesOut: 24th February 20209/10

Jamie Havlin gives his verdict on a film that is part spiritual fable, part heist movie and even part martial arts flick.

By the 1970s, King Hu had established himself as one of Asias most highly respected directors. A Touch of Zen (1971), which he wrote, directed and co-edited, won the Technical Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, making history by becoming the first Chinese language film to win an award there.

As the decade was drawing to a close, though, the kind of wuxia movies that hed made his name with had fallen out of favour with audiences. Martial arts comedies like Drunken Master (1978), starring a young Jackie Chan and Sammo Hungs Enter the Fat Dragon (also from 1978), were proving popular around this time, while Hong Kongs new wave cinema movement began making inroads with contemporary dramas like the controversial Dangerous Encounters: 1st Kind (1980). Hus epic style of cinema was looking decidedly old fashioned and Raining in the Mountain failed to set the box-office alight. It won few foreign sales either. This is a pity as theres much to enjoy in it.

Two men and a young woman travel on foot to a remote Buddhist temple known as the Temple of Three Treasures.

The trio arent seeking spiritual enlightenment. Two are thieves: White Fox (King Hu regular Hsu Feng) and Gold Lock (played by the films action choreographer Wu Ming-tsai), while Esquire Wen (Sun Yueh), is a businessman and patron of the temple. He is ostensibly travelling to give advice to an ageing Abbot, who has decided the time is right for him to choose a successor before he dies, but Wen is more interested in his hired thieves stealing a sacred (and priceless) scroll housed in the library of the monastery.

Wen isnt the only person that the Abbot is seeking advice from. District governor, General Wang arrives with his henchman Lieutenant Chang, while Wu Wai, a Buddhist master enters on a sedan chair carried by a large group of Buddhist nuns.

The next outsider to be welcomed into the monastery is wrongly convicted criminal Chiu Ming. He is undertaking a mission to become a monk to atone for his crimes, even though was innocent and quite a coincidence this framed by Lieutenant Chang.

On his arrival, he is soon assigned to protect the scroll from any potential thieves. This will keep him busy, believe me.

Raining in the Mountain is more comic than most of Hus other work. Theres also less action but more scheming and intrigue. Many of the performers excel, particularly Feng Hsu as the feisty White Fox.

Its a beautifully crafted film. The editing is brilliantly rhythmic. The balletic fight scenes inspired by traditional Peking Opera are a joy to watch and the percussive score helps rack up the tension. Maybe best of all is the immaculate cinematography. This is a master at work.

I did struggle to grasp the full significance of some of the scripts Buddhist philosophy, although watching it again along with the audio commentary by Tony Rayns and reading the accompanying booklet helped in that respect.

A Taiwan/Hong Kong co-production made by a Chinese born director who moved to Hong Kong in 1949, Raining in the Mountain was shot in Korea. It was selected as Hong Kongs entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 52nd Academy Awards, but failed to be shortlisted as a nominee.

If youre already a fan of King Hu films like A Touch of Zen (1970) then you are in for an absolute treat here. If youre new to the director, you might want to start with some of his earlier work such as Dragon Inn (1967), an important inspiration on both Ang Lees Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and Zhang Yimous House of Flying Daggers (2004).

Sadly, Raining in the Mountain is generally regarded as King Hus last great movie. Finding funding for his films became more difficult and his career went into decline, never to fully recover.

Special features include a brand new and exclusive feature-length audio commentary by critic Tony Rayns; Beyond Description, a new and highly informative video essay by David Cairns and a collectors booklet featuring new essays by author Stephen Teo; and Asian cinema expert David West.

For more on the release, click here.

All words by Jamie Havlin. More writing by Jamie can be found at his Louder Than War authors archive.

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Raining in the Mountain - film review - Louder Than War

Feb. 26 marks Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, a 40-day preparation (not including Sundays) for Easter. The word Lent itself derives from the Anglo-Saxon word lenctin, which means spring. The 40-day period also has significance: Moses stayed on Mount Sinai for 40 days; Elijah walked 40 days to Mount Horeb; and Jesus fasted and prayed for 40 days in the desert before beginning his public ministry. Therefore, our 40-day spiritual preparation should be a new spring, whereby we prune ourselves of the dead wood of sin and imperfections, grow in grace and strengthen our faith. The commitment to this preparation is symbolized by the imposition of ashes: the priest says, Remember, that you are dust and to dust you shall return, or Repent, and believe in the Gospel.

The Gospel for Ash Wednesday (Mt 6:1-18) provides a schema for this preparation: fasting, prayer and almsgiving. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1434) highlights the importance of these three forms of penance: conversion in relationship to oneself (fasting), to God (prayer), and to others (almsgiving). First, fasting. We are body and soul, and so fasting intensifies a physical dimension to our prayers: even though we may not be spiritually engaged in prayer, physically, we are praying through fasting. Fasting is a powerful weapon against evil: when the apostles were not successful in exorcising a demon, Jesus said, This kind does not come out except by prayer and fasting (Mt 17:21).

Here we can include abstinence, i.e. giving up something for Lent. We ought to give up something we enjoy, but also something we think we cannot live without, e.g. video games, alcohol, coffee, etc. Here is a sacrifice which will not only challenge but also liberate us.

Second, prayer. Prayer is essential. During Lent, a good practice would be to attend daily Mass, make a weekly Holy Hour, pray the rosary, and pray the Stations of the Cross. These prayers may be offered individually or as a family.

Here we can include availing ourselves of the sacrament of penance. Take time to do prayerfully a thorough examination of conscience, recognizing not only the sinful commissions but also the omissions. Ask the Holy Spirit for enlightenment. Then, with real contrition, go to confession and receive the healing graces our Lord offers through this sacrament. No matter how long it may have been since the last confession, everyone ought to make a good confession during Lent so that we can truly rise to new life at Easter.

Third, almsgiving. While we think of almsgiving as giving money to those in need, we could broaden that to include giving of our time and talent, as well as our treasure. The time and talent given to help someone else is more precious and meritorious than any other act. The most worthy almsgiving is sacrificial, not giving from our surplus, but from our want, as described in the story of the Widows Mite (Lk 21:1-4). In the Book of Tobit we read, Almsgiving saves from death and expiates every sin (Tb 12:8-9). For example, money saved by not eating at restaurants, going to the movie theater, or eating desserts could be given to a particular charity or placed in the parish poor box. Closets and toy chests could be purged of old, forgotten, or seldom used items and given to charity. A visit and the offering of some refreshment could be made to an elderly person who is alone.

While Lent is an intense time to renew our relationship with the Lord, it is not all doom and gloom. Keep in mind that Sundays and the solemnities of St. Joseph (March 19) and the Annunciation (March 25) are technically free days, when we rejoice and therefore may partake of whatever has been offered up for Lent. On St. Josephs day, either at the parish or at home, one can have the St. Josephs table (which includes an array of bread, wine and sweets). Here we remember the holy man who provided for his family, Jesus and Mary, and ask for his protection and support for our own families. On the Feast of the Annunciation (also known as Ladys Day), we remember the mystery of the incarnation, and how Mary received the message of Archangel Gabriel and conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit. Here traditionally people bless their gardens, share Annunciation Bread (a Russian custom), or enjoy waffles (a Swedish custom). So these festivities help us persevere in our Lenten journey and anticipate the great joy of Easter.

Fr. Saunders is pastor of Our Lady of Hope Church in Potomac Falls and episcopal vicar for faith formation and director of the Office of Catechetics.

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More information about these practices and others may be found in the book, Celebrating a Holy Catholic Easter, by Fr. Saunders.

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Getting the most out of Lent - Arlington Catholic Herald

Gilles Peterson tweeted saying it is hard to put into words the influence and impact Andrew Weatherall has had on UK cultureso sad to hear of his passing.

Novelist, Irvine Welsh said, Genius is an overworked term but Im struggling to think of anything else that defines him.

The Chemical Brothers, Ed Simons declared A true inspiration and hero. A lovely funny man. Incredible DJ.

These are just a selection of some of the reactions to the death of electronic musics own man-of-letters and proclaimed swordsman Andrew Weatherall at the age of 56.

Andrew Weatherall occupies a distinct position in British electronic music and club culture. To view him merelyasthe producer of Primal Screams 1991 album Screamadelica is reductive, rather he should be remembered as an arranger of Screamss raw materials, allowing them to catapult to an untouchable pinnacle as a result of Weatheralls knowledge of dub and house musics sonic potential.

He worked alongside New Order and the Happy Mondays producing a scintillating remix of the latters track Hallelujah. However, although Screamadelica and Weatherhalls foray into the Madchester music scene was a commercial highpoint.

Andrew was much more than a one trick pony. He was a DJ, a tastemaker, a remixer, a record collector, a selector, a techno cosmonaut, a revolutionary. He signalled the confluence between the vitality of acid house and an emerging post-punk aesthetic and in the process, carved himself a niche as an idiosyncratic figure within underground music.

Weatherall was born in Windsor, Berkshire, in 1963. During his formative years, he spent his time immersing himself in the vibrant funk and soul nights littered across the capital city. He eventually left home aged 18 and worked in various roles as a labourer; but it was in 1987, the year he moved to London, that Andrews career exploded.

Weatherall was hired to DJ at the south London club Shroom, where he began to establish himself as a selector, playing across the spectrum of electronic music. In 2014, Weatherhall told the BBC that I saved up all my money and went to London at the weekend to buy records, I just got a really good record collection together to the point where people started to say Why dont you play this at our party?, Why dont you play this at our club?'

Following on from his emergence as a collector and DJ, in 1990 Weatherall created his own label Boys Own Productions where he became a highly sought remixer. He collaborated with Paul Oakenfold on Hallelujah, as well as New Orders World Cup single World in Motion in 1990. His Radio 1 Essential Mix broadcast on November 13, 1993 has gone down in electronic music folklore as an iconic touchstone that was to be heavily imitated yet never bettered.

Andrew Weatherhalls views on electronic music often aligned with notions of spiritual transcendence, viewing music throughout the ages as being the vehicle to which we achieve a higher level of spiritual enlightenment.

In an interview with Uncuts Michael Bonner, Weatherall states that club nights imitate the ancient Greek rituals involving herbal drugs to achieve transcendence. For Andrew, People were having transcendent experiences in 1940s dancehalls, dancing to a big band; now we do it with drum machines and electronic technology its the same concept. Humanity hasnt changed for 100,000 years, but our technology has.

For Weatherall, then, there is something innate in humitys quest to seek an out of body experience, an experience that he soundtracked for so many across different generations.

I was lucky to attend a few of Weatherhalls A Love From Outer Space club nights in Glasgow that he ran with Sean Johnston. The nights were always intergenerational, attended by old-skool ravers from the late 1980s summer of love, to new generations of dancers.

Weatherall set one rule and one rule only for DJs at these club nights: no track could surpass the 122bpm mark. As a result, the club nights plodded along to the steady rhythms of the 808 drum machine underpinning the swirling oscillations of synth stabs and the dancers gnawing on their Wrigleys spearmint.

An anecdote I heard from an ALFOS club night was, upon hearing a dancer giving Sean Johnston trouble across the DJ booth, Weatherall asked the dancer how much hed paid to get in. A fiver, he said. To which Andrew replied, Heres a tenner, now f*ck off.

As tributes will continue to pour in across the underground and mainstream music world, Lord Sabres influence on dance music culture will last in the collective memory for as long as there are dance floors.

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A Tribute to Andrew Weatherall - The Mancunion