Daily Archives: June 29, 2022

A Swiss Guard is seen as Pope Francis attends Mass in St. Peter's Square during the World Meeting of Families at the Vatican June 25, 2022. (CNS photo/Remo Casilli, Reuters)

My recent CWR column on Pope Franciss comments about the worrisome rise of what he called the restorers in the American Church appears to have kicked up some dust and not a little misunderstanding.

Many critics seem to think that I was saying more than I was saying. For example, some traditionalists, despite my explicit statement that the primary gaggers of the Council were the post-conciliar progressives and despite my claim that it is Pope Francis himself who is to blame for the current radicalization of the current ecclesial factionalism took my critique of their restorationism as some kind of blanket condemnation of traditionalism tout court. They think I am claiming that there can be no legitimate criticisms of Vatican II.

And it is only that last claim where I think a certain ambiguity in my remarks, born of a need to remain brief, should be clarified on my part. I am in favor of a deep and robust debate, involving all voices in the Church without any censoriousness imposed from above, about the ongoing meaning of the Council and its proper reception.

I myself have criticized the Council for what I call its double naivete. The first naivete was an overconfidence in the internal strength of the pre-conciliar Churchs culture. After all, if the pre-conciliar Church was as healthy as its proponents claim, then how on earth do we explain the almost immediate collapse of that culture after the Church lifted the lid off of the ecclesiastical libido? No less a light than a young Fr. Joseph Ratzinger had already noted, in an important lecture published in Hochland in 1958, that the Church had become a Church of pagans that was rotting from within.

The second naivete was a stunning (almost insouciant) optimism with regard to the Churchs dialogue with modern culture. There was an intoxicating overconfidence in the ability of the bourgeois culture of Liberal democracy to act as a medium within which the Church could be herself and fulfill her mission. In short, I think the Council failed to read properly and prophetically the very signs of the times, both within the Church and in the broader culture, to which the Council appealed as a tool for discernment, and that this failure was near fatal to the conciliar project as a pastoral endeavor, the aim of which was to usher in a new Pentecost within the Church.

Therefore, my problem with the traditionalist critique of Vatican II is not that they dare to question its documents, but rather that their critique is, generally speaking (but not in all cases), simply wrong. Space precludes a more lengthy exposition, but I think they are wrong to reject certain developments of doctrine in the areas of religious freedom, ecumenism, interreligious dialogue, and the theological nuances of Dei Verbum in its Christological recentering of our concept of Revelation and the various media of Revelation in Scripture and Tradition.

However, I think the traditionalist critique of the Council does raise certain thorny hermeneutical and theological questions that have been festering in the Church ever since the conclusion of the Council. Which indicates, at the very least, they are questions that are not going away and need answering. Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI went a long way toward answering some, but not all, of those questions, and I agree with my friend, the brilliant patristic scholar Dr. Lewis Ayres, who stated in an interview I did with him, that the Councils ressourcement theological project is an unfinished product in deep need of a renewed and vigorous revisitation. My traditionalist friends are of the view we have had enough time to do this already and that the project has been an abject failure. And, further, that it is the very unfinished nature of the whole enterprise that has led to the dangling loose ends of theological ambiguity that created this mess in the first place.

I can sympathize with this frustration while rejecting their solution to simply restore the old Mass as the standard Mass of the Church, and to resurrect the mid- century neo-scholasticism of folks such as Garrigou-Lagrange as the standard theology of the Church. I admire Lagrange and have profited from his writings, but a simple return to that mode of theology would be disastrous. Nevertheless, all of this is a debate worth having if for no other reason that the form of theology and liturgy they champion is indeed part of the Churchs Tradition and cannot, and must not, be simply swept away as so much retrograde nonsense.

Therefore, I am in favor of all voices at the table since only an open debate involving all faithful Catholics will help us untie the knots we have twisted ourselves into. But this is precisely my complaint regarding Pope Francis. The Pope of accompaniment and of going out to the peripheries and of synodality and dialogue, seems singularly unable to extend such things to the Churchs traditionalist flank. When it comes to those peripheries there are only harsh and scolding words (rigid, Pharisaical, psychologically unbalanced) and punitive and deprecatory motu proprios, all of which seem designed to disenfranchise and demoralize some of the Churchs most devoted and devout sons and daughters. And when those sons and daughters react negatively and then seek out spiritual enclaves where they can find succor enclaves that may indeed contain dysfunctional elements and theologically facile dismissals of more recent theology he reacts, not like a loving father, but as a harsh magistrate bristling with all of the bureaucratic means at his disposal to put them in their place.

Combine that with this Popes elevation of rather undistinguished bishops McElroy, Cupich, Tobin and Farrell to high office, and a picture emerges of care and concern not for peripheries at all but for the adulation of the rainbow-colored mainstream of our dominant cultural elites. I repeat: reaching out to the sexual libertines of our culture is not a going out to the peripheries at all, but rather a wedding banquet for the well-heeled devotees of our First World fetishes and obsessions.

And when those in the Church who have skin in this game object that this kind of accommodationist project is a recipe for a catastrophic pastoral capitulation to the nihilistic Zeitgeist, they are told that they do not have a place at the table of dialogue; only the progressive understanding of Vatican II is allowed into the banquet. And I can only repeat what I said in my previous essay: that this autocratic and monochrome approach to the Councils reception will only inflame, radicalize, and entrench those who do not agree.

In other words, my claim is that this is a Pope who does not unify, but who instead divides. This is a Pope who polarizes binaries and creates unnecessary peripheries. We need real dialogue, real healing, real conversation, and real Christian discourse in a spirit of charity. But in its place we get the back of the hand.

And that brings me to one of the other responses to my previous essay. This time from the Left, in an absurd tweet from the papal sycophant Austen Ivereigh, who says of my essay:

A curious article, which betrays the isolated conscience of which Francis warns in Let Us Dream, in which the desire to hold onto something we think is threatened ends up distorting our grasp of reality itself.

Devoid of any substantive discussion of my actual arguments, this tweet is also a form of mean-spirited, ad hominem accusation that plays in the sandbox of psychological imputation. And from a man who does not know me in the slightest, does not know my published works, and has most definitely not even bothered to understand my argument or, more importantly, the issues that generated it. He seems to just dismiss me as just one more cranky, Right-wing crackpot who hates the Pope for purely emotional, visceral, and subjective reasons. Therefore, I must be motivated by a badly formed conscience riddled with fear over the demise of things I am clinging to like a child clutching a teddy bear in the night, afraid of the bogeyman under the bed.

The isolated conscience, by the way, was a term used by Pope Francis to describe those who are selfish and who set themselves against the relational path opened up by true charity. And as such, they are tools of Satan, like Judas. Living in their own thought world and besotted by their own ideological deformations, they refuse to encounter reality and retreat instead into their safe spaces of interior, solipsistic, narcissism. And Austen got all of that from my observation that the rise of the traditionalist movement coincided with the rise of Pope Francis, and I dared to see a connection there? The fact that he would see in such a claim some kind of deeply distorting ideology speaks more to his own isolated conscience and lack of contact with charity and reality than it does to my state of mind. Sycophants gonna sycophant.

I only mention this tweet because it is all too indicative of just the sort of dismissive condescension towards people of genuine faith fellow Catholics by the way who dare question this papacy and its aimless drift, like a bobbing cork, in the tidal forces of modernity. It is indicative of the sort of bullying, and intellectually shallow, thuggery that passes for dialogue amongst Pope Franciss most loyal admirers and promoters.

I and millions like me are not restorationists in the negative sense of that term employed by Pope Francis. We are simply loyal sons and daughters of the Church who have toiled in the Lords vineyard for decades. There is only one kind of restorationism that matters: the restoration of all things in Christ. And every faithful Catholic who shares that vision needs to be heard.

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Further thoughts on restorationistsand a remark on papal sycophants - Catholic World Report

After a three-year absence, Glastonbury Festival returns this weekend.

The pioneering Piltdown weekender remains the biggest and most historic music festival of them all, and with a 2022 lineup that includes headliners Billie Eilish, Paul McCartney and Kendrick Lemar playing alongside a diverse, star-studded assembly of musical delights imaginable its easy to see why.

Cynics may grumble about the so called commercialisation of the festival these days, but Worthy Farm remains a uniquely special place where careers can be made, legends can be born and some of the most iconic live performances in history have taken place.

Head honcho Michael Eavis may believe that the festival peaked in its first year, citing the 1970 headline set by Tyrannosaurus Rex (later T. Rex) as his favourite, but, respectfully, there have been many more artists who have delivered career-defining performances to cement Glastonburys status as the world's most magical festival.

Here, then, are the 11 greatest Glastonbury performances ever.

More than a decade had passed since the birth of Glastonbury Festival, and the music scene that it represented in the early '70s had moved on some way as we reached the mid-point of the 1980s.

Not that these changes were particularly reflected in the line-up of the festival, with the 1984 bill featuring jazz legends Fela Kuti and Dr. John and new wave hero Elvis Costello headlining. But, halfway down the bill on the Saturday, Michael Eavis had booked a band that would give the festival the lightbulb moment it needed, leading to its refusal to stagnate ever again.

The Smiths only had one album at this point, their self-titled debut, released in February of that year, but already they were becoming cult-like, a magnet for frustrated and disaffected youth. No one quite knew what was going to happen when Morrissey and Johnny Marr led the Manchester quartet out that day, but their ten-song set seemed to be a siren for young people to appear from nowhere and turn the Pyramid Stage from a docile field of hippies into an pogoing indie disco.

By the time a triumphant Hand in Glove closed the show, a full-blown stage invasion was happening. The festival would never ignore the zeitgeist again.

Glastonburys relationship with dance music wasnt an immediately happy one. Michael Eavis has openly admitted he didnt care for the style, and when a series of free parties started springing up on site around the time that the UK rave scene was being vilified as public enemy number one in the media, a sense of lawlessness that was the antithesis of Glastonburys purpose caused all manner of headaches.

But when the Criminal Justice Act bill of 1994 scandalously targeted and criminalised fans of acid house, the festival, rather than shun the genre, showed solidarity and embraced it.

Brothers Phil and Paul Hartnoll, aka Orbital, were installed as NME Stage headliners that year and proceeded to perform a set that has gone down as a kind of EDM big bang for festivals the world over.

Not only was the duo's hypnotic set of euphoric beats rapturously received, it showed that dance artists could compete with the traditional guitar band set up, opening the door for The Chemical Brothers, The Prodigy, Moby, Fatboy Slim and more to become an integral part of the festival's fabric.

Perhaps even more importantly though, the booking was a statement of political intent, one that defied the government's heavy-handed and discriminatory stance. It offered solid proof that the anti-establishment principles which gave birth to the festival were still alive and well.

When The Stone Roses pulled out of their 1995 headline slot at the last-minute, after guitarist John Squire broke his collarbone and a shoulder blade falling off a mountain bike, Glastonbury was in urgent need of a replacement to close the Pyramid Stage on the festival's Saturday night.

On the face of it, Pulp, indie journeymen who had been plugging away for the past 15 years, and had only just begun to experience crossover success with their 1994 album His n Hers, may have seemed like an underwhelming alternative to the mercurial Mancunians.

But the Sheffield band had a pretty huge ace up their sleeve, having just released what would become their definitive anthem; the arch pop of Common People. So big a hit was the song, that Glastonbury took a punt on the band as headliners, and Pulp repaid them with the performance of their career.

Suave, self-depreciating, charmingly geeky and yet blessed with the kind of charisma that you couldnt take your eyes off, frontman Jarvis Cocker wonderfully conducted the crowd through his band's brilliantly odd, distinctly British, working class, guitar pop anthems. The reaction when the first notes of Common Peoples disco throb begin, just after Cocker has read out his weekly shopping list by way of farewell, is spine-tingling stuff.

It elevated Pulp from cult favourites into one of the biggest bands in the country and turned Jarvis into a national treasure. One of the all-time great feel-good stories of the festival's history.

By 1997, BritPop had been a national obsession for a few years, and that summer's Glastonbury line-up reflected that. But, although no one knew it at the time, the rug was very much about to be pulled out from underneath the movement.

Two weeks before the festival took place, Radiohead released their third album Ok Computer. Installed as Pyramid Stage headliners on the festival's Saturday night, the Oxfordshire band put on a performance that was so good it arguably contributed to changing the entire landscape of popular music in Britain.

Rather than coming out with a bang in an attempt to immediately grab attention, Radiohead teased out the opening of their set with the slow, delicate Lucky. It seemed a risk to start a first ever festival headlining set with a song placed as track 11 on an album that came out just 12 days earlier, but it immediately marked Radiohead out as the antithesis of the zeitgeist.

From there the Glastonbury audience was held rapt, becoming hypnotised by the band ran through a set of songs that sounded completely unique, utterly advanced and totally alien. Take a look at Thom Yorke wailing along, his body flinching and juddering, trying to keep in rhythm with his band as Johnny Greenwoods iconic solo during Paranoid Android rips out of the Pyramid Stage PA, its a truly transcendent moment.

Unquestionably one of the greatest sets in the history of live music, raising the bar to near impossible standards.

Michael Eavis once described David Bowie as one of the three greatest singers of all time, alongside Elvis and Frank Sinatra, and Bowie hadnt rocked up at Worthy Farm since its second iteration back in 1971, so this one was always going to be a bit special.

Let's be honest, there is a more than a touch of revisionism when discussing Bowie these days; during the late '80s and into the '90s he wasnt being lauded as a forward-thinking visionary in quite the same way as he is now, with albums from that period like Earthling and Black Tie, White Noise getting a lukewarm reaction upon their release. This performance, though, did as much as anything to re-cement Bowies place at the very pinnacle of popular culture, as he ran through a greatest hits set that reminded the entire world of his undoubted genius. Also, the warmth with which the veteran performer later spoke about his experiences at the festival was evidence of just how hallowed even the biggest artists considered this site to be.

Watching the set back today, the mass sing-along during Heroes, Life on Mars or Under Pressure are positively life affirming, but dont ignore Bowie ending his set on a fantastic version of Im Afraid of Americans, a nod to his thirst to remain relevant and never sink into the nostalgia quagmire.

Everyone in the music industry knew that Amy Winehouse was a talent, long before this performance blew her stratospheric. But Glastonbury 2007 is the moment where everyone could see that Winehouse was more than just a gifted, enigmatic vocalist; she was a true one off, destined to be one of the finest artists that Britain has ever produced.

Less than a year earlier, her second album Back to Black had received plaudits from pretty much every corner of the music world, but as she stepped onto the Pyramid Stage for her early afternoon slot on the festival's Friday, it felt like everything that made her so special became amplified for the entire world to see.

Theres just something so brilliantly unique about Winehouse here; slim, petite but lacking the airs and graces of a typical diva singer, she wipes the mud from her shoes on her backing curtain, before shuffling on and effortlessly belting out opening track Addicted. From there on in, its a greatest hits set with a few covers - Sam Cookes Cupid, The Specials Hey Little Rich Girl and Toots & The Maytals Monkey Man - thrown in for good measure. Great as they are, though, nothing really can compete with the awe-inspiring performances of You Know Im No Good and Rehab, the pure soul and pain that glides so effortlessly from her mouth showing an artist at the peak of her powers.

As enigmatic as any artist on this list, Winehouse only ever performed at Glastonbury once. At this point shed doubtless have been a headliner, making her 2007 peak even more of a bittersweet pill to swallow.

When Oasis Noel Gallagher scoffed that Glastonbury has the tradition of guitar music... Im not having hip-hop at Glastonbury, it's wrong. after it was announced that Jay-Z was to headline the Pyramid Stage in 2008, he might have been speaking as an out-of-touch, grumpy, old curmudgeon, but he wasnt alone in his thinking.

Even back in 2008 the internet loved a pile on, and the purist's ire was keenly felt, with many traditionalists happily jumping onboard the outrage train. How dare Jay-Z take a place on the bill usually reserved for legendary artists such as... er... Travis and Stereophonics...?

Seems silly now doesnt it? Because those words could not have been more emphatically rammed down the throats of the detractors, as the New York rapper provided one of the all-time iconic Glastonbury moments by walking out to one of the biggest crowds seen in years, guitar in tow, and began to giggle his way through a sarcasm laced cover of Wonderwall, before launching into an awe-inspiring mash up of 99 Problems and AC/DCs Back In Black. As intros go, it might just be the best ever.

From there on in Jay couldnt fail, drawing on one of the most bullet-proof, hit-filled catalogues in modern music, and chucking in snippets of The Prodigys Smack My Bitch Up and Amy Winehouses Rehab just hammered home the win.

This killer set opened the door for Kanye West, Beyonce, Stormzy, Dave and others to storm the festival in later years, and make anyone who ever questioned hip-hop's place at Glastonbury again look exceedingly daft, at best.

Save for the odd booking of alt-metal here and there over the years, Glastonbury had never truly embraced heavy metal. Which, considering the festival's reputation as the most musically eclectic on the planet, was quite the source of frustration for some metal fans. It was a huge shock then to see Michael and Emily Eavis go from 0 to 100 and book the biggest metal band of all time to close the Pyramid Stage in 2014.

Confusingly, this prospect caused almost as much of a stir as Jay-Z's six years prior, with endless indie no marks and the same exhausting online commentators lining up to question the booking: as if that were not enough, an anti-hunting group of festival goers created a petition to have them removed due to James Hetfields extra-curricular activities.

Metallica, as usual, won the day though, mocking the controversy in their set-opening video and playing a set of hard rock and thrash metal that won over even the most skeptical attendee.

In the aftermath Glastonbury would invite Motohead to perform, and give Earache Records a stage to curate, which saw the likes of Gojira, Napalm Death, Entombed, Venom Prison and Employed To Serve added to the bill. Hard to imagine that would have happened without Metallica kicking the door down.

The day after Metallica laid waste to the Pyramid Stage a very different, but no less exciting, event took place.

The long-established Sunday afternoon legends slot on the Pyramid Stage had boasted some great sets by some huge artists, with Tom Jones, Paul Simon, Neil Diamond, Dame Shirley Bassey and more over-seeing mass sing-alongs over the years. But few, if any, pulled such a crowd, or put on such a heartwarming, good time, fun filled set, as country legend Dolly Parton did in 2014.

The consummate entertainer, Dolly knew exactly what was required to make the slot work, and, with the gargantuan crowd eating from the palm of her hand, she turned a muddy field in Somerset into a Nashville hoedown in the most effortless way. The fact that she can just casually chuck Joelene out as the third song of the set says it all.

Some artists truly do transcend genre, and Parton is one of music's all-time great characters and songwriters. In terms of matching the energy, and reciprocal devotion, garnered by that set, only Kylie Minogues emotional and long-awaited performance in 2019 could match an hour of Dolly at her best. It was impossible not to raise a smile.

In 2015, Foo Fighters were due to return to Glastonbury for the first time since 1997, to headline the Pyramid Stage. Then just weeks before the show, Dave Grohl broke his leg falling onstage at a stadium show in Sweden and their entire summer tour was cancelled. Just like 20 years earlier, Glastonbury suddenly needed a new headliner, and just like 20 years previously, the band that stepped in gave the performance of their career.

Florence and the Machine were already a sizeable outfit, having picked up a BRIT award for their 2009 debut album Lungs, but the jump from well-known, indie rock band to Glastonbury headliner is a chasm. And Florence... made the jump with impressive ease, drawing from the best of all three of their albums, and throwing in a beautifully poignant cover of The Foos Times Like These as a nod to their fallen peers, with Dave Grohl later describing their version as being better than Foo Fighters had ever played it.

By the time the victory lap of Youve Got the Love and Dog Days are Over came around, they had established themselves as an all-time festival headlining band.

When Stormzy stepped out onto the Pyramid Stage to headline the Friday night of the 2019 festival he was 25-years-old, had one album to his name and was the first grime artist to do so. These events alone have to make his set one of the most astonishing achievements of Glastonburys history, but the fact that he made it such a spectacle, such a wonderful celebration of the best of black and alternative British culture and such an emotionally moving experience cements its place amongst the all-time greats.

Beginning with a video of Jay-Z giving him advice about what to expect from the festival, which was a lovely little call-back, Stormzy walked out in a Banksy-designed, Union Jack stab vest, railed against the Tory government, then brought out members of the Black Ballet company, a full gospel choir, fellow UK grime artists Dave and Fredo and... er... Coldplays Chris Martin. In the process, he crowned grime as the definitive British youth culture movement of the modern era.

From an underground musical style from the streets of South London to closing the biggest music festival on Earth, Stormzys place at the top of the bill at Glastonbury should give hope to every young musician that the summit can be reached, no matter how stacked the odds are against you.

Watch Glastonbury 2022 on the BBC this weekend.

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These are the 11 greatest Glastonbury Festival sets ever - Louder

''It means girls like me can now see themselves reflected in an industry theyve always loved and admired.''

In the current zeitgeist, the term 'modest fashion' comes with a connotation of being from a decade that has since passed, but that's no longer the case.

Championing less revealing clothing, modest fashion saw "layering, loose silhouettes, higher necklines, long sleeves, and outfits that don't accentuate the shape of the body" reign supreme. Now, the concept has been adopted by many, both religious and otherwise.

Rather than those fashion trends be swiftly labelled under an umbrella term like 'androgynous', the true meaning of 'modest' fashion is finally making its way to the surface in an effort to diversify fashion and create inclusivity for different communities.

"One of my biggest goals as a Middle Eastern/Australian designer is to create a movement to re-define mainstream fashion," she exclusively told ELLE Australia.

"Clothing that's niche based is always considered diverse, but we should consider diverse fashion the norm. With over 12 million beautifully diverse women in Australia, from culture, shape and size, each one of us has our own definition of what we consider the norm as we are all so diverse. And that's where the conversation should really start."

"People say fashion is frivolous, but when you see diversity and inclusivity, it does make everyone feel connected," the Sydney-based designer explains.

"I have always loved fashion and decided to pursue it as further study after school. [...] What started as a casual styling hobby turned into a love for design and craftsmanship," she explained.

"Being raised by traditional Lebanese parents in Australia meant I had the privilege to experience a unique upbringing of incorporating two very different cultures."

"It means I am able to pour my creativity through my designs while staying true to my identity, and it gives me the opportunity to tell my story and break down barriers through awareness in a fun and trendy way."

She continued, "There are many misconceptions surrounding modest fashion. [It] doesn't need to be linked to culture or religion, it's two different entities."

"Women want to feel beautiful and confident. The aim is to be a voice for my community, to breakdown mainstream stereotypes and inspire the youth who are figuring out their identity."

One scroll through her brand's product page and it's easy to see why she's so successful. The products on offer are not only trend-driven, but they bring traditional fashion into a new, more inclusive light. And for Yasmin, she's hoping to translate that mindset into how the fashion industry sees modesty.

"When I first decided to wear the hijab, modest fashion didn't have the resonance it has now, and I felt there was a gap in the market for practical and stylish modest clothing," she shares.

"I love taking a simple pattern and adding a luxe or embellished fabric to make it funky. The vision for Yasmin Jay is to encourage all women who enjoy modest fashion to feel confident, empowered and elevated when they wear one of my pieces."

So, when The ICONIC came knocking with an idea to create an entire shopping subsection for modest dressing, she was all ears.

"It's great that we're embracing an edit dedicated to modest fashion because it means girls like me can now see themselves reflected in an industry they've always loved and admired," she says, adding, "It's a perfect mix of tradition and being fashion forward."

The ICONIC's Modest edit offers customers the opportunity to mix-and-match pieces from a specific selection that's so vast, Yasmin can't even choose a favourite.

"It's hard to narrow down a favourite piece [...] because when I look at a piece I have about five different ideas of how I can style just one garment. That's the beauty about fashion, it's a world full of possibilities with no limitations!"

That's what she loves the most about her eponymous label, each garment was created in the hopes of inspiring confidence in the wearer.

"Within Yasmin Jay the Label every detail of each garment tells a story," she says.

She continues, "What I consider the ultimate styling tip is rocking your outfit with confidence and sprinkling your charm wherever you go because that's where the true beauty lies and I hope my label gives people that confidence to do so."

For modest fashion wearers, or those aspiring to be, there's hope to be had for the diversity of fashion in Australia. Thanks to emerging designers and an increase in freedom of expression, Yasmin believes that the best is yet to come.

"With such a passionate new generation of designers emerging from all walks of life I hope that we can learn that there is no right or wrong answer," she says, adding, "Life is about expressing yourself freely and reflecting on what you want to put out into the world and for myself the way I do that is through my clothing".

"We need to continue pushing the boundaries and challenging the norms through our artistic journey."

For the Australian fashion industry, the full potential of diverse inclusion still has a way to go, but Modest fashion is a great way to get the conversation started.

Original post:

Lebanese-Australian Fashion Designer, Yasmin Jay, On Why Theres A Gap In The Market For Modest Fashion - ELLE Australia

Reduce, reuse, recycle. Its a phrase weve all become accustomed to hearing. Some products and materials are commonly recycled with little thought, such as beverage containers in states with a deposit law or plastic grocery bags returned to the receptacle at the supermarket. Metal, glass and cardboard are other examples. Now think bigger. Think urban. Think entire buildings being converted into a completely new space.

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The practice is known as adaptive reuse, and its gaining momentum in the face of ever-growing environmental challenges. Through adaptive reuse, old buildings are given new life, and the process brings a host of benefits to the community, inhabitants and environment.

Related: Stockholm offices repurposed into apartments with green roof

Reusing buildings already taking up space in the city keeps the building from being torn down, helping to maintain the roots of the community. Plus, existing real estate is less expensive than new builds, providing community members more affordable options in their own neighborhood.

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Existing buildings already have the surrounding infrastructure too. Therefore, the new owner has fewer obstacles in regards to parking and street access. An established location also often means surrounding residential and commercial buildings that offer a premade community. Creating an urban center of accessible services means people are more likely to walk or bike, leaving cars and their toxic emissions off the road.

Embodied carbon is a massive problem for our environment. Every time we source virgin materials, we release carbon into the air through extraction, processing, manufacturing, packaging and transport. This is before the material is even used in construction. The more we can reuse whats already onsite, the less of an impact the build has on the environment. Plus, reusing materials significantly decreases the amount of waste associated with tearing down buildings.

In addition, avoiding new builds helps keep the land intact, since theres no need to clear plants and trees or otherwise prepare the land. As we know, plants absorb carbon dioxide and release the oxygen we breathe. They also sequester that carbon deep in the soil, which is released when we break ground on new construction.

Ava Alltmont, AIA, LEED AP, Associate and New Orleans Studio Director at Cushing Terrell, a multi-discipline design studio, recently put together a paper on the topic titled, Land (Re) Use and Climate Change: Breathing New Life into Old Buildings. She explained the concept is more applicable than ever with shops shuddering and storefronts sitting empty as a result of the pandemic and economic downturn.

When buildings are adapted for reuse, this can benefit both the companies and the communities involved by way of reducing environmental impacts, improving quality of life and maintaining a sense of place, Alltmont said.

Fortunately, many examples of this strategy are being seen in neighborhoods across the country. Youve likely seen an old building being converted into a music venue, offbeat bar, notable restaurant, antique mall or loft apartment. Alltmont says adaptive reuse might be referred to as a renovation, modernization, historic preservation, infrastructure reuse and additions, to name a few. And within those categories are even more varieties of adaptive reuse.

Adaptive reuse isnt without challenges. In most cases, the building is decades or even centuries old. Systems need to be updated and working within the existing framework can be complicated. However, the benefits of a good location combined with the significantly lower carbon footprint makes adaptive reuse an effort that pays in fresh air, lower pollution, cultural rejuvenation and waste reduction.

With the global zeitgeist aimed at recognizing the effects of climate change, adaptive reuse should garner the same attention as other forms of recycling. With a post-pandemic focus on wellness, the increase in work-from-home opportunities, a limited amount of available land to build on and empty buildings blanketing the landscape, its a perfect time for individuals and businesses to invest in the idea.

In summary, the idea of adaptive reuse adds up to more than just reusing building materials. Its a movement that cements the history and culture of an area, ties communities together, directs away from urban sprawl (and the traffic that comes with it) and provides more affordable real estate options.

If we look back at the cyclical nature of recycling, its easy to see the business imperative in adaptive reuse, Alltmont concluded. If opting to reimagine an existing building is good for the environment, quality of life and a communitys sense of place, then it will attract more talent, residents and visitors to the city, thus improving the local economy. Its a case of reduce, reuse, recycle and revitalize.

Via ModernCities and AvaAlltmont from CushingTerrell

Images via Cushing Terrell

Read more here:

The benefits of adaptive reusing old buildings into new... - Inhabitat

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Leah Sottile photo

Chad Daybell's property outside Rexburg, Idaho, where Lori Vallow's children's bodies were found in 2020.

It's a case seemingly made for tabloids and trash TV.

As 2019 neared its end, the world first heard of Lori Vallow, her new husband, Chad Daybell, and the strange tale centered on their lives in small-town Idaho. Sparked by a phone call from concerned grandparents, police in Rexberg discovered that Vallow's two kids, 17-year-old Tylee and 6-year-old JJ, were missing.

In short order, news stories revealed that Daybell's longtime wife Tammy had died under mysterious circumstances just two weeks before he married Vallow. And that her brother and at least one ex-husband had also died under peculiar circumstances. And that the newlyweds, rather than helping police try to find the missing children, flew off to Hawaii. Soon came reports of the couple's unorthodox religious beliefs involving past lives and Doomsday prophecies, and several months later came the discoveries of Tylee's and JJ's bodies buried on Daybell's rural Idaho property.

While the likes of Dateline and 48 Hours were attracted to the case by the obvious salacious aspects, independent investigative journalist and former Inlander reporter Leah Sottile saw something more as she started to dig into the case from her Portland home. Much like the subjects of her award-winning Bundyville podcast tracking the Bundy clan of anti-government extremists and their various armed uprisings across the West, the Vallow/Daybell case featured people who seemed to blend a particular strain of conspiracy-minded religion and anti-government sentiment. But while the Bundys did plenty of interviews and passed their philosophy around the rural part of the West, Daybell and Vallow were living a mainstream Mormon life by all appearances, while also being heavily involved in apocalyptic podcasts, fiction and prepper conventions.

The case is featured in Sottile's first book, When the Moon Turns to Blood: Lori Vallow, Chad Daybell and a Story of Murder, Wild Faith and End Times. It's a well-documented look at the case to date (both Daybell and Vallow's trials will be held concurrently and go to court in January 2023; both could face the death penalty). More impressively, it's a deep dive into the West's predilection for anti-government conspiracies, the celebrity around near-death experiences, and just how mainstream some "extreme" views are in certain communities scattered from Idaho to Utah to Arizona.

In the story of a former beauty queen and an apocalypse-obsessed fiction writer, their whirlwind romance, and their apparently murderous path, Sottile found a natural source for putting her reporting skills and dedication to tracking life on the West's fringes to the test. We talked with her about the case and her reporting; this interview has been edited for length and clarity.

INLANDER: Where did your interest in extreme movements of the West, charismatic people of the West, where did that spark come from?

LEAH SOTTILE: All things lead back to the Inlander with me. I was the music editor, partially because my interest has always been in the weirder side of underground music scenes. At the Inlander, you can do a lot and have to do a lot. So I have some really crazy stories that I was able to do about what felt like fringe cultures at the time. I was covering polyamory before that was in the common parlance. And I wrote about a backyard wrestling group, and I got a ton of space to do that. So I've always kind of been interested in the fringes, whether that's people who feel like they were pushed to the fringes by society, or people who choose to live on the fringes. That's been the common theme of my work for a really long time.

I started freelancing around 2013 and did a story on a prepper, like a survivalist, that was in the [Spokane] Valley, for Playboy. It kind of opened up a world that I was really interested in, that felt like it was in the zeitgeist at the time. Something about what this guy is saying about the world collapsing and just any moment, you know, the United States is going to just slide into turmoil. I could recognize that there was something there that was more than just a novelty. And then, the first day of 2016, we had the takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge by the Bundys. When that happened, I just became obsessed with it. I had knowledge of what was happening, but I was also really curious about whether there was something more to this movement. I got really obsessed with that, and covered the trial that ensued for the Washington Post and wrote a bunch of features about the people who took over the refuge for, you know, Outside and Portland Monthly magazine and kind of chipped away at it as a freelancer because I was so curious about all the sort of varying ideologies that were intersecting there. And that's when I sort of just accidentally fell backward into this world of far-right extremism and kind of haven't been able to emerge from it since.

Holly Andres photo

Author Leah Sottile

At this point, anti-government extremism is obviously being reported on coast to coast, which wasn't always the case.

When I started, it was like, "I'm writing on the fringe!" Now it's like, "Oh, I'm writing on the mainstream. How did that happen?" With the Bundy story and the initial stories that I was pitching around the standoff, around the trial, around the things coming out of the trial, I was getting rejected left and right.

NOTE: In the intervening years since the Malheur standoff, Sottile continued working on stories about various extreme groups and individuals. As a freelancer, she's free to pick and choose the stories she wants to cover. And the ones that most appeal to her, Sottile says, are "stories that intersect with the land, ideology, history, the West." As she started to dig into the backgrounds of Vallow and Daybell, she found a lot of her interests setting off buzzers in her head.

When you first heard of this Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell case, what was it that got your attention early on?

I made this podcast, two seasons of a podcast called Bundyville, which is about the Bundy family, their takeovers, their ideology, etc. It gets into [former Washington state Rep.] Matt Shea, gets into all kinds of wacky stuff. Because of that, and being somebody who's always very interested in ideology and religion, I had come to learn about this thing called the "White Horse Prophecy," which is like this fringe LDS [Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, aka the Mormons] urban legend that there was a revelation that Joseph Smith had told somebody that the Mormons were going to basically save the United States and the Constitution from falling into the brink of ruin. It's not real. The church doesn't accept it.

After I came out with the first season of Bundyville, where we talked about that, I got a lot of emails from people who are like, "Yeah, it's not as fringe as you think." Like, "I'm hearing about that in church. I've heard about it from my bishop, it's less fringe than you think." And I was like, "Oh, OK. Noted."

When I first heard about Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell and the missing kids, I heard an early news report that said something to the effect of the kids are missing and she's missing. And people close to them think that it might have something to do with her strange religious beliefs. I know Rexburg is super Mormon. And pretty quickly, I dug into some writing that her dad had done, and he was mimicking the White Horse Prophecy. So I was like, "OK, this is bigger than just a missing kids case and a missing persons case." It's potentially informed by this very Western belief system, that some Mormons think that they are going to save America.

NOTE: Sottile's first thought was that perhaps Daybell and Vallow were part of a secretive polygamous community, like something out of author Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven. But she quickly found both Daybell, a self-published author and publisher, and Vallow, the five-times-married former beauty queen, had both grown up in mainstream Mormon congregations across the West. They weren't holed up in a compound, but attending prepper conferences, recording podcasts and hanging out in Hawaii while police searched for Vallow's missing kids Tylee and JJ.

How quickly did you start working on this story when you first heard about it?

I started digging in right away. I have a reporting problem. Like, I just can't not report. I remember sitting down at my computer and just building a timeline. Like, the kids were missing. They [Vallow and Daybell] were in Hawaii. I'm trying to work backwards. I just started reporting, building timelines, requesting documents, diving into what I could find. Really, the most immediate resource was, I just bought a ton of Chad Daybell's books. I just started reading his books, because I thought, "Maybe there's something here. Maybe it's a dead end. I got time, it's the pandemic, we can't leave the house."

"I started digging in right away. I have a reporting problem. Like, I just can't not report."

He'd written a ton of books. He had a blog that was pretty active. So it was this wealth of information that I could start putting in my timeline. I just started kind of working the story backwards to figure out where my place was in it. And I was really watching the reporting and seeing that nobody's talking about the White Horse Prophecy. They're just telling it as a very tabloid story. And I was like, "There's something being lost because it's a tabloid story. I think there's something here that's a lot bigger."

NOTE: Daybell's books, while certainly niche products sold primarily in Mormon bookstores, revealed to Sottile that he evolved over time from a relatively mainstream, albeit extremely religious, writer into one obsessed with the end times. The onetime journalist created his own publishing house after working at a mainstream Mormon publisher, and his books showed he saw threats from left-leaning political groups to the country's future, he saw God's judgment waiting in the wings, and he saw in himself a sort of prophet capable of foreseeing the future. Through his writing, Daybell's status rose in prepper/survivalist circles and among a certain set of Mormons who bought into the White Horse Prophecy, despite the church's insistence it isn't real. That popularity among extremists in the West "definitely mattered to him," Sottile says, "and definitely mattered to Lori [Vallow]."

Leah Sottile photo

A community shrine across the street from where Tylee and JJ's bodies were found.

In reading your book, it's fascinating that this beauty queen woman and this sort of schlubby guy fall in love and sort of drop everything for each other.

There's so many questions that are gonna get answered when this goes to trial. I'm used to reading about the Bundys. And they're doing interviews from jail whenever they are in jail. They love the press, any attention. But with this [case], they got arrested, and silence. Everything just stopped.

In Lori Vallow's background, you have these instances of violence, and accusations of violence, but Chad Daybell doesn't seem to have anything like that.

Everyone that I talked to who knows Chad, works with Chad, did a book with Chad, was like, "he was the most docile, nicest, Mormon man. So kind..." It was almost off-putting. He seemed like he had really low self-esteem. Then all of a sudden, you know, he had dead bodies in his backyard. But if you read his fiction, it is like one murder after another. It's just like death and destruction. It's like cities melting, liberals being hanged. It's really dark.

"Everyone that I talked to who knows Chad... was like, 'he was the most docile, nicest, Mormon man.' ... Then all of a sudden, you know, he had dead bodies in his backyard."

You were reporting this during the pandemic. How did that work? Were you able to travel?

The majority of this was done in 2020, so there was not a lot that could be done, but there was an awful lot happening. All the court hearings that I would have wanted to be at were on Zoom, so I could attend them in my pajamas, which was nice. The book is super, super document-heavy. I had the benefit of having all the body-camera footage. I had all the different angles, crime scene photos. Every document that every other reporter had, I had too. So I was just building a story from those things and finding out which rabbit holes I wanted to go down. At one point, I did go to Rexburg [Idaho, where the kids' bodies were found on Chad Daybell's property]; I did a bunch of reporting there. A lot of my reporting is informed by alt weeklies, the type of journalism that I do.Walking the walk from Lori's front door to the parking lot and observing everything, sitting outside of where she lives. Or going to the Daybell house and sitting there and listening to the sounds and the smells and trying to sort of soak up those ethereal writerly details.

So how did the book finally come together? Did you pitch it to a lot of publishers?

As with all things I've done that come together in a way that I'm pleased with, it had to get rejected. I've been wanting to write a book forever. I have made attempts and, really, the ideas haven't stuck for me. But this, it just grabbed me with both hands. And I was like, "I think that that means that this is a book." And my agent took it out, and nobody wanted it. It was rejected all across the board. Just another day of freelance rejection, like it was a normal day. And then, obviously, the pandemic wasn't over by Memorial Day [2020] like everyone had said, and there started to be a lot of stories and think pieces in the news about survivalists and preppers and stuff. Then it was like people were ready to hear it.

Your book is full of history and perspective you don't see in tabloid stories about this case. That's got to be hard to get through to a publisher.

This has been my experience completely in writing about the far right. I think it was just that by the summer of 2020, the crushing reality of what we were living under, with an inept presidential administration, a deadly pandemic, freezer trucks full of bodies in the streets. I think people were really scared. People had to be like, "Oh, shit, maybe the world is gonna end!"

I felt lucky that I could kind of give a little bit of perspective. I tried to take this out of being just a tabloid story and be like, "Look, this is more than a pretty lady and these murderers, or accused murderers. It's a bigger thing about who we are, and the violence that we tolerate." And still, this far into the world we're living in now, I think people still think that the racists and the extremists are like, out there in the hills. They really want to think it's not something that's happening in their community or in their church. And I think that this book says, "Reconsider that."

Leah Sottile worked at the Inlander off and on between 2003-2013, including stints as arts editor and music editor. Her work at the Inlander garnered multiple regional and national journalism awards, and also introduced her to her husband, Joe Preston, a former Inlander art director. Her work's been featured in the Washington Post, New York Times Magazine and The Atlantic, and she's the host and reporter of the Bundyville podcast. When The Moon Turns To Blood is her first book.

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Author Leah Sottile discusses her deep dive into two dead children in Idaho, and where extreme religion meets extreme conspiratorial fervor - Inlander