Photo by Gage Skidmore

By Leo Partible

Stan Lee is a rock star. He is the Elvis of comic books. He didn’t create the medium, nor did he invent the superhero, but he was responsible for popularizing both for the masses. Like Elvis, he understood the possibilities, molding and reinventing the story and structure of the comic book, as well as deconstructing and reconstructing the mythology and the archetypes of the superhero story. Blessed with both a literary sophistication and the soul of a childlike dreamer, the witty and gregarious Stan Lee was the first comic creator to have a personal connection with his audience. And in doing so, he became the name and the face synonymous with the art form.

Elvis was the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll and today, still in the prime of his life and still creating new concepts, Stan Lee is the King of Comic Books. But even more, because of the phenomenal success of the films based on his Marvel Comics characters, Stan Lee is a brand name. He is Walt Disney.

As we sat down in his Beverly Hills office, Stan Lee settled into his chair. For a moment, his eyes focused on the familiar symbol hanging from the chain around my neck. He asked with a tinge of concern, “Is there a reason you have Superman symbol on your chain?” I understood the implication, wearing merchandise associated with Stan’s competition. I answered with a slight crack in my voice, “Is that heresy?” He broke out in a warm and reassuring smile and pointed to a picture on his bookshelf. There was Stan in an iconic pose, ripping open his shirt to reveal the famous Superman logo. I laughed and added, “I also noticed you have a big picture of you in your lobby outside – the one where you’re sitting next to a life-size statue of Clark Kent. That was taken inside the DC offices, wasn’t it?” Stan snickered like a kid caught in the act, brushing off the obvious irony. “You realize you probably saved the character as well as the rest of DC Comics,” I said with great affection. He beamed. “I suppose I did.” Continue reading →

By Pauline Curtet, This is Finland

Finnish heavy metal pioneers such as Nightwish, Apocalyptica and HIM, known worldwide, proved to be inspiring. Since 2006, a priest has regularly organised metal mass – mass for metal music fans – in churches around Finland.

It’s eight o’clock on a cold Saturday night in the southwestern Finnish city of Turku. Several hundred people enter Archangel Michael’s Church to attend a special kind of mass. In this service, a heavy metal band – complete with singer, bassist, drummer, keyboardist and two guitarists – performs the religious hymns.

“We didn’t change the lyrics of the hymns,” says Haka Kekäläinen, the 50-year-old priest presiding over the mass. “We only changed the musical arrangements to fit the rhythms of metal music.” He looks exactly like a metalhead: dark hair down to his shoulders, a long beard and – when he isn’t wearing his priestly robes – a leather coat. Continue reading →

Joyce Fienberg, 75; Richard Gottfried, 65; Rose Mallinger, 97; Jerry Rabinowitz, 66; Cecil Rosenthal, 59; David Rosenthal, 54; Bernice Simon, 84; Sylvan Simon, 86; Daniel Stein, 71; Melvin Wax, 88; Irving Younger, 69. Beautiful lives. Tree of Life Synagogue, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Please read Lou Weiss’s piece in the Wall Street Journal, “Amalek Comes to Pittsburgh.” “There are not so many of us Jews in the world—something like 0.2% of the population—so we pride ourselves on punching above our weight. We introduced some of the foundational ideas of Western civilization: the sanctity of human life, uniform morality, freedom, concern for the downtrodden, the weekend. 

“Sadly we are also above average in attracting evil people who hate what we stand for….The archetype for all anti-Semites is Amalek. His cowardly specialty was picking off the old, weak and infirm stragglers at the back of the Exodus pack. Saturday’s murderer was Amalek brought to life, as he mainly killed old and mentally challenged members of all three of the resident congregations.”

William Blake, who is best known for his poetry, drew pictures of scenes described in the Bible. In this illustration, Satan afflicts Job with sores and boils.

By Kelsey Dallas, Deseret News

SALT LAKE CITY — Still searching for a spooky Halloween costume? Try reading the Bible for inspiration. Old and New Testament stories describe sea monsters, giants and avenging spirits that are just as scary as the vampires or zombies we see on TV, according to religion scholars. People of faith just don’t retell these tales very often, preferring more comforting religious messages.

“A lot of people don’t have a way of knowing that there are monsters throughout the Bible because so many of them have been tamed or domesticated,” said Esther J. Hamori, an associate professor of the Hebrew Bible at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.

Take cherubim, for example. Today, we think of them as “happy, fat angel babies,” but in the Bible they’re winged guardians who sometimes have the body of a lion, Hamori noted. “That’s always a slight shock to my students,” she said.

By redesigning or ignoring biblical monsters, we miss out on more than great costume ideas, Hamori and others explained. We miss a chance to have deeper conversations about why bad things happen and how God wants us to respond. Continue reading →

“No Microwaves, No Freezers, No Heat Lamps.” Happy 70th anniversary to my beloved In-N-Out. While I happily live in Whataburger territory, I’m an unrepentant hustler for the Animal Style Double-Double. So was the late Anthony Bourdain. He described the Double-Double as a “ballistic missile … a perfectly designed protein delivery system.”

Look, debate amongst yourselves all you want: McDonalds vs. Burger King, Shack Shake vs. Five Guys, Wendy’s vs. Jack In the Box. Leave me out of it. In this debate, I’m a lover, not a fighter. Just get me to In-N-Out, my Southern California comfort food feeding trough. When I fly home to Orange County, my first stop from the John Wayne Airport is In-N-Out. Go ahead, ask my mom and dad.

In-N-Out is owned by the descendants of its founders, Harry (1913-1976) and Esther (1920-2006) Snyder. It does not franchise – no matter what the offer. The company is worth about $3 billion and CEO Lynsi Snyder is the 36-year-old granddaughter of the founders (most recently on the cover of Forbes). The company routinely gets offers to go public or sell. “We’ve had some pretty crazy offers,” Snyder told Forbes. “There’s been, like, princes and different people throwing some big numbers at us where I’m like, ‘Really?’ ” The plan never changes. “We will continue to politely say no to Wall Street or to the Saudi princes. Whoever will come,” says In-N-Out. Continue reading →

During a host of one-liners in her 17 minute speech at the 73rd Annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, she poked fun at her boss and a gaggle of other politicians from both parties. In the midst of the laughter, however, she also made a serious point about our severely polarized political culture.

“In our toxic political environment, I’ve heard some people in both parties describe their opponents as enemies or evil,” Haley said. “In America, our political opponents are not evil. In South Sudan, where rape is routinely used as a weapon of war — that is evil. In Syria, where the dictator uses chemical weapons to murder innocent children — that is evil. In North Korea, where American student Otto Warmbier was tortured to death — that was evil.”

“In the last two years, I’ve seen true evil,” Haley continued. “We have some serious political differences here at home. But our opponents are not evil. They’re just our opponents.”

To read the entire article, click HERE

Caroll Spinney and Oscar the Grouch at the Daytime Creative Arts Emmy Awards in New York in April 2006. (Brad Barket/Getty Images)

As a kid, Oscar the Grouch was my fave Sesame Street character. Here’s the low down on the origins of the character from Travis Andrews from the Washington Post.

“He’s green, he lives in a trash can and he’s always waking up on the wrong side of the bed.

“His name is Oscar the Grouch, and even people who watched “Sesame Street” as kids might find him a bit confounding. Why is he green? How did he choose his home? And why’s he in such a bad mood? The answer lies with Caroll Spinney, the performer behind the roles of Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch, who announced his retirement from the show Monday after almost 50 years.”
*** Continue reading →

By Ben Sasse, Wall Street Journal

Humans are social, relational beings. We want and need to be in tribes. In our time, however, all of the traditional tribes that have sustained humans for millennia are simultaneously in collapse. Family, enduring friendship, meaningful shared work, local communities of worship—all have grown ever thinner. We are creating thicker, more vehement tribes around our political differences, I believe, because there is a growing vacuum at the heart of our shared (or increasingly, not so shared) everyday lives.

Loneliness is everywhere in the U.S., across every sector of society. A survey of more than 20,000 American adults conducted earlier this year by the health insurer Cigna and the market research firm Ipsos found that a majority of us are lonely, based on responses to the UCLA Loneliness Scale. The highest scores were reported by the youngest adults, ages 18 to 22. The researchers describe it as a “loneliness epidemic.”

None of this should surprise us. Americans today have fewer shared projects than our parents and grandparents did, and we belong to fewer civic groups. Because we change jobs more often, we have fewer lasting work friendships. We delay marriage, have fewer children and live in larger homes, more separate from those of our neighbors. We move from place to place for relationships, economic opportunity and better weather—and we end up with economic opportunity and better weather. Continue reading →

By Yascha Mounk, The Atlantic

On social media, the country seems to divide into two neat camps: Call them the woke and the resentful. Team Resentment is manned—pun very much intended—by people who are predominantly old and almost exclusively white. Team Woke is young, likely to be female, and predominantly black, brown, or Asian (though white “allies” do their dutiful part). These teams are roughly equal in number, and they disagree most vehemently, as well as most routinely, about the catchall known as political correctness.

Reality is nothing like this. As scholars Stephen Hawkins, Daniel Yudkin, Miriam Juan-Torres, and Tim Dixon argue in a report published Wednesday, “Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape,” most Americans don’t fit into either of these camps. They also share more common ground than the daily fights on social media might suggest—including a general aversion to PC culture. Continue reading →

Mural of the late Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero in Panchimalco, on the outskirts of San Salvador. Photograph: Jorge Dan Lopez/Reuters

Gerhard Ludwig Cardinal Müller, First Things

As the disciples were on their way to the Mount of Olives after the Last Supper, Jesus told them, “All of you will be scandalized because of me this night, for it is written in scripture, I will smite the shepherds and the sheep of the flock will be scattered.” Some two thousand years later, on the evening of March 24, 1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero began to say Mass at the chapel of Divine Providence Hospital in San Salvador. As he finished preaching the homily and turned toward the altar, he was shot. The day before, the archbishop had called for the Salvadoran army to refuse to carry out any more extra-judicial killings ordered by the Junta. Earlier that month, he had anticipated the consequences of this public act. “You can tell them, if they succeed in killing me, then I pardon them, and I bless those who may carry out the killing.”

Romero’s death, like that of Christ, remains a stumbling block. The gospel is not a tidy theory that explains the world, a spiritual technique for facing life’s challenges, or a program whereby mankind can redeem itself—by violence or by peace. No, the Cross contradicts all who attempt to decipher the world without God or to submit it to human control. It urges us to place our trust in him to whom we owe our life and being. That the Innocent One should suffer and die for the guilty is the ultimate scandal of human history. God’s grace alone frees us from sin and enables us to collaborate in building his kingdom.

To read entire article, click HERE.