TODAY IN GOD:
RELIGION NEWS BITES FOR YOUR SNACKING PLEASURE
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Where have you gone, Rev. Jim Ignatowski?
Pete Hamill reviews a new history of taxis in New York City, discusses the rise of individualism and the demise of the hacker/philosopher

Taxi drivers are the most enduring oppressed minority in New York City history. Race, ethnicity and religion are not sources of the oppression. It lies entirely in the nature of the work. Trapped for about 12 hours each day in the worst traffic in the United States, taxi drivers must suffer the savage frustrations of jammed streets, double-parked cars, immense trucks, drivers from New Jersey — and they can’t succumb to the explosive therapy of road rage. Their living depends on self-control.

At the same time, they face many other hazards: drunks behind them in the cab, fare beaters, stickup men, Knicks fans filled with biblical despair, out-of-town conventioneers who think the drivers are mobile pimps. Some seal themselves off from the back seat with the radio, an iPod or a cellphone. All pray that the next passenger doesn’t want to go from Midtown to the far reaches of Brooklyn or Queens. They hope for a decent tip. They hope to stay alive until the next fare waves from under a midnight streetlamp.

In this informative, solid history, Graham Russell Gao Hodges traces the story of the cabdrivers from 1907, when the first metered taxis appeared on New York streets, to the present. He writes with obvious sympathy, having driven a hack himself before moving on to academic labors as a historian at Peking University and Colgate. Loneliness is a running theme in “Taxi!”: if the title were not already taken, Hodges could have called his compact history “One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Across 10 decades, taxi drivers have worked alone in the most crowded city in the country. They’ve had a limited feeling of a shared fate in the taxi garages, or in certain cafeterias. But most of the time, even today, they move by themselves through the streets, alert for fares and dangers, paid to spend their days or nights with people they will never see again. When I was young, most of them had adopted a common strategy against loneliness: a fleeting intimacy with their passengers. This was the era of the cabby as philosopher or comedian, quick to make observations about life itself, or its subdivisions in politics and sports, or to crack wise about women and other mysteries. This form of performance art had two goals: human contact and better tips. Some of the cabbies (most of them Irish, Jewish or Italian) were very smart. Some were very funny. Some were bores. And one morning around 1972, I realized that all of them were gone.
FOR THE FULL REVIEW (NEW YORK TIMES) CLICK HERE

A Sacred River Endangered by Global Warming:
Glacial Source of Ganges Is Receding
VARANASI, India — With her eyes sealed, Ramedi cupped the murky water of the Ganges River in her hands, lifted them toward the sun, and prayed for her husband, her 15 grandchildren and her bad hip. She, like the rest of India’s 800 million Hindus, has absolute faith that the river she calls Ganga Ma can heal.

Around Ramedi, who like some Indians has only one name, people converged on the riverbank in the early morning, before the day’s heat set in. Women floated necklaces of marigolds on a boat of leaves, a dozen skinny boys soaped their hair as they bathed in their underwear, and a somber group of men carried a body to the banks of the river, a common ritual before the dead are cremated on wooden funeral pyres. To be cremated beside the Ganges, most here believe, brings salvation from the cycle of rebirth.

“Ganga Ma is everything to Hindus. It’s our chance to attain nirvana,” Ramedi said, emerging from the river, her peach-colored sari dripping along the shoreline.

But the prayer rituals carried out at the water’s edge may not last forever — or even another generation, according to scientists and meteorologists. The Himalayan source of Hinduism’s holiest river, they say, is drying up.

In this 3,000-year-old city known as the Jerusalem of India for its intense religious devotion, climate change could throw into turmoil something many devout Hindus thought was immutable: their most intimate religious traditions. The Gangotri glacier, which provides up to 70 percent of the water of the Ganges during the dry summer months, is shrinking at a rate of 40 yards a year, nearly twice as fast as two decades ago, scientists say.

“This may be the first place on Earth where global warming could hurt our very religion. We are becoming an endangered species of Hindus,” said Veer Bhadra Mishra, an engineer and director of the Varanasi-based Sankat Mochan Foundation, an organization that advocates for the preservation of the Ganges. “The melting glaciers are a terrible thing. We have to ask ourselves, who are the custodians of our culture if we can’t even help our beloved Ganga?”

Environmental groups such as Mishra’s have long focused on pollution of the Ganges. More than 100 cities and countless villages are situated along the 1,568-mile river, which stretches from the foothills of the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal, and few of them have sewage treatment plants.

But recent reports by scientists say the Ganges is under even greater threat from global warming. According to a U.N. climate report, the Himalayan glaciers that are the sources of the Ganges could disappear by 2030 as temperatures rise.
FOR THE FULL STORY (WASHINGTON POST) CLICK HERE

Christian Composer, Inspired by Allah’s 99 Names
CHILDE OKEFORD, England — Fore anyone in Britain and for millions of television viewers elsewhere, a defining image of the year 1997 was the aerial view of the coffin of Diana, Princess of Wales, inching through the darkness of Westminster Abbey. And the defining soundtrack to that image was a stark lament sung by the abbey choir that captured the moment with heart-stopping potency.

Overnight the worldwide exposure of “Song for Athene” transformed John Tavener from a distinguished classical composer into a public figure. New fans registered his odd appearance: tall and thin, with long hair parted in the middle and the ’60s-pop-star look of shirts unbuttoned to the navel. He was re-evaluated. He was knighted. And for many he became almost a spiritual guide: All his work was steeped in Christianity. Or, as he liked to say, “primordial tradition.”

Although English-born and -bred, Mr. Tavener, 63, turned in the 1970s to Eastern Orthodoxy, mirroring its stark, sluggish severity and tonal structures in his music, which, like his conversation, came with allusions to St. Dionysus the Areopagite, St. Gregory of Nyassa and other blissfully obscure divines. His scores bore titles like “Diodia,” “Apocalypse” and “Agraphon.” And being slow, spare and repetitive, they earned him the affectionate but slightly mocking label Holy Minimalist, a term that survivors of his three-hour “Resurrection” or seven-hour “Veil of the Temple” might challenge.

Most of his output these days tends toward the huge, praising God across long time spans with enormous forces in vast spaces: more events than concerts. And the event to have its premiere in Westminster Cathedral on Tuesday could be considered one more example, but it does something likely to unsettle Mr. Tavener’s devotees. Instead of Christian words it sets a text from the Koran.

Given the times, this is newsworthy, and variants on “Tavener Goes Muslim” headlines have already surfaced in the British press, along with items that report his loss of faith and disenchantment with the Christian church. None of which is true.

But for Mr. Tavener to have written “The Beautiful Names,” a meditation on the 99 names of Allah, commissioned by no less than Prince Charles, for performance in a Roman Catholic cathedral does raise certain issues. For one, the charge of opportunism. For another, the risk that Muslims, who don’t exactly value music in worship, might not be appreciative.

“Well, if you look at it like that,” Mr. Tavener muttered in his endearingly distracted way recently, “I suppose it could be a can of worms I’m opening. I’ve no idea what Muslims will make of it. I haven’t really asked. But right after the London premiere, it’s being done in Istanbul, and no one seems to have raised any objection there.

“All I can say is, it’s a wonderful text — basically a list of names, some of majesty, some of mercy — that I’ve set as theophanies: as soundings-forth on the nature of the divine, with music that reflects their meaning. The Beneficent, the Opener, the Subtle. …”
FOR THE FULL STORY (NEW YORK TIMES) CLICK HERE

Robot hosts South Korean wedding
DAEJEON, South Korea – A robot on Sunday acted as master of ceremonies at a South Korean wedding in what its creators claimed as a world first.

Tiro the robot assisted at the wedding of Seok Gyeong-Jae, one of the engineers who designed it, and his bride at Daejeon, 130 kilometres (78 miles) south of Seoul.

“This is Tiro, master of ceremonies for today’s wedding,” the robot — featuring a cone-shaped body, two arms and a dark-glassed face with eyes and a mouth of flashing lights — said in front of smiling guests.

In a male voice, the robot introduced the couple to the crowd, let the couple bow to them and performed its programmed duties.

Manufacturer Hanool Robotics claims it is the first time a robot has been used as master of ceremonies at a wedding.

After its marital duties, Tiro — whose value was put at 200 million won (some 215,000 dollars) — would be upgraded to perform various other functions, according to Hanool officials.

Small other robots were also at the ceremony to guide guests or give performances.
FOR THE FULL STORY (AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE VIA YAHOO NEWS ) CLICK HERE

Residents try to save Idaho ghost town
SILVER CITY, Idaho – High on scaffolding beneath Our Lady of Tears Catholic Church’s front gable, David Wilper applies a final coat of paint to the window arch.

He’s installing new stained glass in the church, built in 1898 and still host to one Mass every summer month when members of 50 families live in Idaho’s best-known ghost town. November through June there’s a watchman here, to keep vandals on snowmobiles in check.

“That window has been boarded up for 50 years,” said Wilper, the church sexton, whose renovations are part of a broader effort to preserve a delicate balance.

It’s an effort to prevent Silver City from dying out, while keeping it from becoming just another tourist trap huckstering frontier kitsch to ATV-riding hordes streaming into Idaho’s once gold-rich hills from the growing Boise suburbs.

It’s the same challenge faced by its ghost town brethren across the northern Rocky Mountains, including Bannack and Virginia City in Montana, or Berlin in Nevada, all of which eventually shifted to state ownership to help preserve them.

In Silver City, the Bureau of Land Management owns much of the townsite, but its 70 structures remain in private hands. Residents of town, on the National Register of Historic Places, can’t build new and they can’t alter exteriors except for repairs. A new law is in the works to keep the surrounding 10,000 acres looking much as they did a century ago.
FOR THE FULL STORY (AP VIA YAHOO NEWS) CLICK HERE

Sony apologises to Church of England over computer game
LONDON – Entertainment giant Sony has apologised to the Church of England for featuring a prominent British cathedral in a violent video game, a spokesman for the church said Friday.

The Japanese firm had written to officials at Manchester Cathedral in north-west England, saying they had not intended to cause offence by using the building in the PlayStation 3 game “Resistance: Fall of Man,” he added.

“If we have done so, we sincerely apologise,” the letter read.

The cathedral’s dean, Rogers Govender, said in response: “We acknowledge the admission by Sony that the building in the game is Manchester Cathedral.

“We thank Sony for the apology they have made.

“However, we do not move from the position that we are against violence and especially the gun violence seen in this portrayal of the cathedral.”
FOR THE FULL STORY (AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE VIA YAHOO NEWS) CLICK HERE