Radical feminist theologian Mary Daly has died. An appreciation in the independent Catholic paper National Catholic Reporter calls her "a mother of modern feminist theology." What does radical feminist theology sound like? National Catholic Reporter shares an excerpt from a piece Daly wrote for the New Yorker: "Ever since childhood, I have been honing my skills for living the life of a radical feminist pirate and cultivating the courage to win. The word ‘sin’ is derived from the Indo-European root ‘es-,’ meaning ‘to be.’ When I discovered this etymology, I intuitively understood that for a woman trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, ‘to be’ in the fullest sense is ‘to sin.’" That's classic Daly.

“I urge you to sin,” she once wrote. “But not against these itty-bitty religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism—or their secular derivatives, Marxism, Maoism, Freudianism and Jungianism—which are all derivatives of the big religion of patriarchy. Sin against the infrastructure itself!”

Source: National Catholic Reporter 

If you missed the 60 Minutes feature on Predator drones, you’ll have to get your military propaganda fix somewhere else.

America’s flying death machines do not enjoy a favorable reputation in Afghanistan or among many of our allies. It’s a problem that only seems to get worse. “While no military has ever done more to prevent civilian casualties,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates said from a podium in Kabul last year, “it’s clear we have to work even harder.” That was October 2008. More than six months later Afghan families are routinely decimated by U.S. bombs or obliterated altogether.

In the 60 Minutes report, according to the show's website, "Laura Logan discovers first hand how precise the Predator can be.” It’s exactly the message the military needs out there right now: precision, precision, precision. It’s a battle they can’t win, however, if only because war (no matter how technologically advanced) is murderously imprecise.

To the grunts on the ground, war's imprecision is an uncontroversial notion. But the pilots of these deadly machines are different. They fly their drones remotely from a base forty-five miles north of Las Vegas and many worlds away from the particular patch of earth that shakes and burns from their Hellfire missiles and 500 lb bombs.

Not surprisingly, the pilots cleared to speak with Logan exuded confidence:

"What if you get it wrong?" she asks one pilot.

"We don't," he replies.

"Ever?"

"That's a tough question." Pause. "Yeah. We have the resources to make sure we're right.”

Precision, precision, precision. A demonstration of the Predator’s exactitude features Logan and her crew caught by the camera of a hovering drone. “What better way for 60 Minutes to shill for the military,” writes Michael Shaw at his blog BAGnewsNotes, “than to soften the reality of hell-from-the-sky by focusing on the lovely Laura Logan from 10,000 feet?”

It’s striking how much her two-man camera crew resembles a couple of fighters. And it’s no stretch to imagine how a person trained to kill might have an easier time pulling the trigger from the desert north of Vegas—especially when your combat environment looks like this:

In all the talk of America's technological prowess, an important point is lost: Inevitably, people make mistakes. And when the U.S. military makes mistakes, civilians die. When that happens, the military military makes no effort to assess civilian deaths following air strikes, unless a special investigation is called. That job is often left to NATO, which sends soldiers into villages for “battle damage assessments” whenever possible. That means tending to the wounded, counting and photographing the dead, and sitting down with village elders.

Last October I spoke to Brig. Gen. Richard Blanchette, a spokesperson for NATO forces in Afghanistan, about the mess we so often leave behind: “We need the support of the people of Afghanistan,” he said on an unsteady line from Kabul. It’s “a tough challenge for our leadership to go into a village after force is used in that manner.”

I took “a tough challenge” to be a world-class understatement, but I can’t be certain of course. An anonymous ambassador to Afghanistan was more candid in a statement to Human Rights Watch late last year: “Some Afghans think the U.S. is worse than the Russians. There is a cultural problem with the U.S.—they are cowboys.”

It’s a truth we must face: our Cowboy-in-Chief is back in Crawford, but our cowboy problem is far from over.

Source: BAGnewsNotes, National Catholic Reporter 

Screenshots by Michael Shaw. 

Big news! Pope Benedict XVI has broken the papal record for most mosque visits. With his visit to the Hussein bin-Talal mosque in Amman, Jordan, he bested his predecessor’s record by just one visit—but he also doubled it.

That’s not bad math: the record for mosque visits by a single pontiff, which Benedict XVI now holds, is two.

Here’s John Allen from the independent Catholic newspaper National Catholic Reporter:

Late this morning, Benedict visited the Hussein bin-Talal mosque in the Jordanian capital of Amman. That makes two mosque tours for Benedict XVI, after a visit to the legendary Blue Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey, in late 2006. Though John Paul made appearances at many mosques over the years, he only entered one – the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, Syria, in 2001.

Granted, the visit in Amman wasn’t quite the same stunner as Istanbul. For one thing, the symbolism was different; Benedict didn’t share a moment of silent prayer with an imam, and he didn’t take off his shoes. He did both in the Blue Mosque in 2006.

Nonetheless, the pope’s choice to go to the mosque at all, which is named for Jordan’s late King Hussein, offered further confirmation of the rising importance of Islam for this pope and for the broader Catholic church.

Source: National Catholic Reporter 

Catholic Priest and longtime peace activist Roy Bourgeois has been told by the Vatican to end his advocacy for women's ordination or be excommunicated. He’s chosen excommunication. The independent Catholic paper National Catholic Reporter spoke with Bourgeois:

Hardly a day passes that a phone call or a letter doesn’t bring tears to his eyes. 'I never knew just how deeply women have been hurt by the church. And after hearing from so many women, I’m no longer comfortable being part of an institution that excludes them. Over and over again, they tell him of their struggles with faith, of the anguish of sexual abuse, of profound feelings of dejection. And of a rising anger. Some — like a woman who wrote him about being sexually abused by a bishop — are livid that the church, while finding women unworthy for ordination, protects pedophile priests and never threatens to excommunicate them.

Many are also incensed that the Vatican would so quickly take drastic action against Bourgeois. Bourgeois has done several stints in federal prison protesting the  U.S. Army School of the Americas , which has trained dictators, assassins and death-squad leaders across Latin America. While he has appreciated letters that thanked him for speaking out for women who say they have no voice, Bourgeois is careful to make clear that he is not trying to speak for women, but to stand in solidarity with them.

Read the entire story here.