St. Louis News Blog

​ An official with the Saint Louis Science Center has all but ruled out creationists as the possible suspects in a brazen attack this week of a dinosaur sculpture at the museum.

A technician with the traveling "Dinosaurs Unearthed" exhibit repairs the split-open tail of the Apatosaurus statue on Wednesday at the Saint Louis Science Center.

​Beth McClure, a spokesman for the Science Center, said the attack on the Apatosaurus statue outside the facility came from someone swinging on its tail, breaking it off and splitting it open.

Asked by Daily RFT if religious zealots may have been behind the vandalism, McClure responded: "I can't comment on that or speculate."

She was, however, more than willing to speculate on another theory.

"We think it was just some kids who got too close and were just messing around with it," McClure said.

On Wednesday afternoon a technician traveling with the exhibit used a paintbrush to glue the tail's outer layer back together. Despite the seemingly superficial damage to the statue, McClure said the press release she sent out alerting media to the vandalism at the museum was not a publicity stunt designed to drum up interest in the exhibit.

Judge for yourself, after the jump.

Wikimedia Commons

Time for confession?

​A federal grand jury on Thursday indicted the Rev. James Grady for sex trafficking, enticement of children and possession of child pornography. 

Grady was arrested this past summer during an FBI and Maryland Heights Police Department sting. According to the U.S. Attorney's Office, Grady showed up at a house expecting to pay for a half-hour's worth of sex acts with a sixteen-year-old girl.

Grady allegedly arranged the meeting through an ad on Craigslist. 

Grady was the pastor at St. Raphael the Archangel in south city. St. Louis Archbishop Robert Carlson suspended Grady after his arrest this summer.

An outpost of Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam has plans to build its first mosque in St. Louis.

The group, known as Mosque #28, held a fundraiser last Sunday to raise the monies needed to renovate an existing building in the Walnut Park neighborhood of north St. Louis.

A rendering of the proposed Nation of Islam mosque in St. Louis.

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Currently the mosque is based in a Roberts Brothers property on North Kingshighway. According to an e-mail solicitation, Mosque #28 plans to focus on mentoring and youth programs when the new building is up and running.

​Good news for all you good witches. Bad ones, too. The popularity of your belief has more than doubled in recent years.

Yes, according to the American Religious Identification Survey, the number of people identifying as "other religion" or "new religious movements" grew from 1.8 million in 2001 to 2.8 million in 2008.

During that same time period the number of Americans who say they're Wiccan (the religion to which many -- but not all -- witches subscribe) more than doubled from 134,000 in 2001 to 342,000 in '08. The same held true for pagans, whose numbers grew from 140,000 in 2001 to 340,000 in 2008.

Some experts credit the growing numbers of pagan or neo-pagan religions to the Internet, which allows followers to become more connected. Others just say its just a matter of society becoming more tolerant. (When was the last time you heard about a witch being burned at the stake?)

Regardless, here's some interesting factoids on the popularity of these beliefs, courtesy of ReligionLink.com...

thereseofdivinepeace.org

Marybeth McBryan will become the third local Roman Catholic Womanpriest on Sunday -- critics be damned.

​Marybeth McBryan, a former member of the St. Louis Public Schools Board of Education and current deacon at Therese of Divine Peace, will be ordained as a Roman Catholic Womanpriest this Sunday.

McBryan is the third local woman in the last two years to be ordained through the Virginia-based Womenpriest program.

In November 2007, Rose Marie "Ree" Hudson and Elsie McGrath caused quite the brouhaha in local Catholic circles when they became Womenpriests. In March 2008, then-St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke ex-communicated both women.

McBryan says she's prepared to face criticism from Roman Catholics and others who don't believe women have the right to deliver sacraments. "I don't believe that I'm in any position to judge anyone, so I kind of take the attitude that [my critics] aren't either. Nobody died and made them God."
  

flickr.com/photos/stockholm_cindy

​All apologies to detractors of Joyce Meyer, but Elizabeth Clare Prophet, who slithered off this mortal coil last Thursday, was undoubtedly the weirdest female religious figure in this country.

Prophet began her prophetic career in 1973 when her husband Mark Prophet died and she took over the leadership of the Summit Lighthouse, a group he had founded in 1957 and which combined elements of Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism and Theosophy.

Writes William Grimes in Prophet's New York Times obituary:

In 1975, she founded the Church Universal and Triumphant, a formal religion with ceremonies and sacraments, extending the work of the Lighthouse. The religion's teachings were derived from divine messages believed to be transmitted by the Ascended Masters, a pantheon of mystic saints and sages, among them Jesus and the Theosophist master El Morya. Its worldwide membership was once estimated at 30,000 to 50,000 people.

In the late 1980s, Mrs. Prophet issued warnings of an impending nuclear strike by the Soviet Union against the United States. More than 2,000 of her followers left their homes and gathered at the church's compound near Corwin Springs, Mont., near the northern edge of Yellowstone National Park. There they began stockpiling weapons, food and clothing in underground bomb shelters.

As luck would have it, nothing happened. Don't you just hate when your prophecies don't work out?

Photo by Kristen Hinman

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www.myspace.com

Nathan Halbach, reportedly the son of a St. Louis priest, is now ill with brain cancer and asking for help from the Roman Catholic Church

​The St. Louis chapter of SNAP (Survivors' Network of those Abused by Priests) is on the lookout for girls or women who may have been abused by a Roman Catholic priest named Fr. Henry Willenborg, following a revelation last week that an O'Fallon resident fathered a child with Willenborg two decades ago.

"Willenborg lived and worked here [for eight or nine years] and we want to know if anyone was hurt by him," says Barbara Dorris, spokeswoman for SNAP's St. Louis chapter.

Pat Bond, of O'Fallon, told the New York Times that she and Willenborg were lovers for five years in the 1980's and that she conceived two children by him. The first pregnancy resulted in a miscarriage (Bond told the NYT that Willenborg urged her to abort). The second pregnancy resulted in the birth of Nathan Halbach.

(Halbach got the last name of Bond's first husband, apparently to hide the fact he'd been fathered by a priest. After Bond and Willenborg split, Bond remarried and divorced two more times.)

Halbach is now 22. Three years ago he had to quit his studies at Mizzou when he learned he has brain cancer. For many years, and until Halbach turned 21, according to the Times, the Church paid Bond hush-money. But now Bond and Halbach both have cancer and are struggling to make ends meet. Bond wants the Church to help with expenses.

flickr.com/photos/dee_lightful

​Unreal doesn't consider ourself a likely candidate for salvation, but we happened to hear Patti Smith's "Dancing Barefoot" on the radio the other day and decided that if it ever does happen, it will be on a dance floor. Of course, our Patti-inspired vision involves vast quantities of hallucinogens and maybe some ecstatic Sufi-like spinning.

Then we heard about The Body Light Club, a Christian nightclub downtown, next door to the City Museum. Our heathenish heart atremble, we called up Leonard Foxworth, Jr., the club's owner to find out how soon we could get saved.

flickr.com/photos/bestrated1

King Louis IX: saint, crusader, good to Christians, really, really, really mean to Jews.

​Tomorrow is Tisha b'Av, the ninth of the Jewish month of Av and the saddest day of the Jewish year. Most Jewish holidays memorialize the deliverance of the Chosen People from certain destruction at the hands of various pharaohs, kings, sultans, etc., with lots of celebration and eating.

But as anyone who has a passing knowledge of post-Biblical Jewish history knows, there have been far fewer clear-cut victories over the past 2,500 years or so. Yes, the Jews somehow survived, but they mostly owed their survival to expulsion to far-flung locales like Babylonia or, in most cases, sheer dumb luck.

One of the chief perpetrators of Jewish agony over the past few millennia was King Louis IX of France, otherwise known as St. Louis, the man for whom our fair city was named.

Wikimedia Commons

Raymond Burke

Former St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke, now head of the Vatican's supreme court, is determined to stop President Barack Obama from delivering the commencement speech May 17 at University of Notre Dame.

On Friday, Burke told Catholics at a prayer breakfast: "The proposed granting of an honorary doctorate at Notre Dame University to our president, who is so aggressively advancing an anti-life and anti-family agenda, is rightly the source of the greatest scandal."

Burke made similar overtures back in 2004 when he announced that he would deny communion to presidential candidate -- and fellow Catholic -- John Kerry for his pro-choice stand.

On Friday Burke told Catholics that if they are not willing to stand up for the church's teachings, "We are not worthy of the name Catholic."

But could the hard-line stance of Burke and fellow Catholic leaders threaten the church?

flickr.com/photos/james_in_balto

Today is the National Day of Prayer. Or, in the words of the National Day of Prayer Task Force, a chance to "pray with conviction that God would continue to shed His grace on thee." This has been going on since 1952 when President (and Missourian) Harry Truman signed a joint resolution by both houses of Congress into law.

Prayer is a means of forming a closer relationship with God. You can't just ask for things. That is the difference between God and Santa Claus. (I'm getting all this from the National Day of Prayer Task Force official website, by the way. Although I may have taken a bit of license with the part about Santa Claus.)

Sounds great. Only the thing is, the National Day of Prayer is for Christians only. It says so right on the Saint Louis Gateway National Day of Prayer website:

The purpose of the St. Louis Gateway National Day of Prayer Committee is to assist Christians in the metro St. Louis area to gather at local city halls and other venues on the annual National Day of Prayer, the first Thursday of May, to pray for all U.S. citizens.

So what's a nice Jewish girl to do? Or a Muslim or a Hindu or a Wiccan or any other U.S. citizen that does not happen to be a Christian? Are we just supposed to depend on the Christians to pray for us?

saginaw.org

The new archbishop, Robert Carlson

The Vatican announced this morning that Pope Benedict XVI has appointed Robert J. Carlson, bishop of the diocese of Saginaw, Michigan, as archbishop of St. Louis. He will serve as the city's tenth bishop and ninth archbishop.

Carlson, 64, has served as the bishop of Saginaw since 2005. He was born in 1944 in Minneapolis and ordained to the priesthood in 1979 for the archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.

Prior to taking over in Saginaw, Carlson served as the bishop of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where he got into a public spat with former Senator Tom Daschle over the politician's pro-abortion stance. In 2003 Carlson sent Daschle a letter informing the South Dakota senator to remove any references to his Catholicism from his biography.  

Carlson will be introduced to the St. Louis diocese this morning. He replaces Raymond Burke who left last year to work at the Vatican.

Depending on your own political bent, Emmy-nominated satirist Bill Maher is either a personality you love to hate, or a personality you hate to love. From Politically Incorrect to Real Time and religion to legalizing drugs he's never shied away from speaking his mind, whether in front of television cameras or atop a stand-up stage. Before he performs Thursday at the Fabulous Fox Theatre, Maher talked with the Daily RFT.

How are things generally going at Real Time? Everything chugging along merrily?
I think the audience has really embraced the 10 o'clock starting time. So that's great. We're doing good this year and I think in general, audiences -- whether they be the television audience or the live audience for stand-up -- I think we were all sick of Bush and I think we're all happy that it's a new world, and also a new world to make fun of. It's a whole different set of comedic parameters now. I'm enjoying it a lot because I was sick of making fun of Bush. And now we have a new administration and a whole new set of issues, a lot of economic issues. I've been on a road a lot this year already and I'm telling you, there's comedy in it. People who were worried that comedy was over when George Bush went away can rest easy: There is still comedy.

Photo: Jennifer Silverberg

At the end of 2007, when we asked Ferguson barber and former boxer Charles Oliver what he would do to improve St. Louis in 2008, he told us he wanted to change the way people think. "I would set up seminars on building strong character and teach people ways to be impeccable with their word," he said.

Now, after two years of study with Pastor Charles M. Roach of Trinity Mt. Carmel Baptist Church in Florissant, Oliver is about to become ordained as a minister.

"I wanted to understand more about the principles of the church," he says. "The message I speak is different from most churches. I want to collaborate what I know with what they want to hear."

Now that he's about to become a minister, Oliver is prepared to speak whenever anybody calls him. (His cell number is 314-374-0258; he can also be reached at 314-521-1111.)

"A piece of paper makes you stand out," he says, referring to the official ordination papers. "I look forward to helping people become changed because of the Good Word."

Enjoy...

flickr.com/photos/vidiot

This guy didn't make the hot rabbi list, either.

Just in time for Passover, Newsweek has revealed its list of the 50 hottest rabbis in America. (We don't see the connection between Passover and rabbinical hotness, either. Butanyway.)

"Hotness" in this case refers to influence, alas, not personal appearance. The hottest rabbi in America right now is Rabbi David Saperstein, Director of the Religious Action Center and the Co-Chair of the Coalition to Preserve Religious Liberty, and, more significantly, a Friend of Obama.

None of St. Louis' rabbis made the list. But they shouldn't feel too bad. Cousin of Obama Rabbi Capers Funnye didn't make the list, either.

But -- Central Reform Congregation in the Central West End (and, incidentally, the only synagogue within the city limits) made the Web exclusive list of America's 25 Most Vibrant Congregations: "St. Louis's only congregation strives to capture the attention and the involvement of its diverse community."

CRC will celebrate its 25th birthday later this month.

Unreal visited CRC's Purim celebration last year when Rabbi Randy Fleisher dressed up as Fruma Sarah, a Jewish girl hungry for knowledge, and says that if the hot rabbi list had referred to physical appearance, Fleisher would have been a lock.
 

Today is an auspicious day to be a Jew.  It's the last day before Passover, which gives us total license to consume the last of our chametz, or leavened bread, which will be forbidden for the next eight days. It is also the day to say Birkat Hachama, that most exceedingly rare of blessings, said only once every 28 years to thank God for the sun.

(Also, happy birthday, Dad!)

I'm still not entirely clear why we say Birkat Hachama only once every 28 years. It has something to do with the vagaries of the lunar calendar and the sun returning to the same position it was at Creation. The spring equinox also figures in there somehow, but I'll be damned if I know how.

photo by Aimee Levitt

Ah, the traditional rite of spring that is Easter: The resurrection of Christ, a nice bouquet of flowers, a brunch buffet...and a roundhouse kick to the face?

Wikimedia Commons

Maybe Obama knew what he was doing when he gave a shout-out to non-believers during his inaugural address.

www.joycemeyer.org

Joyce Meyer

Seventeen months after the U.S. Senate Finance Committee launched an accounting inquiry into six television evangelists, one of those TV preachers -- Fenton's own Joyce Meyer -- says she's now financially square.

Yesterday a Virginia organization called the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA) issued a statement announcing that Meyer's ministry is fully accredited with its agency.

In November 2007, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), the ranking member on the finance committee, sent a letter asking that Joyce and her husband, David, provide the government with its audited financial statements. At the time, Grassley stated that he was targeting the ministries after hearing complaints of "governing boards that aren't independent and allow generous salaries and housing allowances and amenities such as private jets and Rolls Royces."

This past July, Grassley said that Joyce Meyer Ministries was one of just two organizations cooperating with the inquiry. The four other ministries declined to hand over their finances to the senate committee.

I left a message with Grassley's office yesterday afternoon to see how -- if at all -- the recent accreditation of Meyer's ministry might impact the ongoing inquiry. I've yet to get a response.

In the meantime, here's how ECFA describes itself on its Web site.

William Blake

Anybody out there?

Just two months ago, President Obama identified non-believers as a legitimate religious group, right up there with Jews and Hindus.

But watch out, non-believers! An article in New Scientist claims that you are just deluding yourselves. Human beings are hard-wired to believe in...something.

In the past, scientists, when they've bothered to consider religion at all, have argued that religion is an evolutionary adaptation that helps humans band together and sets up a series of cultural taboos that may keep them safer, especially in uncertain times.

But now some, including Washington University psychologist Pascal Boyer, claim that the brain naturally distinguishes between the physical, or natural, world and the spiritual, or supernatural.

Ten years ago this month, an American-born priest named John Kaiser traveled from his parish in Lolgorien, Kenya, to Nairobi, the capitol, to testify before the Akiwumi Commission, a tribunal established by then-President Daniel arap Moi to investigate the causes of the tribal violence that was tearing the nation apart.

Kaiser's testimony implicated several Kenyan government officials, including Moi. A year and a half later, Kaiser's body was discovered in a ditch beside a major highway. The back of his head had been blown off.

If this story sounds familiar, it's because I told it in an October 2007 cover story, "The Death of Father Kaiser."

On Sunday, the Los Angeles Times began a three-part series about Kaiser's extraordinary life and death. Unlike myself, the writer, Christopher Goffard, got to go to Kenya to do his reporting. It's definitely worth a look.