NYT on Catholic/abortion/hospitals/etc:
In an apparent split with Roman Catholic bishops over the abortion-financing provisions of the proposed health care overhaul, the nation’s Catholic hospitals have signaled that they back the Senate’s compromise on the issue, raising hopes of breaking an impasse in Congress and stirring controversy within the church.
I woke up at 0700 to go birding. One of the most difficult and frustrating parts of birding is not being able to nail down a specific species when you know the general kind of bird you saw. eBird is being a pain in the ass too. I'm grumpy now.
Anyway, check out group of videos documenting the planning, , design, and construction of the Boeing 777.
Metafilter post about the increasing wishy-washiness in American religion.
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British Sex Clubs from the olden days.
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What English sounds like to non-native speakers:
Starlings over Somerset marsh from Steve Parry on Vimeo.
Starlings from doncrowley on Vimeo.
Starlings 7 from Steve Parry on Vimeo.
Starlings 5 from Steve Parry on Vimeo.
European Starling from Eldon Zigarlick on Vimeo.
Europian Starling from Ed Matuod on Vimeo.
Eco: I'm afraid that, by now, it might actually be 50,000 books. When my secretary wanted to catalogue them, I asked her not to. My interests change constantly, and so does my library. By the way, if you constantly change your interests, your library will constantly be saying something different about you. Besides, even without a catalogue, I'm forced to remember my books. I have a hallway for literature that's 70 meters long. I walk through it several times a day, and I feel good when I do.
--From interview with Umberto Eco, that lucky bastard
Andrew Zuckerman's fantastic site with content from his Bird Book Amazing photos with bird calls also.
We also have Telling the Bees, a super blog about everything bee-related.
My new favorite bird.
When I was young, my sister voiced her concern over the validity of Plato's view of women in the Republic. She proposed that the entirety of Plato's philosophy is cast into doubt if he be sexist. The same issue arises again. Discuss.
Video: Hitchens + Fry + Archbishop John Onaiyekan + Ann Widdecombe, M.P.
It's as if someone looked up "strawman" in the dictionary and handpicked the two most incompetent defenders of the Catholic faith possible. Christopher Hitchens was a greasy, smarmy, ignorant fool (as usual) and Stephen Fry was well-spoken and convincing.
So instead of filling Facebook with postings, I will now consolidate all my writings and links here...for better or for worse.
We begin with the next post, which hopefully will be either about neo-atheism or birds.
Street fights in Rome after beatification—
(From The Independent)
Pope Benedict XVI today waded into a fierce political battle in Spain over its bloody past, beatifying 498 priests and nuns killed in the civil war in the largest ever ceremony of its kind.
Addressing the 30,000 mainly Spanish pilgrims that flocked to Rome, the Pope paid tribute to the “martyrs” of the 1936-39 war, who had “paid in blood for their faith in Christ and his Church” and put them on the path to sainthood.
“Their words and gestures of forgiveness towards their persecutors should enable us to work towards reconciliation and peaceful coexistence,” the Pontiff said.
But far from healing the rifts left by the conflict, the lavish ceremony in St. Peter’s Square stirred anger among those who fought against General Franco and suffered under his subsequent 36-year dictatorship. The Roman Catholic Church largely supported Franco’s side during the war and its aftermath and critics said it was again choosing sides by honouring victims on only one side.
Street fights broke out in Rome following the ceremony when a group of faithful attacked left-wing protesters carrying a banner that read: “Those who have killed, tortured and exploited cannot be beatified”. Around 30 enraged pilgrims tore the banner to pieces along with a large reproduction of Picasso’s “Guernica”, the most famous depiction of atrocities committed by Franco’s side. Italian police arrested seven people and impounded a van that protesters had used to film the fighting.
Others critics said the Pope should have recognised the Church’s role in supporting a fascist dictator that killed untold thousands and overthrew a democratically-elected government.
“The Catholic Church has missed an opportunity to recognise its deeds during the civil war and Franco’s dictatorship,” said Spain’s Association for Historical Memory, which is exhuming mass graves of those killed on the Republican side to give them a proper burial. “As long as the Church accepts only its role as victim and not executioner, it will simply be contributing to...the partisan use of the past.”
Spain’s Socialist Government has clashed repeatedly with the Roman Catholic Church over issues ranging from its legalisation of same-sex marriage to the easing of divorce laws and plans to introduce civics lessons into schools. Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, whose own grandfather was executed by Franco’s forces during the war, has likened his government to the Leftist Second Republic that was overthrown by Franco in the war.
Mr Zapatero has caused howls of protest from conservatives after introducing a law aimed at redressing the injustices suffered by victims of Franco’s regime. Among other measures, the law orders the removal of any remaining symbols of the dictatorship, which arguably include the shrines in many Spanish churches to the dead on Franco’s side. By contrast, Republican victims still lie in dozens of unmarked mass graves dotted around the country.
On this occasion, however, both the Government and the Vatican have striven to avoid confrontation. The Government sent its Foreign Minister, Miguel Ángel Moratinos, to lead the Spanish delegation at the ceremony. And the Vatican has strenuously denied that the beatification ceremony as anything to do with the Government’s controversial “Historic Memory” Bill, which comes to a vote next week.
“The beatification process began well before Zapatero came to Government,” the Spanish Cardinal, Julián Herranz, said in Rome. “Those wishing to see the ceremony as political or as having an anti-Government intent are distorting reality and telling a lie.”
But critics have pointed out that only priests aligned with Franco’s side during the war were honoured today. “Priests that were killed in Catalonia or parts of the Basque Country loyal to the Republic are not being beatified,” said Alejandro Quiroga, professor of Spanish history at Newcastle University. “It is a very selective, political reading of the whole thing.”
Families of several Basque priests, executed by Franco’s men because they supported the Government side or were Basque nationalists, have complained that their cases have been forgotten.
“Are we nothing, or what?” asked Vicenta Sagarna Uriarte, whose brother José was shot in his church by Franco’s men in 1936.
“We feel so helpless seeing the Vatican ceremony. What about our own? No one has asked for our forgiveness,” she told Spain's El País newspaper.
Some 500,000 people, mostly civilians, died during the three-year Spanish Civil War. Bands of Communist and Anarchist irregulars on the Republican side burned churches and killed thousands of priests and nuns, while Falangist death squads executed tens of thousands of Spaniards suspected of harbouring Leftist sympathies.
The conflict was seen as a dress rehearsal for World War II, with Nazi Germany supporting Franco’s side and the Soviet Union backing the Republic.
Padre Pio a Fraud?—
Padre Pio a fraud! The Catholic League, as is their wont, have issued their predictable response.
Beer and Gay Sex—
The Catholic League has also gotten its panties in a twist over Folsom Street Fair and Miller Beer's sponsorship of said street fair. Who would guess that such deviant behavior would be sponsored by such a wholesome industry?
"The Miller Brewing Company and the Board of Directors of the Folsom Street Fair have both issued press statements this week apologizing for the offensive Last Supper poster that was used to promote the event. As such, they have insulted Catholics one more time. Let me be specific.
“The poster was the least offensive part of this Catholic-bashing forum. What was even more offensive was the sight of Christian symbols being sold at this Miller-sponsored fair as sex toys. The obscene and blasphemous names of these vulgar sex toys are so disgusting that no mainstream newspaper would print them. Then there was the incredible sight of a stripper and a man dressed as Jesus hoisted in cages above a Catholic church on a Sunday. This was done to provoke, taunt and insult Catholics. And who greeted everyone at the street fair? Men dressed as nuns. Had they been dressed like Al Jolson—with blackened faces—they would have been run out of town as racists.
“The Folsom Street Fair news release on this subject shows how utterly clueless its officers are. It says, ‘The mission is to create volunteer-driven leather events that provide the adult alternative lifestyle community with safe venues for self-expression while emphasizing freedom, fun, frolic and fetish and raising funds to benefit charity.’
“To which I say: If your idea of a ‘safe venue’ ‘self-expression’ and ‘fun’ includes men being beaten with chains in broad daylight, men who masturbate in the street, and men who perform oral sex on each other in public—I have pictures of these acts—then spare Catholics of your ‘fun.’ Leave us out of it and you can do to each other whatever you want.
“The only thing Miller is worried about is its logo appearing on a poster for an event it could not possibly defend. Not until it pledges not to sponsor Catholic-bashing events will the Catholic League call off its boycott and its anti-Miller PR campaign. We’re like that proverbial fly who just won’t go away.”
Starting immediately, the format of this blog is not restricted to religious studies. I've decided to turn Sacred Heart of Odin into a locus of everything that I think is interesting. Narcissism and endless jabber of personal issues/events are still strictly off limits. I welcome your comments--if indeed I have an audience...shit, man, you post comments on what interests you too.
Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus aureus—
MRSA has been in the news recently, and it is a very interesting bug—and killing more Americans than HIV/AIDS.
What makes MRSA so resistant against the penicillin family is that all penicillin-like antibiotics contain a ring called a β-lactam ring which is enables hydrolysis of such antibiotics by producing an enzyme called penicillinase. Without the β-lactam ring, the drugs are ineffective.
Yummy!
Natural Philosophy and the Renaissance Man—
It seems that Renaissance men are hard to come by these days. From this space in time, it seems that the intellectual giants of yesteryear (meaning pre-Renaissance) were versatile individuals, not interested in any one single subject but rather the totality of the world.
I wonder if perhaps the disappearance of the Renaissance Man is related to the Enlightenment and the subsequent development of the scientific method. (By the by, why did it take human beings so long to come up with the method anyway?) As scientific knowledge increased, specialization was a necessity. One of the cool things about natural philosophy was that it was friendly with conjecture—think Pliny's Natural History. Bummer.
The New York Times reports on the controversy surrounding Evangelicals' use of Halo as a recruitment tool (emphasis mine):
The alliance of popular culture and evangelism is challenging churches much as bingo games did in the 1960s. And the question fits into a rich debate about how far churches should go to reach young people.
Far from being defensive, church leaders who support Halo — despite its “thou shalt kill” credo — celebrate it as a modern and sometimes singularly effective tool. It is crucial, they say, to reach the elusive audience of boys and young men.
Witness the basement on a recent Sunday at the Colorado Community Church in the Englewood area of Denver, where Tim Foster, 12, and Chris Graham, 14, sat in front of three TVs, locked in violent virtual combat as they navigated on-screen characters through lethal gun bursts. Tim explained the game’s allure: “It’s just fun blowing people up.”
Once they come for the games, Gregg Barbour, the youth minister of the church said, they will stay for his Christian message. “We want to make it hard for teenagers to go to hell,” Mr. Barbour wrote in a letter to parents at the church.
But the question arises: What price to appear relevant? Some parents, religious ethicists and pastors say that Halo may succeed at attracting youths, but that it could have a corroding influence. In providing Halo, churches are permitting access to adult-themed material that young people cannot buy on their own.
“If you want to connect with young teenage boys and drag them into church, free alcohol and pornographic movies would do it,” said James Tonkowich, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a nonprofit group that assesses denominational policies. “My own take is you can do better than that.”
Daniel R. Heimbach, a professor of Christian ethics at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, believes that churches should reject Halo, in part because it associates thrill and arousal with killing.
“To justify whatever killing is involved by saying that it’s just pixels involved is an illusion,” he said.
Focus on the Family, a large evangelical organization, said it was trying to balance the game’s violent nature with its popularity and the fact that churches are using it anyway. “Internally, we’re still trying to figure out what is our official view on it,” said Lisa Anderson, a spokeswoman for the group.
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David Drexler, youth director at the 200-member nondenominational Country Bible Church in Ashby, Minn., said using Halo to recruit was “the most effective thing we’ve done.”
In rural Minnesota, Mr. Drexler said, the church needs something powerful to compete against the lure of less healthy behaviors. “We have to find something that these kids are interested in doing that doesn’t involve drugs or alcohol or premarital sex.” His congregation plans to double to eight its number of TVs, which would allow 32 players to compete at one time.
Among parents at the Colorado Community Church, Doug Graham, a pediatric oncologist with a 12-year-old son, said that he was not aware of the game’s M rating and that it gave him pause. He said he felt that parents should be actively involved in deciding whether minors play an M-rated game. “Every family should have a conversation about it,” he said.
Mr. Barbour, the youth pastor at the church, said the game had led to a number of internal discussions prompted by elders who complained about its violent content. Mr. Barbour recently met for several hours with the church’s pastor and successfully made his case that the game was a crucial recruiting tool.
In one letter to parents, Mr. Barbour wrote that God calls ministers to be “fishers of men.”
“Teens are our ‘fish,” he wrote. “So we’ve become creative in baiting our hooks.”
"Christian theater troupe scolds Griffin":
PIGEON FORGE, Tenn. - Members of a Christian theater troupe are spreading the word that they're irate about Kathy Griffin'
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In accepting the Emmy for her Bravo reality show, "My Life on the D-List," Griffin said that "a lot of people come up here and thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus."
She went on to hold up her Emmy, make an off-color remark about Christ and proclaim, "This award is my god now!"
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Griffin's comments have also drawn ire from the Catholic League, an anti-defamation group that called on the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences to "denounce Griffin's obscene and blasphemous comment" at the Sept. 9 ceremony. The E! channel chose to edit Griffin's speech when it aired the taped event last Saturday night.
Griffin, whose standup comedy shows often focus on mocking and dishing on celebrities, issued a statement through her publicist in response to the Catholic League's criticisms, indicating her statements were meant as a joke.
"Am I the only Catholic left with a sense of humor?" she said in the statement.
the NY Times has an article on a Baptist church in Georgia and the changes it is going through:
CLARKSTON, Ga., Sept. 21 — When the Rev. Phil Kitchin steps into the pulpit of the Clarkston International Bible Church on Sunday mornings, he stands eye to eye with the changing face of America. In the pews before him, alongside white-haired Southern women in their Sunday best, sit immigrants from the Philippines and Togo, refugees from war-scarred Liberia, Ethiopia and Sudan, even a convert from Afghanistan.
“Jesus said heaven is a place for people of all nations,” Mr. Kitchin likes to say. “So if you don’t like Clarkston, you won’t like heaven.”
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once noted that 11 a.m. on Sunday was the beginning of the most segregated hour of the week in America, and for the better part of 120 years, that certainly applied to this church. From 1883 until a few years ago, anyone on the pulpit would have gazed out at a congregation that was exclusively white. The church is a member of the Southern Baptist Convention, a group that in 1995 renounced its racist past.
But an influx of immigrants and refugees transformed this town in a little over a decade, and in the process sparked a battle within this church over its identity and its faithfulness to the Bible, one that led it to change not just its name but its mission.
The Clarkston International Bible Church, which sits along an active freight rail line down the road from the former Ku Klux Klan bastion of Stone Mountain, is now home to parishioners from more than 15 countries. The church also houses congregations of Ethiopians, Sudanese, Liberians and French West Africans who worship separately, according to their own traditions. The church’s Sunday potluck lunch features African stews and Asian vegetable dishes alongside hot dogs, sweet tea and homemade cherry pie.
The transformation of what was long known as the Clarkston Baptist Church speaks to a broader change among other American churches. Many evangelical Christians who have long believed in spreading their religion in faraway lands have found that immigrants offer an opportunity for church work within one’s own community. And many immigrants and refugees are drawn by the warm welcome they get from the parishioners, which can stand in stark contrast to the more competitive and alienating nature of workaday America.
Indeed, evangelical churches have begun to stand out as rare centers of ethnic mixing in a country that researchers say has become more culturally fragmented, in part because of immigration.
A recent study by the Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam underscored the practical complications of diversity. In interviews with 30,000 Americans, the study found that residents of more diverse communities “tend to withdraw from collective life,” voting less and volunteering less than those in more homogeneous communities.
The study noted a conspicuous exception.
“In many large evangelical congregations,” the researchers wrote, “the participants constituted the largest thoroughly integrated gatherings we have ever witnessed.”
Change Comes to Town
Diversity came to Clarkston like a bolt from the blue. The community, just east of the Atlanta Beltway and 11 miles from downtown, was settled by white farmers and railroad workers in the late 1800s.
Clarkston remained rural and mostly white until the 1970s, when developers began to build apartment complexes for middle-class workers drawn to Atlanta after the international airport here opened. In the next decade, many of those workers began to move to new suburbs farther from town. Vacancies increased, rents fell and crime rose.
In the 1990s, aid agencies that contract with the federal government to resettle refugees pegged Clarkston as the perfect place for these vulnerable newcomers. The town had cheap housing: those empty apartments. It had public transportation — few refugees could afford cars. And Clarkston was within commuting distance of downtown Atlanta’s booming economy.
From 1996 to 2001, more than 19,000 refugees were resettled in Georgia, many in Clarkston or surrounding DeKalb County.
The change to Clarkston was profound. The schools became crowded with children who spoke little English. Locals learned not to drive down Indian Creek Drive on Friday afternoons because of traffic from Friday prayers at the mosque. A third to a half of Clarkston’s 7,100 residents are now foreign-born, most of them refugees.
Some older residents left town, alienated and concerned over the quality of education at the overburdened schools.
Many of those families had attended the Clarkston Baptist Church, leaving empty pews. By the end of the decade the church had canceled one of its two Sunday services. The congregation had dwindled to fewer than 100 from 600.
Concerned about its survival, the church commissioned a study that found blacks and immigrants would soon outnumber whites in the area. William S. Perrin, 75 and a member of the church since 1948, said that at one meeting on the issue, a deacon stood up to express his anger.
“If you think black folks are going to come in here and take our church away from us,” Mr. Perrin remembers the man saying, “you got another thing coming.”
Reaching Out
William Perrin was no stranger to such attitudes. A retired Army lieutenant colonel who survived a midair collision over Vietnam, he grew up in Clarkston before the civil rights era. Some old ideas about race were embedded in his own psyche.
He recalled that while in the Army he once used a racial epithet in front of a black pilot he admired. When he realized what he had done, Mr. Perrin said, he broke down, hugged the pilot and begged for forgiveness.
“I’m ashamed of myself,” he said he told the man. “That’s just my white upbringing in Georgia.”
The pilot forgave Mr. Perrin, who then vowed never to disrespect another person because of race or ethnicity.
With his church failing, Mr. Perrin and other longtime members looked to the Scriptures for guidance and found what they believed was a mandate from Jesus to diversify their church.
“We realized that what the Lord had in store for that old Clarkston Baptist Church was to transition into a truly international church and to help minister to all these ethnic groups moving into the county,” Mr. Perrin said.
To offset costs during the lean years, the Clarkston Baptist Church had leased space to congregations of Filipinos, Vietnamese and Africans for their own services. Mr. Perrin and other members of the church proposed that they invite these congregations to join them as a single multiethnic church.
While an outspoken advocate for diversity within his church, Mr. Perrin is quick to point out that he is no liberal. He voted twice for President Bush. Mr. Perrin said he advocated for an international church because the Bible told him to.
That view is growing more common among conservative Christians, said Mark DeYmaz, a leading proponent of multicultural churches and the pastor of the Mosaic Church of Central Arkansas, in Little Rock, a congregation of 700 from some 30 countries.
In the Book of John, Mr. DeYmaz points out, Jesus is portrayed after the Last Supper as praying for unity among his followers, a message he said runs counter to the notion of an ethnically homogeneous church.
The idea of combining their old Baptist church with congregations of Filipinos and Africans appalled some older white members of the Clarkston Baptist Church, who feared giving up their ways of worship. Some threatened to leave.
“They struggled,” said Allen Hill, the pastor at the time and now an official with the Georgia Baptist Convention. “It’s something Southern Baptists have to struggle with more than others because of our history.”
That history stretches back to 1845, when the Southern Baptist Convention was formed by a group that seceded from a larger national Baptist organization after that group decreed it would not appoint slaveholders as missionaries.
In 1995, the Southern Baptist Convention apologized for its failure to support civil rights and for its congregations that “intentionally and/or unintentionally” excluded blacks. To this day, the overwhelming majority of its members are white, said Michael O. Emerson, a professor of sociology at Rice University who has studied the group.
In 2004, the Clarkston Baptist Church adopted the changes proposed by elders like Mr. Perrin, and merged with the Filipino and Nigerian congregations.
They renamed their church the Clarkston International Bible Church.
That change was too much for many of the older members, like Brenda and Robert White. They left after more than 20 years as members.
“I really resented that,” Mrs. White said of the name change. “I know it’s the 21st century and we have to change and do things differently. But I don’t think it’s fair that we had to cater to the foreign people rather than them trying to change to our way of doing things.”
“It just wasn’t Baptist church anymore,” she said.
A New Church Thrives
Rosa Paige, a 79-year-old Alabama native and member of the church for 46 years, winced and put her fingers in her ears. The staid Baptist hymns of her old church have been replaced by “praise music,” contemporary Christian songs, played by teenagers on electric guitars, that church leaders thought would appeal to new congregants.
“It’s a little loud for me sometimes,” Mrs. Paige said.
Merging congregations has meant compromise for everyone. The immigrants who join the main congregation have to give up worshiping in their native languages. Older Southern Baptist parishioners have given up traditional hymns and organ music.
Other areas, like the potluck lunch in the gym every Sunday, have required little adjustment. “Everybody likes everybody else’s food,” Mr. Perrin said.
The pastor, Mr. Kitchin, a North Carolina native, joined the church in 2006 and learned quickly to keep his sermons simple because so many in his new congregation were just learning English.
“I’d say, ‘You can take it to the bank,’ and nobody had a clue what I was talking about,” he said in a thick drawl.
Mr. Kitchin described his job as part minister, part cultural translator. Church members seek his advice and help.
Recently, Mr. Kitchin said, a Liberian refugee asked him to sponsor a child’s visa so the man’s family could be reunited. Mr. Kitchin declined.
“If I do it for him, I have to do it for everyone in the church who wants their children to come in,” he said. “To tell this man no rips your heart out.”
There are other problems beyond the church’s front doors. Not everyone in the community has appreciated the church’s efforts to proselytize among Clarkston’s newcomers. Salahadin Wazir, the imam at al-Momineen mosque here, said he frequently heard from Muslim refugees and immigrants who say they attended a community outreach program administered by the church where conversation quickly turned to the teachings of Jesus.
“It’s inappropriate,” Mr. Wazir said. “Playing on the minds of small children or desperate, needy people — that’s not the way to preach.”
Mr. Kitchin said he heard such complaints frequently, but he does not apologize.
“I’m a believer in Jesus Christ, and I am commanded by him to go and tell everybody who he is,” he said. “And because we’re in a free country you have the freedom to choose.”
“How can you choose if you don’t know what’s available?”
Despite those tensions, Mr. Kitchin’s church is now thriving. The congregation has grown to more than 300 from 100 a few years ago, and the 10:45 a.m. service on Sundays, which Mr. Kitchin leads, is well attended.
Ultimately, Mr. Kitchin hopes, the groups who worship separately will join the larger congregation as the Filipino and Nigerian congregations did; many of the youngest members, who prefer church in English, already have.
But those congregations face the same tough choices as did the old white Baptist church. Some have been torn between a desire to assimilate and a fear of giving up their own identities.
That is the case with the Liberian congregation led by the Rev. Peter Nehsahn. His flock had considered joining the larger group but decided against it for now, for fear of losing elements of their worship style, which includes drumming and singing African hymns.
“Our people might get lost in the mix,” Mr. Nehsahn said.
But even worshiping separately within the church gives some of the newcomers a sense of connection to the Clarkston community they would not get if they worshiped alone.
For many of those who have joined the main congregation, the experience has been life changing. Marcelle Bess, a white American and a lifelong member of the church, said two of her daughters were dating young Filipino men they had met through the church. She hopes they will marry, she said.
Mr. Perrin said the impact of the church on his life hit him when he and his wife were traveling through the Midwest. They stopped to worship at whatever Baptist church they could find.
“Every church that we walked into was pure white Caucasian,” he said. “My wife and I really felt uncomfortable, because, we realized, here in Clarkston is what the world is all about.”
Mr. Kitchin thinks that in the not-so-distant future many more American churches will face the sort of questions his church has. He said he was frequently asked for advice.
“I tell people, ‘America is changing,’ ” he said. “ ‘Get over it.’ ”
My sister recently converted to Judaism—an event that was broached tactfully by my parents and sister to my grandfather, an elderly and old-fashioned gentleman. Tonight at dinner, my grandfather says, "So is Jane a Jewess now?" The rest of the dinner party remained silent, grasping for the correct answer until I tell him, "that term is not currently favored....I think people prefer 'Jew.'"
"But what do you call a male Jewish person?"
"A Jew."
"So you would call a female Jew a Jewess."
"No," I say, "No more than you would call a female Christian a Christianette."
In the end, Grandpa was not satisfied with our answer that, for some unknown reason, the female form of the word "Jew" was offensive.
Out with the old (after the requisite two year mourning period), and in with the new.
