The Cephalophore Society And Freedom Of Expression

City Safari: The Cephalophore Society And Freedom Of Expression Saint Denis the Headless Saint, Paris. Thu, Oct 15, 2020 By Thom Nickels Contributing Editor

 

 Experiencing high Catholic culture in the ‘tall tree’ section of the city’s Overbrook neighborhood: what could go wrong? For me, it was navigating the neighborhood and locating the monastery where I was supposed to go. The monastery event included a Vesper service and a gathering with serious (and mostly) conservative Catholic men who would gather around a bonfire while enjoying drinks and snacks. The bonfire was situated under a large white rock which acted as a speaker’s platform. Those who wished to say something merely had to mount the rock and speak. The event was sponsored by The Order of Malta, or The Order of St. John of Jerusalem, a lay religious Order and one of the oldest institutions of Western and Christian civilization.

 

 I rarely get to the city’s Overbrook section. More often than not I pass through this neighborhood while on my way to the Main Line, especially when taking the regional rail line once known as the Paoli Local. The event was a celebration of the victory at Lepanto, which saved Europe from the Ottoman Turks. On October 7, 1571, a fleet of ships from Naples, Venice Genoa and the Papacy (called ‘The Holy League’) battled with a fleet of the Ottoman Turks in the Gulf of Patras in western Greece. While the Turks outnumbered the ‘The Holy League,’ the latter had superior firepower which thwarted the Ottomans from taking control of the Mediterranean. Many of the men at the event belonged to a newly formed organization called the Cephalophore Society, founded by attorney David Ermine. A cephalophore is a martyred saint generally depicted in art and sculpture as holding his own severed head. To become a member of the Cephalophore Society one merely has to show up for meetings and events. There’s no initiation ceremony, no dues, no secret oaths or insignias. Finding Visitation monastery, a community of cloistered nuns (under strict papal enclosure) located on Overbrook Avenue, was no small task.

 

 Overbook Avenue is a grand and winding thoroughfare that comes to multiple dead ends only to pick up again after these bizarre cut offs. It took me an hour to find the small hidden monastery. During my walk-a-thon I wandered near the Orthodox community of Talmud Yesiva of Pennsylvania and asked a mother and son out for an evening walk if I was going in the right direction. Prior to meeting these two, nobody on the street seemed to know where Overbook Avenue was. When I finally hit on the correct address, it turned out to be the Baiva Muhainaddean Fellowship, a mosque and not a monastery, which struck me as highly ironic given the celebration I was about to attend. The monastery, as it turns out, was located directly across the street from the mosque but to get to it you had to enter a small wooden gated entrance and then pass a lighted guard house. The dark gravel path to the monastery had a ‘country- monastic’ look. I walked on the path until I spotted a bonfire, entered another gate and was met by a caretaker who told me that the guests were all up at the little chapel, "way up the path amidst the great trees, you can’t miss it.” 

 

The great October night was an inducement to walking. When I spotted the guests, some twenty in all, I noticed that everyone was in a tie and jacket though some wore sweaters and ties. This was no sloppy sweat suit gathering. The friendly assembly greeted me, and soon I was in the quaint Visitation convent chapel for the Vesper service. A priest, ordained just weeks before, officiated. These were G.K. Chesterton style Catholic men, readers of Hilaire Belloc and Thomas Aquinas. I met a retired Army Major, several attorneys, a graphic artist and a sculptor of chandeliers. My host for the evening (the person who invited me) was Steven J. Schloeder, PhD AIA, with Liturgical Environs PC, or Specialists in Catholic Architecture. The men belonged to different Philadelphia Catholic parishes, like Our Lady of Lourdes in Overbrook, or St Mary in Conshohocken an FSSP parish where only the Traditional Latin Mass is said. Conversation, fueled by the best bourbon, Scotch and varieties of beer and wine, swirled around the crisis in the Catholic Church, from the Amazon Synod (and the Pachamama debacle), to the Catholic Eastern Rites vs Orthodoxy (here, I was of some use) and the milquetoast Catholicism of Mr. Biden and Ms. Pelosi. There was also some robust commentary devoted to the November elections

 There was lots of laughter and camaraderie. Cephalophore Society’s founder, Mr. Ermine, was decked out in his best Anglo-Roman Catholic bow tie (his description) as two of his sons, dressed like Edwardian princes, sat near the bonfire while a member mounted the rock and recited G.K. Chesterton’s poem, Lepanto,by memory. And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss, And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross, The cold queen of England is looking in the glass; The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass; From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun, And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun. I sat on a lawn chair beside the newly ordained priest and the graphic designer, listening to Chesterton’s words while looking up at the swaying-in-the-wind treetops. Another man mounted the rock and told the story of a woman he fell in love with who ended the relationship in order to become a nun. The bonfire crackled and snapped, the smells encapsulating the essence of October. At the makeshift bar, David Erimine showed me his rosary, which he had draped over his left hand. Near the bonfire was a very old looking wooden statue of the Virgin Mary framed inside a lattice container.

 

 When the gathering was over, my problem was how to get back to Center City. That was not a problem for long because my gracious host saved the day when he introduced me to the sculptor, Adam Wallacavage, who specializes in handmade octopus chandeliers, and who kindly offered me a ride home. Wallacavage was the subject of an extensive feature in the March 2020 edition of The New York Times Stylemagazine. Wallacavage, who grew up in a conservative Catholic family, agreed with me that the evening had been fascinating on many levels. The free-form, relaxed mood of the gathering was one in which one could say anything without the fear of censorship or disapproval. Freedom of expression, being a major tenet of conservatism.

Entering The Big Tent Of The Bible Thumpers

City Safari: Fri, Nov 06, 2020 By Thom Nickels Contributing Editor 

 

The woke virus now sweeping academia, sports, the corporate world, as well as large segments of the general population, is spiking up into its fifteenth or sixteenth infectious wave with no vaccine in sight. This woke virus has even spread into the world of religion and Bible translation, wreaking havoc on original texts that have been a mainstay for believers and scholars for well over a thousand years. This woke spirit in the world of Bible translations has certain blatant earmarks and is easily detectable. Advocates for traditional translations say that if a new Bible text downplays the existence of Hell or judgment from God, you know that that it has been tampered with and modified. Another red flag is downplaying the deity of Jesus Christ, as is downplaying or eliminating altogether the virgin birth. Bill Muehlenberg, a scholarly evangelical pastor and writer of a blog called ‘Culture Watch,’ calls this "twisted Scripture,’ and calls the writers of these translations "revisionists who conflate description with prescription.” 

 

 Muehlenberg believes that every effort should be made to ensure "that no contemporary political, ideological, social, cultural, or theological agenda is allowed to distort the original meaning of [scriptural] text. "Why should ancient scripture be revised and recast as woke? ‘Agenda’ is the word that comes to mind here. But this agenda is hardly new. As far back as 1895, 18 women on a serious feminist mission came together to work on and publish ‘The Woman’s Bible’. The driver behind the project was Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902), one of the leaders (along with Susan B. Anthony), of the women’s rights movement. Stanton was also a Temperance crusader who believed that women had a right to divorce a drunken husband. She also believed that marriage was merely a civil contract and had nothing to do with God or the supernatural. One might describe her religious beliefs as ‘free form Unitarian.’ She maintained that men and women had the right and ability to determine religious truth for themselves. 

 The Woman’s Bible was an attack on religious orthodoxy and so called ‘patriarchal privilege.’ It was more of a political treatise than a Bible. It was a Bible without a single consoling spiritual passage but with plenty of political rhetoric to fire up the culturally disaffected. The most beautifully translated Bible is the King James Version. Experts say that it has a text that resonates like poetry when read aloud although some passages are difficult for contemporary readers to understand. Aldous Huxley said that the King James Version, "is written in the noblest and purest English, and abounds in exquisite beauties of mere literary form." H. L. Mencken said that the King James "is the most beautiful of all translations of the Bible; indeed it is probably the most beautiful piece of writing in all the literature of the world.” 

 

The Revised Standard Version of the Bible (RSV) is respected by scholars although its translation errs on the liberal side of the Protestant spectrum. In Isaiah 7:14, in the RSV, for instance, we read that "…A young woman shall conceive a son and bear a son.” The missing link here is the replacement of woman for "virgin.” Muehlenberg comments: "Also, contextually, one would have to wonder how a young woman being pregnant would be a miraculous sign. Young women are pregnant all the time.” Feminist neutral language in Bible translations was really the beginning of the ‘woke wave,’ and these translations have stirred up a considerable amount of controversy. Muehlenberg brings up a good point when he says that feminist neutral language is the very thing that creates confusion and the alteration of original texts. To illustrate his argument, he cites two major languages that offer no gender distinctions, Turkish and Chinese, and then goes on to evaluate the treatment of women in those countries. "In fact, I think one would be hard pressed to find two literate cultures in which woman have historically been treated worse than that of the Turks and the Chinese—and I say that as one who otherwise loves Chinese culture, but the way women were (and to a large extent, still are) treated is not the high point of Chinese civilization. "

 In the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), the "Son of Man” when it refers to Christ is not used because it is deemed offensive. "Son of Man’ is offensive because it denotes two gender distinctions. In the NRSV, one can find inserted words not in the original text and omitted words from the original text that alter singular pronouns into plural. All of this is done to avoid the high secular sacrilege of using words with gender distinctions. Fr. John Whiteford writes in "An Orthodox Look at English Translations of the Bible” that this sort of gibberish is nothing but political correctness gone amok. "In recent decades we have been confronted with the new phenomenon of political correctness, and this has resulted in new versions of the Bible that have attempted to neuter the English text to accommodate the concerns of radical feminists. This is silly for several reasons. For one, radical feminists are not likely to be happy with any translation of the Scriptures no matter how neutered the English in it might be. Secondly, the very idea that gender distinctions in a language are at all to blame for any grievances that feminists might have is ridiculous on the face of it.” Many different versions of the Bible exist. The ‘New World Translation,’ for instance, is published by the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Critics have noted that this work was created by nameless "scholars” who have traded the Greek word "kyrios” (Lord) as Jehovah throughout the text except when the narrative refers to Jesus Christ because Jehovah’s Witnesses do not believe in the Trinity or in the divinity of Christ. In the world of serious Biblical scholarship, the ‘New World Translation’ has been called heretical.

 Growing up, my family had one copy of the Catholic Douay Rheims Version (DRV) with its traditional English and extra books (called Deuteroconnical books). The extra books were included in the ancient Latin Vulgate Bible and were, for the most part, accepted as sacred and canonical. The Protestant reformers rejected the extra books because, as one scholar has noted, "The teaching in them seemed to come from Roman doctrine.” The seven extra books are Old Testament texts. Catholics, at least when I was a child, were not Bible readers. Hearing the Gospel and Epistle every Sunday at Mass seemed to be enough scripture for a lifetime. In our minds, the Bible came to be associated with Protestantism. Reading the Bible, especially being caught reading the Bible, came with a hefty price. You might be accused of being a Bible Thumper or a Bible Fanatic. The assumption then was that anyone who picked up a Bible and read it was a person of low intelligence. In the summertime, my hometown of Frazer hosted several big tent Summer Vacation Bible Schools, all of them sponsored by local Protestant churches. Almost all of the Catholic grade school students in the area mocked this concept. ‘Vacation Summer Bible School’ was an awkward misnomer since there can be no ‘vacation’ in any kind of school that had you reading ‘holy roller’ stuff when you should have been down at the shore building sand castles. No doubt, we Catholics lost a lot by not learning to appreciate reading the Bible well beyond the self-contained world of the Gospel and Epistle readings we heard at Sunday Mass. I recently ordered a review copy of the RSV Bible with Catholic additions that came to be known as the "Ignatius Bible,” after Ignatius Press that publishes it. The Ignatius Bible is the favorite of real Catholic scholars and serious students of scripture.

 Over the years, I’ve attempted to read other versions of the Bible with the intention of finishing the text but in every case something was lost along the way. Either boredom set in, or something about the flow of language failed to inspire my wanting to read more. Scott Hahn, Ph.D. Founder & President of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology said that "The RSV, Second Catholic Edition is the most beautiful English translation of the Bible today.” I would have to agree. For the first time in my life, I want to keep on reading. The language literally sails across the page. There are no awkward phrases; no words at war with other words, such as you get in the DRV. First published in 2006, the Ignatius Bible comes in several additions. The Large Print Edition (14 font) comes with thicker paper, creamy page coloring, footnotes and maps of the Holy Land. The Bible I have is the Ignatius Note-Taking and Journaling Bible. It’s small, 6.25 X 7.25 with a double column text layout and a 7 point font. The font is small, and I have to squint like James Joyce (in his thick glasses and his bad eyesight) when reading it, but it’s been well worth it. 

While ecumenism has been condemned by Christian traditionalists as an attempt to water down or compromise certain inflexible points of Catholic or Orthodox dogma, the Ignatius Bible, as the Introduction notes, is really a merging of the RSV with "considerations of Catholic tradition [that] have favored a particular rendering or the inclusion of a passage omitted by the RSV translators.” The lesson here is this: Be careful what you make fun of or condemn as a child, for now it might be said that in some ways I have entered the Big Tent of the Bible thumpers. "The translation was extraordinarily well done because to the translators what they were translating was not merely a curious collection of ancient books written by different authors in different stages of culture, but the Word of God divinely revealed through His chosen and expressly inspired scribes. In this conviction they carried out their work with boundless reverence and care and achieved a beautifully artistic result.”—George Bernard Shaw[11]

The Estate Of Andy Warhol

City Safari: Andy Warhol Wed, Oct 28, 2020 By Thom Nickels Contributing Editor 

 

 When the new biography of Andy Warhol crossed my desk—Warholby Blake Gopnik—I had every intention of reading it on the fly as incidental fluff reading the way one would read mystery or romance novels. After all, there’s serious reading and then there are the ‘breeze-thru-books. I thought I had reached my Warhol saturation point years ago after I interviewed Victor Bockris on his own Warhol bio, but Gopnik reveals things about Warhol, I had never read before. Gopnik strips a lot of Warhol’s blithe comments (or lies) and then reveals the truth underneath them. He destroys the myth that Warhol was asexual. Warhol, in fact, was a kind of Linda Lovelace, famous for his "technique.” 

The Warhol as teetotaler myth is also debunked. The artist loved whiskey and champagne and would often have 4 or more drinks a day. These and other ‘fun’ facts come to the reader as delicious ‘party favors,’ such as the fact that when he was a young man in New York Warhol had a nose job, a cheap nose job one as it turns out (barely $500.00) which left him with a slightly smaller nose but with enlarged, unsightly pores. (Warhol was disappointed that the operation did not transform him into an Adonis.) Gopnik downplays Warhol’s Byzantine Catholicism when he quotes the artist on several occasions as saying that he did not believe in an afterlife, which, in the light of his other obfuscations, is no doubt another lie since Warhol often attended church and compulsively sprinkled his townhouse with holy water. Warhol knew his audience: to come out and proclaim a devout Christianity would have seemed uncool, especially from the creator of films like "Blow Job” and "Lonesome Cowboys.”

 Of special interest to me is Warhol’s visit to Philadelphia in 1965 for his first museum survey at the Institute of Contemporary Art. The exhibition was produced as if it was a show business venture, resulting in 1,600 people pouring into the gallery during the first hour. A "private” viewing the night before had resulted in some damage to the art on the walls so for the official opening there was almost no art at all, just nails in the wall. Warhol came dressed as a motorcyclist. Reporters from local TV stations identified Edie Sedgwick, as Warhol’s girlfriend. The adoring mob forced Warhol and his entourage to take flight—"The crush of people pushed three fans out a window, and into the hospital,” Gopnik writes—with people shouting "We want Andy!” and "Get his clothing!” 

 

Warhol had to be rescued by firefighters who opened a trapdoor near the ceiling so they could escape the mob. Warhol’s group was guided down a fire escape and into waiting police cars. Typical of the city at that time, gay-bashers planned to raid the opening. "A gang of leather-clad, switchblade-wielding hoodlums had planned to break up the opening…but backed down at the last moment. Some of the city’s elites preferred verbal mugging. Penn students climbed on their high horses, declaring the show, and Warhol’s followers, ‘weird’ and ‘disgusting.’” David Bourdon, art critic for the Village Voice, covered the ICA event but devoted his column not to Warhol’s art but to his personality. After Warhol’s death on February 22, 1987, New York City fell into a kind of arts slump. The 1980s was a time of plague (AIDS) and social unrest. Around 1988 a new social phenomenon began to emerge, the Club Kid circuit. ‘Club Kid,’ coined by New York Magazinethat same year, hit Manhattan like a tsunami, spawning night time revelers who called themselves party promoters and dressed up in flamboyant costumes. 

 

Hedonistic glory days had finally replaced the lackluster arts scene after Warhol’s death. Its pope was Michael Alig, who came to Manhattan from South Bend, Indiana, where as a teen he often had to run and hide from antigay bullies. In Philadelphia, the Club Kid scene was not as prominent, probably because it was too gay identified. In Philadelphia the demarcation lines between gay and straight were especially strict in the 1980s. There were punk rock/new wave private membership clubs in the city, such as the East Side Club at 1229 Chestnut, the Kennel Club, Ripley’s and the Trocadero. Leather, chains and Mohawk haircuts identified many of the punks. Philly Club Kids generally headed to New York City where there were more gays and bisexuals. There was certainly no Philadelphia version of Michael Alig, who in retrospect, was really the New York version of Philadelphia’s Ira Einhorn, a charismatic leader with a very un-Club like sensibility who was able to win over a large number of humane venture capitalists with a penchant for ecology.

 Einhorn murdered his girlfriend Holly Maddux and stuffed her body in a trunk which he kept in his Powelton Village apartment, while Alig and a friend, Robert "Freze” Riggs,’ killed their drug dealer compatriot, Angel Melendez in 1996 (in self-defense, they claimed), and kept his body in the bathtub of their apartment for almost two weeks (the decomposing smell muted with Drano and massive amounts of Eternity cologne) while they held heroin and cocaine parties in the adjoining rooms with guests complaining of "the smell.” Riggs and Alig cut up Melendez and stuffed his body into a box and tossed the box into the Hudson River, forgetting to puncture a small hole in the box so that it would sink and not float out into wider waters and wind up on a beach somewhere where it would be discovered by a beachcomber, which is what happened. Alig and Riggs then went into hiding but their cover was soon blown. Both pleaded guilty to the killing of Melendez. Riggs was sentenced to federal prison and released in 2019; Alig was released in 2014. 

Many of Alig’s friends, including former Club Kid and writer, James St. James, hosted a party for Alig upon his release. (Interestingly enough, former Alig friend, Village Voicewriter Michael Musto, absented himself from Alig’s social orbit after the murder.) Post prison, Alig went on to pursue an art career and as an occasional party promoter. Ira Einhorn, by contrast, didn’t have any friends willing to go public or proclaim his innocence. There was certainly nobody in Philadelphia willing or able to host a "coming home” party for him after his capture by a relentless DA Lynn Abraham. Einhorn died in prison, his death far from front page news. While Alig lost many fans due to the Melendez murder, over time and especially through the popularity of the film Party Monsterwith Macaulay Culkin, which is loosely based on his life, he has managed to transform the brutality of the Melendez murder into the realm of a theatrical party trick, somehow making it seem less real. Alig still has adoring fans who write him notes saying, "I love you.” It was Michael Alig, after all, who once boasted, "I am the one who decides. I am the estate of Andy Warhol.”

her Divine to the Corner Swami: Book Review

A FASCINATING TRIP INTO THE OCCULT WITH THOM NICKELS OCTOBER 9, 2020IRISH EDITION  By Sabina Clarke

 

 Despite being raised in a strict Irish-German Roman Catholic household and schooled in the Baltimore catechism when Mass was said in Latin and nuns wore traditional habits, Thom Nickels looked beyond searching for adventure, curious about the world outside his inherited perimeter. After a Mormon family moved into his neighborhood he read the only Mormon book he could find in his high school library No Man Knows My History by Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon Church. And his latest oeuvre From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami…Religious Cults in Philadelphia reflects his insatiable curiosity and sense of adventure; it is fascinating and fun and quirky and well researched.

 

 

 

 He remembers decorating his family’s station wagon with JFK stickers constantly reminded by the nuns that if JFK were elected he would become the first Catholic president. He recalls that in his hometown of Frazer, PA Catholics were viewed by many the way that Amish in their broad brimmed hats are viewed today. After being drilled in the tenets of Catholicism he attended a public high school that required readings of the King James Bible. As a Catholic he was urged not to participate and thus feels that he was perceived as anti-scripture. The Second Vatican Council diluted these distinctions yet the elimination of the Latin Mass bothers him still. As a college student in Baltimore he first visited a fortune teller; “Strolling down East Baltimore Street one evening, I spotted a gypsy shop and decided to have my palm read for $2. The ablaze with neon curtained-off room was no larger than a broom closet. The gypsy woman held my hand and told me that I needed instant karmic cleansing”… “The very day after the instant karmic cleansing, my landlord told me that he was selling his house and that I needed to find another place to live.” 

 

 

 

Undeterred, he continued his quest with fortune tellers and once undercover as a reporter; so he has become an expert of sorts in this genre alone. And he jumped at the chance to be hypnotized for a past life regression. The hypnotist was Philadelphian Marianne Waylock, a former Roman Catholic nun who wrote a book of her psychic experiences while living in the convent. I was particularly fascinated by the story of Father and Mother Divine and their Peace Mission Movement “Mother Divine had an easy and light spirit…she was quick to smile and laugh yet it was my impression that she was surrounded by stiff wooden Cigar Store Indian types who were quick to find fault and scold.” When Nickels and his photographer friend Noel Miles were refused a follow-up interview, after the easy camaraderie of the first visit, they both felt that “Mother was really a prisoner behind pearly gates and that she was no longer acting as a free agent.”

 

 In 2016 and 2017 he interviewed the talented clairvoyant from Levittown Joseph Tittle who now resides in Sedona, Arizona. Tittle said 2020 would be a significant date “when secrets and lies will no longer have merit.” In one vision Tittle saw many people wearing face masks in 2020. Regarding President Trump he said, “I don’t like him but he is President-elect and we have to put creative energy around his presidency. He is a non-establishment type who is surrounding himself with the wrong people.” Arlene Ostapowicz another Philadelphia psychic was a favorite among City Hall judges who sent limos to transport her to their chambers her accuracy was that much in demand. And there were the author’s memorable readings and dinners in psychic Valerie Morrison’s home in Roxborough. Nickels recalls having high tea in the garden of the Rittenhouse Hotel with clairaudient Carolann Sano who gets her messages when she does a reading from angels or spirit guides. She reveals that forty-one saints in the Catholic Church were clairaudient.

 

 

 

 The story of the diabolical Ira Einhorn the counter-culture celebrity who murdered his girlfriend Holly Maddux and stuffed her body into a suitcase in his closet makes an appearance as does “Philly Jesus” aka Michael Grant an ex-heroin addict who dressed in robes and had a long beard and began to think he really was Jesus. Included are the different religious cults like Hare Krishna, the Mormons, the Swedenborgians the Christian Scientists, The Mennonites, the Amish, Scientology and Theosophy founded by the famous Madame Blavatsky who lived at 3420 Sansom Street now the site of the White Dog Café. In the late 1970’s, Nickels rented a unique Victorian apartment in the building that was the headquarters for the West Chester, Pennsylvania Theosophical Society. He was urged by the landlord to attend the meetings but demurred because “most of the women members seemed to resemble Eleanor Roosevelt.” He remembers staring into the portrait of Madame Blavatsky for a revelation but nothing happened. However he did have a very vivid dream in an Atlantic City B& B when on assignment as a reporter that required him to stay overnight. He dreamt that “a traditionally robed Catholic nun had visited me in my sleep and squeezed me into her wimple.” The next day he noticed a small stained glass window by the stairway landing and was told by the proprietor that the house used to be a convent. “Stories of spirit manifestations in the Nickels family were not uncommon,” said Nickels. 

 

 

 

Harry and Meghan, Woke Royalty

City Safari: A Grande Dame Deigns To Explain Meghan And Harry Meghan and Harry, The Real Story Wed, Oct 21, 2020 By Thom Nickels Contributing Editor

 

 My interest in the Royal Family and the unconventional antics of Prince Harry and his Hollywood wife, Meghan Markle, led me to an astounding new book, Meghan and Harry, The Real Story. The author, Lady Colin Campbell, is The New York Times bestselling author of biographies of Diana, the Queen Mother, and Queen Elizabeth II. Lady C, as she is called, hails from a wealthy Jamaican family (Ziadie). She grew up in the United States and met her former husband Lord Colin Campbell, the brother of the 12th Duke of Argyll, in 1974. Their marriage lasted 14 months. In 2013 she bought Castle Goring in West Sussex, England, at that point a complete ruin with crumbling walls and one functioning bathroom. To finance the cost of a new roof, Lady C appeared as a contestant in Britain’s popular reality TV show, "I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!” I felt a connection with Lady C the first instant I watched her on You Tube. After contacting her publicist for a review copy of Harry and Meghan, I was offered an interview with the author on Zoom, with Lady C talking to me from her home, Castle Goring. Castle Goring was designed by John Rebecca for Sir Bysshe Shelley, the grandfather of the poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley’s death at age 29 prevented the poet from living in the castle although it was Mary Shelley’s home for a time. Lady C’s book is a virtual X-ray of Harry and Meghan who have opted to trade their royal status for a life of (financially lucrative) California-woke-visibility.

 

 It is an illuminating read that does not shy away from devoting a considerable amount of space to the couple’s positive points, so the book cannot be classified as a character assassination. Lady C was quick to say that Meghan is far more intelligent and worldly-wise than Harry, "who has spent his whole life being cosseted by nannies, servants, private detectives, staff and courtiers.” My interest in religion prompted me to ask whether the couple steps out on Sunday to attend church. "I think Harry worships at the altar of Meghan, and she worships at the altar of celebrity. Meghan has been Catholic, Jewish and Church of England, so you could say she has something going on with the world of religion.

 

 I think they ultimately believe that God should serve them as opposed to them serving God.” In Meghan and Harry, Lady C quotes an astrologer who predicts a long and fruitful marriage for the pair. This contrasts with a number of You Tube psychics (the list is endless) who predict a breakup once Meghan has had her fill of Harry and established herself as The Most Famous Woman in the World (something she’s committed to doing since signing with the PR firm Sunshine and Sachs). Lady C believes the couples’ marriage is very strong despite the predictions of those who dislike them and wish to see the union fail. "I actually think their marriage is a lot stronger than their detractors say it is.” The detractors often base their claim on the fact that Harry looks miserable in pictures. "But Harry has always been miserable. He’s a spoiled brat,” Lady C says. The American public view Harry and Meghan in a more favorable light than do the British because they see them as being on a quest for independence from an "outdated monarchy” that no longer has any relevance. Yet any astute observer can see that since his marriage to Meghan, Harry is no longer as much fun as he was before he met Meghan. "Now he has to save the world for her. Woke rhetoric, hyper-political attitudinizing, yoga and meditation have replaced the fun sessions the couple had enjoyed prior to meeting each other,” Lady C writes. "Since their marriage, the couple has been pushing the boundaries of what they have been allowed to. They have been breeching rules, protocols and agreements with a degree of alacrity which is actually frightening. This is happening on the basis ‘Let’s see what we can get away with while things are still up in the air,’” Lady C told me. The Queen gave the couple one year to try out their ‘half in and half out’ hybrid lifestyle but once the trial period ends, Buckingham Palace will weigh in on what’s to be.

 

 Lady C believes that Harry and Meghan aren’t going to wait for the Queen’s Royal edict but have already been "discussing the voluntary release of their titles so that she [Meghan} can muck in the political, which as royals they are not allowed to do.” "The British monarchy is not a television show,” Lady C said, leaning forward into the Zoom camera for special emphasis. "It’s one of the most eminent institutions in the world and I think it is almost laughable that Meghan has this almost complete disdain for the royal family and the institution of the Monarchy.” She adds that Meghan has modeled herself on Princess Diana, a maverick and rebel, "who until the end of her life was trying to position herself to try to be bigger than the Royal Family. Diana was cleverer than Meghan. Meghan is flagrant, Diana was obtuse. Diana understood that she was not in such a position of power; Meghan actually thinks she’s a great power broker.” At the time of the couple’s wedding, Meghan’s father, Thomas Markle, was generally portrayed in the United States as a publicity seeking buffoon, but according to Lady C that is the opposite of the truth. The book lays out all of Meghan’s lies and obfuscations about her father. Meghan’s pretensions about being a new sort of ‘peoples’ princess’ falls apart when one considers how deeply ashamed she is of her birth family.

 

 "Everything Meghan said about her father 2 weeks before she met Harry contradicted the assertions that were being made on Meghan’s behalf through Harry. I was outraged,” Lady C says, "and I will go to my grave outraged. It was one of the lowest things that any human being can do to another human being. To do it to a parent showed me the nature of what we’re dealing with. It chilled my blood. I have a great deal of sympathy for Thomas Markle. I also know how completely devastated he has been by the loss of the daughter that he thought he had. It’s almost like a Greek tragedy, it’s that profound.” The British Monarchy welcomed Meghan into their ranks as a woman of color. "Meghan and Harry have both played the color card not only in terms of the British nation but in terms of the Royal family,” she says. "So, the Royal Family has had to be very careful to be seen bending over backwards to be seen to be accommodating…also the Royal Family understands that Harry is a very disturbed individual.” The Crown welcomed Meghan with open arms but Meghan returned that welcome by treating her staff in impolite ways, says the author. Shortly after her marriage, Meghan hurled a dress onto the floor "that had not been ironed to her exacting standards.” In yet another incident with staff, "she lost her temper and threw a hot beverage in the direction of someone who had annoyed her. This had resulted in the member of the staff resigning and being paid $250,000 to leave without disclosing the incident.” 

 

Meghan, Lady C says, is an arriviste. She was a second-rate Hollywood actress who didn’t even have a career in Hollywood. "She’s an avariste who doesn’t have the character, the demeanor, the modesty to understand that she was given one of the greatest roles on earth.” Lady C has the sort of infectious laugh that makes you curious as to what she’ll say next. She tells me about the time she almost knocked the Queen over when the Queen opened the door in her flat thinking she was doing Lady C a favor by letting her dogs out. "She’s really a great gal, as you Americans would say.” What about Harry, the disturbed individual? "There was an incident many years ago when Harry, at a private event, tried to physically attack a friend of mine for no reason at all. Harry is also very paranoid. He’s a puffed up character who complains about everything, a person full of his own importance. Harry also suffers from rage. He is the typical spoiled brat second son. You guys in America don’t really understand the whole business of being the second son. "\ Some Lady C facts about Harry: He was desperate to get married but none of the well-bred girls wanted to marry him. Meghan, when she realized that Harry was a marriage possibility, read up on Diana’s life and copied everything Diana did, including wearing the same perfume. 

 

 When Meghan became pregnant with Archie (the name ‘Archie’ was also an insult, since ‘Archie’ is a name royals usually call their dogs) she clutched her pregnancy bump whenever she could while wearing tight clothing. "That was never done before,” Lady C says. "She was behaving like trailer trash. It appalled all segments of the British population.” "Meghan wants to be the most famous human being on earth,” Lady C cautions, "But you cannot be hyper famous unless you are controversial, unless your reputation is a mixed bag. "So Meghan jumps on the bandwagon with the Obama’s and by inviting Hilary Clinton to tea at Frogmore Cottage and then leaking that news to the newspapers while she does not go to a state event at Buckingham Palace because she doesn’t approve of Trump—all of this is deeply disturbing but it gets her the attention she wants. She cares about Hollywood, the Bill Gates,’ the Obamas and the Clintons of this world. She has calculated that they are her meal ticket to billionaire status and possibly political power.” The Zoom interview, which lasted one hour, ended when Lady C commented on the pictures on my study wall. "You do what I do,” she said, smiling, referring to the artwork and portraits.

Facebook Bullying in the Name of Politics

City Safari: Flower Girl Gets Into The Fray Christine Flowers: Happy Halloween - On Twitter. Mon, Nov 16, 2020 By Thom Nickels Contributing Editor The snowflake hypersensitivity wave plaguing social media for the last several years reached a kind of zenith on Facebook recently. That’s when I encountered a post aimed at local writer Christine Flowers. Flowers, of course, is a conservative columnist and immigration lawyer who once wrote for The Philadelphia Inquirerbut who is now happily employed by The Delaware County Times. Flowers’ columns sometimes irritate people—liberals with narrow minds who cannot stomach a diversity of opinions. Presenting opposing points of view is a good thing because it means that Flowers is doing her job as a columnist. Too many millennials tend to forget that the aim of a newspaper columnist is to present an opinion that you may disagree with. Conversely, there are conservatives with narrow minds who cannot tolerate a diversity of opinions when it comes to liberal views. These people are just as bad as the liberal thought mafia. Both extremes deserve our hearty condemnation. According to this Facebook post, Flowers sent a Tweet or an Instagram message calling attention to 2018 Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’ weight as well as the gap between her two front teeth. Flowers’ Tweet was posted on FB with the header that perhaps she needed to be fired from The Delaware County Timesbecause she seemed to be making fun of Abrams’ weight and that gap between her two front teeth. Medical News Todaydescribes the gap as a diastema. "A diastema is a gap between teeth that is wider than 0.5 millimeters. It can develop between any teeth. Treatment is not usually necessary for medical reasons. But if a person dislikes the appearance of their diastema, it is possible to close or narrow the gap.” The Flowers post drew a lot of comments, mostly from people on the other side of the political spectrum who had always put the conservative columnist on their enemies list. The comments, typically, were unflattering and reminded me of the comments from liberals directed at other conservative commentators. Many expressed shock that Flowers could say such things and then went on to call her a racist. Ideally, of course, commenting on a person’s personal appearance is never good and should be avoided but when it happens reaction should be kept in perspective. Criticizing a person because they have a gap between their front teeth has about as much to do with racism as a fish riding a bicycle. Many overweight people embrace the word ‘fat’ and say it with pride, and yet judging from the severity of the comments you might have thought that Flowers had flipped her lid and done something truly disastrous like blow up a public building or looted some stores on Rittenhouse Square. Her offense, if indeed it can even be called that, was merely a speck of dust on the wide map of real city offenses that have been committed of late, and for that reason not worthy of any outrage at all. I felt sorry for Flowers. Indeed, as a writer and columnist myself, I’ve been on the receiving end of harassment and bullying. When it happens to you for the first time it is always a shock. You feel persecuted and harassed but then you realize that this is something that comes with the territory. People on social media love to gang up on people who express views they don’t agree with. They love to bully and intimidate. These bullying social media gangs go out of their way to get friends and friends of friends to write comments and letters and make it look as if the whole world is crashing down in outrage on the "offender’s” head. It’s all a sham and a game of smoke and mirrors because "the outrage” is made to look much larger than it really is. Conservative commentator and global UK gadabout Katie Hopkins glories in being the most hated woman in all of Britain. Hopkins has learned to love the controversy. Bring it on, she says. All newspaper columnists need to adopt the Hopkins attitude. As for Flowers being called an abhorrent scandalous "racist,” I was curious to see how she replied to the mob on that Facebook post. Writers who have been through this know that there’s a choice: Do you engage with the mob when you are being attacked, or do you take the high road, step aside and say nothing and just let them attack you? Engaging has its risks. You risk being drawn into an endless squabble from which there is no escape. You are certainly not going to change anyone’s mind. Flowers did respond to the Facebook attacks. It was in reply to someone who promised to do all they could to get her fired from that Delco newspaper. Flowers’ response was a mere, "I’m quivering in my boots.” Her response, of course, enraged the mob even more. I’ve been on Flowers’ radio show when she had a show, and she once came to a lecture of mine at the Library Company, so we are sort of friends but not real friends. It’s more of a writerly association with occasional how-do-you-do’s exchanged on social media. But when I saw that she was being attacked on Facebook, I jumped into fray, lasso in the air and my mental pen on fire. I know how important it is to have people rush in to speak up for you at moments like this. So, I spoke up. And my speaking up led to my hearing the other side of the story. Online bullying is not the province of the Left but can just as easily happen on the Right. So, I got the story of how the Right, or Flowers’ fans, bullied the poster of this FB thread that called into question Flowers’ competence as a columnist. I was informed that Flowers’ fans swamped the anti-Flowers poster’s FB page with just as much snake venom as was directed at Flowers herself. This person then gave me a few examples of what was said, some of it not very nice but, in the end, mostly just sticks and stones, words meant to hurt and insult but ultimately just words. A big fat exchange of insulting words… with the accent on ‘fat’ of course.

The Healthy Homeless in Philadelphia

Thom Nickels Thu, Nov 19, 2020 By Thom Nickels Contributing Editor Mark and his brother Keith are from Delaware and have called Philadelphia their home since the early summer. Mark, 36, and Keith, 27, are both homeless and have a drug problem. Their drug problem is responsible for their homelessness. In his former life, Mark had a substantial income, two cars, a wife and family. As a general rule, he has always taken care of his younger brother Keith, the "baby” of the family. Throughout the summer I’d observe the brothers panhandling in the middle of Aramingo Avenue in the city’s Riverwards neighborhood. Mark is known for picking up litter and trash along the Avenue, and passing drivers often reward him for this by handing him large bills. On summer days, panhandling isn’t so bad yet it still necessitated Mark having to "prep up” for his daily ‘work out.’ He told me he has to prepare himself mentally for the abuse, insults, obscenities and the many objects sometimes thrown at him from passing cars. The pay off at the end of a good day is often worth it; he makes as much as $60 to $80. Keith tends to bring in more cash, earning as much as $100. The bad days are often horrendous: $10.00 for 4 hours of panhandling. Periodically a driver will stop and give either Mark or Keith a $100 bill. The police are generally tolerant and understanding and leave the brothers alone. "But there is always that one cop,” Mark says. "That one cop out of ten or twenty who has a bug up his ass and who likes to harass and show off his power.” Currently, Mark has one such cop on his tail. Mark and the cop have played cat and mouse all summer long. Mark and Keith live in a little cardboard condo they built inside an alcove at Arby’s restaurant located just off the Avenue. The condo is in the rear of the restaurant so it affords them some privacy. The little condo for two has two mini mattresses side by side with a headboard shelf filled with personal care products and small pillows. Mark constructed a cardboard screen to block views from the driveway as there are often passersby or rogue cars that circle about aimlessly. Mark was able to construct this little home away from home because he made an unofficial deal with security: he cleans up the Arby’s property and acts as unofficial night watchman in exchange for overnight sleeping privileges. At the crack of dawn, the condo has to be packed into large duffle bags and either placed in a hiding place until evening or carried on the brothers’ back. Mark and Keith keep to themselves and don’t hang around other homeless people. Other homeless people, they say, are not to be trusted. It’s world where friends steal from friends. "They will take the shoes and socks off your feet when you are sleeping. They will steal your cell phone, go through your pockets,” Mark says. Because they are brothers, Mark and Keith trust one another but trust is almost impossible to find on the street. Both Mark and Keith wear face masks when they have to, such as when they go into the local WAWA or Rite Aid, but when they canvass Aramingo Avenue they do not wear masks. They haven’t worn masks while panhandling all summer, and they are not wearing masks this fall nor do they plan on wearing masks into the dead of winter. The brothers are not paranoid about catching covid-19 unlike many of the millennials who live in the area who wear face masks while driving alone in their cars (with the windows up) or when they jog or cycle alone, far from the maddening crowds. Mark and Keith seem to be incredibly healthy. Their meals consist of bought deli sandwiches, soups, and various delicacies passed to them from drivers along the Avenue. They use public restrooms to wash up. These sink baths somehow manage to be enough to ward off any unpleasant smells. The brothers always have an extra bag of clean clothes in their duffle bags but they prefer to panhandle in ratty clothing. A panhandler in rags will elicit more sympathy than one who appears to be well dressed. One time, Mark was given a Brooks Brothers outfit—a striped crew-style sweater, khakis, and a casual golfing jacket--- and while he felt good wearing it, he made much less money panhandling. When he went back to his ripped blue jeans and dirt encrusted white sneakers, the money once again poured in. Mark loves Philadelphia and says that one day he hopes to be able to afford a small room or apartment. He says he has worries about his brother Keith because Keith will panhandle all day and all night just to get more and more drugs. "Keith doesn’t know when to stop. Me? I just get what I need everyday so I don’t get sick but Keith will ride that wave forever.” For months now Mark has been saying how much he fears the winter months when panhandling will become difficult if not impossible because of the cold. Sleeping in the cold is hell. "I need to get my brother and me into rehab before the cold weather months,” he said. But that has not happened yet. The brothers make daily runs into Kensington to get their drugs then head back to the Avenue to panhandle. Their days are highly structured: Mornings are for getting "medication” (code for fix), then something to eat. Free stuff is also available in the mornings. Food, clothing and snacks from various agencies used to be available all day but since covid -19 the hours have been restricted. Some homeless cannot make the tight Some homeless cannot make the tight time guidelines because living on the street isn’t always conducive to a fixed schedule. Mark and Keith see their mother in Delaware about once a month. At home they can shower and wash their clothes and get home cooked food and watch TV, but because they are addicted and haven’t been to rehab they have to go back to Philadelphia. Mark often talks about his mother and how growing up, she seemed to favor and spoil Keith because "he was the baby.” "I won’t go to rehab and leave him [Keith} here alone,” Mark told me. "If I go to rehab, he comes with me. " Mark likes to say how none of the homeless people he knows has ever had covid-19. The people he has seen dying or dead have all been victims of violence (gunshots), but covid-19 doesn’t even seem to be on his radar. I’ve heard this from other homeless as well. In the beginning of the pandemic great fears were raised about covid-19 decimating the homeless population. The homeless were even perceived as possible covid-19 vectors for the general public. Horrible scenarios were forecast that never materialized. The homeless seem to live their lives to the fullest—it’s survival at its most primitive and original—panhandling, eating take-out on city sidewalks, taking sink baths in public washrooms (or not taking sink baths), and sleeping on the ground in unsavory places. In some ways, it seems that many of the homeless have built up immunity to covid-19. Talk to any homeless person and you’ll likely hear the refrain, "I don’t know anyone on the streets with covid-19, but my grandmother died of it.” In other words, a much older person living in a protected germ free "bubble” environment where there are never any dirty hands or meals being eaten on the sidewalk. Perhaps the moral here is that when you "bubble up” or protect yourself to a fanatical degree, your immune system becomes a moving target for invasive viruses. "Back in mid-March,” City Journal New Yorkreports, "the Los Angeles Times warned that ‘coronavirus hitting California’s homeless population could be what finally breaks hospitals,’ as one headline put it. Fears of such strain on the health-care system have long since receded. The hospital overflow system that Washington State’s King County built to accommodate the homeless, which was highly touted by the federal government, never came close to using its full capacity.” One day Mark informed me that he was fighting off an annoying cold. He complained of headaches and said that the night before he went to bed early in his cardboard condo to "sniffle it out. The next day he was feeling better and by day 3 he was back to normal. Never once did it occur to him that he had to run, panic stricken, to the nearest covid-19 testing station. Hearing Mark’s story, I imagined a 24/7 indoor/outdoor mask wearing millennial experiencing a similar cold and racing against time to get tested, all the while fearing the worst of events---death and destruction as the sky overhead, Chicken Little style, began to hurl towards the earth. While the poor homeless may not be able to teach us much in the way of keeping away from drugs, they have so many other wise and sensible lessons to impart. "And he said unto them, He that hath ears to hear, let him hear…”

Interview with Thom Nickels

Editor’s Note: The review of Thom Nickels’ book “From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami” was in the October issue and is online at Irish Edition.com. The following PART TWO is the interview. By Sabina Clarke SC: Many people feel there is something dark about psychics but the story of Arlene Ostapowicz refutes this—as she had a special devotion to St. Therese of Lisieux and the Sacred Heart. Did you get a reading from her? TN: Arlene became a close friend of mine after a long client-reader relationship. She studied metaphysics in England and taught world famous astrologer Jacqueline Bigar astrology. I was honored to give the eulogy at her funeral last year. Arlene wanted to promulgate devotion to the Holy Spirit and felt that the Church needed to do more in this regard. She never felt there was a disconnect between praying to the saints and giving psychic readings even though many Christians equate the word ‘psychic’ with the word ‘Satanic.’ She had an amazing talent to see into the future and she “converted” many skeptics. I miss her. SC: Regarding your reading with the clairaudient and charismatic Catholic Carolann Sano what about it struck you the most? TN: Carolann called herself a Charismatic Catholic, something I never quite understood. I don’t think jumping around at Mass like you’re taming snakes has any place in Catholicism. Charismatic Catholic services remind me of Flannery O’Connor’s religious revival stories set in the South. There’s a section on Charismatic Catholics in the book. Carolann was talented. She had a great feeling for people. When she worked for PAN AM in 1988 she consoled friends and family of those who lost their lives in the December terrorist bombing of Pan AM Flight 103. SC: After your own experience with past life regression do you believe in reincarnation and would you be willing to be regressed again? TN: When it comes to reincarnation, I put more weight behind the famous “scientific” studies of reincarnation by Dr. Ian Stevenson than the stories that come through via hypnosis. Stevenson examined the stories and ‘memories’ of children who talked of their real parents in far off lands, or detailed descriptions of streets where these children said they lived in these previous lives. This gave researchers solid landmarks and people that could be verified. In many cases, the children having these memories were correct. Edgar Cayce was an orthodox Presbyterian minister when he began to do trance induced “health” readings for clients when suddenly he was getting past life information. This shocked him tremendously because it went against his conservative Christian beliefs, but he later came to accept it. When I was 23 and agnostic, I had my own experiences in this realm but that’s a story for another time. I’m skeptical of past life regression, however. When I was hypnotized I never really felt hypnotized the way you see people being hypnotized in movies. The so called scenes from a past life that I was “seeing” felt more like the creative stuff of the imagination that go into creating a work of fiction. I’d be willing to be hypnotized again but I’m a tough subject, very tough. SC: Did you ever meet Ira Einhorn? TN: I never met Ira Einhorn but we both wrote for the same underground newspaper, The Distant Drummer. Ira was proof that if you were a genius at self-promotion you could fool almost anybody, especially politicians and wealthy CEOs with money to give away. SC: As a teenager your reading tastes were pretty eclectic and offbeat-as if you were always searching for more in the mystic realm-for example “The Autobiography of a Yogi” by Yogannada Paramahansa who visited the Catholic stigmatic Therese Neumann. TN: When Yogannada asked Therese Neumann, the famous German stigmatic, if he could have a private audience with her in order to observe her sufferings of The Passion, Neumann said she was happy to “receive a man of God.” Her acceptance of Yogannada speaks volumes and on some level seems problematic. Yet in Yogannada’s book there are many stories of Hindu mystics and saints levitating and performing miracles. I explained this to a priest friend and he cautioned that the devil loves to assume a ‘body of light’ because he is a master at performing “tricks.” When Yogannada died his body remained incorrupt in the style of many Catholic and Eastern Orthodox saints. It even exuded a kind of perfume. It still bothers me on some level that Neumann failed to convert the internationally famous yogi. SC: Your architectural critique on local historic churches is quite sophisticated and Detailed—is that a strong interest of yours? TN: As a child I visited the 1963 New York World’s Fair with my parents where we toured the Vatican Pavilion and the adjoining Chapel of the Good Shepard, a futuristic Catholic Church with no statues or icons, just massive white walls and large stained glass windows. A table (Julia Child’s table) stood in place of a high altar, and the effect was shocking to me. Though just a boy, I remember feeling terrified for the future of the Church. Not far from this modernist disaster was a small log cabin Russian Orthodox chapel with a jewel like iconostasis and the magnificent icon of Our Lady of Kazan. I’d never seen an Orthodox Church before and was so impressed with its startling traditional look that I kept going back to this chapel to see it again. So much of Catholic Church architecture has been ruined in the name of modernism: all that blank grey and white space, the Spartan emptiness of it all. Advocates of these ugly spaces like to say that the plainness has a Cistercian appeal when really the end result is an observer asking: Is this a Catholic Church or a Baptist church? Happily, there’s now an architectural reform of the reform going on, spearheaded by Architect Duncan Strock of South Bend, IN who has been described as “a one-man phenomenon who has changed the landscape of American Catholic church design.” SC: Of all the religious cults you have studied which one interests you the most? TN: The Mormons have always fascinated me with that Church’s epic stories of an angel appearing to Joseph Smith telling him where to dig for golden plates, the ugly stories of persecution and the group’s cross country wagon train to Salt Lake City ending in the “miracle” of the seagulls and locusts. It’s certainly the most American of religions. Christian Science actually contains some nuggets of truth pertaining to the power of the mind (and faith) over the ill-health of the body. Of course, Christian Science goes way too far in its avoidance of conventional medicine. SC: What religious cult that you investigated do you feel is the most dangerous cult? TN: Scientology is dangerous because it is not really a religion as such but a financial scheme posing as a religion. The Church of the Process, which was popular in the 1970s, was dangerous at that time. Process missionaries, so called worshippers of Satan, canvassed Suburban Station in downtown Philadelphia in the 1970s. They wore long black capes and handed out little tracts like the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The New Age movement seems fairly benign but ultimately it has helped create an impossible divide between religion and spirituality. Religion is spirituality with rules but many people want a free form spirituality where you become your own god and make your own rules. SC: What religious cult did you experience as the most harmless? TN: That would be Hare Krishna. Joining Hare Krishna was more of a countercultural rite of passage for many spiritually inclined young people (mostly men) in the 1960s and 70s. Hare Krishna has a strict moral code: no sex before marriage, no divorce, no birth control, no homosexuality, no masturbation. Marriages are for life. It was amazing that so many hippies went from free love communes (“Love the one you’re with”) to shaving their heads and adopting this lifestyle. Few stayed, however. They did the ‘monk thing’ for a year or two then returned to the world. SC: I was surprised to find out that in 1874 Philadelphia attracted many mediums TN: There was a strong Messianic impulse in the United States then. Séances were common and there were many Spiritualist organizations in the city. SC: Your encounters with the homeless seem easy and effortless. You seem to have great empathy for them and know their stories. TN: I’ve written two books about the homeless, “How to Do a Bad Thing Well: Looking for Johnny Bobbitt and The Perils of Homelessness” (with Richard T. Edwards). These books record many of their stories. The homeless come to Philadelphia from all over the country, mostly for the cheap drugs. Most have addiction issues. I have seen several people turn their lives around in remarkable ways. Reporters Note: Thom Nickels is a widely published Philadelphia journalist and author of 15 books – his latest book From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami…Religious Cults in Philadelphia is the subject of this interview. He is now a regular writer for the Irish Edition and also writes for the Philadelphia Free Press and City Journal, New York.