O, Nuwaubia!

Check out this piece about the Nuwaubians, an African-American sect that sprouted right here in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

Basically, these cats have been led by the charismatic Malachi York since the 1970's. They started off as a sort of Nation of Islam spinoff, then became Black Hebrews, had an extra-terrestrial phase, became the Yamasee Nation of Native Americans and now are claiming a diplomatic immunity for their leader, saying he's a Liberian diplomat.

(Oh, yeah - York was imprisoned for about 130 years on child molestation charges in 2004.)

Followers of convicted child molester and sect leader Dwight "Malachi" York - some from Clarke County - are bombarding officials at a federal maximum security lock-up with fake documents that seek to free him from a 135-year prison term.

The documents, some stamped by Athens-Clarke notaries, claim York has been falsely imprisoned since 2004 and should be released because he is an African diplomat, officials said.

....

"I've never been able to rationalize how seemingly intelligent people would follow a man who started off saying he was an extraterrestrial, then changed to being a reincarnated pharaoh, then an American Indian chief, then head of all Shriners or Masons in the world," [Putnam County Sherriff Howard] Sills said. "He also claimed at one time to be a rabbi but was an Islamic imam to start with, then after the trial he ended up being a diplomat.

"You can rationalize how someone follows a charismatic leader if they maintain a consistent philosophy, but how to you go from being an Islamic imam to a rabbi?" he said. "First he came here on a space ship, and years later he came here from Liberia on a diplomatic passport."

I tried to do an in-depth story about them in 2004, following the conviction, but it was a disaster. True, the older cops had fantastic stories - how Nuwaubians "owned" about 6 square blocks of Bushwick and no one entered or left without their say so. Also, how the members ran these incredible criminal scams, and one of their premier cat burglars enjoyed a popular moment in the papers for his rooftop, "spider-man" escapes.

But no one else was very forthcoming. The neighbors still lived in fear, even though the bulk of the group had moved to Georgia in the 1990's. The one "expert" was jealously guarding her research, and tried to have me canned for publishing a piece on the web. The few Nuwaubians who stayed in Brooklyn weren't talking. I thought then that their "white man is the devil" tradition, but now I think it was a lazy lack of persistence.

A damn shame, because there's nothing I dig like new religions.

Religious splinters and new religions stem from serious dissatisfaction. They show fissures in the current paradigms. Nuwaubians are a case in point. It's a trope that the church anchors the African American community, but back in the 1960's and 70's, there was a serious rethinking of Christianity - which, let's face it, was a wholesale legacy of the African enslavement. You found the Nation of Islam, the Black Hebrews, (who still fight for their civil rights from their base in Dimona, Israel), a number of African-Americans who fled to Islam, or Baha'i traditions, or New Age practice. A blossoming of spiritual searching, probing questions, a taking of nothing for granted. Those moments are tough and gorgeous.

Then you found the innovators, who tried to integrate a history of rage and disempowerment into wholesale new cloth. Like Malachi York. Results may vary.

I keep waiting for the gay community to go through a similar moment. Of course, there's a huge gay presence in the New Age / New Thought world, in Kabbalah (tm), in Eastern traditions done western-style. And of course I'm a huge fan of the Radical Faeries. But the gays have yet to hit their stride as religion makers, I'm convinced. What will we see from a nation of spectacle makers, musicians, orgiasts and two-spirits?

The Gods of Gamblers

Check out this recent piece about a poker-playing priest:

The Rev. Andrew Trapp said he entered the PokerStars.net Million Dollar Challenge in hopes of putting St. Michael Catholic Church "super close" to its $5.5 million fundraising goal to build a new facility. He also wanted to strike a public relations blow for priests.

"At the very least, even if I didn't win any prize money, I was hoping it would help people to see that priests can have fun and be normal people and hopefully get a little bit of a fun twist on the image of the priesthood," the assistant pastor said Tuesday.

So the guy won $100,000 for the church building fund. Just ask comedian Steve Harvey to parse what a building fund is.

Why do I love this? The God and gambling nexus is totally gripping. If you ask me, Einstein was out of his gourd when he said that God does not play dice.

Personal bias - in my family's genetic tangle of the sublime and the ridiculous, both god and games play a huge role. My mother's two uncles helped build Las Vegas and were once, respectively, a pit boss at the Golden Nugget and a craps dealer at Binion's Horseshoe. My father was raised in a monastery by his uncle, a holy man named Parthenios (The Virgin). My mother's grandpa came to California to run an offshore gambling boat. My father's aunt was a prioress in a convent.

I could never choose sides. For about a year, I was simultaneously the (ghost) editor of America's oldest Christian magazine, and also one of the country's largest gambling magazines. Tough? Not as much as you'd think. The first month saw the crowning of Jerry Yang - the unlikeliest poker genius to ever win a WSOP bracelet and baffle Christians and gamblers alike.

Yang is a Hmong Laotian who started to teach himself poker near my hometown in California. He's a devoted Christian, prays before matches, and in two years, went from an online dabbler to the king of the green felt. When he sat at the World Series of Poker Final Table, he clearly had God on his side: In the final round, he pushed his chips all in on a pair of 8's, was quickly outmatched, then won by drawing an inside straight on the river, to win a pot worth $8.25 million. A feat of Biblical proportions. What did he do with it? He tithed to kids organizations.

Strangely, neither the Christians or the gamblers made him their poster boy. Go figure.

Kind of a shame. Gambling and prayer aren't as different as you might think. Lord knows, no one prays like a gambler with everything riding. Or as Dostoyevsky (a gambler, penitent and writer in that order) more delicately put it, "Can one even as much as touch a gambling table without immediately becoming infected with superstition?"

There is a good reason for these two activities are so closely tied, I like to think. There's a neat theory put forth by an old Oxford don and Hellenist, Gilbert Murray: Religion is how we think about what we don't know. When we find ourselves on the brink of the unknown - whether through joy, a personal crisis or any other mystical experience - we cast about for some way to understand what can't be understood. That language becomes religion.

Our drive to play games is willfully putting ourselves in that same brink: standing over the abyss, and, like Jerry Yang, letting it all ride. Mystics and gamblers share an adrenaline rush of looking out over the unknown, letting one foot hover over. It's the same rush.

And maybe Yang brought a closer synthesis from his homeland. There seems to be a much nearer nexus between the two in Asia. China, for instance, boasts Buddhism, Taoism and a baroque system of influencing luck at its spiritual center. Go to a Cantonese wedding, and the vows are barely finished before the gaming tables are brought out. Sic Bo and Bacarrat are national passtimes. A precursor of Keno helped build the wall of China.

And - to clarify the lead image above - there's a hugely popular Chinese movie genre which can be summed up as kung fu gambling. Spiritual adepts take their mastery to the gaming tables, and influence the fall of dice and the lay of cards through their spiritual perfection. A cool background here.

More and more American casinos, catering to the enormous Asian market, will hire Feng Shui experts. Entrances face east, walls are built with the soil layering practice of han-chiku and I Ching symbols abound. There's a buddhist shrine at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. A shrine. In a casino. No problem.

Which brings it back to us, I guess - Americans, and what we find holy. I've always been a fan of Vegas, ever since I moved there at 21 and worked the Strip while trying to find my own soul. Chuck Palahnuik wrote, "Las Vegas looks the way you'd imagine heaven must look at night." I agree. Built in 1946 by a nation wracked by Depression and Another Great War, the place remains, for better or worse, an American temple of the first order. Where there was a desert, we created a spring. Where there was scarcity, we created the groaning table of the casino buffet, presided over by the opulent fertility of the showgirl.

So what if these were vegas, or mirages. America has embraced this mirage as its own: that anyone can win, that anyone can be treated like royalty, that the next big hit has your name on it. It's our religion - the faith we hold when we look out into the unknown.

Catholic Girls Gone Bad

Two women on the road to sainthood and the future of the church.

Back in 2005 I was up for a Vatican gig, and I became a passionate Pope-watcher. It amazed me how many intrigues and internecine squabbles still gripped the Little City. Very interesting stuff. There is a Gossip Girls-type spinoff to be set there. Or maybe the last gasp of the reality show moment. Tons of bitchy dudes in skirts - what's not to love?

In any case, this week was a good week to speculate what's going on behind the gilt gates.

To catch you up: The numbers of Catholics are flagging, clearly, even dramatically in the western and developed world. The developing world are increasingly comprising an important faction, but are underrepresented in the halls of power. In the West, which Rome would like to keep, the church is facing a radical shortage of clergy, and the perennial issue of admitting women and married men has been on the front burner.

You can often trend-watch Catholicism by watching the saint machine (or the Offices of the Sacred Congregation for the Causes of Saints). The two big names to come out in the heart of Advent this year seem to say a lot about Rome's evolving relationship with women... and troublemakers.

Mary Ward was a Yorkshire nun who founded what became the Congregation of Jesus and Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a radically liberated order for Catholic women for the 17th century. They attempted to buck the traditions of enclosure and cumbersome habits, wanted to educate young women, and in short tried to follow the extremely successful model of the Jesuits on the other side of the gender aisle. She was brought up for charges of heresy during her lifetime, and her order wasn't given the full go-ahead for a few hundred years.

Mary MacKillop followed a similar path in 19th century Australia, founding the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart. She was actually full-on excommunicated, owing to the rule of life she devised for her order. (The excommunication was later lifted.)

Both women just had miracles approved in the past few days (#1 Ward and #2 for MacKillop). This paves the road for Ward to be beatified and MacKillop to become a saint - the first who was ever excommunicated during her lifetime.

Is the Holy See signaling a climate change for women in the church? Or is this a bone for restless nuns under the papacy of the conservative Pope Benedict XVI? Tune in next week.

Also - some of you know I'm working on a project about miracles. (A puppet show about miracles to be specific.) As I've mentioned to some of you, the Catholic Church maintains that we continue to live in a miraculous age. This was some of the reason behind JPII ramping up the saint machine to unprecedented levels - to say that we live in a time of holy people and miraculous acts.

For those of you curious about what these miracles entail nowadays, they're not all grilled-cheese Jesuses. Both Ward and MacKillop were credited with medical miracles (healing tumors and the like), far and away the most common kind to pass the rigorous testing of the Vatican's miracle office.

Re: the time lag. Sorry for the hiatus, readers. When I first started this blog, I was trying to pitch it to Time Inc, who was losing the religion blog war to the vastly superior Newsweek/WaPo "On Faith" nexus. Now, alas, souped up religion coverage seems a relic of the early post-9/11 years. So, I decided to revive this as a more personal forum. Hope you enjoy.