Cat Stevens, Pellists, Jensenists, what have you got, because the pond's agin it, unless it happens to feature manly men in frocks ...

The pond realises that it's been failing in its duties in relation to meditative Sundays ... we simply haven't been pounding the keyboard hard enough.

This came upon the pond while watching Spotlight last night.

It isn't a particularly good film. The reporters at the Boston Globe are each given haloes, and Mark Ruffalo is given an obligatory intense speech to ensure nominations, while good old Stanley Tucci acts the socks off him. And then there's the banality of the underscore, which frequently delivers bouts of "doing" music to accompany montages of activity (a Christmas carol also performs this duty).

And poor old Rachel McAdams is given the job of becoming a female beagle, such is the intensity of her winsome looks (punters will recall with affection that Anthony Lane awarded Ryan Gosling the title of male beagle when he noted a sure way for the local animal shelter's fund-raising leaflet to raise oodles of money was to have Gosling as the beagle on the cover. It never fails ...)

And yet the sheer enormity of what the Catholic church got up to in Boston, the cover-ups and the abuse, carried the pond through the movie, and made it wonder whether we will ever see the Pellists back in Australia ...

North Coast Voices here carried news of the full, active and rich life the Pellists are currently enjoying in Rome,  and soon we will hear whether that will continue or whether the Pellists will take the trip back to face the music. If the movie is any guide, it's not likely.

Here's one of the end titles for that film ...

So it goes, and so the pond isn't holding its breath ...

And then who should bob up on the Huff but Cat Stevens preaching Guff ...

What a doofus. What an addle-brained ratbag.

Try Greg Hunting Cat Stevens' comments about Salman Rushdie and see if you can forgive this wretch and would want to get on a peace train with such a sorry and pathetic dissembler ...

But the pond always looks for hope alongside sorry tales of despair, and before we get on to despairing about that other axis of weevils, the Jensenists, it's time for a little hope.

It involves a story some months ago in The New Yorker, happily at the moment outside the paywall concerning the redemption of one member of the Westboro church.

Unfollow, How a prized daughter of the Westboro Baptist Church came to question its beliefs, is a long read, and the pond must deliver a spoiler alert, because we're cutting to the chase with the final few pars ... as Adrian Chen and Megan Phelps-Roper returned to the church of hate and its hate signs:

Directly across the street stood a house painted in bright, horizontal rainbow stripes. The house had been bought, in 2012, by Planting Peace, a nonprofit group whose mission, according to its Web site, is “spreading peace in a hurting world.” The Equality House, as it’s known, is home to a group of young L.G.B.T. activists. Planting Peace has worked with former Westboro members to spread its message of tolerance. Megan first visited the house in 2013, after her cousin Libby encouraged her to visit. She sneaked in the back door, for fear of being spotted by her family. 
Today, Megan and Grace’s only connection to Westboro is virtual. Although Phelps-Roper no longer believes that the Bible is the word of God, she still reads it to try to find scriptural arguments that could encourage Westboro to take a more humane approach to the world. Sometimes she’ll tweet passages, knowing that church members will see them. After they left the church, Megan and Grace were blocked from Westboro’s Twitter accounts, but they created a secret account to follow them. Sometimes, when her mother appears in a video, Megan will loop it over and over, just to hear her voice. 
Fred Phelps died in March, 2014, at the age of eighty-four. Former members of the church told me that Fred had had a softening of heart at the end of his life and had been excommunicated. (The church denies these claims.) Zach Phelps-Roper, Megan’s younger brother, who left the church later that year, said that one of the precipitating events in Fred’s exclusion had been expressing kindness toward the Equality House. At a church meeting, Zach recalls, members discussed the episode: “He stepped out the front door of the church and looked at the Rainbow House, the Planting Peace organization, and looked over and said, ‘You’re good people.’ ”

Westboro is a particularly hate-filled version of extreme Calvinism, which naturally brings the pond to the hating of the angry Sydney Anglicans and the Jensenists ...

Lately the Jensenists have stopped turning up at their old haunts, and Michael Jensen can be found scribbling away at The Drum ...

Sad to say, The Drum - much like the ABC in general - isn't what it used to be, and even though this particular piece of rotting fish is days old, it was still top of the digital page ...

Now anybody with the requisite cast-iron stomach can attend the page here, but please allow the pond to set the tone of the discourse with this stomach-churning gobbet ...

This is classic Jensenism.

It involves either a deliberate lie - as with some Islamic fundamentalists, it is considered legitimate to lie to infidels - or a confession of profound ignorance and stupidity.

Of course it could be just a mix of the two, and so let us now set off to judge by word and by deed ...

Why not head off to Meet Alliance Defending Freedom, Fox's Favorite Anti-LGBT Legal Organization ...

How about How An Extreme Anti-LGBT Legal Powerhouse Is Working To Enact "Religious Freedom" Laws ...

Why not dabble in This Right-Wing Legal Powerhouse Wants To Make Gay Sex Illegal ...

Of course in the world of Jensenism, wanting to make gay sex illegal isn't "gay hate", it's just saving gays from hell ... or making practitioners get their deserved comeuppance.

Either way, it isn't hate. Just as a tooth for a tooth and an eye for an eye is a jovial form of barter. Or some such thing ...

Why would the Jensenists not think working in assorted countries around the world to get gay sex criminalised, or re-criminalised, or to stay criminalised isn't an example of gay hate?

Why, it's because angry Sydney Anglicans have been in the thick of such activities in Africa, as recounted many times by the pond in the past ...

The angry Calvinist Sydney Anglicans stand, if the pond may borrow from the Jensenist phrasing, against the encroaching of tolerance and a liberal 'live and let live' philosophy, with a fierce form of Calvinist fundamentalism, which is anything but liberal, since it actively seeks to eradicate homosexuality from public life entirely ...

This is how radical extremism and bigotry works. It seeks to pretend that extremists are moderates just going about their moderate daily business of discrimination in a godly way ...

It's a lie, built on lies, and perhaps that's why there's a shortage of respect.

You can't pretend you're doing one thing, while off doing wicked things.

Time then for a little Elmer Gantry Holy Roller judgement:

For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.

And this is what requires judging. It's the half-baked apologetics. See if you can recognise the classic equivocating Jensenist style ...

Now, as it happens, I don't agree with everything that the ADF says, or with its approach to church-state relations ...

....these are serious people who make sustained legal and intellectual arguments for their positions, and use legitimate tactics to pursue them

....Even a passionate pro-choice advocate should surely recognise that the issue of abortion is extremely morally complex. It deserves argument, whatever your position ...

...The place and shape of the family is likewise a matter for serious debate, whatever one's views.

...We seem to have lost the vision of a genuine pluralism, in which competing points of view on serious moral issues are both allowed to coexist so that the arguments for each may be put...

...Rather, we resort to tweeting and shouting.

Of course there's rich pickings there. A genuine pluralism seems to consist of one side being cast into hell for all eternity ...

And the issue of having an abortion is easily understood ... if you happen to be a woman, with the right to be in control of your body.

As opposed to men, such as angry Anglicans and fundamentalist Islamics wanting to control it for you ...

In the end, Westboro's hardline haters are more intellectually honest than those who claim they use fancy legal and intellectual arguments and legitimate tactics... while pursuing exactly the same homophobic, hate-filled outcomes that the Westboro mob want

The Westboro mob - what's left of them - just hate. The rest is fancy dressing and frippery and airy talk of legitimate tactics, of the kind Calvinists should really disdain ...

As for tweeting and its wickedness?

Perhaps the angry Anglicans should get out into the world and tweet a little more ...

On December 20, 2009, Phelps-Roper was in the basement of her house, for a church function, when she checked Twitter on her phone and saw that Brittany Murphy, the thirty-two-year-old actress, had died. When she read the tweet aloud, other church members reacted with glee, celebrating another righteous judgment from God. “Lots of people were talking about going to picket her funeral,” Phelps-Roper said. When Phelps-Roper was younger, news of terrible events had given her a visceral thrill. On 9/11, she was in the crowded hallway of her high school when she overheard someone talking about how an airplane had hit the World Trade Center. “Awesome!” she exclaimed, to the horror of a student next to her. She couldn’t wait to picket Ground Zero. (The following March, she and other Westboro members travelled to New York City to protest what they described in a press release as “FDNY fags and terrorists.”) But Phelps-Roper had loved Murphy in “Clueless,” and she felt an unexpected pang—not quite sadness, but something close—over her death. As she continued scrolling through Twitter, she saw that it was full of people mourning Murphy. The contrast between the grief on Twitter and the buoyant mood in the basement unsettled her. She couldn’t bring herself to post a tweet thanking God for Murphy’s death. “I felt like I would be such a jackass to go on and post something like that,” she said.
...Her hesitance reflected a growing concern for the feelings of people outside Westboro. Church members disdained human feelings as something that people worshipped instead of the Bible. They even had a sign: “GOD HATES YOUR FEELINGS.” They disregarded people’s feelings in order to break their idols. Just a few months earlier, the Westboro Web site had received an e-mail arguing that the church’s constant use of the word “fag” was needlessly offensive. “Get a grip, you presumptuous toad,” Phelps-Roper had replied. She signed off, “Have a lovely day. You’re going to Hell....”

...As Phelps-Roper continued to tweet, she developed relationships with more people like Hughes. There was a Jewish marketing consultant in Brooklyn who abhorred Westboro’s tactics but supported the church’s right to express its views. There was a young Australian guy who tweeted political jokes that she and her younger sister Grace found hilarious. “It was like I was becoming part of a community,” Phelps-Roper said. By following her opponents’ feeds, she absorbed their thoughts on the world, learned what food they ate, and saw photographs of their babies. “I was beginning to see them as human,” she said. When she read about an earthquake that struck off Canada’s Pacific coast, she sent a concerned tweet to Graham Hughes: “Isn’t this close to you?”

Perhaps angry Anglicans might be better off not scribbling for The Drum in support of bigotry and homophobia and hate ...perhaps they should take to twitter, and perhaps then they might even end up seeing others as human ...

And so, just to complete the circle, and having dissed an Islamic, Catholics, and angry Anglicans, the pond would like to thank a correspondent for helping complete the circle.

The pond has always loved to end its meditative Sunday pieces with sightings of men in frocks.

Usually this has featured the Pellists, but there are some excellent frock sightings elsewhere, thanks to Cardinal "manly man" Burke.

Here, for example, and here, and at the pond correspondent's link here, while you can find the manly Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke's manly man insights here in an interview ...

Cardinal Burke: First of all, be manly yourself. In other words, cultivate your own manly qualities, because the priest is first and foremost the spiritual father; he is a man. You need to have manly qualities of selflessness, chivalry and discipline to avoid situations improper for a priest. A priest must have the manly confidence and credibility to be a spiritual father to his flock, giving clear firm guidance with kindness and charity.

What a hoot it is, unless of course, you happen to have been a child growing up in Boston, or in certain parts of Australia, or elsewhere around the world, and caught up in a pandemic of evil ...

Never mind, let's end with a few manly men sightings ...