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    Namwamba Rallies Support for Starlets as Kenya Secures Hollywood and NBA Deals

    Namwamba Rallies Support for Starlets as Kenya Secures Hollywood and NBA Deals

    Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua (center) interacts with friends at his rural home in Mathira, Nyeri County on September 24, 2023.

    Kenyans React After Gachagua’s Revelation on His Village Friend

    Rashford's £700k Ride Involved in an Accident After Man Utd's Win

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    A photo of Citizen TV's studios in Nairobi.

    Ex-Citizen TV Journalist Appeals for Help, Reveals He’s Homeless 

    Water and Sanitation Cabinet Secretary Alice Wahome (left) shakes hands with President William Ruto during a UDA faction in 2022.

    How Alice Wahome Found Herself in Ruto’s Cabinet 

    Nairobi City County to Dispose 193 Unclaimed Bodies

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      Public Service PS Amos Gathecha speaking during the opening ceremony of Public Service Counsellors workshop on September 18. PHOTO-Amos

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          Namwamba Rallies Support for Starlets as Kenya Secures Hollywood and NBA Deals

          Namwamba Rallies Support for Starlets as Kenya Secures Hollywood and NBA Deals

          Rashford's £700k Ride Involved in an Accident After Man Utd's Win

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              Namwamba Rallies Support for Starlets as Kenya Secures Hollywood and NBA Deals

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                  Namwamba Rallies Support for Starlets as Kenya Secures Hollywood and NBA Deals

                  Namwamba Rallies Support for Starlets as Kenya Secures Hollywood and NBA Deals

                  Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua (center) interacts with friends at his rural home in Mathira, Nyeri County on September 24, 2023.

                  Kenyans React After Gachagua’s Revelation on His Village Friend

                  Rashford's £700k Ride Involved in an Accident After Man Utd's Win

                  Rashford’s Ksh108 Million Ride Crashes After Man United Win

                  A photo of Citizen TV's studios in Nairobi.

                  Ex-Citizen TV Journalist Appeals for Help, Reveals He’s Homeless 

                  Water and Sanitation Cabinet Secretary Alice Wahome (left) shakes hands with President William Ruto during a UDA faction in 2022.

                  How Alice Wahome Found Herself in Ruto’s Cabinet 

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                    A photo of Citizen TV's studios in Nairobi.

                    Ex-Citizen TV Journalist Appeals for Help, Reveals He’s Homeless 

                    Public Service PS Amos Gathecha speaking during the opening ceremony of Public Service Counsellors workshop on September 18. PHOTO-Amos

                    Govt Identifies Most Stressed Civil Servants

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                    CS Nakhumicha Warns Kenyans of Health Risks Linked to Worldcoin Eye Scans

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                      A photo of Billy Chemirmir- Kenyan man found dead in his prison cell in Texas on Septmber 19, 2023.

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                        Namwamba Rallies Support for Starlets as Kenya Secures Hollywood and NBA Deals

                        Namwamba Rallies Support for Starlets as Kenya Secures Hollywood and NBA Deals

                        Rashford's £700k Ride Involved in an Accident After Man Utd's Win

                        Rashford’s Ksh108 Million Ride Crashes After Man United Win

                        From left Barcelona Coach Xavi Hernandez, Manchester City coach Pep Guardiola and Bayern Leverkusen boss Xavi Alonso. The 3 coaches are unbeaten.

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                            Namwamba Rallies Support for Starlets as Kenya Secures Hollywood and NBA Deals

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                              A new type of spyware means those online ads could go from annoying to menacing. AP Photo/Julio Cortez

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                              Sinead O’Connor Was Once Seen as a Sacrilegious Rebel, but her Sic and Life were Deeply Infused with Spiritual Seeking

                              Brenna Moore by Brenna Moore
                              August 2, 2023
                              Irish singer Sinead O'Connor performs at Paradiso in Amsterdam in March 1988. Paul Bergen/Redferns via Getty Images

                              Irish singer Sinead O'Connor performs at Paradiso in Amsterdam in March 1988. Paul Bergen/Redferns via Getty Images

                              When news broke July 26, 2023, that the gifted Irish singer Sinead O’Connor had died, stories of her most famous performance circulated amid the grief and shock.

                              Thirty-one years ago, after a haunting rendition of Bob Marley’s song “War,” O’Connor ripped up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on live television. “Fight the real enemy,” she said – a reference to clerical sex abuse. For months afterward, she was banned, booed and mocked, dismissed as a crazy rebel beyond the pale.

                              Commemorations following her death, however, cast the protest in a very different light. Her “Saturday Night Live” performance is now seen as “invigorating,” the New York Times’ pop critic wrote, and “a call to arms for the dispossessed.”

                              Attitudes toward Catholicism, sex and power are far different today than in 1992, whether in New York or O’Connor’s native Dublin. In many people’s eyes, the moral credibility of the Catholic Church around the world has crumbled, and trust in faith institutions of any sort is at an all-time low. Sexual abuse, once discussed only in whispers, is now beginning to be talked about openly.

                              I join the chorus of voices today who say O’Connor was decades ahead of her time. But leaving it just at that, we miss something profound about the complexity and depth of her religious imagination. Sinead O’Connor was arguably one of the most spiritually sensitive artists of our time.

                              I am a scholar of Catholicism in the modern era and have long been interested in those figures – the poets, artists, seekers – who wander the margins of their religious tradition. These men and women are dissatisfied with the mainstream centers of religious power but nonetheless compelled by something indelibly religious that feeds the wellsprings of their artistic imagination.

                              Throughout her life, O’Connor defied religious labels, exploring multiple faiths. The exquisite freedom in her music cannot be disentangled from that something transcendent that she was always after.

                              ‘Rescuing God from religion’

                              Religion is often thought about as discreet traditions: institutions that someone is either inside or outside. But on the ground, it is rarely that simple.

                              The Catholic Church had a strong hold on Irish society as O’Connor was growing up – a “theocracy,” she called it in interviews and her memoir, “Rememberings” – and for many years she called for more accountability for the clerical abuse crisis. But she was also open in her love of other aspects of the faith, albeit often in unorthodox ways. She had a tattoo of Jesus on her chest and continued to critique the church while appearing on television with a priest’s collar.

                              Sinead O’Connor, with her tattoo of Jesus, embraces singer Deborah Harry at the 2011 amfAR Inspiration Gala in Los Angeles. Jeff Vespa/Getty Images for amfAR

                              Ten years after her SNL performance, O’Connor took courses at a seminary in Dublin with a Catholic Dominican priest, Rev. Wilfred Harrington. Together, they read the prophets of the Hebrew Bible and the Psalms: sacred scriptures in which God’s voice comes through in darker, moodier, more human forms.

                              Inspired by her teacher, she made the gorgeous album “Theology,” dedicated to him. The album is a mix of some of her own songs inspired by the Hebrew Bible – like “If You Had a Vineyard,” inspired by the Book of Isaiah; and “Watcher of Men,” which draws from the biblical story of Job – and other tracks that essentially are sung versions of her favorite Psalms.


                              Also Read: State and Religion: Why the Church in Kenya Has Failed


                              In a 2007 interview with Fordham University’s WFUV radio station, O’Connor said that she was hoping the album could show God to people when religion itself had blocked their access to God. It was a kind of “rescuing God from religion,” to “lift God out of religion.” Rather than preaching or writing, “music is the little way that I do that,” she said, adding, “I say that as someone who has a lot of love for religion.”

                              Reading the prophets

                              In doing so, she stood in the long line of the prophetic tradition itself.

                              The great Jewish thinker Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s book “The Prophets” begins with this sentence: “This book is about some of the most disturbing people who have ever lived.” Over and over, the Bible shows the prophets – the prophets who inspired “Theology” – mounting bracing assaults on hypocrisies and insincerities in their own religious communities, and not politely or calmly.

                              A photo of Sinead O’Connor ripping the photograph of Pope John Paul II stands in front of a protest in Krakow, Poland, in 2023, accusing church hierarchy of covering up sexual abuse. Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images

                              To many horrified Catholics, O’Connor’s SNL appearance and her many other criticisms of the church were blasphemous – or, at best, just throwing stones from outside the church for attention. Other fans, however, saw it as prophetic condemnation. It was not just a critique of child abuse but of church officials’ professed compassion for children – sanctimonious pieties as they covered up the abuse.

                              In calling this out and so much more, O’Connor was often seen as disturbing: not just the photo-of-the-pope incident, but her androgyny, her shaved head, her openness around her own struggles with mental illness. But for many admirers, as the documentary “Nothing Compares” makes clear, all this showed that she was free, and like the prophets of old, unashamed and unafraid to provoke.

                              Rasta to Islam

                              At the same time, O’Connor’s religious imagination was so much more than a complex relationship with Catholicism. Religion around O’Connor was eclectic and intense.

                              She was deeply influenced by Rastafarian traditions of Jamaica, which she described as “an anti-religious but massively pro-God spiritual movement.” She considered Sam Cooke’s early album with the Soul Stirrers the best gospel album ever made. She counted among her spiritual heroes Muhammad Ali – and converted to Islam in 2018, changing her name to Shuhada’ Sadaqat.

                              O’Connor performs during a concert at the Admiralspalast in Berlin in December 2019, after her conversion to Islam. Frank Hoensch/Redferns via Getty Images

                              Yet O’Connor’s vision was not fragmented, as if she were constantly chasing after bits and pieces. The miracle of Sinead O’Connor is that it all coheres, somehow, in the words of an artist who refuses to lie, to hide or not say what she thinks.

                              When asked about spirituality, O’Connor once said that she preferred to sing about it, not talk about it – as she does in so many songs, from her luminous singing of the antiphon, a Marian hymn sung at Easter services, to her Rasta-inspired album, “Throw Down Your Arms.”

                              In “Something Beautiful,” a track from the “Theology” album, O’Connor speaks both to God and the listener: “I wanna make/ Something beautiful/ For you and from you/ To show you/ I adore you.”

                              Indeed, she did. To be moved by her art is to sense a transcendence, a peek into radiance.The Conversation

                              Brenna Moore, Professor of Theology, Fordham University

                              This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

                              Tags: CelebritiesIrelandIslamMusicPope John Paul IIPopularReligion and SocietySinead O'ConnorSpirituality

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                              Brenna Moore

                              Brenna Moore

                              Brenna Moore is a specialist in the area of modern Christianity, with a focus on Catholic intellectual and cultural history in Europe. She is particularly interested in questions concerning women, gender, and religion; mysticism and spirituality; a movement in theology known as resourcement; and the various Catholic responses to modernity (especially secularism, the rise of fascism, religious and cultural difference, with interests in Islam and Judaism). She is most recently the author of Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism (University of Chicago Press, 2021). This project explores a remarkable network of Catholic historians, theologians, poets, and activists who pushed against both the far-right surge in interwar Europe and the secularizing tendencies of the leftist movements active in the early to mid-twentieth century. For this community, “spiritual friendship” was both a pathway to God, and also a worldview they sensed was uniquely capable of engaging the social and political crises of the mid-century. Friendships took place not only in face-to-face settings, but also in other modes of consciousness including memory, dreams, and imagination. Members of this network included the Islamicist Louis Massignon and the Egyptian philanthropist Mary Kahil, the scholar of medieval mysticism and Nazi resister Marie Magdeleine Davy, Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, the Chilean poet and Franciscan oblate, Gabriela Mistral, and the poet of the Harlem renaissance, Claude McKay. In her research, Brenna is especially drawn to the creative religious thinkers – theologians, poets, mystical writers, and novelists – who engaged in imaginative, humane, and cosmopolitan response to the challenges of the twentieth century. She’s published on figures like the novelist Léon Bloy, the mystic and poet Raïssa Maritain and her husband, the philosopher Jacques Maritain, and the Jesuit historians of spirituality, Henri de Lubac and Michel de Certeau. She is the author of Sacred Dread: Raïssa Maritain, the Allure of Suffering, and the French Catholic Revival, 1905-1945 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2013) and co-editor, with Mary Dunn, of the volume Religious Intimacies: Intersubectivity in the Modern Christian West (Indiana University Press, 2020). She has also presented research on the resistance to Nazism in France, and has published short pieces on the religious imagination of artists like Sinéad O'Connor and Beyoncé, and on exhibits at the MET. Brenna also occasionally contributes to contemporary conversations about religion and modernity in forums such as the Immanent Frame and Contending Modernities (some examples are here and here). Brenna also serves on the Board of Directors of LSA Family Health Service, a community-based organization founded by the Little Sisters of the Assumption in 1958, that aims to empower families and children in East Harlem. She is currently working on an interdisciplinary research project telling the story of LSA’s extraordinary history and its impact in the community. In 2020, Brenna was elected to serve as the Vice President of the American Catholic Historical Association, and will serve as President in 2022. She recently served on the editorial board of Fordham University Press. At Fordham, Brenna teaches introductory courses in theology, seminars for majors, and graduate course. She loves helping students think about what it means to major in the humanities, is interested in Ignatian and Jesuit pedagogy, and is the 2014 recipient of the Fordham University faculty award for mentoring undergraduate research. A Midwesterner at heart, Brenna now lives in Hastings-on-Hudson and loves gardening, serving her community, and taking adventures with her family.

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