Dispatches From the Culture Wars -- She-roes, Heroes & Zeros edition

Day; Rosenberg; Davis; Purple; Coates

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When Prominent Catholics Opposed Dorothy Day

By Teresa Tritch
September 30, 2015
New York Times

In the winter of 1949, Francis Spellman, then the Archbishop of New York, broke a strike by 240 Catholic gravediggers at the largest Catholic cemetery in New York City. Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker newspaper she founded had steadfastly backed the strikers with money, supplies, legal aid and moral and editorial support.
Dorothy Day challenged him. In a letter on March 4, 1949, she said the strike was about the workers’ “dignity as men, their dignity as workers, and the right to have a union of their own, and a right to talk over their grievances.” She asked the cardinal to go to the union leaders, “meet their demands, be their servant as Christ was the servant of his disciples, washing their feet.”


The Rosenbergs’ Truth in Fiction

By Sheila Wilensky and Jillian Cantor
September 17, 2015
Tucson Weekly

Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed on June 19, 1953, the only Americans put to death during the Cold War between the United Sates and the former Soviet Union.
The fact of their execution still incites debate. And Jillian Cantor, 37, author of The Hours Count: A Novel, which debuts next month, doesn't shy away from the ongoing controversy. Was it the inextricable fear of "the other, communism, or anti-Semitism," which sealed their conviction?, she asks. Both of the Rosenbergs were first-generation Jewish-Americans, born in New York to immigrant parents.
I didn't realize that Julius and Ethel were parents," says Cantor. "I empathized with Ethel as a mother. I have two young sons, who were similar ages to her boys when she was first arrested" on Aug. 11, 1950. "I started wondering, 'Was she innocent?'"


Was Pope Francis Actually Swindled into Meeting Kim Davis?

By Charles P. Pierce
October 1, 2015
Esquire

According to E. J. Dionne, the meeting between Kim Davis and the pope was brokered by Archbishop Carlo Vigano, the papal nuncio to the United States at whose residence the pope stayed during his time in Washington, which is when the meeting took place.
Ratzinger's fingerprints are all over this story. Vigano is a Benedict loyalist. Robert Moynihan, whose newsletter, Inside The Vatican, got the story first, is an actual lifelong Ratzinger protégé. And the Vatican press office acted just the way I'd want it to act, if I were the guy setting this up. First, it issues a silly non-denial denial, and then it merely confirms that the meeting occurred. At which point, the office clams up, leaving the story festering out there in the news cycle, and leaving the pope out there in the American culture war to twist in the wind.

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Adam Purple, legendary gardener, 84, is dead; Was biking across Williamsburg Bridge

By Lincoln Anderson
September 15, 2015
The Villager

Adam Purple, the godfather of the Lower East Side community gardens who fought a losing battle to save his spectacular Garden of Eden from destruction for a low-income housing project, died Monday as he was bicycling over the Williamsburg Bridge.
Purple’s garden was demolished in 1986.
The Garden of Eden covered 15,000 square feet between Forsyth and Eldridge Sts. near Stanton St. With planting beds in Zen-like concentric circles, it featured corn, cucumbers, tomatoes, asparagus, raspberries and 45 trees.
“It was a work of art — an earthwork, a work of art that was also ecologically based,” Purple told Amy Brost in a 2006 interview.


Ta-Nehisi Coates To Write New Black Panther Comic Book Series For Marvel

By Matt Ferner
September 22, 2015
Huffington Post

Ta-Nehisi Coates will be writing a new Black Panther comic book series for Marvel, The New York Times announced Tuesday.
Coates, 39, a national correspondent at The Atlantic, National Book Award nominee, and author of the recent New York Times bestselling book Between The World And Me, is one of the most thoughtful and provocative writers about the African-American experience, America's long struggle with racism and issues of social and criminal justice. He's also a Marvel Comics superfan and living encyclopedia on the subject.
Black Panther, the first black superhero, was created in 1966 by Marvel comics legends Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. The storyline to be written by Coates is titled "A Nation Under Our Feet." It's inspired by Steven Hahn's book of the same title. The comic book will follow Black Panther as he responds to an uprising in his country set off by a group of superhuman terrorists called the People.