Word: firebrand
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...kind of sister who for better or worse acquainted generations of parochial schoolers with Catholic discipline. But the liberal church activists who came to hear Chittister speak last week at a Los Angeles conference knew better. They were aware that Sister Joan, her vows notwithstanding, is a longtime feminist firebrand in the midst of a daring gambit. "If Scripture has nothing at all to say about the ordination of women," Chittister asked, "on what basis do we use Jesus as our right to obstruct it?" Her audience thought for a moment, clapped and finally broke into cheers...
...familiar to most mainline churchgoers. A growing evangelical contingent among American Episcopalians fiercely opposes gay ordinations and unions, both of which the church allows to be performed at a bishop's discretion. Conservatives feel that leaders betrayed the integrity of Scripture three years ago in failing to censure firebrand bishop John Shelby Spong (now retired), who publicly disputed Jesus' unique divinity. The exodus of disaffected traditionalists exacerbated the church's drop in baptized membership from 3.6 million in 1965 to 2.3 million today...
...fans take to the Internet and radio hot lines daily to swear they glimpsed you dancing in a nightclub or slipping out of a recording studio--five years after you were laid to rest--it's a sure sign something special is going on. So it goes with the firebrand rapper Tupac Shakur, whose celebrity has swelled into a mystique of near Elvis-like intensity since his death in a Las Vegas drive-by in 1996 at age 25. Shakur was an electrifying rapper whose flashes of gangsta bravado (like the petulant song Hit 'Em Up) were counterbalanced...
Freedom's Daughters (Scribner; 460 pages; $30) weaves the stories of neglected figures like Pauli Murray, organizer of the first sit-ins in Washington during the 1940s, and Gloria Richardson, the firebrand of the struggle in Cambridge, Md., during the 1960s, into a seamless saga of inspiring protest. Olson's subjects had to battle not only white supremacy but also the chauvinism of male civil rights leaders. As she writes, black women in the movement "felt torn between loyalty to their race and loyalty to their sex. Most of them chose race, insisting that their own liberation could...
Ibrahim Hajimi is not, it turns out, just another Palestinian child. His father Hassan is a charismatic firebrand currently in detention in Jerusalem for suspected terrorist acts. And the boy's maternal grandfather is George Raad, a Boston cardiologist and internationally known Palestinian advocate. The death of a little boy so prominently connected offers a chance for some effective anti-Israel propaganda. To neutralize that very thing, Colonel Daniel Yizhar of West Bank security briefs Lieutenant Doron on what will be the official army version of the checkpoint episode. The story is mostly accurate but omits, Doron notes, the long...