Listen To Mr. October

• Willie Mays died last week at the age of 93. This is part of how we remember and honor him: “Willie Mays’ death reopens debate: Who’s the game’s ‘greatest living ballplayer’?” (Erik Loomis had his post on this up a full day before the NBC story.)

Something like this happened shortly after Aretha Franklin died. We all knew who the “greatest living singer” was and then, suddenly, we no longer did. Discussing and arguing over candidates who might be worthy of succeeding her was a way of paying tribute to her greatness.

That was also a much trickier argument, since you can’t cite statistics to support the claim that someone is a great singer, and also since the obvious answer was not “Her godson, Barry Bonds. Duh.” (Yes, he eventually took the stuff others had been taking for years before then. But the skinny guy who hit 30-40 home runs every year despite not seeing a fastball in the strike zone for a decade before that was still one of the greatest hitters any of us has ever seen.)

• Willie Mays won Rookie of the Year honors in 1951 with the New York Giants. He spent most of 1952 and 1953 in the Army during the Korean War, then returned to the Giants in 1954. That year he hit 41 home runs, batted .345, and won the league’s Most Valuable Player award en route to sweeping Cleveland to win the World Series.

The following year, Willie Mays reported to Spring Training and was not permitted to stay in the same hotel as the rest of the team or to dine with them in public. Willie Mays — reigning MVP, World Champion, Army veteran — was still a Black man in 1955 America.

(See earlier: “Spring Training in Black and White” and “‘The Soreno Has Politely Said No’,”)

Willie Mays’ final game in a major league uniform was as a New York Met, on the losing side of the 1973 World Series won in seven games by the Oakland A’s. That A’s team featured future hall-of-famers Reggie Jackson and Rollie Fingers.

Whether or not you care about baseball, you should listen to Reggie Jackson’s description of what it was like to be a Black ballplayer in Birmingham, Alabama, in the 1960s. There are way too many Yankees on this panel, so skip ahead in the video to the 5-minute mark:

• “Tzlofchad’s Daughters and the Master’s Tools.” Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg on Zelophehad’s daughters and what that story can teach us about possibility and lasting change.

• Those of us who like reading about the Sea Peoples will enjoy reading Philip Jenkins on “The Sea Peoples” of 1200 BCE and the Sea Peoples of the 9th century CE.

• “The Sea Peoples” may also soon be an apt name for residents of Miami.

• At Atlas Obscura, Diana Hubbell writes about “Why We Tell Bees About Death.” It’s a deep dive into the tradition or folklore or superstition of “telling the bees” about the death of someone close or significant.

Hubbell starts off with an excerpt from John Greenleaf Whittier’s “Telling the Bees,” noting that it was a “poem about grief.” That gets lost a bit in all of the fascinating discussion of bees and what they represent in human folklore and mythology across times and civilizations. It’s “about grief.”

In the lovely, gentle streaming series Three Pines, adapted from Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache books, Alfred Molina plays a detective whose super-power is simply kindness. At one point Molina’s Gamache tells a child whose mother was slain that “Grief is love … love with no place to go.” That is what “telling the bees” is for.

• Richard Beck: “Petitionary prayer is an experience of failure. Because everyone you pray for will die.”

To be fair, it is also true that everyone you don’t pray for will also die.

Beck provides some wisdom on an important topic here. It reminds me of Gordon Atkinson’s bit about how it’s CPE, not supposedly liberal theology, that causes so many seminarians to lose or alter their faith. “Clinical pastoral education” sends seminarians into hospitals and hospices for a semester. People imagine that seminary students’ faith is tried because they read too much Bultmann, but really it’s because CPE forces them to confront the universal inevitability of death, regardless of our desires, wishes, or prayers.

• Garry Wills, at age 90, writes about Mother Jones for Mother Jones: “America’s Best Made-Up Person.”

(No, he never met her. Mary Harris Jones died in 1930. Wills was born in 1934.)

• Colorado Republican and famed theater-goer Lauren Boebert supports the establishment of religion by mandating the posting of the “Ten Commandments” [white-/Christian-nationalist revised edition] in public school classrooms “because we need morals back in our nation.”

Also backing this affirmation of official morality is twice-removed former Alabama Judge Roy Moore. “Twice-removed” there refers to Moore’s judicial history:

After he was removed as chief justice of Alabama Supreme Court in 2003 for his refusal to remove the Ten Commandments monument, Moore was elected to the post again, but was suspended from the bench in 2016 after a judicial discipline panel ruled he had urged probate judges to refuse marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

But Moore was also famously more than twice removed from shopping malls in Alabama, where he was notorious for creeping on teenage girls.

The recent confluence of this latest “Ten Commandments” fever and the story of Texas mega-church pastor Robert Morris being forced to resign due to his history of sexual predation toward minors has me thinking again of Roy Moore. He’s been quoted in several stories about Louisiana’s commandments law. I’m still waiting for someone to ask him to comment on the Gateway Church scandal.

Anyway, since it’s been a while since he was a familiar name in the headlines, here’s a look back at some of what we’ve written here about Moore and his defenders over the years: