After months of obsessive coverage of Twitch streamer Hasan Piker [above], some [corporate] mainstream news outlets finally decided to invite him on to talk to him directly. The problem, however, is that these interviews were obviously bad faith attempts to bait him into saying something “controversial” to delegitimize the left – and Abdul El-Sayed, specifically. In this video we’ll talk about Hasan’s interviews with Axios and MS NOW and why they were so bad.
Figueredo’s timely and insightful 26-minute video commentary can be viewed in its entirety below. It's followed by an excerpt from an article published earlier today by The New Arab which speaks to Piker's support of non-corporatist Democrats, such as Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed.
Hasan Piker’s following has been large enough that he’s been able to mobilise support for outsider candidates in the Democratic Party. For instance, he’s widely considered to have played a crucial role in Zohran Mamdani’s New York City mayoral campaign.
Several other Democrats from the “democratic socialist” wing of the parties have appeared on his stream in the last year, or have benefited from his fundraising efforts. The most prominent has been Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for the Michigan Senate election, who has even had Piker speak at his rallies.
[. . .] A couple of months ago I thought the liberal hysteria at the spectre of Hasan Piker had reached its peak when the U.K. banned him from entering the country due to the “risk [he] may pose to U.K. society.” But since then, the Democratic Party-aligned press in particular seems to have become somewhat obsessed with him.
It’s no exaggeration to say his name is being mentioned practically daily in mainstream coverage, as though he were a major player in U.S. politics.
In the last few weeks, Piker has been condemned as “dangerous, malicious and antisemitic” by Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader in Congress. Other Democratic Congress members have chimed in, with one saying Piker has a history of “hateful ideas and antisemitic remarks”, or claiming his rhetoric is “right out of the Nazi playbook.”
This all seems a bit much for a man who’s given lengthy speeches opposing antisemitism, or who recently squeamishly replied, “I’m a little too woke for this,” when Norman Finkelstein said on his stream that he “doesn’t talk to Israelis” after the Gaza genocide.
But of course, we have to directly address the issue here. Although his other leftist opinions may be controversial, the real sticking point against Hasan Piker is his principled and well-articulated opposition to the state of Israel. That’s the central thrust behind all of the attacks on him.
Underlying all of this is the severe anxiety that support for Israel in the United States is deteriorating across the board, but especially with Democratic voters, where it is now a ‘fringe position’. The number of Democratic voters who say they have a positive view of Israel is now 13%, which is lower than the percentage who support banning all abortions.
So how can the party leadership rationalise being so diehard in support of a position the vast majority of their members oppose? Right now, Hasan Piker has become their scapegoat. Similar to how a lot of Americans vastly exaggerate the amount of influence Vladimir Putin has in domestic U.S. politics to avoid dealing with the uncomfortable fact that MAGA is homegrown, the Democratic establishment has convinced themselves that their members’ sharp turn against Israel is not because they’ve had to watch them commit a live-streamed genocide for almost three years; it’s because a witty Twitch streamer bamboozled them into it.
A spiritual resource that many of my Christian patients find particularly meaningful is Sarah Young’s devotional, Jesus Calling: Enjoying Peace in His Presence. It’s a collection of daily reflections written as if Jesus himself is speaking directly to us. They are words of encouragement, comfort, and reassurance based on Jesus’ own words of hope, guidance, and peace found in Scripture.
I share this evening a favorite reading of mine from Jesus Calling, one that is inspired by Colossians 1:16, 1 Kings 19:12, and Psalm 5:3.
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Wait quietly in my Presence while My thoughts form silently in the depths of your being. Do not try to rush this process, because hurry keeps your heart earthbound. I am the Creator of the entire universe, yet I choose to make My humble home in your heart. It is there where you know Me most intimately; it is there where I speak to you in holy whispers. Ask My Spirit to quiet your mind so that you can hear My still small voice within you. I am speaking to you continually: words of Life . . . Peace . . . Love. Tune your heart to receive these messages of abundant blessing. Lay your requests before Me, and wait in expectation.
Last Wednesday, September 16, was the 49th anniversary of the death of American-born Greek opera singer Maria Callas (1923-1977).
Here at The Wild Reed I commemorate Callas and her artistic legacy with a number of items relating to her brief but memorable foray into the cinematic world via Pier Pablo Pasolini’s 1969 film, Medea.
On my (archived) website Callas as Medea, I describe Pasolini’s film as “a hypnotic cinematic experience and a powerful ideological tale of the clash of two cultures.”
But before we get more into this doozy of a film, here’s a short Opera Wirearticle by Francisco Salazar about how Callas’ artistry continues to inspire not only those in the world of music but also film, including actress Anne Hathaway.
Anne Hathaway [left] is revealing that for her acclaimed performance in The Odyssey, she took inspiration from Maria Callas.
During the premiere of the film, the actress said, “I thought a lot about Greece and I was thinking about somebody who’s mythic to me in my own life is Maria Callas, and I was just thinking like okay if this film were an opera, Maria Callas would 100 percent play Penelope. How would she play her? And then I just let myself imagine towering emotions and the way Maria Callas could do much with intimate moments, the way she could stand there so still inside of herself and produce the most beautiful sound but then turn around and be so full of fury. So Maria Callas was a huge inspiration for me.”
Hathway portrays Penelope in the new adaptation of The Odyssey and is garnering Oscar buzz for her turn in the film.
Callas was recently portrayed by Angelina Jolie in a biopic titled Maria, for which she received Golden Globe and Oscar nominations.
As I’ve already mentioned, years ago I created a website, Callas as Medea, dedicated to the “hypnotic cinematic experience” that is Pasolini’s Medea. My tribute contains a number of insightful writings on the film (including Myth and Marx by Peter Bondanella, Medea: Myth and Reason by Stephen Snyder, and Medea: Tropism of a Transplanted Race by Molly Haskell.
I wish I could say that Medea was the beginning of a robust and celebrated film career for Callas. Sadly, that wasn’t the case.
At the time of its release, critical response to Medea was divided, with most reactions focusing on its unconventional narrative structure, visual style, and Callas’s performance in what was to be her only film role. Vincent Canby’s 1971 New York Times’ review noted Callas’s “fascinating” presence in the title role and highlighted the film’s stylized approach to the Euripidean play, while acknowledging its highly symbolic and unconventional treatment of narrative. Retrospective criticism has generally been more favourable, with, for example, The Guardian’s Philip French describing the film as a “Freudian-Marxist-Christian take on the myth” [of Medea, Jason, and the Golden Fleece] and praising its cinematic ambition as “visually astonishing” and calling Callas a “commanding presence.” Writing for the British Film Institute, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas praised Callas’s “diva-esque regality,” and observes that “Medea’s final act of revenge feels less like the fury of a woman scorned, and more like the primal howl of a goddess facing obliteration.”
Following is a mesmerizing video montage of images and music from Medea. It’s followed by a Medea-focused excerpt from my 2016 review of Naomi Greene’s book, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Cinema as Heresy.
Pasolini lamented the vanishing of humanity’s sense of the epic, the sacred, mediated through “luminous” nature and a deep sense of human experience. It was a vanishing he attributed to the rise of capitalistic culture. Nowhere is this explored and expressed more powerfully then in his 1969 film Medea – wherein the inhabitants of ancient Colchis, including the High Priestess Medea (played by Maria Callas), are depicted as perceiving and responding to the presence of the sacred in their land. The marauding Jason and his companions, however, show no respect for either the land or others’ connection to it. Jason represents Pasolini’s view of the secularized First World – one dominated by logic and wherein acknowledgement of the sacred, of mystery, has no part.
The corruption of Medea, manifested in her willingness to assist Jason in his theft of the sacred relic of the Golden Fleece, symbolizes for Pasolini the all too common fate of indigenous cultures exposed to the conquering, consumerist mentality of the secularized nations of the West. As enticing as the First World nations may appear, Pasolini’s Medea shows that a fatal price is paid for aligning with them. The fate of Medea symbolizes and personalizes this price – “The poor soul has had a reverse conversion,” notes Jason’s mentor, “and [she] has never recovered from it” The people of Colchis have an ominous premonition of this “reverse conversion,” and they accurately connect their sense of dread with the arrival of Jason:
The sky was the boundary of our kingdom
But Jason will come and he will pierce the sky
And bring an end to our kingdom
He will laugh while we cry
For the name of blasphemy is on his lips
And where he passes, all will turn barren
He will bring an end to our kingdom
And the blood shed because of him
Will erase forever the sacred blood of God.
We know the vineyard but not the sea
We know fields of peas and garlic but not the sea
And Jason comes from the sea
He comes from the sea.
We will fall like dead upon the ground
And when we open our eyes again
We will see things forever abandoned by God.
By betraying and abandoning her land and her people, Medea is shown to lose touch with her religious beliefs and thus her connection to the land (“Speak to me Earth! I no longer hear you! Earth, where is your meaning? I touch the earth with my feet but do not recognize it!”). Living in exile as an “archaic woman” in Greece – in “a world that doesn’t believe in anything in which she always believed” – Medea is feared as a foreigner and treated as an outcast. In time – driven to desperation and rage – she commits a horrific act of vengeance.
Greene perceptively reads the character of Medea as a symbol of early religious sensibilities abruptly exposed to, and immersed in, a predominately secular and profane world. Jason represents this “new” world – enticing yet devoid of depth, of the mythic, the epic, the sacred. The film’s ultimate and tragic outcome is a clear indictment of not only the industrialized/secularized First World’s exploitation and oppressive violence of so-called Third World countries, but the responsive violence from those being exploited and oppressed.
Before they started shooting, [Pasolini] made some notes and showed them to Maria: “Medea watches Jason, enchanted, lost in him. It is a true and complete love; in this moment it is Jason’s virility that prevails. Medea has lost her dazed manner, like a disoriented animal. Suddenly she finds in love which humanizes her, a substitute for her lost religious sense. In the sensual experience she finds the lost rapport, the sacred identification with reality. So the world, the future, her well-being, the meaning of things, all take shape again suddenly for her. It is with gratitude, like one who feels reborn, that she lets Jason possess her, she in turn possessing in him the regeneration of life.”
Maria recognized the parallels, and through Medea she could relive her own story: the love [she had for Aristotle Onassis] that made her tap into the woman in her and in some sense humanized her, the sensual experience of oneness, the new meaning, the new vitality like a rebirth. And in reliving her story through Medea’s, she could exorcise some of her bitterness [over Onassis’ betrayal]; she could see that it was not, after all, as it had seemed in the dark months that had passed, “nine years of meaningless sacrifice.”
At the beginning of June 1969 this mystic Marxist [Pasolini] and Maria found themselves working together on Medea in a forgotten wild corner of Asia Minor. Göreme, in Turkey, with its rocks carved into weird shapes, was exactly the place Pasolini wanted - a place where it was at times hard to distinguish between myth and reality.
During her last month in Paris [Maria] could hardly get up before midday; in Goreme she was up at dawn. She arrived on the set to be dressed and made up before anyone expected her . . . She was full of humility about her new venture, constantly seeking advice, confirmation, reassurance. “Tell me, is this gesture too grand? Too operatic?”
From Göreme, they went to Aleppo in Syria, and then to Italy, to Pisa, to the lagoons and islands of Grado, to Tor Caldara and Tor Calbona near Rome. And wherever they went, out of rocks and deserts, blanched dunes and beaches, Pasolini re-created a strange, lost world of mystery and magic, a world where ritual, violence and the the supernatural were part of everyday life.
[Maria] was almost obsessively involved with Medea. In one scene, she was being taken in long shot, and had to run frantically barefoot on a dry riverbed. She was wearing a heavy gown with huge ropes of pagan jewels, the sun was beating down and she was running, running until she fainted and collapsed on the mud. Pasolini and the entire crew ran toward her, and as she came back to consciousness her first words were, “Please forgive me! I’m so stupid. I shouldn’t have done that. It’s cost everyone so much time and money.” Maria the professional could not bear to be the one slowing things down.
For the final moments of the film, [Maria] refused the stand-in who was available: “Here,” remembers [costume designer] Piero Tosi, “Maria reached the apex of her performance. Medea must build a great fire, and holding the bodies of her dead sons, perish in the flames while defying their faithless father. It was very dangerous, because she had to stand on a high wooden platform with flames soaring before her.
It was a sacred ritual and Maria, blind as she was, had to hurl herself into the holocaust, or at least seem to do so for the camera’s eye. Three times she acted out the scene, and during the last take she nearly fell right into the inferno. For Maria, it could have been done no other way.
“Didn’t you find it exhausting to have to shoot the same scene many times?” Maria was asked at the end of July, when the shooting had moved to Italy. “No, it’s futility that exhausts me, not work . . . There will be a great void when it’s all over.”
There was a void, but something had happened during these two months of living with Medea and Pasolini that nobody could take away from her. She had reached a deeper understanding of what the last nine years [with Onassis] had meant and a quieter acceptance of the way they had ended.
She had always called herself a fatalist, and often her fatalism implied resignation, a self-destructive giving up on life. But for the moment, the fatalism was of a different kind: an accepting trust that the patterns, large and small, of every aspect of her life, had some definite, however obscure, meaning. Her relationship with Pasolini, who, through both his poetry and his films, had always sought the meaning and connections beneath the surface, encouraged this trust.
I’m choosing to start the week with one of the most beautiful and powerful passages from A Course in Miracles.
It’s the eighth (and final) paragraph in Section IV of Chapter 5 (“Teaching and Healing”) of the Text. I share it with no accompanying commentary or interpretation, just an invitation to whoever’s reading this to take from it anything that “shimmers” with deep truth for you.
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How can you who are so holy suffer? ²All your past except its beauty is gone, and nothing is left but a blessing. ³I have saved all your kindnesses and every loving thought you ever had. ⁴I have purified them of the errors that hid their light, and kept them for you in their own perfect radiance. ⁵They are beyond destruction and beyond guilt. ⁶They came from the Holy Spirit within you, and we know what God creates is eternal. ⁷You can indeed depart in peace because I have loved you as I loved myself. ⁸You go with my blessing and for my blessing. ⁹Hold it and share it, that it may always be ours. ¹⁰I place the peace of God in your heart and in your hands, to hold and share. ¹¹The heart is pure to hold it, and the hands are strong to give it. ¹²We cannot lose. ¹³My judgment is as strong as the wisdom of God, in Whose Heart and Hands we have our being. ¹⁴His quiet children are His blessed Sons. ¹⁵The Thoughts of God are with you.
Above: Andrew Scott in Simon Stone’s soon-to-be-released film, Elsinore.
Following, with added images and links, is an excerpt from an article by Catherine Shoard published yesterday in Guardian.
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This Sunday, the curtain falls on the Toronto Film Festival, the last of the three big autumn showcases – alongside Venice and Telluride – that are launchpads for award campaigns. And as the dust settles on the red carpets, one name rises above the others as destined for sure-fire glory: Andrew Scott.
The Irish actor, 50 next month, is now not only considered a lock for a leading actor Oscar nomination but almost certain to take the prize next spring. Should he win, he will become the first out gay actor to do so in the Academy’s almost 100-year history.
If that’s a fact that seems astonishing today, it would have felt an inevitability in 1989, when the film for which Scott has been so praised is set. In Elsinore, he plays Ian Charleson [left], the dashing Scottish star of films including Chariots of Fire and Gandhi. Charleson had been given his first role three years before Chariots by Derek Jarman, but excised it from his CV (leading to a lifelong rift, depicted in Elsinore). Muting his sexuality was then considered essential in the pursuit of stardom. Yet despite such curation – and his undeniable talents – Charleson never reached the level of fame he felt he deserved.
Until December 1989, that is, when he took over the role of Hamlet from Daniel Day-Lewis at the National Theatre, despite secretly having AIDS. His performance was reckoned to be one of the finest ever, and he died six weeks after the final show, aged 40. His family then went public with his diagnosis and sexuality: this was the first celebrity death in the U.K. attributed to AIDS, and did much to boost awareness and acceptance.
The film is a passion project for Scott, who also produced and rallied together funding alongside Stephen Beresford, screenwriter of Scott’s big-screen breakthrough, 2014’s Pride, another real-life story of 1980s gay history, about an unlikely alliance of LGBTQ+ activists and striking Welsh miners. Scott was galvanised to get Elsinore off the ground by the death of his mother, Nora, in 2023. “When you’re in that grief state,” he said, “you feel like you’ve got nothing to lose.”
The actor’s own path to stardom makes for a curious contrast with the man he plays. Born in Dublin in 1976, Scott shot his first film aged 17 before studying drama at Trinity College Dublin and moving to London aged 22. Despite playing gay characters, he, too, was advised to remain silent on his own sexuality, to avoid pigeonholing. Speaking after Elsinore’s Toronto premiere last week, Scott said such a climate gave him “a horrible feeling that I perhaps wasn’t going to be able to speak a language I was desperate to speak.”
He came out publicly in 2013 aged 37, shortly after his small-screen breakthrough as Moriarty opposite Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock. In the 13 years since, Scott has arguably done more than any man since Ian McKellen to refute the idea that publicly gay actors cannot plausibly play straight roles. His part in Fleabag is the most lusted after example, yet the hot priest stands alongside numerous other heterosexual characters he’s taken on: Richard Rogers in Blue Moon, Anthony Julius in Denial, 10 different people in his one-man Uncle Vanya. Still in cinemas is his sturdy and scowling Group Captain James Stagg, meteorological hero of D-day and new drama Pressure.
“The war is never over,” said Scott of the debate over LGBTQ+ casting in Toronto, “but there have been significant advances in what I believe is stopping the underestimation of audiences. They’re smart and they want to see representation and also transformation.”
And yet alongside his more conventional career choices, the actor has also consistently sought to engage with the pricklier aspects of the debate – railing against the use of the phrase “openly gay” while doing the rounds for All of Us Strangers [right] in 2023, for instance. His next role, in Leo Reich’s forthcoming sitcom It Gets Worse, pushes the envelope further. A teaser appears to shows him as a toxic therapist who instructs his much younger client that he’s “just a hole for daddy” before spitting into his mouth.
For Guy Lodge, chief critic of Variety, Scott is “essentially carving an unprecedented career path for an out gay leading man in the industry. One where he isn’t pigeonholed into queer roles, but where he doesn’t have to avoid them either, in order to prove his mainstream viability.”
While some of his highest-profile roles have been gay or queer men – Pride, All of Us Strangers, the Netflix series Ripley [left] and now Elsinore – Lodge points to the lack of other commonalities between these parts. “In defiance of the restrictions and stereotypes that would, not all that long ago, have limited his options, Scott is showing us that there are many ways to embody queerness on screen.”
And it is this forward-thinking integrity that has come to mark the actor’s persona. His gentle, uncompromising candour – paired with an elegant discretion about his private life – has meant he is held in high regard and affection both by the public and his collaborators.
“I love him,” says Johnny Flynn, who plays the director Richard Eyre in Elsinore, and previously starred opposite Scott in Ripley. “He’s a dear friend and I think he deserves everything for Elsinore. He always puts his whole soul into whatever he does but this was something else. Watching him channel and hold Ian Charleson was such a privilege.”
Scott, Flynn adds, is “one of our greatest actors. He’s got such a unique quality – a beauty in the deftness of his thinking; darkness and humour and power with heartbreaking fragility. He is such a gorgeous human being – so quick to laugh and wicked fun.”
[. . .] Andrew Haigh, who directed him in All of Us Strangers, calls Scott’s turn “simply astonishing. I struggle to think of a better performance. Andrew embodies the character so completely it feels as if we are watching lived experience. But make no mistake, this is a performance of incredible skill. Andrew is completely fearless in the role.”
Likewise, Elsinore director Simon Stone says that “every time I rewatch the film I can’t see Andrew – it’s just Ian. The way he surrenders to the character, to the world, the situation, is beyond compare. Sure, it’s also an effortlessly brilliant performance in terms of technique. But what is most astonishing is how he matches this technique with raw truth.
“Where other actors may perform an emotion or a state, Andrew presents us with a character surprised by what he is going through. That shock helps the audience be surprised and heartbroken with him and we can feel empathy in the truest sense.”
The Academy has spent 98 years giving out leading performance Oscars to gay actors who never or only later publicly spoke their whole truth, as well as to a parade of straight stars for playing LGBTQ+ characters. Their failure to recognise Scott’s remarkable achievements, both professional and personal, seems unlikely.
To read Catherine Shoard’s article in its entirety, click here.
A “woman” is a gender construct forced by much of society onto people who are assigned a female sex at birth or are intersex. It is a set of norms and behaviors, often ridiculously arbitrary (boys should prefer blue; girls, pink) that emerge from culture, which varies over time and place and has shifted throughout history. Gender is not binary and neither is sex. Intersex people exist, whether the right wing wants to acknowledge them or not, and XX and XY are not the only chromosomal pairings humans have. If gender were an inherent quality, it would be unchanging, immune from cultural forces and socialization and would not have to be enforced, as if often is in conservative cultures. Babies are not born performing gender; it is something they learn from the societies they’re raised in – the adults who assign them those roles as soon as they’re old enough to understand them.
Anyone sincerely who does not understand this answer and asks follow up questions may be worth engaging, but overwhelmingly, the people asking that question [have] no intention of understanding it and in fact, [will go] to great lengths to willfully misinterpret it. There is no point [engaging with] people who do this.
As you’ll see below, the music video of their duet shows Dolly and Olivia in two separate recording studios. ABC News nevertheless reported at the time of the song’s release that “both artists expressed deep joy about finally working together, with Olivia noting she had always wanted to sing with Dolly.”
Although it’s sad that both of these music legends have now died (Dolly passed last month), I’m grateful that we have their many wonderful recordings – including this very special duet. Enjoy!
As Macklemore example shows, ACTUALLY opposing the Israeli occupation means NOT putting personal careers ahead of the fight. Why? The apartheid Israeli state and its genocidal policies exist at the behest of the billionaires and multimillionaires who want to maintain control over the Middle East and their political representatives. Which means that Palestinian solidarity REQUIRES pissing off extremely powerful and wealthy individuals.
Macklemore has shown that he's willing to do that. As have Kneecap and Bob Vylan. As have the Filton 4 and countless working and young people across the world, including tech workers.
Ed Sheeran, who has about $400 million in wealth, has decided to put his own money and career ahead of the need for Palestinian solidarity. Sheeran said: “I am not complicit. . . . Just because I choose not to speak publicly, . . . it doesn’t mean I don’t care.”
Yes, Ed Sheeran, you ARE complicit, as are any public figures with real influence and ability to build the movement against Israeli apartheid but who refuse to do so. This applies even more so to the leadership of the Democratic Socialists of America and their elected officials like Zohran Mamdani and AOC, who claim to be pro-Palestinian but whose many actions have shown otherwise.
Mamdani has endorsed arch Zionists Kathy Hochul and Hakeem Jeffries. AOC has also endorsed Jeffries, and voted against cutting funds for the Israeli military with the idea that Israel should get “defensive” weapons so it can carry out genocide with impunity. Such actions constitute a whitewashing of Zionism and are geared towards keeping cordial relations with powerful Zionists and building careers in the Democratic Party.
I established The Wild Reed in 2006 as a sign of solidarity with all who are dedicated to living lives of integrity – though, in particular, with gay people seeking to be true to both the gift of their sexuality and their Catholic faith. The Wild Reed's original by-line read, “Thoughts and reflections from a progressive, gay, Catholic perspective.” As you can see, it reads differently now. This is because my journey has, in many ways, taken me beyond, or perhaps better still, deeper into the realities that the words “progressive,” “gay,” and “Catholic” seek to describe.
Even though reeds can symbolize frailty, they may also represent the strength found in flexibility. Popular wisdom says that the green reed which bends in the wind is stronger than the mighty oak which breaks in a storm. Tall green reeds are associated with water, fertility, abundance, wealth, and rebirth. The sound of a reed pipe is often considered the voice of a soul pining for God or a lost love.
On September 24, 2012,Michael BaylyofCatholics for Marriage Equality MNwas interviewed by Suzanne Linton of Our World Today about same-sex relationships and why Catholics can vote 'no' on the proposed Minnesota anti-marriage equality amendment.
"I believe your blog to be of utmost importance for all people regardless of their orientation. . . . Thank you for your blog and the care and dedication that you give in bringing the TRUTH to everyone."– William
"Michael, if there is ever a moment in your day or in your life when you feel low and despondent and wonder whether what you are doing is anything worthwhile, think of this: thanks to your writing on the internet, a young man miles away is now willing to embrace life completely and use his talents and passions unashamedly to celebrate God and his creation. Any success I face in the future and any lives I touch would have been made possible thanks to you and your honesty and wisdom."– AB
"Since I discovered your blog I have felt so much more encouraged and inspired knowing that I'm not the only gay guy in the Catholic Church trying to balance my Faith and my sexuality. Continue being a beacon of hope and a guide to the future within our Church!"– Phillip
"Your posts about Catholic issues are always informative and well researched, and I especially appreciate your photography and the personal posts about your own experience. I'm very glad I found your blog and that I've had the chance to get to know you."– Crystal
"Thank you for taking the time to create this fantastic blog. It is so inspiring!"– George
"I cannot claim to be an expert on Catholic blogs, but from what I've seen, The Wild Reed ranks among the very best."– Kevin
"Reading your blog leaves me with the consolation of knowing that the words Catholic, gay and progressive are not mutually exclusive.."– Patrick
"I grieve for the Roman institution’s betrayal of God’s invitation to change. I fear that somewhere in the midst of this denial is a great sin that rests on the shoulders of those who lead and those who passively follow. But knowing that there are voices, voices of the prophets out there gives me hope. Please keep up the good work."– Peter
"I ran across your blog the other day looking for something else. I stopped to look at it and then bookmarked it because you have written some excellent articles that I want to read. I find your writing to be insightful and interesting and I'm looking forward to reading more of it. Keep up the good work. We really, really need sane people with a voice these days."– Jane Gael
"Michael, your site is like water in the desert."– Jayden
