CNN Jun 3, 2025 CNN will air the penultimate performance of this 5x Tony-nominated play LIVE for one night only – you won’t want to miss this historic live event on June 7 at 7p ET on CNN’s cable channel, digital platforms and streaming live on Max. “Good Night, and Good Luck” tells the gripping true story of journalist Edward R. Murrow’s legendary showdown against McCarthyism.
Free Will Astrology: Week of June 5, 2025
BY ROB BREZSNY | JUNE 3, 2025 (NewCity.com)
ARIES (March 21-April 19): You have had resemblances to cactuses in recent days. It hasn’t always been pleasant and cheerful, but you have become pretty skilled at surviving, even thriving, despite an insufficiency of juicy experiences. Fortunately, the emotional fuel you had previously stored up has sustained you, keeping you resilient and reasonably fluid. However, this situation will soon change. More succulence is on its way. Scarcity will end, and you will be blessed with an enhanced flow of lush feelings.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): I foresee abundance emerging from modest sources. I predict breakthroughs arising out of your loving attention to the details of the routine. So please don’t get distracted by poignant meditations on what you feel is missing from your life. Don’t fantasize about what you wish you could be doing instead of what you are actually doing. Your real wealth lies in the small tasks that are right in front of you—even though they may not yet have revealed their full meaning or richness. I invite you and encourage you to be alert for grandeur in seemingly mundane intimate moments.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): It’s time for your Uncle Rob to offer you some fundamental advice for living. These tips are always worthy of your contemplation, but especially now. Ready? Being poised amidst uncertainty is a superpower. You may attract wonders and blessings if you can function well while dealing with contradictory feelings, unclear situations and incomplete answers. Don’t rush to artificial closure when patience with the unfinished state will serve you better. Be willing to address just part of a problem rather than trying to insist on total resolution. There’s no need to be worried or frustrated if some enigmas cannot yet be explained and resolved. Enjoy the mystery!
CANCER (June 21-July 22): Acclaimed Cancerian poet Lucille Clifton published fourteen books and mothered six children. That heroism seems almost impossible. Having helped raise one child myself, I know how consuming it is to be a parent. Where did she find the time and energy to generate so much great literature? Judging from the astrological omens, I suspect you now have access to high levels of productivity comparable to Clifton’s. Like her, you will also be able to gracefully juggle competing demands and navigate adeptly through different domains. Here’s my favorite part: Your stellar efficiency will stem not from stressfully trying too hard but rather from good timing and a nimble touch.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): One of the seven wonders of the ancient world was the Colossus of Rhodes, located on a Greek island. Symbolizing power and triumph, it was a towering statue dedicated to the sun god Helios. The immediate motivation for its construction was the local people’s defeat of an invading army. I hereby authorize you to acquire or create your own personal version of an inspiring icon like the Colossus, Leo. It will symbolize the fact that the coming months will stimulate lavish expressions of your leonine power. It will help inspire you to showcase your talents and make bold moves. PS: Be alert for chances to mobilize others with your leadership. Your natural brilliance will be a beacon.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): The Great Barrier Reef is the world’s biggest structure built by living things. Lying beneath the Coral Sea off the east coast of Australia, it’s made by billions of small organisms, coral polyps, all working together to create a magnificent home for a vast diversity of life forms. Let’s make the Great Barrier Reef your symbol of power for the next ten months, Virgo. I hope it inspires you to manage and harness the many details that together will generate a robust source of vitality for your tribe, family and community.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): One of my favorite poets, Arthur Rimbaud, wrote all of his brilliant work before he became an adult. I suspect that no matter what your age is, many of you Libras are now in an ultra-precocious phase with some resemblances to Rimbaud from age sixteen to twenty-one. The downside of this situation is that you may be too advanced for people to thoroughly understand you. You could be ahead of your time and too cool for even the trendsetters. I urge you to trust your farseeing visions and forward-looking intuitions even if others can’t appreciate them yet. What you bring to us from the future will benefit us all.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Blacksmiths still exist. They were more common in the past, but there are many twenty-first-century practitioners. It’s a demanding art, requiring intense heat to soften hard slabs of metal so they can be forged into intricate new shapes. The process requires both fire and finesse. I think you are currently in a phase when blacksmithing is an apt metaphor. You will need to artfully interweave passion and precision. Fiery ambition or intense feelings may arise, offering you raw energy for transformation. To harness it effectively, you must temper your approach with patience, restraint and detail-oriented focus.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were two feisty, independent, strong-minded French writers. Beauvoir was a trailblazing feminist, and Sartre was a Nobel Laureate. Though they never officially married, they were a couple for fifty-one years. Aside from their great solo accomplishments, they also gave us this gift: They proved that romantic love and intellectual equality could coexist, even thrive together, with the help of creative negotiation. I propose we make them your inspirational role models for now. The coming months will be a favorable time to deepen and refine your devotion to crafting satisfying, interesting intimate relationships.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Over 2600 years ago, ancient Babylonian astronomers figured out the highly complex cycle that governs the recurrence of lunar and solar eclipses. It unfolds over a period of eighteen years and eleven days. To analyze its full scope required many generations of researchers to carry out meticulous record-keeping with extreme patience. Let’s make those Babylonian researchers your role models, Capricorn. In the coming months, I hope they inspire you to engage in careful observation and persistent investigation as you discover meaningful patterns. May they excite your quest to discern deep cycles and hidden rhythms.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): I invite you to try this visualization exercise, Aquarius: Picture a rosebud inside your body. It’s located in your solar plexus. Imagine it’s steadily and gently opening, filling your body with a sweet, blissful warmth, like a slow-motion orgasm that lasts and lasts. Feel the velvet red petals unfolding; inhale the soft radiance of succulent fragrance. As the rose fully blooms, you become aware of a gold ring at its center. Imagine yourself reaching inside and taking the ring with your right hand. Slip the ring onto your left ring finger and tell yourself, “I pledge to devote all my passionate intelligence to my own well-being. I promise to forever treat myself with tender loving respect. I vow to seek out high-quality beauty and truth as I fulfill my life’s mission.”
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): I foresee the arrival of a living fossil, Pisces. An influence you thought was gone may soon reappear. Aspects of your past could prove relevant to your current situation. These might be neglected skills, seemingly defunct connections, or dormant dreams. I hope you have fun integrating rediscovered resources and earmarking them for use in the future. PS: Here’s a lesson worth treasuring: While the world has changed, a certain fundamental truth remains true and valuable to you.
Homework: What is the best surprise gift you could give yourself right now? Newsletter.FreeWillAstrology.com
What I learned about freedom in a secret Chinese prison
Lei Cheng | TED2025
• April 2025
Accused of leaking state secrets, journalist Lei Cheng was imprisoned in China for more than three years, where she was detained in tight quarters and kept under constant supervision. “Freedom is wasted on the free,” she says, recounting how she and fellow inmates found joy in the smallest of moments: the smell of rain, a poem delivered in secrecy, kindness where it seemed undeserved. She distills the unexpected lessons that confinement taught her — and challenges us to rethink what freedom really means.
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About the speaker
Lei Cheng
Journalist
How We Render Reality: Attention as an Instrument of Love
By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)
Whatever fundamental reality might exist, we live out our lives in a subjective reality defined by what we agree to attend to. “An act of pure attention, if you are capable of it, will bring its own answer,” D.H. Lawrence wrote. But we live largely in the territory of the unanswerable because there is no pure attention — the aperture of our attention is constricted by myriad conditionings and focused by a brain honed on millions of years of evolutionary necessities, many of which we have long outgrown.
How the brain metes out attention and what that means for our intimacy with reality is what the philosophy-lensed British psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist takes up in his immense, in both senses of the word, book The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (public library) — an investigation of how “the very brain mechanisms which succeed in simplifying the world so as to subject it to our control militate against a true understanding of it,” and what a richer understanding of those mechanisms can do for living in closer and more felicitous communion with reality. At its heart is the recognition that “the whole is never the same as the sum of its ‘parts’” and that “there are in fact no ‘parts’ as such, but that they are an artefact of a certain way of looking at the world.”
Art by the Brothers Hilts from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader.
Punctuating his ambitious 3,000-page effort to braid neuropsychology (the way our brains shape our impression of reality), epistemology (the way we come to know anything at all), and metaphysics (our yearning to wrest meaning from fundamental truth as we try to discern the nature of the universe) is an ongoing inquiry into our way of looking at the world — the lens of consciousness we call attention. He writes:
The world we know cannot be wholly mind-independent, and it cannot be wholly mind-dependent… What is required is an attentive response to something real and other than ourselves, of which we have only inklings at first, but which comes more and more into being through our response to it — if we are truly responsive to it. We nurture it into being; or not. In this it has something of the structure of love.
This property of reality is what Iris Murdoch had in view when she observed that “love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real,” and what the poet J.D. McClatchy captured in his insistence that “love is the quality of attention we pay to things.”
One of artist Margaret C. Cook’s rare 1913 illustrations for Leaves of Grass — Walt Whitman’s supreme serenade to the art of paying attention. (Available as a print.)
McGilchrist considers the way our attention constructs our reality and becomes the beating heart with which we love the world:
Defining attention as “the manner in which our consciousness is disposed towards whatever else exists,” he writes:
A century-some after William James insisted that our experience is what we agree to attend to, and two generations after Simone Weil asserted that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” McGilchrist adds:
[…]
Attention is not just another “cognitive function”: it is… the disposition adopted by one’s consciousness towards the world. Absent, present, detached, engaged, alienated, empathic, broad or narrow, sustained or piecemeal, it therefore has the power to alter whatever it meets. Since our consciousness plays some part in what comes into being, the play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged. So how you attend to something — or don’t attend to it — matters a very great deal.
In the vast remainder of The Matter With Things, McGilchrist goes on to explore how “the type, and extent, of attention we pay changes the nature of the world that we experience,” shaped largely by the difference between the way the brain’s two hemispheres pay attention — “narrow-beam, highly focussed attention” in the left, “broad, sustained vigilance” in the right. Complement this tiny fragment of it with Mary Oliver on attention and love, then revisit cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz’s wonderful field guide to eleven ways of paying attention to the everyday wonderland of life.
What It’s Like to Be a Psychic Detective with Pam Coronado
New Thinkin Jun 3, 2025 Pam Coronado is an internationally recognized psychic detective with over 25 years of experience assisting law enforcement agencies and families in solving complex criminal cases and locating missing persons. Over the years, Pam has collaborated with more than 40 law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, providing leads and insights in high-stakes investigations. Pam is a former president of the International Remote Viewing Association (IRVA) and the co-founder of the Fowler-O’Sullivan Foundation, which supports families of missing persons. Her website is https://www.pamcoronado.com Pam shares hard-earned wisdom drawn from over two decades of working active missing persons and criminal cases alongside law enforcement. She speaks openly about the importance of building trust with families and agencies, the risks of offering unsolicited insights, and the emotional toll of working cases involving loss, danger, and uncertainty. 00:02:33 The awakening: Pam’s journey 00:08:16 Navigating law enforcement 00:17:49 Working cold cases 00:24:47 Success stories in psychic detection 00:34:33 Limitations of psychic work 00:40:25 Dealing with heavy emotions 00:49:09 Using the CRV protocol 01:02:08 Advice for beginners 01:15:03 Overcoming fear and anxiety in psychic work 01:30:15 Conclusion Debra Lynne Katz, PhD, is the founder and director of the International School of Clairvoyance. She is also an adjunct instructor at the California Institute for Human Science. She is author of You Are Psychic: The Art of Clairvoyant Reading and Healing, Extraordinary Psychic, Freeing the Genie Within, and Associative Remote Viewing. Debra currently serves as President of the International Remote Viewing Association (IRVA) and co-director of its research unit. Her website is www.debrakatz.com (Recorded on May 9, 2025)
Report: Someone Totally Doing It Somewhere Right Now
Published: January 8, 2008 (TheOnion.com)
CHICAGO—According to a groundbreaking new study published Monday in The Journal Of The American Statistical Association, somewhere on the planet someone is totally doing it at this very moment.
“Of the 6.7 billion inhabitants of Earth, approximately 3.5 billion have reached sexual maturity,” said Dr. Jerome Carver, a mathematics professor at the University of Chicago and lead author of the study. “From a statistical perspective, it simply stands to reason that at least two of these inhabitants are totally going at it right now. Like, as we speak.”
“But it’s probably way more than that,” Carver added. “Like at least a hundred.”
The multidiscipline study, which tapped leading experts in several fields, including reproduction and population sciences, foundoverwhelming evidence that there is never even a second when someone is not doing it.
An analysis of the data, based on a new statistical model referred to as “Rauchembauer’s Overlap,” indicates that, given the sheer number of people in the world, by the time the first set of people is done doing it, someone else has already begun getting it on.
In addition, the findings suggest that there is a “good, to very good” chance that someone is doing it close by.
“The nearer you get to major metropolitan areas, the more likely you are to be in proximity to those making it,” said California Institute of Technology probability theorist Howard Bergsson, who contributed to the report. “For example, we’re in Chicago, a city of three million people. Someone is probably doing it right down the street, or maybe even somewhere in this building.”
“And even if they’re not, you have to keep in mind that it’s nighttime in England right now,” Bergsson added. “So someone is, in all likelihood, doing it over there.”
While exciting in its own right, the new revelation has also lent credibility to several long-held theories, including the idea that those doing it are either partially or totally naked, and that the doing it itself may in large part involve a process known as “humping.”
Citing the global population boom, Carver went on to demonstrate a strong correlation between rising birth rates and the new doing-it probability model.
“Roughly 350,000 babies are born every day,” said Carver, who is currently working on a new report entitled “Making It: A Comprehensive Survey Of Sexy Stuff Happening All Over The Place.” “And how does that happen? I’m telling you, people are just getting it on like crazy—just all the time.”
“Think about it,” Carver continued.
Carver said the most important aspect of the study is that it accounts for variables often overlooked in earlier inquiries, an error which may have resulted in a much lower estimation of the worldwide frequency of going at it.
“Other studies addressing this phenomenon made the faulty assumption that people only do it in bed,” Carver said. “But people can do it anywhere. Sometimes even in the shower. Or the basement.”
According to observers, the study’s secondary findings are in some ways even more surprising: Given the fact that not everyone goes all the way all the time, the report predicts that there are at least four times as many people currently frenching or getting to second base than there are doing it.
“The number of people being felt up right now is astronomical,” Carver said.
Though the evidence presented by the study appears to be irrefutable, it has already found its share of detractors within the scientific community.
“No way,” said Dr. Lane Keilor, a professor of theoretical mathematics at the University of Rochester in New York. “Gross.”
Augustine of Hippo: Saint who rejected his bisexual past, defended intersex people
by Kittredge Cherry |
Last Updated on June 1, 2025 by Kittredge Cherry (qspirit.net)
After a sexually active and probably bisexual youth, Augustine of Hippo became an influential early Christian theologian who was sex-negative but argued that God created intersex people. This contradictory queer saint’s feast day is Aug. 28 in western Christianity.
[Update: On May 8, 2025 Pope Leo XIV became the first Pope from the Augustinians, a religious order named for the African saint Augustine of Hippo. Later that day genealogists discovered that his grandparents were people of color (Creole, mulatto and/or black) who assumed a white identity and passed as white when they moved from New Orleans to Chicago. The Pope’s brother said his family never discussed their family’s racial history and they identified completely as white. And yet Leo chose to join the Augustinians. It remains to be seen whether the new Pope will be as open to gender diversity as Augustine was in the 5th century.]
LGBTQ people may appreciate Augustine’s passionate friendship with another man and his relatively compassionate recognition of gender diversity. Augustine is also often blamed for the misogynist, anti-sex attitude that runs through much of church history. His life and work show that Christians have wrestled with questions of sexuality and gender identity since antiquity.
Augustine is one of the most important Christian thinkers, perhaps second only to Saint Paul of Tarsus. Both are famous converts with a possible same-sex attraction and a sex-negative Christian theology adapted from a classical education.
From 396 to 430 Augustine served as bishop in the North African city of Hippo in present-day Algeria. He also organized a community of men who lived together there like monks and inspired the foundation of a monastic religious order.
Augustine called himself “a slave to lust”
Augustine’s best-known book is “Confessions,” a vivid tell-all memoir that has fascinated and perhaps titillated readers for centuries. Completed in the year 400, “Confessions” is considered the first Western autobiography. This honest account describes his religious development, emotional life and sexual history as a self-proclaimed “slave to lust.”
In addition to the section about his possible male lover, he writes at length of illicit affairs with women and fathering a child with his live-in concubine. It was during this sexually active period that he uttered the humorously human prayer that has become famous, living on as a slogan on mugs, T-shirts and such: “God, give me chastity and moderation — but not yet.”
Augustine’s antagonism toward sex is legendary. He was among the first to claim that Sodom was destroyed for the sin of homosexuality. Earlier understandings, even within the Bible itself, identified the sin of Sodom as abusing strangers. He condemned “sodomy” and his own “past foulnesses and carnal corruptions.” But he was less extreme than some of his contemporaries because Augustine conceded that there was some acceptable sex (for procreation within marriage).
His own preference showed when he wondered why God even created women. “How much more agreeable for companionship in a life shared together would be two male friends rather than a man and a woman,” he wrote in “De Genesi ad litteram” (The Literal Meaning of Genesis).
He encouraged intimacy between men in his advice on how to do the kiss of peace after the Eucharist: “When your lips draw near to those of your brother, do not let your heart withdraw from his,” he wrote.
Augustine was born and raised in Africa
Augustine grew up in Roman culture where homosexuality was accepted as normal. Aurelius Augustinus, known as Augustine, (Nov. 13, 354 – Aug. 28, 430) was born in the Roman city of Thagaste in Algeria to a Romanized family with Berber (Amazigh) heritage. No record of his appearance exists, but because he was African there is reason to believe he had dark skin. He has been portrayed as black at various times and places throughout art history and in contemporary works by artists such as John Nava and Bruce Herman.
Saint Augustine, artist unknown
His father, Patricius, was a pagan landowner with Roman roots and his mother, Monica, was a pious Christian who was canonized later as a Catholic saint. Monica has been proposed as a patron saint for parents of LGBTQ people.
Augustine appears with his mother Monica before they were saints in an 1846 painting by Ary Scheffer (Wikipedia)
A brilliant student, he received a classical Latin education and then became a rhetoric professor. Like most men in his culture, he had a stronger emotional connection to other men than to women, except his mother.
“Although it is debatable to what extent, if any, these passionate friendships were homoerotic, they express a sensibility that today is probably to be found, at least in Western industrial societies, only among gay men,” wrote Toronto historian Brad Walton in “Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage.”
Augustine and the man he loved
Many see self-incriminating proof of Augustine’s homosexual affairs in his own statements about his youth in Book 3.1 (translated by Carolinne White):
“To love and also be loved in return was what excited me, especially if I could enjoy my lover’s body. So I polluted the stream of friendship with the filth of lust and obscured its brightness with foul passions. But despite this shameful and degrading behavior, in my excessive vanity I hoped to be regarded as elegant and civilized.”
“Saint Augustine of Hippo: Lord, Make Me Pure, But Not Yet” by Sarah Talbot (available on Etsy)
One same-sex relationship stands out in particular. As he wrote in “Confessions,” Augustine fell completely in love with an unnamed young man when they were both in their late teens. His beloved was a fellow student who had grown up with him. This “most dear friend” was “sweet to me above all sweetness… I felt that my soul and his soul were ‘one soul in two bodies,’ ” Augustine wrote. Many have interpreted their relationship as homosexual.
But the friend developed a fever and died. Augustine was devastated by grief, which he described in dramatic terms that echo across the ages. Here is just part of his lengthy description of his turmoil:
“When my friend died, grief darkened my heart and wherever I looked, all I could see was death. My home town was a torture to me and my family home a place of misery. All that I had shared with my friend became excruciating without him. I hated everything because he was absent; nowhere I went could say to me, ‘Look, here he is,’ as it did when he was alive but not with me….
“I wept bitterly and found consolation in my bitterness…. I was amazed that other people were alive when the man I had loved as if he were immortal was dead. I was even more amazed that I was alive when he was dead, since I was his second self. Someone expressed it well when he called his friend ‘half of his soul,’ for I felt that my soul and my friend’s had been one soul in two bodies.” (Book 4.4-6)
These quotes come from a translation by Carolinne White in the first modern illustrated edition of the “Confessions.” Her translation is enhanced by medieval and Renaissance art from manuscripts at the British Library.
There are many other English translations of “Confessions.” Two versions that are recommended by Q Spirit for accuracy and readability are by Henry Chadwick in 2009 or Maria Boulding in 2002.
Augustine decided to leave Thagaste to escape the torment of missing his deceased friend. At age 17, he moved to Carthage in Tunisia, marking a spiritual turning point that eventually led to Christian conversion and baptism in Milan when he was 32. Before that he was a Stoic, a Neoplatonist and a gnostic “heretic” in the Manichaeism sect.
Baptism of Augustine by Benozzo Gozzoli, 1464-65 (Wikipedia)
“Odd it is to note that the most famous conversion in Christian history, after that of St. Paul, originated in one man’s love for another,” writes historian Paul Halsall in his online Calendar of LGBT Saints. His essay also includes the full set of quotations in which Augustine describes his relationship with his beloved male friend.
Augustine said God created gender diversity
Many contemporary LGBTQ people reject Augustine’s teachings on sexual activity, but his ideas about gender diversity are much more in tune with contemporary queer theology.
Augustine associated gender variance with holiness when he preached at least three sermons on Perpetua and Felicity, praising the way a “manly spirit” overcame their supposed female fragility.
He wrote a section affirming intersex people as part of God’s creation in “City of God,” a major book of Christian philosophy. The book is regarded as “a masterpiece of Western culture” by Encyclopedia Britannica and many others. Writing in Latin, Augustine used the terms “hermaphrodite” or “androgyne” to denote an intersex person. In Book 16 of “City of God” he writes:
“God, the Creator of all, knows where and when each thing ought to be, or to have been created, because He sees the similarities and diversities which can contribute to the beauty of the whole…. As for the Androgyni, or Hermaphrodites, as they are called, though they are rare, yet from time to time there appears persons of sex so doubtful, that it remains uncertain from which sex they take their name,”
This quote and other aspects of Augustine’s theology of gender are examined in the 2015 book “Sex Difference in Christian Theology: Male, Female, and Intersex in the Image of God” by theologian Megan DeFranza.
Gabrielle M.W. Bychowski provides a full in-depth analysis of Augustine’s writings on gender diversity in her article “The Sites of Hermaphrodites: Intersex in the Greco-Roman World.” She teaches transgender and intersex history at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. She writes:
“The idea that hermaphrodites are monsters that signal failures of embodiment that should be eschewed to the margins is condemned by Augustine as heretical and small-minded. Whether or not intersex is a human person or another race of people entirely, they are members of God’s world. To call hermaphrodites disordered in their embodiment is to critique God their creators. Augustine writes, “What if God has seen fit to create some races in this way, that we might not suppose that the monstrous births which appear among ourselves are the failures of that wisdom whereby He fashions the human nature, as we speak of the failure of a less perfect workman?” (Augustine XVI.viii).
Looking carefully at each line in Augustine’s text, Bychowski goes on to say:
…The problem is not in the true lives of the hermaphrodites but in the environment that misunderstands them and fears sharing the world with them. “But He who cannot see the whole is offended by the deformity of the part,” writes Augustine, “because he is blind to that which balances it, and to which it belongs.” (Augustine XVI.viii).
In a section that may relate to transgender people, Augustine criticized the pagan cult of the Great Mother goddess Cybele for having castrated eunuch priests who were “neither changed into a woman nor allowed to remain a man.” (City of God VII.xxiv)
Augustine’s impact on understanding of sexual orientation and gender identity is also explored in “Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault” by Jonathan Dollimore.
Augustine canonized by popular acclaim
Augustine’s extensive career in the church came to a close when he died of illness at age 75 during the siege of Hippo by Germanic Vandals. He was canonized by popular acclaim, and later honored as a doctor of the church. The Augustinian order was founded in 1244 to carry out his teachings. His feast is celebrated on Aug. 28 by western churches and June 15 in the Orthodox tradition.
In an updated queer iteration of the canonization process, Augustine is included on the Advocate’s “30 LGBT Saints” list.
Saint Augustine by Philippe de Champaigne, 1645-50 (Wikipedia)
Most images of Augustine show him in old age as a bishop dressed in splendid vestments. The standard iconography pictures him holding a flaming heart and/or a book. The heart in his hands is not the usual Sacred Heart of Jesus that often appears in Christian icons. Augustine holds his OWN flaming heart. Experts explain that this symbolizes the intensity of his own heart on fire with love of God — or how the heart may burn with “lascivious and harmful loves” until it is given to God.
The conflict between Augustine’s sexuality and spirituality is expressed particularly well in a portrait by French Baroque artist Philippe de Champaigne. In this painting, Augustine looks away from his flaming heart and holds it at arms length like a hot potato, touching it with only his fingertips to avoid getting burned.
In addition to his honored role in the church, Augustine has entered the popular imagination. He even appears on a mug at the DrinklingsCoffeeMugs Etsy shop.with one of his best-known quotes: “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only a page.”
Saint Augustine’s face appears with one of his most famous quotes on mugs available at Etsy.
Other popular quotes by Augustine include:
“You have made us for yourself, O God, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
“This very moment I may, if I desire, become the friend of God.”
“There is no saint without a past, no sinner without a future.” (later paraphrased by celebrated gay writer Oscar Wilde)
LGBTQ-Liberation Prayer to Augustine
Canadian gay theologian Donald Boisvert wrote a prayer to Augustine and the Apostle Paul from an LGBTQ-liberation perspective. The prayer is included in his 2004 book “Sanctity and Male Desire: A Gay Reading of Saints.” His chapter on Paul and Augustine draws parallels between the two saints. They are both intellectuals who had dramatic conversion experiences and wrote influential sex-negative theology. Here is his prayer:
Blessed Paul and Augustine, doctors and defenders of the faith, men of integrity, architects of an inhuman theology of sexuality, you have done us harm. We are grateful for the beauty and passion of your words, but we also pray that our common brotherly love will shield us from their poison. You have been misused to condemn us and our desires for the affections and bodies of other men. We think you understood us. We need you now to stand with us. Inspire and motivate the leaders of our faith to see the hatred they spread against us in your name. Convert them as you were once converted. Be our strength, our bold and born-again guides. Amen.
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To read this article in Spanish, go to:
Agustín de Hipona: el santo que rechazó su pasado bisexual y defendió a las personas intersexuales (Santos Queer)
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Top image credit:
Detail from “St Jerome and St Augustine” by Carlo Crivelli, c. 1490 (Wikipedia)
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This post is part of the LGBTQ Saints series by Kittredge Cherry. Traditional and alternative saints, people in the Bible, LGBT and queer martyrs, authors, theologians, religious leaders, artists, deities and other figures of special interest to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people and our allies are covered.
This article was originally published in August 2019, was expanded with new material over time, and was most recently updated on June 1, 2025.
Copyright © Kittredge Cherry. All rights reserved.
Qspirit.net presents the Jesus in Love Blog on LGBTQ spirituality.
Founder at Q Spirit
Kittredge Cherry is a lesbian Christian author who writes regularly about LGBTQ spirituality.She holds degrees in religion, journalism and art history.She was ordained by Metropolitan Community Churches and served as its national ecumenical officer, advocating for LGBTQ rights at the National Council of Churches and World Council of Churches.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj on the innermost light
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Tarot Card for June 5: The Fool
| The Fool The Fool is a joyous and exciting card – combining both perfect trust and self reliance.As the very first card in the Tarot deck, it marks the moment upon which we embark on a new phase in our spiritual journey.When we explore new terrain, we are bound sometimes to encounter danger or challenge. The Fool’s energy gives us the power and self-confidence to move through challenges with an open heart, to recognise friends and to gather experiences to us as the true treasures that they are.Innocence is a devalued quality these days. We forget that to approach life with eyes that are new each morning reveals to us more of life’s mystery than anything else. We cannot substitute the sheer growth permitted by trust and innocence with cynicism nor prior knowledge.So, on a day ruled by the Fool, we need to lift our hearts upwards and open them to the richness and beauty of life. We need to regard ourselves as travelling through a land of wonderment and joy. We need to encourage excitement and exhilaration, and to look constantly for that which is new and bright and hopeful in every step we take.We also need to trust to the life process, and to remember that, by and large, the gods have no need of our suffering, and every need of our joy, laughter and celebration. Affirmation: “I tread the path of life with joy in my heart and a smile on my lips.” |
(Angelpaths.com)
Thomas Jefferson on Trump
“A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”
― Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence
The Declaration of Independence, formally The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America in the original printing, is the founding document of the United States. Wikipedia