“Cultural district status to be pursued - Baton Rouge Advocate” plus 1 more

Cultural district status to be pursued - Baton Rouge Advocate

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The East Baton Rouge Redevelopment Authority is looking into getting the neighborhood between downtown and LSU designated as a state-recognized cultural products district.

If Old South Baton Rouge gets the designation from the Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism, it would allow any restoration of historic buildings there to qualify for a 25 percent tax credit.

Also, anyone selling original works of art created within the district can do so without charging state and local sales taxes.

Harold Briscoe, project manager for the RDA's effort to restore and reopen the Lincoln Theater as the center of an arts and culture-oriented block, said the restoration tax credit would help finance the project.

Coupled with a 25 percent state credit from Louisiana Economic Development and a 20 percent federal credit lined up for the Lincoln, "you're looking at 70 percent of the cost to renovate the theater is covered."

The restoration of the theater, however, is only a small part of the project to revitalize the Old South icon — the RDA and other organizations are still working to solve the issue of programming and funding a theater, which is no small task.

But Briscoe said the designation will also help ensure that the broader dream for the Lincoln — at the center of a vibrant arts block — comes to pass.

Baton Rouge has gotten three other areas designated as cultural products districts since the program began a few years ago.

Downtown, Perkins Road and Midcity all contain cultural products districts.

Lafayette's downtown area also has been granted the designation.

Cultural products districts first need to be nominated to the state by local government. Metro Councilwoman Tara Wicker put the Old South Baton Rouge ordinance up for introduction at the next council meeting.

The Old South district's western boundary would be River Road, the northern boundary South Boulevard, the eastern boundary Park Boulevard and Dalrymple Drive and the southern boundary West and East Chimes Street.

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The Rev. Peter Gomes uses the Bible to point the way out of cultural divisiveness - Cleveland Plain Dealer

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Published: Tuesday, March 01, 2011, 3:46 PM Updated: Tuesday, March 01, 2011, 3:54 PM

The Rev. Peter J. Gomes was a veteran Harvard divinity professor but a neophyte to talk radio last year when he sat down before an open microphone in Chicago.

The hour was meandering quietly, so the radio host "decided to juice up the callers out there," Gomes recalled. "She came back from a break and said, `He's black. He's Republican. He's gay. Is he going to hell?'

The switchboard lit up with eager respondents. "Having survived that three hours - the longest three hours since Good Friday, in my opinion - I feel I can survive any question put to me," he said.

About 1,000 listeners laughed appreciatively, having gathered yesterday at the Renaissance Cleveland Hotel to hear the author of "The Good Book: Reading the Bible With Mind and Heart," (William Morrow & Co., $25).

The short, magisterial preacher has surprised his publisher by selling more than 250,000 books. (The initial press run was 20,000 copies.) He has surprised himself by discovering an authentic American hunger for meaning and community.

"Reactions have been quite remarkable," Gomes reported to the Town Hall of Cleveland. "It's not that the book is that great. It's that the need is that great. ...

"My travels have told me over the last year that the culture is crying out for some basis of spiritual and cultural unity. We've spent so much of our time looking for the dividing lines and we've discovered we pay a very high price for that."

Gomes has spent most of his 55 years confounding American cultural dividing lines: a Baptist born in Boston, a black Republican who helped with the inaugural prayers for both Ronald Reagan and George Bush, and a gay man who holds a professorship in Christian morals.

The last bit became public in 1991 almost by accident, when Gomes responded spontaneously to some campus gay bashing by coming out. He acquired his 15 minutes of fame and a segment on "60 Minutes," but no interest in becoming, as he puts it, "the Barney Frank of the pulpit."

"I have spent all my life transcending and breaking stereotypes," Gomes told the San Francisco Chronicle. "I did not wish to be known as the black minister at Harvard. I did not wish to be known as the Republican minister at Harvard. And I certainly did not wish to be known as the gay minister at Harvard. All of those are parts of my persona."

True to form, it was an abuse of the Scriptures in an anti-gay tirade that roused Gomes' ire. "I acted not as an outraged homosexual, but as an outraged Christian," he said.

Misuse of the Scriptures

His book dissects classical misuses of the Scriptures in those arguments that supported temperance, slavery, segregation and the subjugation of women. Gomes declared that "within our lifetimes," the biblical castigations of homosexuals will be recognized as just as archaic as those arguments made on behalf of slaveholders.

Asked by a high school student how he dismisses St. Paul's writing against homosexuality, Gomes asked for a definition of terms and suggested the apostle's understanding was limited to his place and time.

"I wouldn't trust the Apostle Paul's views on sexuality anymore than I would trust him to predict the weather," the professor said. "Clearly, the Apostle Paul had what we would call a very rigorous and clear dedication to the then Jewish principle that sexuality was solely to reproduce and sustain the race. That understanding is really out of kilter with the vast majority of medical, psychological and theological understanding."

A conservative man, Gomes would be the last to throw out the teachings of Paul. He simply argues that every reading of the Bible requires a discernment between universal principles and culturally bound artifacts. Unlike some of the great families of the Bible, he points out, few contemporary people cotton much to polygamy.

These difficulties do not render the Bible itself a fossil, Gomes said.

"Mrs. Eddy wrote a much more consistent book in Christian Scientology," he said. "The Book of Mormon is much clearer. The first thing we have to remember is the Bible is not one book, it is 66 books written by at least 66 different authors over thousands of years.

"It is a library of conviction put together by various people at various times that remains an imperishable part of our Christian heritage. Our heritage is rich and confused because it represents the highs and the lows of the human struggle to understand God and what he expects of us."

Gomes argued yesterday that the Bible contains a beginning point for the way out of cultural divisiveness in which America is mired.

"We must look for the things that make for peace," he said. "As a Christian, one must take very, very seriously the example of Jesus and the summary of the law: that you love your God with your whole heart, your whole soul and your whole mind and love your neighbor as yourself."

This story was first published in The Plain Dealer Nov. 18, 1997.

Cultural

Tuesday, March 1, 2011