Female popes in science fiction

There are science fiction stories where there is a female pope. (Babylon 5 and the Nights Dawn series for instance.) Of course, if you're inventing a fictional pope, you can't easily dodge the decision of what gender they have, so you have to, however awkwardly, suggest a more egalitarian future, or to not do so (even if you decide in your own head that future popes will be split male/female and your book just happens to have a man in).

I'm not sure if those examples just stuck with me because there was a reason to notice them, or if most science fiction stories don't mention a pope AT ALL, so those that choose to mention a female pope might actually form a majority?

How many future fictional popes can you think of at all? (I'm not sure whether to include male popes who are mentioned but not named: presumably include them if anything is said ABOUT them, but not if it's just "civil and religious leaders including .... united in ...")

I looked up fictional popes on wikipedia, and it had some historically fictional popes (TIP: if you don't want to lose count and accidentally skip a pope, DON'T CALL YOURSELF ALL 'JOHN', OK? :)), but no "list of all fictional popes in any book ever" :)

Off the top of my head:

- B5. Female, unnamed?
- Night's Dawn: Pope Eleanor.
- Sparrow: Male, unnamed?

A bluffer's guide to the Passover Meal: Part I

Introduction

This year and last year I've gone with Rachel to her family's passover meal, and recently caused her very much hilarity by trying to summarise the order of service from the perspective of a layman, and I decided to try to write up a short summary for anyone curious to know.

The emphasis will be heavily on (i) humour (ii) theology (iii) her family's particular passover, as it various incredibly widely. The initial part will focus on "if I'm invited to a friend's passover service, what do I need to do", although hopefully it will move on into running the best service you can when EVERYONE is ignorant.

Family Gathering

The Passover meal is a the big family celebration, somewhat equivalent to Christmas (but no presents). All the family get together, you invite any strangers who may not have a passover to welcome, it's in the home rather than the synagogue, there's a big meal, children are encouraged to enjoy themselves.

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A bluffer's guide to the Passover Meal: Part II

When is it?

Passover begins (within a day or so) on the day of the full moon in the week before Easter, and lasts for seven (or eight) days. Occasionally there's a glitch in the Gregorian/Hebrew calender syncromesh and passover is a on the day of the full moon BEFORE the full moon in the week before Easter, in which case you should urgently go to Eastercon, because it will be one of the few times you can go to Eastercon and your girlfriend can eat in the buffet that serves gluten, because passover has dietary restrictions (see next post) which can clash unfortunately if thrown with little warning into a mix with food service and vegetarianism.

Most Jewish holidays are at the start (?) or occasionally middle (?) of the month, which are always within a day or so of the full moon. What's with all the "within a day or so"? Well, originally there was a harvest festival at about this time of the year, so the year started when it was obviously spring, and the month started at the new moon. But there's a couple of extra days that appear or disappear in order to ensure that certain festivals DO NOT fall on the Sabbath or do not fall ADJACENT to the Sabbath, etc, etc, and do not ask why, because then someone will explain it to you, and then you will say "ah, but what if..." and then they will hand you a book bigger than your head and ask you to read it and then you'll learn about two-thousand years of calendar-fiddling and then your brain will explode.

What's with all the "off by one" days? You might have THOUGHT that a religion (apparently) devoted entirely to pedantry would have extremely precise lengths of major holidays. Well, some time in the last three millennia (you will see this qualification a lot) someone observed that if the beginning of the year and month was determined in Jerusalem, it may take a couple of days for the change to propagate to everywhere else, so people got into the habit of celebrating everything twice just in case they were a day off, to make ABSOLUTELY DOUBLE SURE they got the right day. And (you'll see this a lot too) this became a tradition. You might not have thought you'd need to do this for a festival in the MIDDLE of the month, but there you go. (If it takes the messenger several days to get there, you might still be off-by-one even if you count backwards from his arrival). Eventually someone invented an algorithm and made the calendar just follow that, and then invented magical "internets" which could convey date and time round the world at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, but the tradition remains in most places. This tends to happen more for orthodox and conservative movements outside Israel (?)

But everyone outside Israel celebrates the meal on the first AND second day (?). Which is very nice because it lets you celebrate the first one with your family, and then if you're very nippy on your feet very quickly dash to Scandinavia with your boyfriend in order to lead the service on the second night there. Obviously not EVERYONE does that. It's probably just Rachel. But it's what I'M used to. And in the unlikely event that the earth is destroyed and these notes are the sole remaining Jewish instructions, well, then it will become a tradition, and everyone will say "I don't understand, why is the second night the 'stockholm' night?"

How long is it?

Passover is the whole seven (or eight) days. The meal (the seder) is on the first (and second) nights. (Everything has several names, I often get confused.)

How long will it usually last

We normally start at 6, have a service for an hour or so, have a leisurely meal, and then finish with more service between 10 and midnight. But everywhere will be different.