Category: News

LOS ANGELES — Now on display at the Los Angeles Central Library through November in an exhibit entitled “Something in Common.” There is a San Diego Chicken costume, a half-smoked cigar from Babe Ruth that likely — maybe? possibly? — was spirited from a Philadelphia brothel in 1924 and a baseball signed by Mother Teresa. The real Mother Teresa? Well … maybe not.

The artifacts are on loan from the Baseball Reliquary, a real organization blending wonder and whimsy with deep reverence. Its vibe lands somewhere near the intersection of Cooperstown and Ripley’s Believe It or Not.

The stories these gems tell belong to the ages — as now, poignantly, so does Terry Cannon, the mirthful, thoughtful, masterful doer whose curiosity, energy and passion for his projects was boundless. The nonprofit Reliquary was Cannon’s brainchild in 1996. Then came the Shrine of the Eternals, a sort of distant and mischievous cousin to the baseball Hall of Fame, in 1999.

The last few years have been difficult. The pandemic hit, followed by Cannon’s death from cancer in August 2020. Then a seismic retrofitting indefinitely closed the Pasadena Central Library, where Reliquary members and fans gathered annually to pay homage to inductees as wide-ranging and diverse as Jim Bouton (2001), Shoeless Joe Jackson (2002), Buck O’Neil (2008), Marvin Miller (2003) and Charlie Brown (2017).

In this baseball summer of All Stars playing in Dodger Stadium and past greats like Gil Hodges, Tony Oliva, Jim Kaat, Minnie Miñoso and O’Neil being honored in Cooperstown, recent silence stoked concern that the Shrine of Eternals might have been eternally silenced.

“Absolutely not,” said Mary Cannon, Terry’s widow and co-conspirator, noting the beginnings of a stirring comeback. “It is very much in the works.”

The website, dark since January because of technical difficulties, sprang back to life in early July. And the Shrine’s 2020 class will be inducted on Nov. 5 in a public ceremony at the Los Angeles Central Library’s Taper Auditorium that will coincide with the closing of the six-month exhibit the next day. That class — the broadcaster Bob Costas; Rube Foster, known as the Father of Black Baseball; and Max Patkin, the “Clown Prince of Baseball” — has been on pause for nearly two years.

“Fantastic,” said Costas, who, like many others, assumed the Reliquary was lost to the pandemic. “But I’d better show up, because I’m the only one still living. This is the Shrine of the Eternals, and the other two already are in eternity.”

The Baseball Reliquary emphasizes the game’s art, culture and characters over statistics and is financed in part by a grant from the Los Angeles County Arts Commission. Its thousands of books, periodicals, journals, historical magazines, artifacts, original paintings and correspondence now are housed at Whittier College’s Institute for Baseball Studies.

“Terry and I conceived and connived and advanced that,” said Joe Price, who accepted a request from Cannon before his death to take charge and steer the Reliquary forward. With his infectious enthusiasm and impish smile, Price seems a natural choice.

Now a professor emeritus in religious studies at Whitter, Price, alongside Charles Adams, a retired professor of English at Whittier, spent the pandemic organizing and cataloging the collection of more than 4,000 books according to Library of Congress standards.

Within is where history and historical fiction playfully mingle. It is where Moe Berg, the former catcher who later served as a spy for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, crosses paths with Chicago’s 1979 Disco Demolition Night — with keepsakes from each in the archives. Alas, the yukata jacket that Berg “might” have worn in Japan and a partially melted vinyl record “allegedly” from Comiskey Park appear to have lost certificates of authenticity over the years.

“Academy Awards are always won by movie stars, yet everyone else who carries their water and makes them look good — the character actors, are more interesting than the movie stars,” said Ron Shelton, who wrote and directed Bull Durham. Shelton inducted Steve Dalkowski, the inspiration for the movie’s Nuke LaLoosh character, into the Shrine in 2009. “In a certain way, the Hall of Fame honors the movie stars, though a lot of them are dishonorable characters. The Reliquary is about everything that’s not a movie star.”

Shelton and Cannon became acquainted when each was involved in experimental film groups in the Los Angeles area in the 1970s.

“He was weirdly brilliant,” said Shelton, whose book about the making of Bull Durham, “The Church of Baseball,” was published this month. “I use weirdly in the most positive way. He not only had his own drummer, he had a kind of vision that went with it. The Reliquary really is a work of imagination. The archive lives in your mind and sometimes in your heart.”

The Shrine’s inaugural class in 1999 included Curt Flood, who took M.L.B. to court to challenge the reserve clause preventing player movement; Dock Ellis, perhaps best known for claiming to have thrown a no-hitter while high on LSD but who was also a civil rights advocate; and Bill Veeck, the maverick owner who was a master showman.

At the ceremony, Cannon read a letter Ellis had received from Jackie Robinson praising his civil rights work that warned him that people in and out of the game eventually would turn against him. Ellis was moved to tears. Afterward, he donated a set of his hair curlers.

Those are authentic, as is the burlap peanut bag that held peanuts “packed for Gaylord Perry’s peanut farm.” The sacristy box “reputedly” used by a priest at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York to administer last rites to a dying Babe Ruth in 1948? The jock strap “purportedly” worn by Eddie Gaedel, the smallest person to appear in an MLB game at 3 feet 7 inches? Eyes twinkling, Price allows that the provenance of some of these items “is certainly questionable.”

“You know what was really hard to find was a child-sized jock strap,” said Mary Cannon, who added a few touches to make it seem as if it came from the 1951 St. Louis Browns. “We went to so many stores to find that thing.”

By definition, the word “reliquary” means “a container for holy relics.” To Terry Cannon and his disciples, more important than the actual authenticity of these “holy relics” is the idea of them.

A visual as simple as produce from a grocery store can be a powerful force to ignite the imagination. As a prank when he was at Class AA Williamsport in 1987, catcher Dave Bresnahan heaved a potato into left-field during a fake pickoff throw to trick a rival into running from third base into an out at home plate. A distant nephew of the Hall of Fame catcher Roger Bresnahan, Dave was waiting for the runner with the ball at home plate. He was promptly released and never played again. In memoriam, Mary Cannon carved two potatoes — at least one of which lives in the archives here in a Mason jar.

“We didn’t realize formaldehyde would turn them dark brown,” she said, adding: “There are all of these wonderful stories but nothing there, so we tried to create tangible things for people to see.”

Even within the baseball industry, some are unfamiliar with the Reliquary. Nancy Faust, the retired Chicago White Sox organist who created walk-up music for batters, had to look it up when she got the call for induction in 2018.

“My husband, Joe, said, ‘What is this, some kind of joke? A Baseball Aquarium?’” Faust said. “I said, ‘There’s nothing fishy about it.’ When I knew who was going in with me, I thought, ‘Wow! That’s some pretty good company.’ I felt honored to be remembered.”

Faust was inducted in 2018, along with Tommy John and Rusty Staub.

“Rusty Staub’s a perfect one, right?” Costas said. “He’s not quite a Hall of Famer, but he’s a significant player. There are other players who aren’t as significant, but you put Rusty Staub in before you put Chet Lemon in because Rusty Staub is ‘Le Grande Orange.’”

Dr. Frank Jobe, the inventor of the Tommy John surgery, preceded the pitcher into the Shrine in 2012. There is a Spaceman (Bill Lee, 2000) and a Bird (Mark Fidrych, 2002). There also is rich diversity in Jackie Robinson (2005) and his widow, Rachel (2014), the first female umpire, Pam Postema (2000), and several Negro Leagues representatives.

Bouton once referred to the Shrine as “the people’s Hall of Fame, and inductions traditionally started with Terry Cannon leading the audience in the clanging of cowbells in tribute to Hilda Chester, perhaps the most famous fan in history.

As Cannon noted at the 2018 ceremony, Chester’s fame began to fade when the Dodgers left Brooklyn for Los Angeles and “while she may have died in relative obscurity in 1978, in our community of fans, Hilda is royalty. And through our annual remembrance, we can be assured that the final bell has not yet rung for Hilda Chester.”

Nor, as it turns out, has it for the Reliquary. To Shelton’s memory, it was the poet W.D. Snodgrass who, when speaking, often would tell his audience that every time he tells a story, it’s true.

“Then he would pause,” Shelton said. “And say, ‘I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s better than true.’ That’s what the arts do. It’s better than true. And that’s where the Reliquary lives.”

They have handed out Russian passports, cellphone numbers and set-top boxes for watching Russian television. They have replaced Ukrainian currency with the ruble, rerouted the internet through Russian servers and arrested hundreds who have resisted assimilation.

In ways big and small, the occupying authorities on territory seized by Moscow’s forces are using fear and indoctrination to compel Ukrainians to adopt a Russian way of life. “We are one people,” blue-white-and-red billboards say. “We are with Russia.”

Now comes the next act in President Vladimir V. Putin’s 21st-century version of a war of conquest: the grass-roots “referendum.”

Russia-appointed administrators in towns, villages and cities like Kherson in Ukraine’s south are setting the stage for a vote as early as September that the Kremlin will present as a popular desire in the region to become part of Russia. They are recruiting pro-Russia locals for new “election commissions” and promoting to Ukrainian civilians the putative benefits of joining their country; they are even reportedly printing the ballots already.

Any referendum would be totally illegitimate, Ukrainian and Western officials say, but it would carry ominous consequences. Analysts both in Moscow and Ukraine expect that it would serve as a prelude to Mr. Putin’s officially declaring the conquered area to be Russian territory, protected by Russian nuclear weapons — making future attempts by Kyiv to drive out Russian forces potentially much more costly.

Annexation would also represent Europe’s biggest territorial expansion by force since World War II, affecting an area several times larger than Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula that Mr. Putin took over in 2014.

The prospect of another annexation has affected the military timetable as well, putting pressure on Kyiv to try a risky counteroffensive sooner, rather than waiting for more long-range Western weapons to arrive that would raise the chances of success.

“Carrying out a referendum is not hard at all,” Vladimir Konstantinov, the speaker of the Russian-imposed Crimean Parliament, said in a phone interview this week. “They will ask: ‘Take us under your guardianship, under your development, under your security.’”

Mr. Konstantinov, a longtime pro-Russia politician in Crimea, sat next to Mr. Putin at the Kremlin when the Russian president signed the document annexing the peninsula to Russia. He also helped organize the Crimean “referendum” in which 97 percent voted in favor of joining Russia — a result widely rejected by the international community as a sham.

Now, Mr. Konstantinov said, he is in constant touch with the Russian-imposed occupying authorities in the neighboring Kherson region, which Russian troops captured early in the war. He said that the authorities had told him a few days ago that they had started printing ballots, with the aim of holding a vote in September.

Kherson is one of four regions in which officials are signaling planned referendums, along with Zaporizhzhia in the south and Luhansk and Donetsk in the east. While the Kremlin claims it will be up to the area’s residents to “determine their own future,” Mr. Putin last month hinted he expected to annex the regions outright: he compared the war in Ukraine with Peter the Great’s wars of conquest in the 18th century and said that, like the Russian czar, “it has also fallen to us to return” lost Russian territory.

At the same time, the Kremlin appears to be keeping its options open by offering few specifics. Aleksei Chesnakov, a Moscow political consultant who has advised the Kremlin on Ukraine policy, said Moscow viewed referendums on joining Russia as its “base scenario” — though preparations for a potential vote were not yet complete. He declined to say whether he was involved in the process himself.

“The referendum scenario looks to be realistic and the priority in the absence of signals from Kyiv about readiness for negotiations on a settlement,” Mr. Chesnakov said in a written response to questions. “The legal and political vacuum, of course, needs to be filled.”

As a result, a scramble to mobilize the residents of Russian-occupied territories for a referendum is increasingly visible on the ground — portrayed as the initiative of local leaders.

The Russian-appointed authorities of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, for instance, announced this week that they were forming “election commissions” to prepare for referendums, which one official said could happen on Sept. 11 — a day when local and regional elections are scheduled to be held across Russia.

The announcement invited residents to apply to join the election commission by submitting a passport copy, education records and two I.D.-size photographs.

Officials are accompanying preparations for a vote with an intensified propaganda campaign — priming both the area’s residents as well as the domestic audience in Russia for a looming annexation. A new pro-Russian newspaper in the Zaporizhzhia region titled its second issue last week with the headline: “The referendum will be!” On the marquee weekly news show on Russian state television last Sunday, a report promised that “everything is being done to ensure that Kherson returns to its historical homeland as soon as possible.”

“Russia is beginning to roll out a version of what you could call an annexation playbook,” John Kirby, the spokesman for the U.S. National Security Council, said this month, comparing the referendum preparations with the Kremlin’s moves in 2014 to try to justify its annexation of Crimea. “Annexation by force will be a gross violation of the U.N. Charter and we will not allow it to go unchallenged or unpunished.”

In Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, officials say any referendum on merging with Russia or forming a Russian client state in occupied areas would be illegal, riddled with fraud and do nothing to legitimize land seizures.

For Ukrainian civilians, the occupation has been accompanied by myriad hardships, including shortages of cash and medicine — a situation the Russians try to exploit to win allegiance from locals by distributing “humanitarian aid.”

Those seeking a sense of normalcy are being incentivized to apply for a Russian passport, which is now required for things like registering a motor vehicle or certain types of businesses; newborns and orphans are automatically registered as Russian citizens.

“There’s no money in Kherson, there’s no work in Kherson,” said Andrei, 33, who worked in the service department of a car dealership in the city before the war. He left his home in the city with his wife and small child in early July and moved to western Ukraine.

“Kherson has returned to the 1990s when only vodka, beer and cigarettes were for sale,” he said.

After taking control in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, Russian forces sought out pro-Kremlin Ukrainian officials and installed them in government positions.

At the same time, they engaged in a continuing campaign to stifle dissent that included abducting, torturing and executing political and cultural leaders who were deemed a threat, according to witnesses interviewed by The New York Times, Western and Ukrainian officials, and independent humanitarian groups like Human Rights Watch.

Russian occupiers cut off access to Ukrainian cellular service, and limited the availability of YouTube and a popular messaging app, Viber. They introduced the ruble and started changing the school curriculum to the Russian one — which increasingly seeks to indoctrinate children with Mr. Putin’s worldview.

A top priority appears to have been to get locals watching Russian television: Russian state broadcasting employees in Crimea were deployed to Kherson to start a news show called “Kherson and Zaporizhzhia 24,” and set-top boxes giving access to the Russian airwaves were distributed for free — or even delivered to residents not able to pick them up in person.

In an interview late last month, Ihor Kolykhaiev, the mayor of the city of Kherson since 2020, said the Russian propaganda, coupled with the feeling of being abandoned by the government in Kyiv, was slowly succeeding in changing the perceptions of some residents who have stayed behind — mainly pensioners and people with low incomes.

“I think that something is changing in relationships, probably in people’s habits,” he said, estimating that 5 to 10 percent of his constituents had changed their mind because of the propaganda.

“This is an irreversible process that will happen in the future,” he added. “And that’s what I’m really worried about. Then it will be almost impossible to restore it.”

Mr. Kolykhaiev spoke in a video interview from a makeshift office in Kherson. Days later, his assistant announced he had been abducted by pro-Russian occupying forces. As of Friday, he had not been heard from.

Mr. Putin has referred to Kherson and other parts of Ukraine’s southeast as Novorossiya, or New Russia — the region’s name after it was conquered by Catherine the Great in the 18th century and became part of the Russian Empire. In recent years, nostalgia in the region for the Soviet past and skepticism of the pro-Western government in Kyiv still lingered among older generations, even as the region was forging a new Ukrainian identity.

But early in the occupation this spring, residents of Kherson gathered repeatedly for large, boisterous protests to challenge Russian troops even if they provoked gunfire in response. This open confrontation has largely ended, according to a 30-year-old lifelong Kherson resident, Ivan, who remains in the city and asked that his last name be withheld because of the risks of speaking out publicly.

“As soon as there is a large gathering of people, soldiers appear immediately,” he said by phone. “It’s really life-threatening at this point.”

Still signs of resistance are evident, residents said.

“Our people go out at night and paint Ukrainian flags,” said another man, Andrei. “In yellow and blue letters they paint, ‘We believe in the Ukrainian Armed Forces.’”

Andrew E. Kramer and Alina Lobzina contributed reporting.

HAZARD, Ky. — Firefighters and National Guard crews have swarmed into eastern Kentucky after days of deadly flooding, rescuing by the hundreds people who found themselves trapped in the perilous water.

Also preparing to send a delegation: the tiny community of Bremen, Ky., nearly 300 miles away. When Bremen was shredded last year by one of the worst tornadoes in state history, the mayor from a little town in the eastern part of the state came to help with the cleanup. That town, Hindman, was among the hardest hit in this week’s floods. So the mayor of Bremen immediately began planning trips across the state with trucks full of supplies — even as his own community continued to rebuild.

“I said, ‘You were here in December and helped us,’” Mayor Allen Miller of Bremen told the mayor of Hindman in a phone call. “‘Now it’s time for me to return the favor.’”

Officials have held up efforts like these as a testament to a kind of generosity ingrained in the culture of Kentucky, a spirit forged over generations of hardship in which communities had to rely on one another to pull through.

But that cycle of support is also a grave reminder of the turbulence wrought by natural disaster that has gripped the state in recent months and will make recovery from the latest calamity all the more difficult. Officials said on Saturday that at least 25 people had been killed in the floods, but it could take weeks for the full magnitude of the human toll and physical devastation to become clear.

“I wish I could tell you why we keep getting hit here in Kentucky,” Gov. Andy Beshear said during a briefing in which he updated residents on the rising death toll and displayed a sense of anguish and exhaustion that many in the state have felt after recurring disasters, including a powerful ice storm last year that cut off power to 150,000 people in eastern Kentucky, a flash flood last July that left many stranded in their homes and the rare December tornadoes that carved a nearly 200-mile path of destruction and killed 80 people.

“I wish I could tell you why areas where people may not have much continue to get hit and lose everything,” the governor went on. “I can’t give you the why, but I know what we do in response to it. And the answer is everything we can.”

These disasters — particularly the flooding and tornadoes — would be staggering setbacks for any community. But here, they have been especially calamitous, striking rural areas that were already deeply vulnerable after decades of decline.

“These places were not thriving before,” said Jason Bailey, the executive director of the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy, a nonpartisan think tank, noting the erosion of the coal industry and loss of manufacturing jobs. “To even get back to where they were is a long road.”

For communities inundated by the powerful floods, that road has only begun.

The worst of the devastation has been concentrated in roughly a half-dozen counties in the Appalachian region on the eastern edge of the state. At least 14 people, including four children, died in Knott County, officials said. More than 1,400 people have been rescued by boat and helicopter, and thousands remain without electricity.

Homes were pulled from their foundations. Bridges have washed out, leaving some remote communities inaccessible. “I’ve seen ditches formed where there weren’t ditches because of the rushing water,” said Dan Mosley, the judge-executive for Harlan County.

His community experienced only minor flooding, he said, so for the past several days, he has accompanied workers from the county Transportation Department with dump trucks equipped with snow plows to clear out roads blocked by muck and debris in neighboring communities. The worst destruction he saw was in Knott and Letcher Counti

“The pure catastrophic loss is hard to put into words,” he said. “I’ve just never seen anything like this in my career or even my life.”

In Breathitt County, at least four deaths had been confirmed, roughly a dozen people were missing and much of the county remained underwater. Many homes in the sparsely populated county were still inaccessible. The community was already struggling to find its footing after the last flood.

“We had another flood, a record flood, not 12 months ago, and a lot of families had just started getting their lives back on track,” said Hargis Epperson, the county coroner. “Now it’s happened all over again, worse this time. Everybody’s lost everything, twice.”

In Hazard, a city of just over 5,200 people in Perry County, 24 adults, five children and four dogs had taken shelter at First Presbyterian Church — a number that was almost certain to climb in the coming days. Their homes had been flooded or wiped out by a mudslide.

Some of them arrived soaking wet and caked in mud, said Tracy Counts, a Red Cross worker at the church. All she had to offer them was baby wipes; there was no running water.

“It’s making it a harder puzzle to solve, but we’re adapting and making it happen,” Ms. Counts said. “It’s just hard to ask for help when we’re all in the same boat.”

Melissa Hensley Powell, 48, was brought to the church after being rescued from her home in Hardshell, an unincorporated area of Breathitt County. She and her boyfriend had pulled her brother, who is paralyzed, out of their house and then carried out a mattress for him to lie on. They kept him dry by holding garbage bags and umbrellas over him.

Two days after her rescue, while having a lunch of Little Caesars pizza and bottled water, she said the gravity of what she had endured was soaking in. “It’s starting to,” she said. “We’re still in that adrenaline rush.”

At the church, one congregant has rented portable toilets. People have dropped off water, blankets and dog food, the donated items filling some of the pews.

“I know people have this image of Eastern Kentucky,” Ms. Counts said, acknowledging the painful perception among outsiders of the region as poor and backward. “But we are the first ones to step up. We are the first ones to ask, ‘How can we help?’”

But now, an onslaught of disasters was testing that spirit of support in profound ways.

It is difficult to link a single weather event to climate change, but the flooding and tornadoes have highlighted the vulnerabilities that Kentucky faces. For some, it has also underscored the failures to prepare, as experts warn of heavier rainfall, flash floods that are becoming shorter in span but more powerful in magnitude, and weather patterns overall becoming more erratic.

“Let’s be aware that this a new normal of incredibly catastrophic events, which are going to hit our most vulnerable communities,” said Alex Gibson, the executive director of Appalshop, the arts and education center in Whitesburg, Ky., comparing the litany of flooding disasters in eastern Kentucky with the devastation faced by poor island nations around the world in the era of climate change.

In the vast stretches of the state now contending with the aftermaths of flooding and tornadoes, Mr. Bailey said, the infrastructure had already been inadequate and the communities had been impoverished. “We have people who are living on the edge,” he said.

“So much of the wealth has been extracted,” he said. “In a topography that has been stripped, literally, of trees and mountainsides, flooding in particular becomes more likely, more risky, more dangerous — that’s what we’re seeing.”

And as much as the communities want to rely on one another to recover from the devastation, it would be difficult to summon the necessary resources on their own.

“The strain has been immense,” Judge Mosley, who is also an officer in the Kentucky Association of Counties, said of the widespread consequences from major disasters.

Without outside support, “this would be unsurvivable,” he said. “The federal government’s resources and our faith in God is the only thing that’s going to get us through this.”

Shawn Hubler contributed reporting.

It’s too much, this being alive. Too heavy, too uncertain, too chronically cataclysmic, too bellicose, too unwell, too freighted with a possibility of the perception of error. The word of the last few years — in American activist and academic circles, anyway — has been “precarity.” Which gets at ideas of endangerment, neglect, contingency, risk. Basically: We’re worried. And: We’re worried you’re not worried enough. Like I said: It’s too much.

If I were a globally famous musician whose every blink gets inspected for Meaning, now might be the time to discover how it feels to mean something else, to seem lighter, to float, to bob, splash, writhe and grind, to sashay-shanté. To find “new salvation” in building her “own foundation.”

Were I that musician, now might be the time to call my freestyle jam “America Has a Problem” and not say what the problem is because A) Psyche! B) What I’ma say you don’t already know? And C) The person actually performing this song knows “that booty gon’ do what it want to.” Now’s the time to work your body in lieu of losing more of your mind. “America” is one of the closing tracks on “Renaissance,” Beyoncé’s seventh solo studio album, the one where she surveys the stakes and concludes they’re too damn high. Now’s the time to remind yourself — to be “telling everybody,” as she sings on the first single, “Break My Soul” — that there’s no discourse without disco.

What a good time this thing is. All 16 songs hail from someplace with a dance floor — night clubs, strip clubs, ballrooms, basements, Tatooine. Most of them are steeped in or conducted entirely with Black queer bravado. And on nearly every one, Beyoncé sounds like she’s experiencing something personally new and privately glorious: unmitigated ecstasy. It takes different forms: bliss, obviously; but a sexy sternness, too. The exercise of control is as entertaining on this album as the exorcism of stress.

As expensive, production-wise, as “Renaissance” sounds (one song credits two dozen writers, including samples and interpolations), Beyoncé’s singing here transcends any price tag. The range of her voice nears the galactic; the imagination powering it qualifies as cinema. She coos, she growls, she snarls, she doubles and triples herself. Butter, mustard, foie gras, the perfect ratio of icing to cupcake.

At about the halfway point, something arrives called “Plastic Off the Sofa.” Now, part of me wept because those are words she doesn’t even bother to sing. Plastic off the sofa? Got you again! The rest of me wept because the singing she does do — in waves of rhapsodically long, Olympic-level emissions — seems to emanate from somewhere way beyond a human throat: The ocean? The oven? But this is one of the few songs that sound recorded with live instruments — plinking guitar and some pitter-pat percussion. (The musical plastic comes off the album’s sofa.) The bass line keeps swelling and curving and blooming till it outgrows its flower bed, and Beyoncé’s voice does, too. It surfs the swells. It smells the roses. “Renaissance” turns to gospel here and there — on “Church Girl,” most brazenly. This is the only one that sounds like it was recorded in Eden.

It takes a minute for all the rapture on “Renaissance” to kick in. First comes a mission statement (“I’m That Girl”) wherein Beyoncé warns that love is her drug. Then it’s on to “Cozy,” an in-the-making anthem about Black femmes luxuriating in their skin. This one has a bottom as heavy as a cast-iron skillet and a bounce the Richter scale couldn’t ignore. “Cozy” is about comfort but sounds like an oncoming army. The first true exhalation is “Cuff It,” a roller-skate jam held aloft by Nile Rodgers’s signature guitar flutter while a fleet of horns offer afterburn. Here, Beyoncé wants to go out and have an unprintably good time. And it’s contagious enough to overthink a throwaway line like “I wanna go missing” later, when I’m sober.

Comedy abounds. Thank the sampled contributions of Big Freedia and Ts Madison for that. “Dark skin, light skin, beige” — Madison drawls on “Cozy” — “fluorescent beige.” Thank the tabloid-TV keyboard blasts on “America Has a Problem.” But Beyoncé herself has never been funnier than she is here. The sternness she applies to the word “No” on “America” alone would be enough. But there’s her impersonation of Grace Jones’s imperiousness on “Move,” some sharp-elbowed dancehall refraction in which the two of them command the plebes to “part like the Red Sea” when the queen comes through. (Here’s me not touching who the queen is in that scenario.) Pop music has been tattooed with Jones’s influence for 45 years. This is one of the few mainstream acknowledgments of her bounteous musical might. There’s also Beyoncé’s vamp at the end of “Heated,” which she recites to the crack of a splayed hand fan. It’s one of those round-table freestyles that go down at some balls. A fraction of hers includes: “Unnncle Jonny made my dress/That cheap spandex/She looks a mess.”

This is an album whose big idea is house. And its sense of house is enormous. It’s mansion music. “Renaissance” is adjacent to where pop’s been: pulsing and throbbing. Its muscles are larger, its limbs flexier, its ego secure. I don’t hear marketplace concerns. Its sense of adventure is off the genre’s map, yet very much aware of every coordinate. It’s an achievement of synthesis that never sounds slavish or synthetic. These songs are testing this music, celebrating how capacious it is, how pliable. That might be why I like “Break My Soul” so much. It’s Track 6, but it feels like the album’s thematic spine. It’s got tenderness, resolve and ideas — Beyoncé brokering two different approaches to church.

On “Pure/Honey” Beyoncé breaks through wall after wall until she gets to the chamber that holds all the cousins of her 2013 sizzler “Blow.” It ends with her lilting next to a sample of the drag artist Moi Renee bellowing, “Miss Honey? Miss Honey!” And it’s as close to the B-52’s as a Beyoncé song might ever come. (But Kate, Cindy, Fred, Keith: Call her anyway!)

The album’s embrace of house and not, say, trap unambiguously aligns Beyoncé with queer Black folks. On the one hand, that means she’s simply an elite pop star with particularly avid support. But “Renaissance” is more than fan service. It’s oriented toward certain histories. The knotty symbiosis between cis women and gay men is one. The doors of impersonation and tribute revolve with centrifugal force.

With Beyoncé, her drag seems liberating rather than obfuscating. It’s not just these lesser-known gay and trans artists and personalities her music has absorbed. It’s other artists. On “Blow,” Beyoncé wondered how it felt for her partner when he made love to her. Now the wonder is: How does it feel for her to make love — and art — sometimes as somebody else? The album’s final song is “Summer Renaissance,” and it opens with the thrum of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love.” It’s not the first time she’s quoted La Donna. But the nod is not only there, where the reference is explicit. It’s in the album’s rich middle, which includes that sofa song and “Virgo’s Groove,” maybe the most luscious track Beyoncé’s ever recorded. This is to say that “Renaissance” is an album about performance — of other pop’s past, but ultimately of Beyoncé, a star who’s now 40, an age when the real risk is in acting like you’ve got nothing to lose.

Another history is right there in the album’s title: 100 years ago, when things were also too much for Black Americans — lynchings, “race riots” all over the country — and flight north from the South seemed like a sound alternative to murder, up in Harlem, Alain Locke and Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes and Aaron Douglas and Jessie Fauset, to pick five figures, were at the center of an explosion of art that could be as frivolous, party-hearty and vulgar as some of what’s on this album. Its artists were gay and straight and whatever was in between. The point is they called that a renaissance, too. It sustained and delivered delight and provocation in spite of the surrounding crisis, it gave people looking for a house something that approximates home. New salvation, old foundation.

Beyoncé
“Renaissance”
(Parkwood Entertainment/Columbia)

President Biden tested positive for the coronavirus again on Saturday morning, becoming the latest example of a rebound case after taking the Paxlovid treatment that has otherwise been credited with broadly impressive results in fighting the virus and suppressing its worst effects.

“The president has experienced no re-emergence of symptoms, and continues to feel quite well,” Dr. Kevin C. O’Connor, the White House physician, said in a memo released by the press office. “This being the case, there is no reason to reinitiate treatment at this time, but we will obviously continue close observation.”

The “‘rebound’ positivity,” as Dr. O’Connor termed it, meant that Mr. Biden was forced to resume “strict isolation procedures” in keeping with medical advice. The White House announced that the president would no longer travel to his home in Wilmington, Del., on Sunday as planned nor make a scheduled visit to Michigan on Tuesday to promote newly passed legislation supporting the domestic semiconductor industry.

Mr. Biden played down the development. “Folks, today I tested positive for COVID again,” he wrote on Twitter. “This happens with a small minority of folks. I’ve got no symptoms but I am going to isolate for the safety of everyone around me. I’m still at work, and will be back on the road soon.”

The White House later posted a video of the president on the Truman Balcony with his dog Commander and he appeared well. “I’m feeling fine,” he said. “Everything’s good.”

Mr. Biden first tested positive for Covid-19 on July 21 and experienced a sore throat, runny nose, cough, body aches and fatigue. After five days of isolation, he tested negative on Tuesday evening and returned to the Oval Office on Wednesday, declaring that his relatively mild case demonstrated how much progress had been made in fighting the virus that has killed more than one million Americans.

But doctors were watching for signs of a rebound case and made sure to keep testing him every day. He tested negative on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday before receiving a positive antigen result on Saturday morning.

Paxlovid rebound has become a source of debate within the scientific community and among Covid patients. Initial clinical studies of the drug, which is made by Pfizer, suggested that only about 1 percent to 2 percent of those treated with Paxlovid experienced symptoms again. A study published in June that has not yet been peer-reviewed found that of 13,644 adults, about 5 percent tested positive again within 30 days and 6 percent experienced symptoms again.

But the anecdotal accounts of Paxlovid rebound — including a case involving Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the president’s chief medical adviser — have echoed widely, causing many to wonder whether the reported data was still accurate as the new and much more contagious BA.5 subvariant sweeps through communities and reinfects even patients who recently recovered from Covid-19.

“I think this was predictable,” Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a prominent cardiologist and professor of medicine and surgery at George Washington University Hospital, wrote on Twitter on Saturday after the president’s positive test was disclosed. He added that “the prior data suggesting ‘rebound’ Paxlovid positivity in the low single digits is outdated” and that the real number was likely significantly higher.

Either way, experts stressed that Paxlovid had been notably successful in preventing more severe Covid-19 illnesses and hospitalizations. And a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study published in June reported that symptoms from a rebound tended to be milder than during the primary infection and unlikely to lead to hospitalization.

“While we continue to monitor real-world data, we remain very confident in the treatment’s effectiveness at preventing severe outcomes from Covid-19,” Amy Rose, a Pfizer spokeswoman, said in a statement on Saturday.

The C.D.C. issued an emergency health advisory in May that said people experiencing a rebound case “should restart isolation and isolate again” for at least five days, reflecting the agency’s general isolation recommendations for people infected with the virus. The advisory also said that rebounding did not represent reinfection with the virus or resistance to Paxlovid.

Dr. Ashish K. Jha, the White House’s Covid-19 response coordinator, told reporters when Mr. Biden first tested positive that by looking at Twitter, “it feels like everybody has rebound, but it turns out there’s actually clinical data” suggesting otherwise. Moreover, he said, “Paxlovid is working really well at preventing serious illness, rebound or no rebound, and that’s why he was offered it, and that’s why the president took it.”

Dr. Paul G. Auwaerter, the clinical director in the infectious diseases division at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said it was unlikely that Mr. Biden, who has been fully vaccinated and boosted twice, would become seriously ill. He added that scientists were working to explain why some people experience a rebound of the virus.

Among his Covid-19 patients experiencing a rebound case, Dr. Auwaerter said, many of them have had the recent Omicron subvariants. None has been hospitalized while rebounding. Those highly infectious and vaccine-evasive forms of the virus, he added, can cause people to test positive for longer.

Taking the drug, Dr. Auwaerter said, could be like “moving the goal posts” in the course of an infection, suppressing the virus but not clearing it completely. Still, he said, high-risk people should “absolutely” still take the medication.

Dr. John P. Moore, a virologist at Weill Cornell Medicine, said researchers were still lacking correlations between age, risk factors or vaccination status. “I haven’t heard anyone come up with a definitive cause,” he said. “He’s just the unlucky guy in the one out of 20. It’s just a numbers game.”

Dr. Moore said that if data could support such a move, federal regulators might want to consider allowing a longer course of the drug, to definitively rid the body of the virus. “The simplest thing would be to go back on the drug for longer,” he said.

Mr. Biden’s rebound case will complicate his effort to turn his illness into a positive story. As the oldest president in the nation’s history, Mr. Biden, 79, has been eager to show that he remains fit, especially as he forecasts plans to run for a second term in 2024. He continued to work from the White House residence during his first isolation, appearing by video before several groups, and then made a triumphal return to work in person on Wednesday.

Instead of the narrative of beating the virus, however, the president’s rebound case reinforces the unpleasant reality that the pandemic refuses to go away. Although the death toll has fallen dramatically, Covid-19 remains a fact of life for Americans, some of whom have been infected multiple times.

Mr. Biden’s new positive test may also raise questions about his fidelity to precautions against infecting others after returning to the office. Aides said he would wear a mask while with others, but in every public appearance he made since Wednesday, his face remained uncovered.

Aides said that he was socially distant from others and that he was cautious to avoid exposing aides, Secret Service agents and members of the household staff. The White House Medical Unit found that 17 people had been in close contact with Mr. Biden before his initial positive test, but as of Wednesday none had tested positive.

While the president did not wear a mask in the video on Saturday, a photograph released by the White House showed him wearing one as he signed a disaster declaration responding to flooding in Kentucky.

Dr. Auwaerter said Mr. Biden might not have put others at great risk in the last few days even without wearing a mask, since he was being tested for the virus regularly and was testing negative. For those not testing as regularly, he said, it would be prudent to continue wearing a tightfitting and high-quality mask, particularly around high-risk people, because of how infectious Omicron subvariants can be.

But the new positive test will also set back Mr. Biden’s efforts to get back on the road to promote his agenda and campaign for Democrats facing an uphill struggle to keep control of both houses of Congress in this fall’s midterm elections.

The president, whose approval rating stood at only 33 percent in a New York Times/Siena College poll in July, has been described as eager to travel the country after a spate of foreign trips, but the renewed isolation will delay that further.

BASRA, Iraq — Iraqi protesters loyal to the nationalist Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr thronged Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone for the second time in a week on Saturday to prevent the formation of a new government. They scaled concrete barriers and pushed past security forces to get into the Iraqi Parliament, filling the empty seats of representatives and shouting their support for Mr. Sadr: “Son of Mohammed, take us wherever you want.”

Their move effectively made it impossible for Parliament members to convene to form a government, a step that political parties had tentatively scheduled for Saturday.

The occupation of Parliament by Mr. Sadr’s followers looked perilously like a government takeover, not least of all because as the day wore on, some of his supporters briefly moved to the building that houses judges’ offices. On social media, some Iraqi analysts voiced concerns that the crowd would target the homes of Mr. Sadr’s political opponents.

Earlier this summer, Mr. Sadr requested Parliament members loyal to him resign after a federal court ruled that two-thirds of Parliament must agree on a president and his coalition could not gather enough votes for any one individual. Mr. Sadr thought his rivals would ask him to return, but instead the next largest coalition, which includes Shiite groups that had or used to have armed elements linked to Iran, rushed to fill the empty slots with its own candidates and prepared to form a government.

It is the intra-sectarian character of the current tension that makes it so dangerous, said Abbas Kadhim, the director of the Iraq Initiative for the Atlantic Council.

“In Iraq, we used to have disputes in an inter-sectarian way — the Shia Muslims versus Sunnis, the Arabs versus the Kurds — but now we are moving to a more dangerous place which is really intra-Shia, intra-Kurd, intra-Sunni rivalries,” he said.

“People tolerate disputes with others, but disputes within a sect or an ethnicity is always a fight for the soul of the group itself, for who speaks for the group,” he added.

Mr. Sadr, who led the main Shiite opposition to the United States’ occupation of Iraq, supported the creation of an armed wing known as the Mahdi Army, which was involved in targeted killings of U.S. troops as well as executions of Iraqis perceived as “traitors.” However, Mr. Sadr later backed away from that approach and learned how to marshal the millions of Iraqis loyal to him and his storied clerical family, by sending them into the street when he wanted to exert political pressure.

Many of his supporters have felt like outsiders and Mr. Sadr fanned those feelings, counting on their passion, loyalty and sheer numbers to force those in power to meet his demands, or at least consider them.

Mr. Sadr, however, did not judge the most recent political situation accurately. Since he cannot undo his decision to withdraw from the government and is now an outsider, he has leveraged the option left to him: to send his legions of supporters to halt the creation of a new government and demand reforms and new elections that could once again bring his group power within the government.

“The protesters have issued several demands that I think are dangerous,” Sarmad Al-Bayati, an Iraqi political analyst, said in an interview.

“It might cause excitement among Iraqis; they might even get support from the Tishreen movement,” he said, referring to the thousands of protesters from different backgrounds who came together in October 2019 to demand that the government deal with unemployment, rein in corruption, supply electricity and put an end to the unbridled power of the armed groups linked to Iran. Their protests immobilized city centers from Baghdad to the south of Iraq; more than 500 protesters were killed by security forces and armed groups, and more than 19,000 were wounded, according to the United Nations.

Among the demands that could be a rallying call are: to amend the constitution to change Iraq’s government from a parliamentary to a presidential system; to anoint a caretaker government that is responsible for constitutional changes and agrees to hold early elections; and to hold corrupt officials to account, Mr. Al-Bayati said.

These demands have been enumerated by people close to Mr. Sadr in statements or tweets in recent days.

The United Nations Mission in Iraq released a statement urging political actors on all sides to calm the situation. “The ongoing escalation is deeply concerning,” the statement said. “Voices of reason and wisdom are critical to prevent further violence. All actors are encouraged to de-escalate in the interest of all Iraqis.”

There were also calls for calm from some of Mr. Sadr’s political opponents, while others sounded more confrontational.

Ministry of Health officials said that by midafternoon there had been 125 injuries. There were reports that tear gas and noise bombs were used to try to disperse the crowds, but the government’s security forces so far have largely been restrained at the request of Iraq’s caretaker prime minister, Mustapha al-Kadhimi, who has coordinated with his security forces and protesters to avoid confrontations and charges that he is suppressing freedom of expression.

Some of the roots of this week’s unrest date back to the protests in 2019, which raised the profile of many activists but ultimately achieved little in the way of reform. Those demonstrations were initially championed primarily by civil society activists and anti-corruption advocates, who opposed Iranian-linked militias in Iraq as well as the government’s failure to provide jobs and staunch corruption. They were joined by Mr. Sadr’s supporters, who also claimed to be strongly opposed to corruption — although analysts say the ministries controlled by Sadrists are also rife with kickbacks and other corruption.

While Mr. Sadr also has ties to Iran and a number of his close family members live there, he has pushed an Iraqi nationalist agenda that asserts his power and that of Iraq, rather than loyalty to Iran.

The 2019 protests resulted in the resignation of the prime minister, Adil Mehdi, and the choice of Mr. Kadhimi to replace him until early elections were held.

Those elections, however, did not produce a consensus about a new political leadership for the country or reforms. Now there is no figure, neither Shiite, Sunni nor Kurd, who is able to reach across Iraq’s disparate religious, ethnic and political identities to respond to people’s demands, said the Atlantic Council’s Mr. Kadhim.

Adding to the precariousness of the situation is Iraq’s blazing summer heat, he said. “Any time you have a mass of people in the streets, the risk of violence is 70 percent,” he said. “It’s hot, it’s summer, it’s July, it’s Iraq; you don’t want more than 20 people in one place.”

WASHINGTON — President Biden and his top advisers have tried for months to press forward amid a seemingly endless drumbeat of dispiriting news: rising inflation, high gas prices, a crumbling agenda, a dangerously slowing economy and a plummeting approval rating, even among Democrats.

But Mr. Biden has finally caught a series of breaks. Gas prices, which peaked above $5 a gallon, have fallen every day for more than six weeks and are now closer to $4. After a yearlong debate, Democrats and Republicans in Congress passed legislation this past week to invest $280 billion in areas like semiconductor manufacturing and scientific research to bolster competition with China.

And in a surprise turnabout, Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, a Democrat who had single-handedly held up Mr. Biden’s boldest proposals, agreed to a deal that puts the president in a position to make good on promises to lower drug prices, confront climate change and make corporations pay higher taxes.

“The work of the government can be slow and frustrating and sometimes even infuriating,” Mr. Biden said at the White House on Thursday, reflecting the impatience and anger among his allies and the weariness of his own staff. “Then the hard work of hours and days and months from people who refuse to give up pays off. History is made. Lives are changed.”

Even for a president who has become used to the highs and lows of governing, it was a moment to feel whipsawed. Since taking office 18 months ago, Mr. Biden has celebrated successes like passage of the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill and slogged through crises like the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. Gas prices soared; now they are coming down. Unemployment is at record lows even as there are signs of a looming recession.

The president’s brand of politics is rooted in a slower era, before Twitter, and sometimes it can pay off to have the patience to wait for a deal to finally emerge. But now, with congressional elections coming up in a few months, the challenge for Mr. Biden is to make sure his latest successes resonate with Americans who remain deeply skeptical about the future.

The magnitude of the Senate deal was received like a splash of icy water across Washington, which had all but written off the possibility that Mr. Biden’s far-reaching ambitions could be revived this year. Republicans moved quickly to attack the proposal, with Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, deriding what he described as “giant tax hikes that will hammer workers.”

Inside the West Wing, aides were forced to scramble to come up with talking points for a deal almost no one saw coming. If Congress manages to pass the compromise reached with Mr. Manchin, they argue, it will move the country to the forefront on addressing the globe’s changing climate and lower drug prices even as it raises money from corporations to lower the federal budget deficit.

The deal would give Medicare the power to negotiate lower prices for millions of Americans, extend health care subsidies under the Affordable Care Act for three years and require corporations to pay a minimum tax — something many progressive Democrats have been demanding for years.

“For months, the environmental community, President Joe Biden and Leader Chuck Schumer, and economists have pointed out that climate action would reduce inflation and lower energy costs for Americans,” Melinda Pierce, the legislative director for the Sierra Club, said in a statement after the deal was announced. “We’re glad the Senate is recognizing the opportunity they have before them. Climate action cannot wait one day longer.”

For Mr. Biden, that kind of success cannot come soon enough.

The elections this fall will determine which party controls the House and the Senate, with many experts predicting a Democratic drubbing. And doubts about the president’s own future are rising as fast as his popularity is sinking. A New York Times/Siena College poll conducted in early July found that 64 percent of Democrats wanted someone other than Mr. Biden to be the party’s nominee in 2024. A CNN poll later in the month put that figure at 75 percent among Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters.

Even as Mr. Biden hailed the news of the Senate deal on Thursday, his own comments underscored the darker reality that he and his administration still face — a litany of promises that remain unfulfilled, with little evidence that more surprise victories are on the horizon.

During his remarks, the president himself listed many of the parts of his 2020 campaign agenda that remain stalled: more affordable child care; help for the elderly and those who care for them; cheaper preschool; efforts to confront the cost of housing; student debt relief and tuition-free community college; and money to cover health care for the poor in states that have refused to expand Medicaid.

The president’s failure to make good on those promises has left many people who were once his most ardent supporters disappointed, angry and — in some cases — even ready to abandon him for someone else.

Alexis Steenberg, 19, a college student in eastern Pennsylvania, helped convince her father to vote for Mr. Biden in 2020 because of his promise to wipe away thousands of dollars in student debt. Now, as one of those debt-ridden college students, she is angry that Mr. Biden has not made good on that promise.

“It’s so frustrating because I tried, I put my all into persuading my dad to vote for someone that I knew he wouldn’t on his own,” she said in an interview. “And the reason I persuaded him, it fell through entirely.”

An administration official said the president was still considering whether to cancel some student debt.

Ms. Steenberg is a Democrat and supports Mr. Biden’s priorities, she said, but she wants to vote for a different candidate.

“I am one of the 75 percent that thinks somebody else should run,” she said. “Not only because he’s been failing his promises, but also because he doesn’t seem like he can articulate his thoughts enough to the public nor the people behind the scenes that are helping him out.”

Mr. Biden, she said, is “just floating along waiting for the term to end.”

In the future, aides believe Mr. Biden must find a way to better communicate the progress he has made to people like Ms. Steenberg.

The stimulus plan he pushed through at the beginning of his term distributed hundreds of billions of dollars to individuals and businesses in the midst of the pandemic. His $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law is making large investments in clean energy, broadband and long-delayed projects to fix crumbling roads, pipes and bridges.

David Axelrod, who was a top adviser to President Barack Obama, wrote on Twitter on Friday that Mr. Biden was “the victim of his own expansive expectation- setting.”

“He’s quietly amassing a record of historic wins on infrastructure, guns, manufacturing—& now maybe Rx pricing, climate & energy,” Mr. Axelrod wrote. “Not a new New Deal but pretty damned impressive in a 50/50 Congress.”

Still, Mr. Biden has so far struggled to ensure that his victories break through the often grim reports that dominate news coverage. Critics, including some members of his own party, say his speaking style fails to convey the sense of urgency that many Americans feel.

“I think we’re looking to be inspired,” said Jamie L. Manson, the president of Catholics for Choice, who was disappointed after Mr. Biden’s speech following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Dakota Hall, the executive director of the Alliance for Youth Action, which advocates on behalf of young people and people of color, said Mr. Biden had failed to live up to the promises he made on the campaign trail for bold change in a number of areas.

Mr. Hall said he regularly saw Mr. Biden promoting his administration’s progress on making small, incremental change.

“That is absolutely necessary,” he said. “But that is not the change that people went out and voted for.”

“They want somebody who’s going to show their anger, to slam their fist onto the podium and say enough is enough,” Mr. Hall added. “They don’t get that from Biden, right?”

White House officials are aware of the frustration, but they say it is misplaced. They say the president has been fighting for all of his priorities but has been blocked by forces outside of his control: Republicans who refuse to compromise, a handful of conservative Democrats and global events like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the economic fallout from the pandemic.

They argue that Mr. Biden’s accomplishments are sometimes not appreciated. They point to the crush of negative news coverage that he received as gas prices were rising rapidly and the comparatively smaller amount of coverage as gas prices have fallen after his decision to release a record amount of oil from the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Derrick Johnson, the president of the N.A.A.C.P., said Democrats should direct their ire at lawmakers — including Republicans and a few Democrats — who have prevented the president from making more progress. He urged people to vote in November to elect more people who support Mr. Biden’s agenda.

“We need a Senate that’s going to do their job,” he said.

On Twitter this past week, former President Barack Obama, who was often frustrated by Congress as he pushed his own agenda, said change could be halting.

“I’m grateful to President Biden and those in Congress — Democrat or Republican — who are working to deliver for the American people,” Mr. Obama wrote. “Progress doesn’t always happen all at once, but it does happen — and this is what it looks like.”

SZCZECIN, Poland — The Polish state has banned abortion for 29 years, but that has done little to prevent women from finding access to the procedure, leaving the Rev. Tomasz Kancelarczyk a busy man.

The Roman Catholic priest plays ultrasound audio of what he describes as fetal heartbeats in his sermons to dissuade women considering an abortion. He has threatened teenage girls with telling their parents if they have an abortion. He hectored couples as they waited at the hospital for abortions on account of fetal abnormalities, which were permitted until the law was further tightened last year.

But Father Kancelarczyk’s most effective tool, he acknowledges, may actually be something the state has mostly neglected: helping single mothers by providing them with shelter, supermarket vouchers, baby clothes and, if need be, lawyers to go after violent partners.

“Sometimes I am overwhelmed by the number of these cases,” Father Kancelarczyk, 54, said during a recent visit to his Little Feet House, a shelter he runs in a nearby village for single women, some pregnant, some with children, all with difficulties. “There should be 200 or 300 houses like this is Poland. There is a vacuum.”

As strict abortion bans proliferate in some American states, Poland offers a laboratory, of sorts, for how such bans ripple through societies. And one thing evident in Poland is that the state, if determined to stop abortions, is less focused on what comes afterward — a child who needs help and support.

Poland’s government has some of the region’s most generous family welfare benefits, yet it still offers only minimal support for single mothers and parents of disabled children, much the same as in the parts of the United States where abortion bans are being put in place.

“They call themselves pro-life, but they are only interested in women until they give birth,” said Krystyna Kacpura, the president of the Federation for Women and Family Planning, a Warsaw-based advocacy group that opposes the government ban. “There is no systemic support for mothers in Poland, especially mothers of disabled children.”

This is one reason the number of abortions does not appear to have actually dropped — abortions have merely been driven underground or out of the country. While legal abortions have dropped to about 1,000 a year, abortion-rights activists estimate that 150,000 Polish women terminate pregnancies every year, despite the ban, either using abortion pills or by traveling abroad.

Poland’s fertility rate, currently at 1.3 children per woman, is one of the lowest in Europe — half of what it was during Communist times, when the country had one of the most liberal abortion regimes in the world.

The legal ban, even die-hard anti-abortion warriors like Father Kancelarczyk concede, has made “no discernible difference” to the numbers.

Offering food, housing or a place in child care, on the other hand, can sometimes make a difference, and Father Kancelarczyk, who raises money through donations, says proudly that such aid helps him “save” 40 pregnancies a year.

One was that of Beata, a 36-year-old single mother who did not want to disclose her full name for fear of stigma in her deeply Catholic community.

When she became pregnant with her second child, she said the father of the child and her family shunned her. No bank would lend her money because she had no job. No one wanted to hire her because she was pregnant. And she was refused unemployment benefits on the grounds that she was “not employable.”

“The state completely abandons single mothers,” she said.

Then one day, as she was sitting on the floor in her tiny unfurnished apartment, Father Kancelarczyk, who was alerted by a friend, called, encouraged her to keep the baby and offered help.

“One day I had nothing,” Beata said. “The next day he shows up with all these things: furniture, clothes, diapers. I could even choose the color of my stroller.”

Nine years later, Beata works as an accountant and the son she chose to have, Michal, thrives at school.

For many women, Father Kancelarczyk has turned out to be the only safety net — though his charity comes with a brand of Christian fervor that polarizes, a division on stark display in Szczecin.

Father Kancelarczyk’s gothic red brick church towers directly opposite a liberal arts center whose windows are adorned with a row of black lightning bolts — the symbol of Poland’s abortion rights movement — and a poster proclaiming, “My body, my choice.”

Every year, Father Kancelarczyk organizes Poland’s biggest anti-abortion march with thousands departing from his church and facing off with counterprotesters across the street. Before a local gay pride parade, he once called on his congregants to “disinfect the streets.”

He gets hate mail nearly every day, he says, calling it “Satan’s work.”

Ms. Kacpura, the advocate who opposes the government ban, says that the lack of state support especially for single mothers has opened up space for people like Father Kancelarczyk to “indoctrinate” women who find themselves in financial and emotional distress.

Under Communism, child care was free and most Polish workplaces had on-site facilities to encourage mothers to join the work force. But that system collapsed after 1989, while an emboldened Roman Catholic Church put its shoulder behind the 1993 abortion ban as it also rekindled a vision of women as mothers and caregivers at home.

The nationalist and conservative Law and Justice Party, which was elected in 2015 on a pro-family platform, saw opportunity and passed one of Europe’s most generous child benefits programs. It was a revolution in Poland’s family policy.

But it still lacks child care, a precondition for mothers to go to work, as well as special support for the parents of disabled children. Over the past decade, groups of parents of disabled children twice occupied the Polish Parliament to protest the lack of state support, in 2014 and 2018.

When someone contacts Father Kancelarczyk about a woman contemplating abortion — “usually a girlfriend” — sometimes he calls the pregnant woman. When she does not want to talk, he says he will engineer bumping into her and force a conversation.

He also admonishes the fathers, waving ultrasound images in the faces of men looking to leave their pregnant girlfriends. “If men behaved decently, women would not get abortions,” he said.

While abhorred by many, he is admired in the religious communities where he preaches.

Monika Niklas, a 42-year-old mother of two from Szczecin, first attended Mass with Father Kancelarczyk not long after she had learned that her unborn baby had Down syndrome. This was 10 years ago, before the ban included fetal abnormalities, and she had been contemplating an abortion. “I thought my world was crumbling down,” she said.

During his service, Father Kancelarczyk had played a video from his phone with the sound of what he described as a fetal heartbeat.

“It was so moving,” Ms. Niklas recalled. “After the Mass, we went to talk to him, and told him about our situation.” He was one of the first people to tell her and her husband they were going to make it and offered support.

After her son Krzys was born, Ms. Niklas gave up on her career as an architect to take care of him full time. Krzys, now 9, got a place in a school only this fall, one example of how government support falls far short of matching their needs.

She now advises expecting parents of disabled children, trying to counsel them to keep their babies — but without sugarcoating it.

“I never just tell them, ‘It will be all right,’ because it will be hard,” she said. “But if you accept that your life will be different from what you had envisaged, you can be very happy.”

“We have these ideas about what our children will be — a lawyer, a doctor, an astronaut,” she added. “Krzys taught me about love.”

But in all her counsel, she said, one thing barely features: the abortion ban.

“This has not impacted how people make decisions,” she said. “Those who want to get an abortion do it anyway, only abroad.”

Many women here concurred.

Kasia, who also did not want her full name used because the stigma that surrounds the issue, is one of nine women currently living at Father Kancelarczyk’s shelter. She was 23 when she became pregnant. She said her boyfriend had abused her — the police refused to intervene — and then left her. Her mother had kicked her out of the house. A friend contacted an abortion clinic across the border in Germany.

“It is not difficult,” she said of getting an illegal termination. “It is a matter of getting a phone number.”

In the end, it was a near-miscarriage in the eighth week of her pregnancy that changed Kasia’s mind and persuaded her to carry out her pregnancy.

Father Kancelarczyk offered her not just free room and board in his shelter but a lawyer, who took the former boyfriend to court. He is now serving a 10-month sentence and might lose custody.

“I feel safe now,” Kasia said.

Father Kancelarczyk says the number of women referred to him because they were considering abortion did not increase when Poland’s ban was tightened for fetal abnormalities. But he still supports the ban.

“The law always has a normative effect,” he said. “What is permitted is perceived as good, and what is forbidden as bad.”