Today is Friday, January 7, 2005: the day after the feast of the Epiphany in the western church, and Christmas Day in the East. If you haven't gotten your sweetie a Christmas present yet, stop by World Vision's
great gifts site, and send some farm animals to the Third World in his/her name. Better yet, pick up an
emergency gift for tsunami victims.
Today's Categories:
Tsunami
Religious groups continue to [http://www.ajws.org/ step up] to the plate for relief efforts: the Catholic Diocese of Boise has
joined the Catholic Relief Services effort. CRS has pledged $25 million, which is $10 million more than...oh, never mind.
The UMC is chipping in $750,000, and as mentioned above Christi Charity/World Vision is reworking its Christmas gift program to help victims. And if you're not doing anything tomorrow, you can stop by Grace ELCA in Elmore Ohio. They're hosting a pancake breakfast for relief efforts.
Mmmm, Lutheran pancakes...
GetReligion has some excellent thoughts on the theodicy issue:
Even a story of a premature baby, born as its mother was fleeing from the surging waves, sets Rosenbaum's teeth on edge. Because the child's father praises "God's grace" for allowing the baby and the mother to come through alive, our modern-day wannabe Job launches into the following: "If you believe that God intervened to save this one little life, you have to believe that He chose not to intervene to save the lives of all the other children. He wanted them dead."
I'd issue some kind of grand retort here but, like I said, this stuff just does not move me. That people are rotten, or that the earth shakes, it seems to me, do not count for much against the possibility of a good and loving God whose actions in this world are not always easy to discern or explain. Jeremy Lott
and our favorite, from tmatt:
Caught up in the disaster, they had no time for religious ceremonies of any kind. In Sri Lanka, as in coastal southern India and along the beaches of Indonesia, there was only time to dig huge holes in the ground and shovel in the dead. "In this kind of tragedy, there is no religion," said Syed Abdullah, a local imam in the ancient south Indian port of Nagapattinam, where Muslims, Hindus and Christians have lived together peacefully for centuries. "Let the dead be buried together. They died together in the sea. Let their souls get peace together."
We wish we could say all the reactions had been so savory. Here's Rush Limbaugh's reaction, via the Gutless Pacifist:
I have been suspicious of these numbers from the get-go. First day, 12,000; then 14,000; then 50. Then 60 then 100, then 140 -- there was even a number, 400,000 thrown around out there. And it just -- who's verifying this?
And here's a release from Pravda Agape Press, headlined "Tsunami Survivors Desperate for Help, Open to Gospel".
So now we've established that the tsunami was not only an opportunity to deride other people's religions, it's also an opportunity to criticize the media and an opportunity to evangelize.
Nice.
For our money, we'll stick with this kind of religious response:
Thanks to Catholic News Service for the link.
Christianity Today, as always, has the most thorough roundup of links.
Religion & Homosexuality
The story getting the biggest play in the past couple of days is the court case against Repent America and some associated protestors arrested at last October's OutFest in Philadelphia. (Figures. Two of them are from Lancaster County.) Coverage here and here, and that doesn't include the literally dozens of Conservative Christian links up on the issue.
An American Family Association lawyer is representing the protestors, and argues that the US Department of Justice was improperly involved in their arrests. Not surprisingly, some other folks dispute that.
The figure in the center of the controversy is Repent America's Michael Marcavage. Many on the right are hailing Marcavage as a Christian hero, both mainstream and not.
They may want to rethink their support, however. We'll spot Marcavage his previous arrests here and here; they were in the context of protests, RNR has friends who've been arrested hundreds of times the same way. But honestly, does the Religious Right want to be associated with someone endorsed by the Army of God, or one who defends convicted sex offenders with these words: "Citizens should be concerned about how a man can be tried and convicted on the testimony of a 14-year-old"?
Ew. That was RNR's first link to a Free Republic page. We may need to take a shower break.
That's not all the news in this category, though. Westboro Baptist is planning to protest in Helena MT, over that states' Supreme Court ruling in favor of same-sex domestic partner benefits. Typically, they're not just protesting at the Supreme Court, though: they're also going to the University of Montana and six local churches.
Last: Oliver Stone sez that his Alexander flick tanked due to "raging fundamentalism in morality." Funny, we thought it was because the movie stank. Well, at least our...er...friends with good taste got this out of sword and sandals epics: 365.com has video of Brad Pitt donning armor in "Troy."
Denominational News
The Missoula Independent, of all places, has a lenghty profile of a local UCC congregation that's seen its weekly attendance rise from about 250 to somewhere between 325 and 350 people since the elections. What was that I heard about liberal churches dying?
Chuck Currie carries UCC President John Thomas' warning about complacency, however:
The deeper danger for us is that we will grow content with a message of inclusion and welcome. An invitation to a community of amiable tolerance is certainly to be preferred to the mean-spirited exclusion around us, but as our prayer suggests, the hands we reach forth are to be an embodiment of the outstretched arms of Christ in his passion. The welcome we extend is to a baptism that names us children of God and members of the church, a baptism that does not bless us and the culture in which we live, but reshapes us for costly discipleship, resisting those elements of our culture that demean, diminish and destroy. The invitation we give at the Table is not an offer of friendly dinner conversation, but an encounter with Jesus, crucified and risen, and with a vision of the realm of God that contends with the violence and injustices of our day. The Jesus who never turns anyone away is the same Jesus who asks us to take up the cross.
Go read the entire letter. Thomas is no piker at theological reflection.
And lest we be accused of slanting the good news, here's a story from the WSJ opinion page (via Amy Wellborn) on rising enrollment at religious-affiliated colleges. We're not so sure that the rise in quality & quantity of students can be attributed to these schools attractiveness--competition is up across the board--nor does this seem limited to just conservative schools. But hey. Good is good.
Religion & Politics
Catholic leaders and others in Connecticut are speaking out against the upcoming execution of a serial killer.
Apparently, liberal Christians aren't the only ones who feel like their religion has been hijacked sometimes. Witness this from Dar al Hayat:
The milestone has been turning for the past century and we still don't know its face and we still don't know where the track of its freedom is. There were four explosions in Riyadh and we still don't know who the perpetrators are. Did they come from within our societies or did they come from abroad? Why do these people find a fertile soil in our lands and why do these people find supporters amongst us? All these are questions that should be addressed with transparency. It is about time to stop saying that these people are from within our societies and are lost and we should bring them back on the right path. Why should be we bring them to the right track after they have incited fear in our secure cities?
What these people really deserve is death. They deserve to die as a punishment for what they did to us. Let us start by identifying things with their names, and let us start searching for solutions for our predicaments. These people are our children and part of our nation, but they are terrorists. They live comfortably amongst us and their allegation is always the same; religion. They hide behind religion and have in fact abducted religion. You find that they identify and impose the religious rituals according to their own interpretation. However, today and everyday, an explosion such as in the city of Riyadh, I start to doubt the religious interpretations and religious methods that these people utilize. These people are following the same pursuit of President Bush: "You are with us or against us."
We don't agree with the "deserving death" part, but it is interesting to hear echoes of American struggles in the Middle East.
Michael Newdow has refiled his Pledge of Allegiance case, and is also taking aim at prayers at the next Inaugural. Does this guy know how to stir the pot, or what?
We take our hats off Jesus' General for the umpteenth time. He's found perhaps the best shot from Alberto Gonzalez' recent press conference:
We couldn't have said it better. So we won't.
This 'n' That
A remarkably small bag this afternoon: if you need information on polygamy, the Utah AG has a helpful brochure for you to read. Not that, y'know, we're endorsing it or anything. Mrs. Pastor would kill us...
And if you've got any money left over from tsunami donations, you might want to consider tossing a few bucks Ani DiFranco's way. She's trying to save a church in downtown Buffalo: