(1) Happy Birthday, Archbishop Burke. Ad Multos Annos!

(2) A local nun looks back on imprisonment in a WWII camp:

“On Chinese New Year the sisters’ hearts skipped a beat when they were told they had been summoned to the office of the camp’s commander.

“We were told to come to the Japanese headquarters and we wondered what in the world was going to happen,” Sister Mathews said. “So we marched, I think it was a mile and a half. We had a soldier behind each one of us and two soldiers at the tail end (of the group). We wondered what in the world would happen when we got there…..”

(3) The Pope does not wear Prada.

(4) Bad tenured teachers are hard to fire:

MIDDLE ISLAND, N.Y. (AP) — Few people know better than school superintendent Allan Gerstenlauer that disciplining a tenured teacher can be a long and expensive process.…

Over the weekend, I have been reflecting on the news of Archbishop Burke’s transfer to Rome. As an active participant in interfaith activities in St. Louis, I have encountered Archbishop Burke in a number of community settings. The first time was at a small dinner of welcome arranged by the Jewish Federation of St. Louis and the Jewish Community Relations Council. He carried himself as a warm and somewhat shy person, but comfortable in the midst of the Jewish community. He reflected on his interactions with the Jewish community of La Cross, Wisconsin his former diocese, and looked forward to working with the St. Louis Jewish community on matters of mutual concern.

For the media in St. Louis, Archbishop Burke was a blessing. His denial of communion to supporters of “choice” in the national debate on abortion, made the national news. It was an election year. As a rabbi, I…

“How can you pray for someone you don’t know?”

The question was asked candidly, without rancor, and with genuine interest. The person asking the question was seriously ill and I was the chaplain assigned to the floor of the hospital where she was being treated. I had not even offered prayer; I had simply introduced myself and explained that I was a chaplain. Her question brought me up short.

The recent Pew religion poll found that more than half of all Americans report praying regularly. The number is impressive, but it leaves me wanting to know so much more. I wonder what and for whom people pray, what they even mean by prayer, what they understand to be happening when they pray, how it feels to them. Religion in America is a little like sex: media portrayals of other people’s spiritual practices can seem calculated to shock or offend (preachers damning our…

There are religion blogs and then there are religion blogs.

The Civil Religion blog is civil, the writing is good and the posts are frequent.

(1) When we were discussing the set-up of this blog, religion reporter Tim Townsend suggested we look at the Washington Post religion blog, On Faith, to see what a religion blog looks like. I found it confusingly laid out and not appealing and said so to Tim. Today I have another reason to stay away. Look at this from the Dallas Morning News blog:

“Sally Quinn, the Washington socialite and journalist, attended Tim Russert’s funeral.

Russert was Catholic. Quinn isn’t. In fact, as far as I can tell, she isn’t demonstrably religious at all, despite being one of the founders of the On Faith blog published by Newsweek and The Washington Post.

She decided to receive Communion at Russert’s funeral Mass.

In some churches, this would be no…

A story in the New York Times sports section Sunday about the women’s golf phenom, Lorena Ochoa delved into the rarely-coincidental worlds of sports wagering and religion.

Despite it’s headline, “Keeping Faith, Ochoa Takes Magical Tour,” and a mention in the fifth paragraph that the 26-year-old Mexican golfer is Roman Catholic, the story was a sports piece - about a golf pro whom everyone seems to like.

However, reporter Karen Crouse hooks onto an interesting anecdote toward the end of the story.

After telling us that Ochoa gives herself incentives, which “always involves candy,” we learn that during a round in Mexico City last March:

…Ochoa told Brooker, who does not belong to any organized religion, that she was worried his daughters would be shut out of heaven. How many tournaments would she have to win, she asked, for him to have his children, Hadley, 3, and Madelaine, 2, baptized?

Brooker,…

Earlier in June, two dozen Roman Catholic and Muslim scholars met in Rome to discuss the theme “Christians and Muslims as witnesses of the God of Justice, of Peace and of Compassion in a World suffering from Violence.” Pope Benedict XVI personally visited the meeting to highlight its significance. While such interreligious dialogues seem groundbreaking these days, this meeting was actually the 14th annual meeting between the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue and the The Islamic-Catholic liaison Committee.

Rev. Dr. Frederic Ntedika Mvumbi, OP, one of my Dominican brothers from the Congo who teaches Islam in a Catholic seminary in Nairobi, Kenya, was fortunate enough to be one of the participants, and sent a personal report. In it he said that “a common understanding of these issues was found, though with difficulty, and an appeal was made to commit ourselves to it:”

1. The inherent dignity of each human being, from…

Today I learned a lesson about reading the fine print. I turned on Channel 9 at 9 o’clock, all excited to watch Traces of the Trade (the documentary on the largest slave-trading family in United States history, which I wrote about in in an earlier post). Instead, KETC was airing a really cool Frontline episode called “Jesus in China.” Not a waste of time, by any means, but not what I was expecting.

First, let me apologize if I led anyone else into this same frustrating cul-de-sac (I don’t want to call it a dead end, since the Frontline program was great). I did a bit of digging and learned that “Traces of the Trade” is only airing on KETC HD, not on the regular KETC (Channel 9). According to the PBS website, a DVD version of the documentary will be available for purchase soon. It also appears to be available now…

If you or someone you know is looking for a way to make a difference in our community, and you have an hour a week to change a person’s life for the better (and really, you know you do), check out the Senior Connections program run by the Singer Institute of St. Louis.  Senior Connections provides training, ongoing support, and placement for volunteers who make a weekly visit to a person in a nursing home who otherwise would have no visitors.  Can you imagine being shut in with no contact from the outside world?  Turns out many many people are living such lives.  But you can provide the simple human connection they need to thrive.

Members of all ages at the Ethical Society have been taking part in this program for over a year, and we recently received an amazing letter from one of the homes our volunteers visit.  Here’s an…

According to the Episcopal News Service, “Traces of the Trade” will air on the PBS show POV tonight.  I have been hearing good “buzz” about this documentary ever since it was previewed at the 75th General Convention of the Episcopal Church in 2006, but I have not had an opportunity to see it myself.  I believe it will air tonight at 9:00.  I hope to post more on the topic after seeing it and would encourage readers to respond to it here (in the comments section) if they so desire.  Here’s part of the ENS story for those who haven’t heard about the documentary:

“Traces” […] tells the story of the DeWolf family, the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history and also a prominent part of the Episcopal Church in Rhode Island. James DeWolf Perry was the 18th Presiding Bishop.

In the film, Katrina Browne, a DeWolf descendant and the documentary’s producer…

In a recent issue of The New Yorker, Joan Acocella writes on Fordham University’s recent conference on the hit HBO show, “The Sopranos: A Wake.” One of the presentations went as follows:

Philip Scala, a retired F.B.I. agent, said that the ritual by which Christopher was “made” was entirely accurate, down to the burning of the saint’s picture, but that, as part of the lowering of standards so often deplored by Tony, the DeCavalcante family, said to be the model for Tony’s crew, had abandoned the ceremony: “They would just have a pizza party and say, ‘You’re made.’” (This caused other families to disrespect them.)

I’ve never much gotten into The Sopranos on TV, mainly because we’ve never gotten HBO at home. But this little snippet did make me think about rituals of initiation and rites of passage. Any rite of passage seems to be inherently religious, very broadly defined, in that the…