Some days ago when The pope, the Holocaust & the Lefebvrists appeared on these pages, fellow blogger Khalid Shah, a Muslim, commented:”It is always good to find out when we are wrong and this story helped correct one of my opinions. I have always thought that though the Jews suffered a lot during WW2 that they play the Holocaust sympathy card a bit too much and are a bit paranoid on this issue. Thank you for correcting this wrong opinion of mine…..”

Mr. Shah’s comment stunned me — he is a highly educated man –  much as Lefebvrist Bishop Richard Williamson’s downplaying of the Holocaust had astonished me days earlier.

How could anyone not know the full extent of what happened to the Jews in WWII?

Bishop Williamson has been booted from Argentina back to England – shoving a reporter along the way — and he has issued a cheap apology — a typical 2009-style…

Anne Frank

If you would like to get beyond the  NPR headline “Anger & Dismay as Pope Reinstates Holocaust Denier” you may be interested in George Weigel’s recent articles, one published in Newsweek and another in our Catholic archdiocesan newspaper, the St. Louis Review.

Over at GetReligion, blogger E. E. Evans critiques various media coverage of this story, including the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and Catholic  News Service:

It’s always interesting when writers take a controversial story and approach it from very different angles.

Such was the case today in the continuing and complicated drama of the Pope’s move to lift the excommunications of the four traditionalist Society of St. Pius X bishops.

Warning for mature audiences-the two mainstream press stories contain the “r” word (rehabilitate), one deemed inaccurate by some folks in the comments pages. The Catholic News Service story does not.

Let’s start with the lede of today’s article from the Los Angeles Times:

The Vatican stood firm…

Turning a Lake into Yoghurt http://img159.imageshack.us

There is a sufi story (some people swear this is a true event but it is just a story) that a man was sitting by a lake and slowly putting a little bit of starter yoghurt into it. Some people came by and he looked up and looked at them a bit sheepishly and said “I know, I know this little bit of starter yoghurt won’t change the whole lake into yoghurt.”  He paused but then suddenly his eyes lighted up and he said “But my friends just imagine if it did make the whole lake into yoghurt! What a wonderful thing that would be!” …………. It is ok to dream a little.

My dream about the Palestine issue is to have peace there. The ‘starter yoghurt’ for this is ‘reason’. To keep asking “if they can have make peace in South Africa why can’t you?”…

elusive-bird-of-peace http://farm1.static.flickr.com

It is difficult to have a reasonable discussion on the Palestine-Israel issue. Passions run very high.  I guess as a Muslim I am supposed to offer support for Palestinian suffering and condemnation of Israeli brutality. Whenever events flare up in Palestine (like they have right now), there is a knee jerk response here in USA by Jews and by Muslims in passionate support of their respective co-religionists (and opposing the other). This is not very healthy. Suffering of all civilians is important and this spiraling violence has been going on far too long with no end in sight. We need to step back and take a hard look. Here are a few thoughts.

After over 40 years of violence and turmoil very little seems to have changed. It seems each side only goads the other to ever more depraved acts of violence. Over the years, both sides have committed so…

Forty-four bishops from the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America and its Canadian equivalent left for the Middle East today, including Bishop Gerald Mansholt of the church’s Central States Synod which includes Missouri.

On the synod’s website, Mansholt said the two-week trip is part of the ELCA’s “Churchwide Strategy for Engagement in Israel and Palestine,” adopted by the 2005 Churchwide Assembly.

According to John Brooks, director of the ELCA News Service, the trip was planned “long before the current Gaza conflict.”

Writing in a Dec. 31st pastoral letter, Bishop Mark Hanson, the ELCA’s presiding bishop, said the denomination “joins with all people calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and southern Israel,” and asked ELCA members “to join Middle East religious leaders who requested that Sunday, Jan. 4, be ‘a day for justice and peace in the land of peace,’” according to an ELCA press release.

In his own message, Mansholt wrote that there were three goals…

Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori in Gaza in March, courtesy of Episcopal Life Online

When something has been a “crisis” for longer than one has been alive, it can be hard to maintain focus and energy around it. We’re all familiar with the idea of compassion fatigue. But the crisis in the Middle East, and at the moment particularly in Gaza, has reached a new boiling point. Rather than try to figure out the historical origins of the conflict, or God forbid get into a shouting match about victimization and blame, it seems the most important thing is to focus on the people being hurt by the situation, and not close our eyes to the ongoing and worsening humanitarian crisis.

“Innocent lives are being lost throughout the land we all call Holy, and as Christians remember the coming of the Prince of Peace, we ache for the absence of peace in the land…

Okay.  So, mixing the faith and politics, I was a BIG TIME Obama supporter!  Bumper sticker, buttons, voter registration drives and even an Obama action figure for my son (yes, I said action figure).  But, something continues to dog me about the movement for change that elected him to serve as our 44th P.O.T.U.S.  It seems that many were in search of a messiah, not a president. 

Clearly, folks don’t think he’s Jesus or any second coming.  But, consistent with the more traditional Judeo-Christian (Hebrew Scriptures/Old testament) concept of a promised, prophet-king as son of God who would care for the widow and the orphan, instituting God’s reform agenda, many believe the President-Elect fits the bill.  My caution for this (small ‘m’) messiah is that this role is never completely filled in this realm.

The good King Hezekiah comes closest in the Hebrew Scriptures/Old Testament tradition.  This youngster on the throne gathers a team…

A bagpipe in Jewish culture credit: www.hotpipes.com

Tyree is a Scottish name, one I married into, and also Scottish is the maiden name of my paternal grandmother, MacLean.

The windy Isle of Tiree, the outermost of Scotland’s Inner Hebrides, is mighty close to the Isle of Mull, the seat of the MacLean Clan.

I questioned MacLean Clan historian Detta MacLean when I took on the Tyree name and she said my new husband was probably a MacLean. “I grew up on Mull and knew everyone on Tiree. They are all MacLeans!”

Detta MacLean’s point might be a stretch, but it’s very Scottish thinking. Very clannish.

As it happens, the Scots have a good deal in common with the Jews, according to Duncan A. Bruce, author of the 1996 history, The Mark of the Scots. And the parallels, taken together, have landed these two groups a good deal of trouble throughout the ages. Take a look at…

I was struck by this review of the new exhibition of fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Jewish Museum in New York City.

There has been no greater archaeological discovery of the past hundred years or so to shed light on the Jewish and Christian Scriptures than when “the Bedouin goatherd who in 1947 tossed a stone in a cave above the Dead Sea, heard the shattering of pottery, and discovered scrolls that proved to date from the third century B.C. through the time of Jesus.”

But I find the history of what happened after their discovery to be just as intriguing as the scrolls themselves. Better than anything in schlock like The DaVinci Code.

And the reviewer’s nod to Walter Benjamin’s concept of artistic “aura” is choice.

Those of us long in the tooth can regale you with stories about print media’s history of hostility to religion, so it is a great satisfaction to be part of this Civil Religion blog project created by Post-Dispatch religion reporter Tim Townsend. Tim’s Sunday, front page story about our archdiocesan seminarians was a delight to read. What a refreshing change from years past.

And Monday’s post from Rabbi Mark L. Shook — Memorials Do Matter — about his youth group’s ingenious Holocaust project was gratifying as well. Look at the joy on the faces of all those young people!

What we are doing matters.

This morning’s Catholic news services carried a story about just this topic, how religious groups can better public discourse:

WASHINGTON-Religious groups can better public discourse, John Carr and Mark Silk, Ph.D., said at the spring meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) Committee on Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs and the…

Thinking ahead to what is on the calender in the next week, here are some excellent books I’ve discovered in recent months.

May 11: Mother’s Day

The Christian Grandma’s Idea Book: Hundreds of Ideas, Tips, and Activities to Help You be a Good Grandma by Ellen Banks Elwell.

The Christian Mom’s Idea Book: Hundreds of Ideas, Tips, and Activities to Help You be a Great Mom by Ellen Banks Elwell.

* In both of these books, Elwell puts her own encouragement and insight into the mixture along with the words of hundreds of other mothers and grandmothers. These books are short on ivory-tower theory, and long in practical advice, sensible living, and Christian encouragement.

May 14 : The 60th Anniversary of the state of Israel

On the Road to Armageddon: How Evangelicals Became Israel’s Best Friend by Timothy P. Weber.

Future Israel: Why Christian Anti-Judaism Must Be Challenged by Barry E. Horner.

* Sixty years. Given the furor Israel faced in even…