.

We don’t like to think about hate crimes. They are a disappointing reminder of parts of our history we would just as soon forget.

While the story about the white judge who denied an interracial couple a marriage license is slightly distressing, most of the comments about the New Orleans justice of the peace, have been along the lines of “Hey, our country has moved past that.” The justice said he wouldn’t marry the couple because he didn’t think interracial kids were a good idea.

Governor Bobby Jindal said “Disciplinary action should be taken immediately - including the revoking of his license.” The couple did get married, but now have a sad story to tell.

Much more inconvenient and terrifying is getting shot for your religion.

Two men were shot in the legs on their way in to the Adat Yeshurun Sephardic Congregation in Los Angeles the other day, and the gun man neither spoke to…

In the midst of the recent deluge of neighborhood violence in the city and cries from the community for action, Saint John’s United Church of Christ (UCC) is working with its partners to try to answer the question, “What is the church doing?” with “The Beloved Community: Equipping the Saints for the Work of Justice,” an ecumenical conference that will provide practical tools and information that citizens and communities of faith can put into action immediately.  The event will be held November 5-9^th at Saint John’s UCC, 4136 North Grand Boulevard, at the corner of Grand and Lee Avenue.  It includes two worship experiences, a play by The Black Rep, three separate ministry institutes, a discussion on faith and politics and two community service opportunities.  Conference partners and supporters include the Missouri Mid-South Conference of the UCC, The African American Pulpit Journal (Memphis, TN), The Black Rep, Washington Metropolitan A.M.E. Zion Church,…

Last week was a case study in theological theory meeting practice for me.  On Sunday, I shared information with our congregation on the intent of President Obama’s Health Care proposal, reminding them that the United Church of Christ declared support for H.R. 676, an early and more progressive effort calling for a single-payer, universal health care system in our summer General Synod in Grand Rapids.  On Monday, I stood with the leadership of the Saint Louis Metropolitan Clergy Coalition and a representative from Organizing for America to declare support for the president’s Health Insurance Reform and invite others to pray for our elected leadership.  On Wednesday (the day Senator Max Baucus unveiled the Senate Finance Committee plan) at our church’s mid-week Bible study we reflected on the prophetic vision of Isaiah chapter 1 that the responsibility of the people of God extends beyond worship to “defending the fatherless…pleading for the…

Dignity of Man ourfatherswillcommunications.com

Setting the scene: It began with a fall and a slightly sprained ankle: my better half got up and steady again — with the help of the local fire department — and went to bed.

Then came the back pain, followed by severe sciatica, alleviated by heavy- duty pain pills.

The next few days brought more falls, more  fire department rescues and then an accidental overdose of pills — no one person’s fault, just old-fashioned miscommunication.

Then pneumonia, an ambulance, a hospital and suddenly talk of end-of-life decisions.

With the help of numerous prayers (thanks in great part to Noreen McCann’s e-prayer tree) and the right medicine (Thanks to Dr. Jennifer Delaney) , within 24 hours the patient turned himself around and was, in the words of his doctor, “progressing on all fronts.”

A week at a skilled nursing center followed, then home before Christmas into a new world of 24/7 nursing-aides…

www.time.com

Some years ago, when FIRST THINGS was new, I met Diane, a young Episcopalian woman affiliated with the Institute on Religion and Democracy. We got to talking about FIRST THINGS, our favorite monthly magazine.

Diane was in the habit of reading the longer articles first, then rewarding herself with Fr. Richard John Neuhaus’ various commentaries in his While We’re At It section.

I jumped immediately to Fr. Neuhaus’ pages. It was like sitting down with an old friend.  He saw right through sham and he consistently skewered woolly-headed thinking with wit and grace.

AP reporter Rachel Zoll, writing for The New York Times tries to get it right today by describing Fr. Neuhaus’ life as moving from left to right:

A native of Canada and the son of a Lutheran pastor, Neuhaus began his own work as a Lutheran minister at St. John the Evangelist Lutheran Church in a predominantly African-American Brooklyn neighborhood. He was active in…

This is not Gracie, who was a mutt we rescued from a shelter. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Once when I was working as a hospital chaplain a patient asked me whether or not dogs go to heaven. He was a successful and well-educated man, a little ironic in tone, and at first I wondered if he was pulling my leg. But in the end we had quite a lovely conversation about how important pets can be. I think I said something about how at the very least the love we have for them must be eternal; having a pet in our lives can transform our hearts in such a way that it clearly seems a gift from God. And once given, would God take such a gift away from us?

Later I remembered Jesus’ teaching about how we won’t be married in heaven and I wondered if I had wandered into…

Photo Courtesy New York Times

A few days ago the New York Post ran a column  by Iranian-born journalist Amir Taheri highlighting comments made by the Rev. Jesse Jackson describing the radical change of influence Israel would have under a Barrack Obama presidency. Taheri writes,

The most important change [says Jackson] would occur in the Middle East, where “decades of putting Israel’s interests first” would end.

Jackson believes that, although “Zionists who have controlled American policy for decades” remain strong, they’ll lose a great deal of their clout when Barack Obama enters the White House.

“Obama is about change,” Jackson told me in a wide-ranging conversation. “And the change that Obama promises is not limited to what we do in America itself. It is a change of the way America looks at the world and its place in it.”

Soon after, Jackson released a statement suggesting that the New York Post column misrepresented his views on America’s partners…

Bishop Martin D. Holley, a black priest and Auxilliary bishop of Washington, D.C.,  responded quickly to a recent Guttmacher Institute report indicating U.S. black women have abortions at five times the rate of white women.

Bishop Holley serves as Chair of the Sub-Committee on African American Affairs and he is a member of the Committee on Pro-Life Activities of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).

Bishop Holley said,

As an African American, I am saddened by evidence that Black women continue to be targeted by the abortion industry. The loss of any child from abortion is a tragedy, but we must ask: Why are minority children being aborted at such disproportionate rates?

Over 80 percent of Planned Parenthood clinics are located in minority neighborhoods…..

Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, began the ‘Negro Project’ to reduce the Black population…..

My brothers and sisters, we can overcome abortion in our nation.

Let us defend our community…

Photo from Resman Associates

David Briggs at the Cleveland Plain Dealer has a fascinating story about black churches leaving lower-income neighborhoods. Oddly, this has been a centuries old practice among whites but it has rarely uttered an objection. What we find, in fact, is not that the “black church” is simply moving out of low income areas but the second large wave of black middle-class folks are now moving to the suburbs–a trend that began in the 1960s when blacks were given more freedom to let the market inform our living preferences.

There are still black churches in black communities. For example, if you drive up and down Page Avenue between Vinita Park and downtown, you cannot drive half a mile without seeing a black church. However, Briggs writes,

[T]he black church is at a crossroads. Longtime congregations like are critical to struggling neighborhoods, providing safety, social services and an anchor for revitalization plans.

In…

Senator Barack Obama (AP photo)

I was on the website for Sojourners magazine when I saw this article about an effigy of Barack Obama having been found hanging from a tree at George Fox University. The story has also been covered by The Oregonian and other news outlets.

Maybe it doesn’t matter that it happened at a Christian university, since we don’t know and might never know who did it. Maybe it was students there, maybe it was outsiders trying to stir up a ruckus. (*See note below.)

But surely the choice of an avowedly Christian campus as the setting for this despicable stunt was intentional, if only to add to the shock value.

I’ve already seen some comments that suggest this is no big deal, that people really need to chill out and recognize that there’s a big difference between hanging a cardboard cutout from a tree and harming a real live human being. But…

Last weekend, my church hosted Gladys Knight and the Saint’s Unified Voices Choir.

Yes, that’s right, Gladys Knight, from Gladys Knight and the Pips. Only this time she wasn’t singing with the Pips and she wasn’t singing “Midnight Train to Georgia”.  Instead, she was performing with a 100 person multi-cultural choir made up of members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) who live in the Las Vegas, Nevada area.

We had 6000 tickets, free and by invitation only, for four performances that could better be described as praise worship events. Someone called it a “Mormon revival”.

The packed events were much more spirited and lively than anything our church typically does. The musical heritage of our faith finds its roots in those of its early converts, many of whom were white and from the eastern United States and Europe. They brought with them a ural heritage of many faiths, but the influences of African American ure have been slow to take root.

That is…

Just in case your summer reading list has wilted in the heat, my good friend John Nunes, president of Lutheran World Relief, recently posted a booklist of top books for the globally enlightened student.

The list was in response to a college professor who asked him what books she should encourage her students to read to gain greater global awareness. He passed along the question to a group of friends and colleagues. I was honored to be included.

My contribution was as follows:

The Gospels in Our Image: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Poetry Based on Biblical Texts, edited by David Curzon. A kind of midrashic collection of poems ranging from the deeply reverent to the keenly skeptical. Also a great primer in world poetry from the last century.

Jesus and the Disinherited, by Howard Thurman. A classic in Black theology. A seminal read for the young Martin Luther King, Jr.

Exclusion and Embrace, by Miroslav…

(1)  CWNews: The new English Translation of the Order of Mass for the United States was approved by the Vatican July 28:

The United States Bishops Conference announced that it received the go ahead from the Holy See’s Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments to the first section of the translation of the third edition of the Roman Missal.

It includes most of the texts used in every celebration of the Mass, and involves new translations of the penitential rite, Gloria, creed, Eucharistic prayers, Eucharistic acclamations and Our Father.

Amanda Shaw, blogging at FIRST THINGS, is enthusiastic about the changes, to put it mildly:

Some of the oddities and abominations of the English translation of the liturgy are about to go extinct, reported the Congregation for Divine Worship last week……

Go here to see  some of the changes.

(2) The Knights of Peter Claver, a black Catholic fraternal organization, held its 93rd convention in Florida,…

I have a nice little plaque with the famous “Serenity Prayer” on it.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.

I’ve always liked the prayer, its beautiful simplicity, its deep meanings packed into a few dense words.

And it has always seemed less Hallmark-y to me to know it was written by renowned 20th century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.

Not so fast. The New York Times reports that his authorship of the “Serenity Prayer” is being called into question.

It is a fun little controversy that I think reflects more on the notion of authorship in western culture than either Professor Niebuhr or the prayer itself. Western literary culture is so dominated by the Romantic idea of a solitary, original “author” as being the only “true” source of a text that it becomes increasingly difficult for people to conceive…

(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.

An English teacher in his…

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 as…

(1) The English newspaper The Independent thinks President George W. Bush is contemplating becoming a Catholic.

(2) Democratic candidate Barack Obama scolded absentee fathers on Sunday, Father’s Day. According to the NYTimes, Mr. Obama noted that

“more than half of all black children live in single-parent households,” a number that he said had doubled since his own childhood……”

(3) Meanwhile, black pro-life advocates will be protesting outside the upcoming Cincinnati, Ohio annual NAACP meeting. Rev. Clenard Childress, a New Jersey pastor, said

“Because 2008 is an election year, the presidential candidates will undoubtedly speak at the convention. This gives us a national stage to make our case to the American people, as a whole, as well as the convention delegates.”

The NYTimes published an article A Life of Quality: Harriet McBryde Johnson:

“…..What many saw when they looked at her was a scrawny woman with a twisted spine who got around with a power wheelchair and lots…

I have enjoyed reading the comments that have been made to my last post — Latter-day Saints examine racial history. I especially enjoyed the expressions of faith in the grace of God.

To clarify, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is built on the foundation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We believe in a restored, not reformed gospel. We believe in living prophets and apostles and our doctrines are derived from an open cannon of continuing revelation from God. Our roots are in Christian teachings, but our doctrine is distinct relative to other Christian traditions because of our open cannon. If there are errors in our practice, those errors are of man.

Our open cannon makes us open for correction or clarifying revelations. It makes our church vibrant and responsive to challenges in our times. We often refer to the church as a “living church”.

We rejoiced in the clarifying revelation in 1978 that extended the…

Tim Townsend’s article on Monday touched on a topic close to my heart, that is: the experience of black members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. To read his story, Black Mormons straddle two worlds on 30th anniversary – click here.

I have to admit, Tim’s story, while balanced and refreshing, was also hard to read. Especially hard for me to read was a comment made by my friend, Latter-day Saint (Mormon) convert, Nekisha Rhodes who says she is “comfortable being uncomfortable” as she struggles to learn more about the heritage of her new-found faith, a heritage that includes a church policy, lifted 30 years ago, prohibiting black male members from the priesthood.

Nekisha sounds much like many African American Latter-day Saints when they candidly express their faith and experience in the church. Catherine Stokes, Latter-day Saint and former assistant director, Office of Health Care Regulation,…