photo courtesy photobucket

I’ve been reading and enjoying the comments on the post I put up on the Manhattan Declaration.  I’ve also been reading what’s being written elsewhere & I came across this article from the Washington Post, written by Jonathan Merritt.  It raises some of the same issues we’ve already discussed, but I think it’s good enough to just pass on to all of you.  The line “The belief that something is important and the belief that something is exclusively important are two very different things” makes one of my earlier points much more clearly and concisely than I did.  Anyway, go ahead and read the whole article - it’s worth the time.

Dr. Timothy George, dean of Samford University, speaks at press conference Friday, photo courtesy Christian Post

A coalition of 152  Evangelical, Catholic and Orthodox leaders have issued a 4,700 word statement addressing the sanctity of life, traditional marriage and religious liberty.  The Manhattan Declaration: A Call to Christian Conscience is more than a list of convictions.   The document is a pledge to engage in civil disobedience in defense of the outlined principles, if necessary:

“We will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act; nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriage or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family.”

Signatories include nine Catholic archbishops, by my count,…

Jim and Betty, myparentswereawesome.com

Several months back a Facebook friend sent me a link to the website People of Walmart and I quickly became addicted to it.  People of Walmart is crowdsourced, meaning that it is dependent on contributions from the masses for its content.  The format is simple:  contributors submit photos taken at any WalMart   The photos are accompanied by captions; some clever, others just vicious.  What will you find at the site?  Many large people in tiny clothes, people in almost no clothes, lots of mullets and other eccentric hairstyles, semi-committed cross dressers, shockingly obscene t-shirts, creepy clowns and disturbing tattoos.  None of it is pretty.  Study some paintings by Bruegel the Elder and you’ll wind up with a similar sensation.  Humanity as displayed on People of Walmart is nasty, brutish and extremely overweight.    The site is funny, and wildly popular.  You can now purchase People of Walmart t-shirts and hoodies to…

photo courtesy buynothingchristmas.org

The first Christmas after we married my husband and I had almost no money at all but still wanted to be able to give each other something special.  We each made a list of ten things that we’d like for Christmas and then exchanged the lists to take the guess work out of shopping.  One might argue that we’d also taken the thought out of the process, but that didn’t occur to us at the time.  And so we took our lists and carried out our “plan” to buy each other a few gifts.  When Christmas morning came - surprise!  It turned out that my husband had purchased everything on my list, and I had purchased everything on his.  But how, when we had no money?  Credit, of course!

I look back on that first Christmas as a demented consumerist version of “The Gift of the Magi”.  That was…

Dorothy Day facing her last arrest, photo by Bob Fitch

Dorothy Day was an anarchist and a pacifist who was arrested multiple times throughout her life (the last time when she was in her 70s).  The FBI had a 500 page file on her, and Herbert Hoover J. Edgar Hoover hoped to see her arrested for sedition.  She’s also been called “the most significant, interesting and influential person in the history of American Catholicism” (by historian David O’Brien in “Commonweal” magazine), and the Vatican has approved considering her cause for canonization.

That’s my kind of saint.  I love Dorothy Day.  In the great communion of saints, there are a handful of people that I look to as my heroes and role models, my “household saints”.  Dorothy Day is one of them, and today is her birthday.  She  was a “sign of contradiction”, “holiness not easily domesticated”, to quote Robert Ellsberg.  She managed to…

photo courtesy of photobucket

On November 1, 2001 I received a call from a social worker looking for a licensed foster family to take a newborn for “a week or two”.  My husband and I were licensed, true, but we’d never served as foster parents, nor did we intend to.   Our licensing was part of the process of adopting a little boy from Haiti.  Unfortunately, the wheels of bureaucracy grind exceedingly slowly and we’d been waiting for our son for many months.  But this baby, this newborn, just needed a place to stay for a week or two.  Her birth mother had made an adoption plan, an adoptive family had been selected - but that family did not want to take her into their home until every detail for the adoption was in place.  So the question remained:  would we take her?  I had two children, but had only cared for…

Rob Bell courtesy Beliefnet

Pastor/author Rob Bell launched a boisterous discussion last week when he attempted to define the word “evangelical” during an interview with the Boston Globe.   Here’s the exchange between reporter Michael Paulson and Rob Bell that’s been getting most of the attention:

Q. What does it mean to you to be an evangelical?

A. I take issue with the word to a certain degree, so I make a distinction between a capital E and a small e. I was in the Caribbean in 2004, watching the election returns with a group of friends, and when Fox News, in a state of delirious joy, announced that evangelicals had helped sway the election, I realized this word has really been hijacked. I find the word troubling, because it has come in America to mean politically to the right, almost, at times, anti-intellectual. For many, the word has nothing to do with a spiritual…

courtesy Barnes and Noble

A friend recently recommended William Lobdell’s book “Losing My Religion:  How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America - and Found Unexpected Peace”.  I haven’t finished the book yet, but I’ve been deeply moved, and somewhat saddened, by Lobdell’s spiritual memoir.  His confession of unbelief, after an earlier, powerful conversion to Christianity is especially striking.

For years now, I had tried to push away doubts and reconcile an all-powerful and infinitely loving God with what I had seen, but the battle was lost. I couldn’t keep ignoring reality. I couldn’t believe in Christianity any more than I could believe two plus two equals five. My worldview had shifted. There was no time machine that could send me back to a more comfortable period when believing in God was natural and automatic.

I saw now that belief in God, no matter how grounded in logic and reason, requires…