Progressive Patriot Girl
How perfectly cool:
SALEM — The First Church in Salem, Unitarian, one of the oldest Protestant churches in North America, is beginning life anew.
Following a $1.8 million renovation and addition, which required it to close for nearly a year, a church founded in 1629 and steeped in history, a church where Roger Williams and William Bentley once preached, has reopened.
They made the controversial decision to sell their church silver for $800,000 and raised $1 million in capital campaign funds. And all in order to make an accessible building available to the community-at-large.
Congratulations, Salem!
I know this is old news, but it’s way cool:
DUBLIN — The names of 3,700 dead from Northern Ireland’s conflict are being read aloud in a Dublin church on the 14th anniversary of the Good Friday peace agreement.
Dublin’s Unitarian Church remembers the dead each Good Friday as ministers, congregation members and others take turns reading all names of those killed during the past 46 years of bloodshed over the British territory.
Paramilitary cease-fires that preceded the Good Friday accord of 1998 have abated the violence, but Irish Republican Army splinter groups still mount occasional attacks.
Friday’s list of victims is read alphabetically and takes three hours. The most recent is a Northern Ireland police recruit, 25-year-old Ronan Kerr, who was killed in April 2011 by a dissident IRA bomb placed under his car.
Helps me in my effort to make every week, Holy Week.
Speaking as a person of faith, separation of church and state — PLEASE!
After the House passed its budget last month, liberal religious leaders said the Republican plan, which lowered taxes and cut services to the poor, was an affront to the Gospel — and particularly Jesus’ command to care for the poor.
Not so, says Wisconsin Republican Rep. Paul Ryan, who chairs the House Budget Committee. He told Christian Broadcasting Network last week that it was his Catholic faith that helped shape the budget plan. In his view, the Catholic principle of subsidiarity suggests the government should have little role in helping the poor.
“Through our civic organizations, through our churches, through our charities — through all of our different groups where we interact with people as a community — that’s how we advance the common good,” Ryan said.
And frankly, that goes for liberals and conservatives, alike.
A quite interesting story.
Dr. Kahlida Mamdouhah of Cairo waited for years before fulfilling his dream of making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem out of respect for the late Coptic pope who had banned followers from visiting Israel.
But after Shenouda III died last month, there was nothing stopping him except what he called the unofficial disapproval of the government.
That barrier, however, proved to be a non-issue.
“I respect the pope and his wishes, but not the government,” he said, while clarifying that there is nothing political about the pilgrimage, which is of a purely spiritual nature.
Not sure if it’s the church or the government discouraging the visits. Despite the contested status of Jerusalem, it’s wrong. Either way.
Remembering the days when we sang this song in church, often. Helped seal my Unitarian-Universalist identity.
The perfect song to start — and end — Holy Week.
For indeed, Morning has Broken.
Pope Benedict XVI heads to Mexico this weekend, but will skip Mexico City — the Vatican says it’s to avoid the capital’s high altitude and smog. Others say the real reasons are the laws that make abortion and gay marriage legal in Mexico City.
Mexico City represents a lost battleground for the Vatican. In July, Mexicans elect a new president, and the church has already issued “pastoral guidelines” recommending that Mexicans reject politicians who accept Mexico City’s liberal ways.
Speaking near the basilica in Mexico City, top-ranking bishop Víctor René Rodríguez defends the Church: “We don’t believe in persecuting women, but what we do argue is that they think about the life about to be born,” the bishop said.
So Mexico City is a bubble. And the epicenter of a religious battleground. More.
(Photo: Pope Benedict XVI on a visit to Portugal on May 11, 2010. (Catholic Church/Flickr))
Missed this news.
WASHINGTON (RNS) Atheists and nonbelievers gathered on the National Mall Saturday (March 24) in a bid to show politicians, voters and even themselves that they have grown into a force to be recognized and reckoned with.
“We are here to deliver a message to America,” David Silverman, president of American Atheists, one of the rally’s sponsors, told the crowd. “We are here and we will never be silent again.”
Indeed, thousands came out for what organizers dubbed The Reason Rally and billed as the largest-ever gathering of nonbelievers in one place. They stood in a steady and sometimes heavy rain as speakers, singers, writers, comedians and activists charged them with channeling their common rejection of God into a force for political change.
“We are here to celebrate our belief in reason, science and the power of the human mind,” comedian Paul Provenza said from the podium as raindrops fell. “We are here to say to elected politicians … that there is a base for them to stand on to stand up to the religious right.”
I consider myself agnostic, but I would have been there with them today.
Cross-posted at ProgressivePatriotGirl.Blogspot.com.
I tend to agree with the Washington Post on this one. Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Cuba benefits the Vatican, and Fidel and Raul Castro. The Cuban people, not so much.
When Pope John Paul II visited Cuba in 1998, he called for the island nation “to open to the world and for the world to open to Cuba.
Pope Benedict XVI now will walk in that wider doorway.
The official reason for the trip is pastoral. Just weeks before his 85th birthday, Benedict is mustering his strength to bring encouragement to the Cuban flock after his first stop in Mexico this week.
The pope will bless the patroness of Cuba, La Caridad, the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre, on the 400th anniversary of her statue found floating in the sea.
The article goes on to say how weak churchgoing is in Cuba, despite the fact that an estimated 4 million came to see La Caridad as the statue toured the island in the last 15 months.
Well sure church going is weak in Cuba. Cubans threw the Catholic Church off their backs along with the Spanish priests associated with pre-1898 repressive rule a long, long time before Fidel Castro was even born. Even I regularly burn a candle of La Caridad – and I am not, and have never been Catholic.
Culture and religion are not the same thing. And in the case of the Catholic Church and Cuba, something the Vatican has never quite gotten a hold of.
Just in case anyone is interested!
How perfectly, cool!
At the turn of the 20th century, one of Rutherford’s most important and forward-thinking residents was not an elected official, business owner—or even a man.
Estella Elizabeth Padgham was a Unitarian minister who became the minister of the Church of Our Father in Rutherford and also leader in the Suffragette period.
“She was kind of ahead of her time,” borough historian Rod Leith said. “She was pretty much a pioneer.”
The book, “Past and Promise: Lives of New Jersey Women,” published in 1997, provides a biography on Padgham. Leith has also written a biography on her, which is now at the Meadowlands Museum.
