Children's Choir begins again on September 1 at 5:00 p.m. Children aged 3-9 are welcome. Please contact Sheri Gifford for more information (754.2072).
Peggy Snyder reports that during June Loaves & Fishes served 75 families (260 individuals).
In these hard times, the need for our community's Loaves & Fishes is increasing, so please donate whatever you can. Particular needs are canned meals, sauces, green beans, 100% fruit juice, pancake mix, syrup, and canned meat (no tuna, please). Professionally processed meat—especially—hamburger is also welcome!
Start behaving well, and you will feel better. This is what Jesus would want, and He is there in the rug store. Maybe he was embarrassed to tears, like when your kid has a tantrum in public, which pretty much captures the scene. I stared off at the log-pile of rugs. I was trembling, and you could have opened walnuts with my self-righteousness. But Jesus doesn't hold this against a person. His message is that we're all sort of nuts and suspicious and petty and full of crazy hungers, and it all feels awful a lot of the time, but even so -- one's behavior needs to be decent. So I would try.
Although Annie Lamott was dealing with "The Carpet Guy," her attempts to deal with her own righteous anger is a parable for anyone moved to wrath, especially during the stressful holiday season when it's so easy to be moved to wrath. Sometimes, she says, one has " a moral and spiritual obligation to clean up one's side of the street," regardless of who is right and who is wrong.
While we celebrate Christmas in honor of Christ's birth, the ways we celebrate it--our customs and observances--have their roots in millenia of winter celebrations. The BBC's Religion & Ethics web site has a nice "History of Christmas" which explores the roots of our Christmas festivities.
On Christmas Eve, I placed the envelope on the tree, the note inside telling Mike what I had done and that this was his gift from me. His smile was the brightest thing about Christmas that year and in succeeding years. For each Christmas, I followed the tradition--one year sending a group of mentally handicapped youngsters to a hockey game, another year a check to a pair of elderly brothers whose home had burned to the ground the week before Christmas, and on and on. The envelope became the highlight of our Christmas. It was always the last thing opened on Christmas morning and our children, ignoring their new toys, would stand with wide-eyed anticipation as their dad lifted the envelope from the tree to reveal its contents. As the children grew, the toys gave way to more practical presents, but the envelope never lost its allure.
The BBC's website for Religion & Ethics, provides an unusual audio Advent Calendar. Each day leading up to Christmas provides a piece of poetry, music, or Bible reading, some read by famous voices, such as Derek Jacobi and Lionel Ritchie.
Presbyterian Women host their annual Cookie Sale on Saturday, 10 December 2005. All proceeds support the PW local mission giving.
You can help by donating cookies and buying cookies. Please bring your cookies to Ferren Hall on Friday, 9 December, and mark them "cookie sale." Thank you!
If you don't subscribe, however, Paterson's lovely calendar is also available online from the Presbyterian Church (USA) web site. It features a collage-building activity that's especially good for the children in your family.
On December 4th and 11th, the Market table is set up after worship in Ferren Hall. When you make a purchase, you will receive a beautiful Christmas gift card along with your gift inscription; then you can send the card to the person of your choice. Gifts are available in all prices. Here's the Bethlehem Shopping List for 2005:
A Church of England vicar was on Wednesday unveiling his self-styled "100-Minute Bible," an ultra-condensed edition of the Christian holy book which claims to neatly summarise every teaching from the Creation to the Revelation.
The Presbyterian Church (USA) has established a new webpage that centralizes news about Hurricane Katrina Relief efforts by Presbyterian Disaster Assistance. You can find the webpage at http://www.pcusa.org/katrina/.
Union Presbyterian Church's Sunday School staff (a.k.a. Sunday Journeys) was commissioned for 2005-06 during the worship service on Sunday, 11 September 2005:
C.E. Committee: Cyndi Barski—Moderator, Cindy Blevins, Sandy Hatcch, Nona Allen, Kelly Muecke, Jackie Payne, Anna Rodgers
Adult Education Committee: Cyndi Barski, Sandy Hatch—Moderator, Gregg Bessler, Joy Ann Bloom, Jill Rice, Anna and Brian Rodgers
1. The Presbyterian Church (USA) is providing Hurricane Katrina Disaster Relief along a number of fronts (latest update from PCUSA below). Money gifts to Presbyterian Disaster Assistance efforts are needed. You can donate online (using a credit card) to one of the following accounts:
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
Individual Remittance Processing
P. O. Box 643700
Pittsburgh, PA 15264-3700
Members of Union Presbyterian Churcn are invited to see their Presbytery in action and to attend the associated worship services. Here's the schedule:
Thursday, 15 September 2005
Yesterday on The 700 Club, Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition of America, called for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. His comments have sparked a firestorm of discussion (see Google News search results) and repudiation from the State Department.
Enter serendipity.
Also yesterday, National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation included a segment titled "Examining the Intersection of Religion and Violence." During the show, host Neal Conan discussed "correlations between Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and other theologies, and violent acts." His guests were two authors:
The Synoptic Gospels Primer is a web site originally designed for undergraduates at Rutgers University who were studying the "Synoptic Problem."
At the web site, a user is able to look at parallel texts from Matthew, Mark, and Luke and discover their similarities and differences.
By now, we're all familiar with the trend the Lance Armstrong Foundation's LIVESTRONG yellow wristband started. By buying a band, you're supporting cancer research; by wearing the band, you're raising awareness of the problem.
You can buy fund-raising wristbands for almost any charity, but one of the absurdities of our times has been the way uninformed people and greedy corporations have turned wristbands into fashion accessories with no meaning. In sportswear stores, I can buy a package of three colored wristbands that say nothing . . . just to accessorize my sports outfits and make it seem as if I were an informed, caring, generous, activist person.
While I'd been aware of the atrocities of the Sudanese government against its people, this morning's op-ed by Steve and Cokie Roberts finally helped me overcome the sense of futility which had immobilized me. I may not be able to join Doctors Without Borders and go to the Sudan, but--damn it--I've got a checkbook and I'm not afraid to use it.
What is happening in the Sudan?
Since independence 49 years ago, Sudan has been a country of civil strife. But beginning in 2003, the strife grew heinous. Tens of thousands of Sudanese citizens have been murdered; thousands of women have suffered systematic rape; 1.5 million people have been driven from their homes and their towns destroyed. The CIA Factbook on Sudan estimates 4.367 million internally displaced people.
Worst of all, the violence has been perpetrated against its own people by Sudanese military or the government-sponsored militia called janjaweed (or janjawid). The government has deliberately inflamed ethnic conflict and impeded humanitarian aid.
An article from The New Yorker recounts the personal violence the Sudanese have endured:
On 7 July 2005, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Austria wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times arguing that evolution may be inconsistent with Catholic faith. (See "Finding Design in Nature.")
Alarmed, some Catholic American scientists have asked the Vatican to clarify. According to The New York Times, "The scientists asked the pope to reaffirm earlier statements on the subject by Pope John Paul II and others 'that scientific rationality and the church's commitment to divine purpose and meaning in the universe were not incompatible'" (13 July 2005).
Less alarmed, publications such as The National Catholic Reporter have argued for calm, pointing out that "the compatibility of evolution with Catholic faith" has a long and tested history. As Slate magazine points out, no one wants a repeat "of that Galileo mess" ("What Catholics Think of Evolution").
Some analysts have suggested that Schönborn wrote his op-ed piece at the urging of the Discovery Institute in Seattle, a leading intelligent design think tank. If so, then the Cardinal seems to have decided to step into one of America's current cultural war issues: creationism and/or "intelligent design" vs. evolution.
What does the Presbyterian Church USA have to say about evolution?
In 1969, the General Assembly (then of the PCUS) approved a statement which concludes "Neither Scripture, our Confession of Faith, nor our Catechisms, teach the Creation of man by the direct and immediate acts of God so as to exclude the possibility of evolution as a scientific theory." At the same time, the church "re-affirm[ed] our belief in the uniqueness of man as a creature whom God has made in His own image."
In other words, the scientific theory of evolution is not incompatible with the Bible: "Nowhere is the process by which God made, created or formed man set out in scientific terms. A description of this process in its physical aspects is a matter of natural science. The Bible is not a book of science."
The 214th General Assembly (2002) went a step further, reaffirming the compatability of good theology and good science. Within the resolution that GA passed were these points:
