SF response to Westboro Church
Someone told me that they were in town. They were protesting at the Twitter HQ. Glad to see the Bay Area respond with an “in kind” protest. Apparently they were going to protest in front of the theater where Fiddler on the Roof was being performed. Sometimes I wish I could get inside their twisted theology, but I’d rather not go there. Laughing Squid posted the details:
Westboro Baptist Church showed up to protest in front of Twitter’s San Francisco office on Thursday, but found themselves severely outnumbered by a crowd of absurdist pranksters, including guest blogger EDW Lynch above.
Other Christians
I just answered a Twitter poll about religious identity. It’s no secret that I’m a Christian. And many of you know I’m an Episcopalian.
I’ve found recently that when I get worked up over an issue, it’s best to “write it out” rather than attempt to “sleep on it” since I just wind up tossing and turning anyway. So welcome to my “nightmare”.
Megachurches and racial division
Martin Luther King once said “11 o’clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of the week … And the Sunday school is still the most segregated school.” Here’s a article from Time magainze that looks at how megachurches may be reversing the status quo.
But in some churches, the racial divide is beginning to erode, and it is fading fastest in one of American religion’s most conservative precincts: Evangelical Christianity. According to Michael Emerson, a specialist on race and faith at Rice University, the proportion of American churches with 20% or more minority participation has languished at about 7.5% for the past nine years. But among Evangelical churches with attendance of 1,000 people or more, the slice has more than quadrupled, from 6% in 1998 to 25% in 2007.
Don’t bank on them
Churches defaulting on their mortgages.
Mortgages on houses of worship once seemed like safe bets for lenders, but with parishioners tithing less and less in these tough times, many churches are now struggling to stay current on loan payments.
I wonder how the gospel of prosperity folks are doing?
Homeless spend Christmas at Temple
From the NY Times:
Newly homeless families will bunk here for two weeks before moving to another house of worship — and then another and another….
In the Oneg Shabbat room at Temple Isaiah in Lafayette, children hooked angels on a tall Christmas tree.
I participated once with a team of churches that alternated providing a dinner and shelter once a week, as I recall. So often homeless people are invisible. These rotating shelters help parishoners gain a short glimpse of homelessness. Sadly, nearly every semester I have at least once student explain to me that they are either homeless or “housing challenged”. I wonder how many of their peers realize they have homeless students in their midst.
Doubting and religious belief
This is a topic that interests me a great deal. There was a thread on Andrew Sullivan’s blog that I found intriguing. It was prompted by Pope Benedict’s recension of the prior excommunication of a schismatic bishop. (More posts on the current situation coming up.) Any reasonable person would call this bishop a holocaust denier. But that part is an aside. The substance of the post is about faith and doubt. Sullivan writes:
… the internal wrestling never ends. The search for truth must always be first; and religion is nothing if it is not true. Which is why doubt can never be a danger. Banishing doubt is the danger.
An island of sanctuaries
There probably are other places that have more places of worship per square inch of NYC, but the NY Times has a nice profile of some of these New York sanctuaries. I’d never seen the interior of the famous Abyssinian Baptist Church or the Riverside Church.
The author, Holland Cotter, mentions teaching once at St. John the Divine:
During a teaching stint I brought a class here. Ostensibly we were considering differences between Christian and Hindu religious architecture. But the discussion soon swung around to the question of mixing traditional religion with New Age-Pop, as St. John’s does, and was that a problem. After much looking and talking, a consensus was reached: not a problem. And as to the cathedral’s state of perpetual incompletion, that’s life.
Along with descriptions of existing churches, Cotter remembers the loss of a church:
St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, distinctly unmonumental at four stories tall, stood a few blocks from where I lived just south of the World Trade Center. I loved the church’s Old World savor, with its gilded icons and candelabra. I loved that its long-dispersed congregation returned, a devout little band, every Easter. I loved the sight of its silhouette, tiny, against the steel mass of the south tower. When that tower fell on 9/11, St. Nicholas was ground to dust.
The law of unintended consequences
The Washington Post’s George Will has an op-ed today entitled “Rome’s call: ‘Come on over‘”. In it he warns us with far more subtle terms than he usually. I should take back the “us” since I’m not a Roman Catholic. But I am an Episcopalian and the topic of the op-ed is about Rome’s recent outreach to disaffected Anglicans.
Rome is saying to individuals, and perhaps to entire parishes and even dioceses: “Come on over.” It is trolling with rules, recently written, that will enable Anglicans-become-Catholics to retain some of their liturgy. The church will accept some already married priests, and perhaps married seminarians, but not bishops.
Mormon church supports gay rights
Who woulda thunk?
With a historic endorsement from the Mormon church, the Salt Lake City Council unanimously passed a pair of ordinances making it illegal to discriminate against gays in housing and employment.
Church support for the ordinances is due in part to the way they are drafted to carve out exceptions that protect the religious freedoms of all churches, according to Under the exceptions, for example, a church owned school that sets rules based on its religious principles would not be forced to change them if the ordinance becomes law.
A whole new meaning to multi-purpose room
There are a lot of “dying” churches out there. Or maybe another way to put it is a lot of church real estate that is under used. This church has pulled out all the stops it seems. For instance, the “Lutheran Church of the Messiah also hosts a food program that allows customers to buy directly from local farmers.”