faithvalues's blog

The first three videos on The New York Times Web site have some relationship to faith and values. The first is about Dutch Harbor and a pastor's attempt to make the defunct bar The Elbow Room into a shelter for people on hard times in the Unalaska fishing community. The other is about a guard's actions on the night the Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago. Finally, the last video of interest is about Fort Hood Muslims reacting to the news that fellow worshiper Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan's killed 13 people on the Army base Thursday.
I'm going to let my mind hang on to the first two videos more than the last.

As I was wrapping stuff up for the day Thursday afternoon, a colleague said that he had already heard from a student that the Fort Hood shooting was to blame on Muslims. Well, it looks like it's to blame on one Muslim, according to news reports.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves about what this means about Islam or American Muslims, though it certainly sets back their full acceptance into U.S. society.
The Council on American-Muslim Relations (CAIR) issued a statement yesterday condemning the attack on Fort Hood soldiers.

I recently sat down with Sara Gavit at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church at Tudor Road and Lake Otis Parkway. Gavit is a friend of a friend who is a member of St. Mary’s. I had heard her preach during my friend’s daughter’s baptism, and thought of her last summer when it seemed everyone in Anchorage was debating the gay rights ordinance. You see, Sara Gavit is the pastoral care minister at St. Mary’s and she’s also an out lesbian.
Since much of the debate was framed as one of devout Christians versus pagan or nonreligious gay people and their supporters, I thought now might be the time to visit with Gavit to talk with her about her faith, her wish to be an ordained Episcopal priest and how her sexuality fits in. Why now? Well, I’m hopeful that Anchorage is starting to heal from the polarizing debate over the proposed ordinance and Mayor Dan Sullivan’s veto. Besides, I’d been curious about how Gavit “heard the calling,” so to speak, to become a minister.

Steven Waldman, who founded Beliefnet.com 10 years ago as a website devoted to all faith traditions, is stepping down as editor in chief. Waldman's site can be credited with helping launch "user-generated content" since it was users' message posts that started getting turned into articles. Waldman is also the author of "Founding Faith." The book is about how Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Madison and John Adams and their ideas about the role of religion and the state influenced the

The Roman Catholic Church outstretched its hand to Angelicans disgruntled by liberal trends in their own church. The Vatican is saying to these Angelicans, "Join our ranks, and you can keep some of your distinctive spiritual traditions."
There are about 80 million Angelicans the world over, though no one is sure how many have been turned off by the ordination of women as priests and bishops and, in some regions, the ordination of gays. However, a breakaway network calling itself "Traditional Angelican Communion" says it has about 400,000 members. Perhaps 5,000 or more of the 2.2 million Episcopalians in the US are part of this network.

The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner covered the refurbishment of Congregation Or HaTzafon's Torah scroll earlier this week. The project was overseen by New York sofer Neil Yerman, who is a trained Torah scribe.
Yerman received the Torah in April and set to work to restore the 100-year-old sacred document.
The congregation got it back just before the High Holy Days last month.

Rosh Hashanah begins at sundown tonight, so say a kind word to your friends and neighbors who are Jewish. Rosh Hashanah is the first of the Jewish High Holy Days celebrated in the fall every year.
This week, I've been showing students "Gentleman's Agreement," a movie about a reporter's crusade against entrenched anti-Semitism in the 1940s in the United States. Some of them were perplexed and surprised by the level of anti-Semitism as recently as 50 years ago. "Gentleman's Agreement," from 1947 is very realistic about the insiduous ways we thought about and treated Jewish people, even after World War II.

NPR's excellent religion reporter Barbara Bradley Hagerty has a report this morning about what congregations are doing to try to curb the H1N1 virus from spreading at their houses of worship. Beware the font of holy water.

The Christian Science church in Anchorage is sponsoring a talk titled "What Would You Do If...?" The subtitle is "Prayer: Practical Help Right Where You Need It." It's a question often posed to Christian Scientists. Christian Scientists believe that sickness and injury can be healed through prayer. Generally speaking, they eschew medicine and doctors. As Pat Hicks, who was working at the Christian Science Reading Room this week said, "It's about how we are never outside the healing influence of God's love for us. The power of prayer is a very present help in all circumstances."
The speaker is Ron Ballard, a Christian Science practitioner, teacher and lecturer from Ashland, Ore. A Christian Science practitioner is someone whose occupation is healing others by following the teachings of Christian Science.

Hi readers,
I'm looking for a Muslim family who would let me visit them for iftar during Ramadan, which ends on the 19th. If you're willing for me to come over and see what the breaking of the daily fast is like, I'd love to do it.
Thanks,
Paola

An insightful article by Father Raymond J. de Souza of the National Catholic Register, which bills itself as the "most complete" Catholic newsweekly in the United States, about Sen. Edward Kennedy's Catholicism and his pro-choice position. That position has, of course, been thorny for the Church. It hasn't been too keen on seeing other Catholic politicians fall into the camp in favor of abortion rights — John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi and so on.
Cardinal Sean O'Malley, archbishop of the Boston Archdiocese, will preside over the funeral mass Saturday morning. But the Boston Globe reports two other priests will be more visible. They are the Rev. J. Donald Monan, chancellor of Boston College and the Rev. Mark R. Hession, pastor of Our Lady of Victory parish in Centerville, Mass.

Somehow, I thought this Kennedy would live forever.
I was wrong.
Soon after I read about Sen. Edward Kennedy's death in the paper and got online for more news, an old high school classmate had posted a note on Facebook about how 40 years after Chappaquiddick, Mary Jo Kopechne's family had seen justice done. This friend has always been socially and politically conservative, so the tone of her message was no surprise.
But I wonder if that is all conservatives should remember about Kennedy. Oh sure, they didn't like his politics. He was an unabashed liberal, a champion of the little guy and government spending on social programs.

We had just finished watching the end of the track and field world championship broadcast last night when we heard a heck of a sound outside. We're used to hearing cars and trucks tear down the Seward Highway in the summer, when it becomes a kind of drag race. But this sound was different. Squealing tires and the something louder and contorted. Within minutes the sirens screeched to a halt just beyond our backyard, which faces the highway. We went out to see what all the commotion was. Police officers were blocking off northbound traffic at Fireweed Lane. A pickup was turned over on its side. The other car, a black sports car, was facing south but it had been traveling north. Its driver was sitting on the grass by the highway as police talked to him. In the middle of the highway lay Michael VanRoten, and paramedics were tending to him.

I've been an incredibly bad blogger recently. So much to write about, from Iran to this incredible summer. But that will have to wait a little bit.
I wanted to let you know about the Codex Sinaiticus, which is billed as the oldest Bible in the world. This doesn't mean that it's the oldest Bible ever written, but that it is the oldest one we know of.
Handwritten more than 1,600 years ago, it contains the Christian Bible in Greek. The work is named after the Monastery of St. Catherine, Mount Sinai, where it was preserved. Four institutions own parts of the Bible because parts were taken to be distributed at various points in its history. These institutions, the above-mentioned St. Catherine's Monastery, the British Library, the Leipzig University Library in Germany and the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg.

President Obama met with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia today on the first leg of a trip that's taking him to the Middle East and to Europe to commemorate D-Day on June 6. Obama started in Saudi Arabia because it is the cradle of Islam and the United States has long had a cozy relationship with the kingdom.
The highlight of the trip is going to be his stop on Thursday in Cairo to deliver what is supposed to be a major statement to the Muslim world about relations with the United States. In essence, his audience will be Muslims. According to NPR, the Obama administration mulled several possible countries before settling on Egypt as the site for this speech. He could have chosen Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim nation in terms of population and a fledgling democracy. It was also his home during the years after his mother married an Indonesian. He could have chosen Morocco, which is seen as moderate, modern Islamic country. But it is also rather far flung — and perhaps too much in the orbit of the West for the comfort of some conservative Muslims — to be ideal. He could have chosen Turkey, a Muslim-majority nation and a democracy. But like Indonesia, it is not Arab, and some thought that he had to address not only the nation's relationship to Muslims, but to Arabs. Egyptian dissident Saad Eddin Ibrahim said this morning on NPR that he would have preferred a less repressive government than the one of President Hosni Mubarak to host Obama.

An ob/gyn nurse I know told me recently that she sees a lot of cases of unwed mothers at Providence Alaska Medical Center where she works. "It's very common," she said.
How common in Alaska? I'm not sure, but the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics issued a report last week that shows nearly four out of 10 births are to unwed mothers nationwide.
Childbearing by unwed mothers has continued a climb this decade. There are lots of interesting nuggets to dig out of the report, but one of the most interesting is that it's not just teenagers who are giving birth outside of wedlock. While it's true that most births to teenagers (86 percent in 2007 were nonmarital) among women 20-24 nearly 60 percent of the births were to unwed mothers. Nearly one-third of births to women 25-29 were also out of marriage in the study period.

A lot of people seem to think that public relations is just a way of "spinning" information to favor your side, your cause or your organization. When public relations is misused, it becomes a mere exercise in rearranging facts to accomodate your position. But public relations at its core is about consideration for others while also influencing them through a well-articulated message.
In Pope Benedict XVI's four years as the Bishop of Rome, he has not taken easily to his role as chief spokesman for the Catholic Church. He reminds me of the hyper-intelligent but socially awkward people you sometimes see in academia.

Pope Benedict is off to Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories this week. His May 8-15 visit may be the biggest moment of his papacy thus far.
In his first four years as pope, Benedict has not been known for his savvy PR skills. Most recently, he angered a lot of church moderates and Jews for rehabilitating a Holocaust-denying bishop.
But he's had touches of real interpersonal brilliance, as when he visited Turkey in 2006 and the United States last year.
But this is the pontiff's first visit to an Arab nation, and the visit comes at a time when the peace process between Israel and the Palestinian people is nearly dead. At the same time, Christians are fleeing the Middle East, including Iraq, because of violence and repression.

While heading to the UAA bookstore recently, I stopped to pick up an issue of the Catholic Anchor, the Anchorage Archdiocese's newpaper. In it, I read a column from George Weigel, a conservative Catholic commentator whose prose is rich and engaging.
His commentary was essentially a friendly backslap to Mary Eberstadt, who recently penned an essay called "Food the New Sex?" about how we used to be willing to make moral judgments about people's sexual habits, but now we are uncomfortable doing so. What happens "behind closed doors" is really none of our business. But what we eat, well that's a perfectly reasonable topic on which to pass moral judgments. So we criticize others who eat at McDonald's and personally avoid eating swordfish since it's been overfished.

I was struck last week by the volume of commentary about whether the U.S. used torture on its detainees in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and Iraq. The flood of blog posts, stories and opinion pieces came in the wake of the Obama administration releasing four Justice Department internal memos authorizing the use of tactics such as waterboarding on detainees. These memos were authored under President Bush's two terms in office, and they confirm that the government tortured in our name.
There seemed to be a lot more open anxiety about what the use of torture means for U.S. values than I remember there being in 2002, 2003 and 2004 when we were rounding up terrorism suspects.