TODAY I RECEIVED an e-mail from a friend who was sharing an article by Julie Polter titled "Martha Stewartship" (May-June 2002).
Departments
Rose Marie Berger, Jodi Hochstedler 9-01-2002
Two-hundred-seventy Haitian refugees—including children—have been held for more than six months in a maximum-security prison
Rose Marie Berger, Jodi Hochstedler 9-01-2002
Brazilian popular educator Paulo Freire probably never thought his ideas would revolutionize the fashion industry, but his student Maria Teresa Romeiro Leal has done just that.
Rose Marie Berger, Jodi Hochstedler 9-01-2002
Daring Deeds. In June, seven women gathered on a boat on the Danube in Austria to be ordained as Roman Catholic priests.
Rose Marie Berger, Jodi Hochstedler 9-01-2002
In June, the African Religious Leaders Assembly on Children and HIV/AIDS met in Nairobi at the request of the Hope for African Children Initiative and the World Conference of Religions and Peace.
Rose Marie Berger, Jodi Hochstedler 9-01-2002
Here's the perfect gift for the hard-to-shop-for Lutheran in your life, or for that matter any friendly neighborhood church reformer.
Joanne Callahan 9-01-2002
JIM RICE'S "SINS of the Fathers" and Rose Marie Berger's "Managing the Erotic Life" (May-June 2002) were much too coy about male supremacy's major role in maintaining sexual promiscuity and abuse in the church.
Rose Marie Berger, Jodi Hochstedler 9-01-2002
Nurit Elhanan and her husband, Rami, both 52, are campaigning for an end to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. What's remarkable about their peace campaign?
Rose Marie Berger, Jodi Hochstedler 7-01-2002
In Colorado, ranchers and environmentalists are collaborating in a common cause—protecting water rights and sustainable land use.
Rose Marie Berger, Jodi Hochstedler 7-01-2002
International relief organizations in Kabul are employing 3,500 women bakers to ensure that more than a quarter of a million Afghan school children are fed during the school year.
Rose Marie Berger, Jodi Hochstedler 7-01-2002
First he took off his hat and coat; then his sweater and shirt.
Kari Jo Verhulst 7-01-2002
Those of us who identify ourselves as activists of various stripes often use our work as a shield against our deepest fears and loneliness. Leery of those who peddle spirituality as self-help and who ignore the "root causes" of injustice and suffering, we can be fearful of admitting our own fatigue and dismay.
Within this tendency lies an interesting idolatry—one that is harder to identify than wealth, security, or even doctrinal purity. More often than not, we understand the gifts we have been given—the prophetic word, the cry of challenge to unjust systems—as something deposited in us, rather than something that flows through us. Thus we interpret our lives according to our faithfulness to this gift, rather than according to our relationship with the God who is the source of our gifts and callings. This severance casts our efforts in a strangely harsh light: It either causes us to interpret ourselves as being of singular importance, which renders us easily threatened, or it increases our already deep sense that we are always failing, no matter how hard we try. In either case, cut off from our life-source, the seed we sow in the world will be born of this fatigued arrogance, and we become just one more force out there imposing its vision on the world.
Listen to me, you that pursue righteousness, you that seek the Lord. Look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were dug (Isaiah 51:1).
Rose Marie Berger, Jodi Hochstedler 7-01-2002
The Christian Coalition of Georgia, along with Peace State Methodist and Baptist churches, are in a pitched battle to close down the state's video poker machines.
Larry Bellinger 7-01-2002
‘Every once in a while, a truly brilliant idea comes along: the wheel, Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Cannoli...you get the idea." So say Tom and Ray of NPR's "Car Talk" radio program about the Good News Garages in Vermont and Massachusetts. Following the example of the folks in New England, people in Charleston, West Virginia, have established their own Good News Mountaineer Garage.
The agenda is simple. They fix cars and give them away. As Tom and Ray joke: "Not a good business plan!" Unless one is in the business of helping move folks from welfare to work.
"People want to help others—I believe it is a part of our basic nature," said the program's executive director, Barbara Bayes, who grew up in an impoverished area of eastern Kentucky, "and this program addresses the most difficult barrier for poor people in rural areas" in their efforts to break their cycle of poverty.
"In West Virginia, one out of four low-income people listed lack of transportation as the main problem in maintaining employment or getting to job training," said Bayes, citing the West Virginia Research Task Force on Welfare Reform. It was to deal with that problem that the Good News Mountaineer Garage was developed by the West Virginia Council of Churches, the state Department of Health and Human Resources, the Bureau of Family and Children, and the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation.