Monthly Archives: December 2010

E. J. Dionne on why getting the Civil War right matters

Posted on by
Reply

From The New Republic.

Money quote:

After the war, in one of the great efforts of spin control in our history, both Davis and Stephens, despite their own words, insisted that the war was not about slavery after all, but about state sovereignty. By then, of course, slavery was “a dead and discredited institution,” McPherson wrote, and “(to) concede that the Confederacy had broken up the United States and launched a war that killed 620,000 Americans in a vain attempt to keep 4 million people in slavery would not confer honor on their lost cause.”

He concludes:

Why does getting the story right matter? As Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour’s recent difficulty with the history of the civil rights years demonstrates, there is to this day too much evasion of how integral race, racism and racial conflict are to our national story. We can take pride in our struggles to overcome the legacies of slavery and segregation. But we should not sanitize how contested and bloody the road to justice has been. We will dishonor the Civil War if we refuse to face up to the reason it was fought.

Whatever happened to the “Ground Zero Mosque”?

Posted on by
Reply

Check out the article on Salon.com.

Here’s what happens if you google it:

I’m not quite so sanguine as Justin Elliott that:

In 2011, the “ground zero mosque” story will probably live on — but primarily on Fox News and Pamela Geller’s blog. It’s unlikely that anyone else will pay much attention ever again.

If it was effective in 2010, there’s no reason to think it won’t be tried in 2011.

I guess I went to the wrong movies this week. Oh well.

Posted on by
Reply

So I saw Black Swan and The King’s Speech. Apparently, I should have gone to True Grit, instead; at least according to Stanley Fish.

In case you’re wondering–both were worth watching. Black Swan for the cinematography and Natalie Portman’s performance. I don’t quite buy Mahnola Dargis’s take on it.

The King’s Speech was wonderful. I learned a great deal about an important historical figure about him I knew almost nothing. Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush were both brilliant.

Perhaps I’ll find time later in the week for True Grit. I’ve been a huge fan of the Coen brothers since the very beginning.

Should churches do exit interviews?

Posted on by
Reply

Employers use them; businesses use them to find out why customers leave them; William Byron in this week’s America wonders whether churches should use them as well. He’s reflecting on responses to an earlier article he wrote for another Roman Catholic publication:

As a long-time writer of a biweekly column called “Looking Around” for Catholic News Service, I devoted a recent column to the exit interview idea and was inundated with responses from readers. Many indicated that they had been waiting to be asked why they left. The high response rate is all the more unusual because the column appears only in diocesan newspapers around the country. Evidently, respondents who claim to be no longer “in the boat” are still keeping in touch. Many of my respondents identified themselves as older persons.

He includes in this article a number of the responses he received; nothing too unexpected: the church’s teachings on contraception, women in the priesthood, end-of-life, and of course, the clergy sex abuse scandal. All of that is unique to the Roman Catholic Church. But there were other things, too.

They are soliciting feedback on America’s facebook page.

We might think about doing exit interviews ourselves. But what should we ask?

Christmas Day, 2010

Posted on by
Reply

 

Christmas Day
December 25, 2010

Last night, I mentioned my friend’s record of celebrating the Eucharist every year on Christmas Day for nearly fifty years. He was ordained a priest as a young man. I was only ordained in 2006, but I have celebrated the Eucharist every year since my ordination, and to add to that string, I preached on several Christmas Days before that.

Continue reading →

A lovely story about Las Posadas featuring Grace parishioners

Posted on by
Reply

The story on Madison.com includes photos and a description of what went on last Saturday night. Las Posadas, emphasizes the fact that Joseph and Mary were themselves in a sense refugees, forced from their home by an imperial power, and forced to seek shelter wherever they could find it. And their journey didn’t end in Bethlehem, but they went on to Egypt, when Herod sought to kill the child who was the Savior of the world.

The publicity for our Hispanic congregation is somewhat bittersweet, because while celebrating Christmas in this way, our Spanish-speaking congregation, indeed all of Grace, is saddened by the fact that the Rev. Pat Size is retiring at the end of 2010. She has provided leadership and vision to our noon service, and pastoral care for many of us at Grace over the years.

But the congregation will continue to thrive, relying on the gifts of its members and the support of the whole congregation.

Why do Americans claim to go to church more often than they actually do?

Posted on by
Reply

Surveys fascinate me, especially surveys of religious belief and practice. I suppose I should have been a Sociologist of Religion. There’s an article on Slate.com that explores the reality behind survey results that show high percentages of Americans attending weekly services.

In contrast to self-reporting surveys, some social scientists have tried alternatives. For example:

This neutral interviewing method produced far fewer professions of church attendance. Compared to the “time-use” technique, Presser and Stinson found that nearly 50 percent more people claimed they attended services when asked the type of question that pollsters ask: “Did you attend religious services in the last week?”

In a more recent study, Hadaway estimated that if the number of Americans who told Gallup pollsters that they attended church in the last week were accurate, about 118 million Americans would be at houses of worship each week. By calculating the number of congregations (including non-Christian congregations) and their average attendance, Hadaway estimated that in reality about 21 percent of Americans attended religious services weekly—exactly half the number who told pollsters they did.

Perhaps most shocking: Philip Brenner concluded:

Americans attended services about as often as Italians and Slovenians and slightly more than Brits and Germans. The significant difference between the two North American countries and other industrialized nations was the enormous gap between poll responses and time-use studies in those two countries.

The full article is here. The first couple of paragraphs of the article are somewhat misleading, beginning with the question “why do Americans say they are more religious than they actually are?” In fact, church attendance may not correlate to beliefs or self-identification as Christian. The article then goes on to cite percentages who claim to believe in God.

Perhaps even more interesting would be to try to figure out whether rates of church attendance have fluctuated over the centuries. Certainly there’s an assumption that it was very high in the 1950s, but as I recall from reading a bit about the problem, that may have been an aberration.