Our friends and neighbors at Bethel Lutheran have been sponsoring a book club for homeless people for over a year. There’s an article about it on Madison.com. This is one part of a great effort that includes offering computer time, a spirituality group, and other resources.
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.
December 24, 2010
Merry Christmas! After four weeks of Advent and a week of bustling activity around Grace Church, Christmas is finally here. It has arrived at your homes as well—at least I hope it has arrived or is arriving. If we’re not ready by now, it’s too late.
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.
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.
First the thoughtful: Ross Douthat in the New York Times.
Jonathan Chait responds to Matthew Yglesias and Ross Douthat.
A couple of pieces on Religion Dispatches:
And then there was the $11,000,000 Christmas tree in the hotel in Abhu Dabi. Talk about your culture wars!
An article in today’s NY Times about a new approach to homelessness. Building on the “housing first” initiative that begin in the 1990s, it views homelessness more as a public health crisis than as a nuisance. Homeless people have access to emergency rooms; they do not have access to ongoing care. And this is expensive. In LA, 4800 chronically homeless people (10% of LA’s total homeless population) consume a half-billion dollars worth of services each year.
These are shocking statistics:
Another thing that Common Ground discovered was that the homeless were an amalgam of many subgroups. They have now surveyed almost 14,000 chronically homeless people and found that roughly 20 percent are veterans, 10 percent are over the age of 60, 4 percent have H.I.V. or AIDS, 47 percent have a mental illness and 5 percent remain homeless because they can’t find housing with their pets.
For more on the 100,000 homes project, go here.
First up: This article on the Secession Ball, held last evening in Charleston, SC. No comment is necessary. The brilliant historian Eric Foner offers a necessary historical perspective.
A century and a half after the civil war, many white Americans, especially in the South, seem to take the idea that slavery caused the war as a personal accusation. The point, however, is not to condemn individuals or an entire region of the country, but to face candidly the central role of slavery in our national history. Only in this way can Americans arrive at a deeper, more nuanced understanding of our past.
The Civil War lives on, as does racism. To wit, Haley Barbour.
For a very long time, perhaps since 1995, I’ve had a visceral reaction to “Lessons and Carols.” I can attribute that to having been at Sewanee for five years. When we arrived; no, perhaps it was already during our interview, we heard about the Lessons and Carols extravaganza at Sewanee. When we came to Sewanee, Lessons and Carols provided us with several of our quintessential moments. One was the year we received tickets to the “special performance.” It wasn’t called that, but it was the Saturday performance at which prominent donors, and busloads of Episcopal Church groups came from far and wide. It was a warm day in December, perhaps in the 70s. As Corrie and I walked to the reception in Convocation Hall, we passed a frat house on the heart of campus, where the guys were enjoying the weather, and their alcohol. Then we saw a group of folk, assembled behind a seminarian clad in cassock and surplice, and carrying a crucifix. We attended the reception, then made our way to the service. The music was beautiful of course, but what made the greatest impression on me was the myriad of Southern Anglican matrons in attendance, wearing their minks, in unseasonably warm weather.
I’ve always thought that any Lessons and Carols service, apart from that at King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, was manipulative and contrived, designed more to attract donations than to create a worshipful experience. Still worse, I’ve thought, was the Festival of Advent Lessons and Carols. At least that was liturgically correct, unlike Sewanee’s or Furman’s, which are clearly Christmas services, taking place during the Season of Advent.
Today was the second Lessons and Carols over which I’ve presided at Grace (I succeeded in doing away with it at my previous parish, but I note its return since my departure). I rarely expect, when presiding, to experience God’s presence outside of the celebration of the Eucharist, or to worship. But that happened today. The music was profound; our soloists were perfect; the musical selections transported us out of the mundane into the heavenly presence.
Thanks to all who participated. Berkley Guse and Greg Upward, music director and organist, Will Raymer, whose composition “Come/We wait” captured the Advent experience; and especially the performance of Lauridsen’s O Magnum Mysterium, in memory of Jerry Shannon.
Our processional hymn at the conclusion of the service was Lo! he comes, with clouds descending, text by Charles Wesley. The words are transporting, taking us from first Advent to Second:
Those dear tokens of his passion
still his dazzling body bears,
cause of endless exultation
to his ransomed worshipers;
with what rapture, with what rapture, with what rapture
gaze we on those glorious scars!
December 19, 2010
There’s a lot about Madison with which I am unfamiliar yet. Oh, Corrie and I know how to get around town, of course, and we certainly have our favorite restaurants and shops, and after a year and a half our circle of friends and acquaintances continues to grow. But there’s a lot that I still don’t know, a lot that takes getting used to. One of the most interesting things for me is exploring Madison’s curious relationship toward religion and specifically toward Christianity. I had one of those encounters this week that reminded me I’m not in the south anymore. Continue reading
