Now a Chautauquan

Back from a great week at the Chautauqua Institution in New York State. Chautauqua was founded in 1874 as a retreat for Methodist Sunday School teachers, and became the centre of the Chautauqua movement of lectures, performances and worship services - "art, religion, music, and knowledge" ("recreation" has now been added as Chautauqua is rife with opportunities for boating, sailing, swimming and biking). There are other "Chautauquas" still operating in the summer elsewhere in the US.

Clergy Renewal Week is organized by the Christian service organization The King's Daughters and Sons and brings ministers from across the US and Canada to Chautauqua. Our group had United Church of Canada, Anglican Church of Canada, United Methodist, Presbyterian Church of the USA, and United Church of Christ clergy. Gate passes were provided by the Chautauqua Institution's Department of Religion and accommodation is provided by the IOKDS in the two houses they own.

Chautauqua is a beautiful town of Victorian cottages, many of which have been in the same family for generations. Its winter population of 300 mushrooms to 10,000 people a day in the summer. It's certainly a bastion of liberal Protestantism, with the mainline American Protestant denominations maintaining houses in the village, although there are two Jewish congregations, and a Roman Catholic presence in facilities borrowed from Protestants. I attended worship services with the Episcopal priest and renowned preacher Rev. Dr. Barbara Brown Taylor preaching (and she signed two books for me!), lectures on the week's theme of photography - the inventor of the digital camera, Steve Sasson, photographers Steve McCurry and Ed Kashi, former US poet laureate Billy Collins, and George Eastman House director Tony Bannon were among the speakers - and symphony, ballet and opera performances. It was indeed a renewal week.

"Church" in an app

Fascinating Huffington Post article by Paul Lamb on the potential for religious communities (including creating new kinds of communities) of location-based, social networking apps for mobile phones. He concludes:

There is no question that the mobile experience will redefine how and when people engage with their spiritual and religious communities. Just as we have Web-only worshippers, we may soon be seeing mobile-only congregations which organize and disband on the fly. Nobody knows exactly where things will end up, but next-generation mobile apps could offer a powerful and extended community experience unlike anything that exists today outside of institutional walls and on the Internet.

In a world where it is getting harder and harder to bring people to church, mobile apps might lead the way in bringing church to the people.

I'll be thinking about this one for a while.

Farewell to Prison Farms

The fight to save the prison farms around Kingston, Ontario, was lost in a recent court decision that gave Correctional Services Canada the go-ahead to close the farms and auction off the livestock. I've worked with ex-offenders and with food banks, and I support prison farms: the work gives prisoners confidence and skills (the government says that farm skills aren't useful in the "real world" but I wouldn't say that to the farmers around here, or to the government's rural base!), the output of the farms feeds prisoners and goes to local food banks, and closing the farms will not actually save the government money as there will have to be new skills training programs and replacement purchases for the farm produce. It's rumoured that the hidden agenda at work is using the farmland for expansion of the prisons. Father Raymond de Souza has an excellent piece in The National Post on the issue.

"Jerusalem"

Although I'm in what at one time would be called a "Dissenting" denomination, I always love William Blake's lyrics to Jerusalem, listed by its first line in hymn books as And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time. Chariots of fire, arrows of desire, the Holy Lamb of God walking on England's pleasant pastures green. See the blog Ghost of a Flea on controversies over singing the hymn (which was in our 1971 joint Anglican-United Church of Canada red hymnal, and whose tune is in our present hymn book as O Day of Peace) in the modern Church of England.

Tea Party Jesus

The Huffington Post has excerpts from Tea Party Jesus, putting quotes from key Tea Party and Republican figures into the mouth of Jesus. It makes a great point about how the language of people who call themselves Christians so often isn't, well, Christian. What would Jesus do?

Just a few lines on the G20 Summit

The Muskoka G8 and Toronto G20 summits have been analyzed from here to back online, but here are just a few lines from John Doyle in today's Globe & Mail:

Nobody on TV was prepared, or indeed intellectually equipped, one suspects, to see the enormous fences and the extreme disruption of downtown life and business, as a symbolic act of hostility against a population, and as symbolic examples of the remoteness of the powerful from ordinary people.

Fox in the Henhouse

Much hand-wringing, name-calling, glee, and angst from commentators of various political stripes over the prospect of a "Fox News North" as Quebecor plans to expand Sun TV - which I get on my TV, and seems to broadcast mostly The Casino Rama Grill Room sports talk show - into a conservative news network. Publicity that Quebecor couldn't buy otherwise. I do find the trumped-up indignation of both Fox News and Sun TV amusing, as they protest that a conservative voice is absent from the "lamestream media." In Canada English-speaking conservatives have The National Post, the entire Sun newspaper chain (which in turn owns virtually all of the local papers in my area), talk radio, and Maclean's magazine. As well, conservative talking heads are part of CBC and CTV news coverage. But, of course, it plays well to the base if one is constantly foaming at the mouth about how there is a media conspiracy against one's point of view. The left does the same thing.

Rare Bibles

I'm home from the Medieval Festival at Upper Canada Village - a very sanitized version of the Middle Ages. Many visitors were there from Quebec, where medieval re-creations are very popular. The all-pervasive influence of the Church was left out of this version of medieval times - nary a cross or friar in sight, although a couple of Roman Catholic priests were among the spectators (I was incognito).

But further on ancient times, and my last blog posting about the Lowy Council, this article is about amassing a collection of old Bibles. The Lowy Collection has a first edition of the Authorized Version, the King James Bible, as well as editions of the Torah and the Tanakh, the complete Hebrew Bible.

Judaica and Hebraica

I'm on the Council of the Jacob M. Lowy Collection at Library and Archives Canada - the Lowy donation is Canada's national collection of Judaica and Hebraica, meaning Jewish and Hebrew literature. We had a meeting tonight with Library and Archives officials to discuss how the collection will fit into modernization of the agency, while adhering to the terms of the deed of Mr. Lowy's gift in 1977 (pre-public Internet). But I do need to pay tribute to our retiring curator, Cheryl Jaffee, and welcome the incoming part-time curatorial team led by Leah Cohen. It's a privilege to be part of the Lowy Council and to be surrounded by books that speak of heritage and survival.

Church is good for something...

According to the Tamil rapper Maya (aka M.I.A.). In this profile in the New York Times Magazine, Maya is driving by a church in East London and says:

“That church saved my life. Christ Church! That’s the last time I got to be a high-school dropout: I should have been in school, and a youth worker at the church, who had been in prison, grabbed me and slammed me against the wall one day and said: ‘What is the matter with you? If you stay around here, you’ll end up living in one of these apartments with six babies before you’re 20.’ I used to be hanging about, getting into trouble. He changed my life.”

I haven't blogged for so long! Been relying on Twitter and Facebook. I'm just back from the annual meeting of the United Church of Canada's Montreal & Ottawa Conference in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec, and the annual meeting of the Canadian Theological Society at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, held at Concordia University. Montreal was great as always - smoked meat, distractions like the boutique at the Musée des beaux-arts and the Apple Store, hundreds of people around Concordia and on Crescent Street on a Monday night, driving up and down the Main and St. Urbain.

And I'm mourning the death of the Rev. Rod Carter, who taught restorative justice at Queen's Theological College. Rod had been in prison and received a pardon, going on to serve in the military and as a Correctional Services of Canada chaplain, making a difference in the lives of many, many offenders and students - his story is a good counter to the portrayal of pardons by the federal government and media. A gentle man who had a quiet passion for justice.

Beck surrogate responds

There's an ongoing debate about churches and social justice, prompted by Glenn Beck of Fox News commenting that Christians should "flee" churches which talk about social justice. He sees "social justice" as a code phrase for both communist and fascist extremism. This brought a predictable backlash from a wide range of Christians, from the Sojourners' Rev. Jim Wallis to Biblical scholars pointing out that the early church was effectively socialist (see Acts 4:32-35).

The Washington Post's religion pages have been filled with this debate, with the latest being a response from a producer of Glenn Beck's show. He cites one example of "social justice" extremism and says that Beck has nothing against Christian charity, only against advocacy of societal change. But can churches stop at charity? One Brazilian bishop said in the days of the dictatorship in that country, "When I feed the poor, they say I am a Christian. When I ask why they are poor, they say that I am a Communist." Can churches ask these questions?

Revolution by Latrine?

See this article in The New York Review of Books.

30th Anniversary of the Martyrdom of Oscar Romero

"The poor have shown the church the true way to go. A church that does not speak out from the side of the poor is not the true church of Jesus." - Monsignor Oscar Romero, assassinated in San Salvador, March 24, 1980

World Water Day

The UN reports that polluted water accounts for more deaths than all forms of violence in the world.

A Kindle in Every Pot

A talk radio host in Ottawa is going on in amazement about how his wife can sit in their living room and access 270,000 books on her Kindle - so why do we need to spend money on libraries? Well, for one thing none of the recent books on the Kindle are free - only Project Gutenburg and other similar public domain works are. And not only can many families not afford to buy ebooks for the Kindle, they can't afford the Kindle in the first place. I shudder to think how I would have bankrupted my parents if they had had to pay for the stacks of books I would bring back from the bookmobile. Yes, libraries will change - but they're still needed. And talk radio hosts with vacation homes in the Bahamas, and $500 to buy a Kindle, should not assume that everyone has the same standard of living.

Rock and Roll!!!

I'm quoted in a Carleton University Magazine article on the glory years of on-campus concerts in Porter Hall. This will likely be one of the few times that "United Church minister" and "sex-club scene" appear together in the same article and the subject is NOT a scandal involving the clergy - the 1984 concert by Frankie Goes to Hollywood is the topic here.

Haiti in Mourning

Very powerful slide show of Haitians at prayer.

Separatism of the Rich

Having been opposed to Quebec separatism my whole life, I now share Brian Topp's concerns about another kind of separatism, that of the rich: see today's Globe & Mail, as he discusses Newfoundland & Labrador Premier Danny Williams' surgery in the US:

Kind of like how governments in the industrialized West can pull together trillions of dollars in a matter of weeks to prop up and bail out speculators and profiteers who played computer games just a little too recklessly with our pensions and savings. While the same governments cannot find tiny fractions of those sums to end child poverty, illiteracy, or homelessness (this can't be done, a young soldier for the separatism of the rich explained to me during last year's coalition negotiations, because addressing those issues would be "fixed costs").

Kind of like how a rich man whose titanic ego (and remarkable energy) led him into the premiership of a Canadian province will not give two seconds' thought to the implications of buying himself care in an American health system tailor-made for wealthy people like himself. Even though he is himself the lead administrator of a public system built on fundamentally different -- and far better -- principles.

Twittering

Twitter proving its utility for anyone interested in travel - announcements about seat sales, train discounts, contests. So it's good for something other than celebrity musings and sightings.

Jesus, Jobs and Justice

New York Times review today of Bettye Collier-Thomas' authoritative Jesus, Jobs, and Justice: African-American Women and Religion. Reviewer Richard Thompson Ford states that:

Unfortunately, the civil rights movement has often lagged on the question of women’s equality even as it has led the nation on matters of race. Much of the blame for this must be borne by the religious institutions that have played a predominant role in the struggle for racial justice. Until recently, most black churches refused to grant women leadership roles, depriving them of the platform that so many black men have used to rally followers and challenge injustice. Despite these affronts, black women have remained the most faithful and abiding servants of the church, and they have been among the most diligent and effective activists for racial justice.