Food for the Soul

A great op-ed piece in the NY Times...

Food for the Soul By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NY Times - Aug. 23, 2009

On a summer visit back to the farm here where I grew up, I think I figured out the central problem with modern industrial agriculture. It’s not just that it produces unhealthy food, mishandles waste and overuses antibiotics in ways that harm us all.

More fundamentally, it has no soul.

The family farm traditionally was the most soulful place imaginable, and that was the case with our own farm on the edge of the Willamette Valley. I can’t say we were efficient: for a time we thought about calling ourselves “Wandering Livestock Ranch,” after our Angus cattle escaped in one direction and our Duroc hogs in another.

When coyotes threatened our sheep operation, we spent $300 on a Kuvasz, a breed of guard dog that is said to excel in protecting sheep. Alas, our fancy-pants new sheep dog began her duties by dining on lamb.

It’s always said that if a dog kills one lamb, it will never stop, and so the local rule was that if your dog killed one sheep you had to shoot it. Instead we engaged in a successful cover-up. It worked, for the dog never touched a lamb again and for the rest of her long life fended off coyotes heroically.

That kind of diverse, chaotic family farm is now disappearing, replaced by insipid food assembly lines.

The result is food that also lacks soul... Read the whole article here.

Episcopal Church Is Looking to Grow

Pared-Down Episcopal Church Is Looking to Grow Through ‘Inclusivity’
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN, NY Times, 7/19/09

ANAHEIM, Calif. — The Episcopal Church is betting its future on the hope that there are more young people out there like Will Hay. Mr. Hay, 17, was one of the youngest voting delegates at the church’s 10-day triennial convention, which ended Friday. He has stuck with his church, even when the priest and most of the parishioners in his conservative San Diego parish quit the Episcopal Church two years ago in protest of its liberal moves, particularly the approval in 2003 of an openly gay bishop, V. Gene Robinson.

Mr. Hay has helped rebuild his parish, which was left with 48 people and has since drawn nearly 100 new members. Mr. Hay is no left-wing ideologue, and in fact fears that some of the convention’s landmark decisions last week may alienate even more conservatives. The church’s convention voted not to stand in the way if another gay bishop were elected and to allow for the blessing of same-sex couples.

But Mr. Hay was not troubled by those things. And he believes that the church can grow by emphasizing “inclusivity,” the favorite buzzword of Episcopalians. “I’m sure we will attract people who are saying maybe we are doing it right,” Mr. Hay said as he came off the convention floor for lunch one day with his mother. “For me it seems right because I was raised in a household where we were always taught to accept everyone, regardless of creed, color, gender or sexual identity.”

Whether Episcopalians really can regenerate a church based on youth and “inclusivity” remains to be seen.

Read the whole article here.

All the News Fit to Print (from NY Times)

Sometimes the NY Times has articles that get us thinking...

A $10 Mosquito Net Is Making Charity Cool

Donating $10 to buy a mosquito net to save an African child from malaria has become a hip way to show you care, especially for teenagers. The movement is like a modern version of the March of Dimes, created in 1938 to defeat polio, or like collecting pennies for Unicef on Halloween.

Unusual allies, like the Methodist and Lutheran Churches [and Episcopal Church!], the National Basketball Association and the United Nations Foundation, are stoking the passion for nets that prevent malaria. The annual “American Idol Gives Back” fund-raising television special has donated about $6 million a year for two years. The music channel VH1 made a fund-raising video featuring a pesky man in a mosquito suit.

It is an appeal that clearly resonates with young people.

Read more about it here.

Learn about the Nets for life Program (through Episcopal Relief & Development) here.

Gay Unions Shed Light on Gender in Marriage

For insights into healthy marriages, social scientists are looking in an unexpected place.

A growing body of evidence shows that same-sex couples have a great deal to teach everyone else about marriage and relationships. Most studies show surprisingly few differences between committed gay couples and committed straight couples, but the differences that do emerge have shed light on the kinds of conflicts that can endanger heterosexual relationships.

Read the rest here.

Out of a Church Kitchen and Into the Courts

NEBRASKA BEEF has been accused of making people at a church social very sick; one elderly woman died. Meatballs served at a smorgasbord of the Salem Lutheran Church in Longville, Minn., were tainted with deadly E. coli bacteria, and Nebraska Beef was named as the culprit in lawsuits filed by the dead woman’s husband and by Ellie Wheeler, one of 17 other people who became ill.

Ellie Wheeler, one of those at a church social who became ill, is suing Nebraska Beef. The company is suing her church. Carolyn Hawkinson died after eating meatballs at Salem Lutheran Church in Longville, Minn. All of this is straightforward enough, and you might expect that it would lead to an out-of-court settlement, with the meat company vowing to clean up its act.

But Nebraska Beef, based in Omaha, is pursuing a very different tactic. For starters, the company has denied that it is responsible for providing bad meat, and it has provided a culprit of its own. It blames the Salem Lutheran Church — contending in its own lawsuit that the volunteer church ladies who prepared the food were negligent.

Read the rest here.

Radical Love Gets a Holiday (The New York Times)

Radical Love Gets a Holiday
By SARAH VOWELL
Published: January 21, 2008

IN 1983, Ronald Reagan signed a bill honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with a federal holiday. Reagan opposed it, but back then, in the olden times of checks and balances, the vote by 338 representatives and 78 senators establishing the holiday threatened certain veto override.

...

Here’s what Dr. King got out of the Sermon on the Mount. On Nov. 17, 1957, in Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, he concluded the learned discourse that came to be known as the “loving your enemies” sermon this way: “So this morning, as I look into your eyes and into the eyes of all of my brothers in Alabama and all over America and over the world, I say to you: ‘I love you. I would rather die than hate you.’ ”

Go ahead and re-read that. That is hands down the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical thing a human being can say. And it comes from reading the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical civics lesson ever taught, when Jesus of Nazareth went to a hill in Galilee and told his disciples, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.”

Read the whole article here.

The Moral Instinct (The New York Times)

The Moral Instinct
by STEVEN PINKER
Published: January 13, 2008

Which of the following people would you say is the most admirable: Mother Teresa, Bill Gates or Norman Borlaug? And which do you think is the least admirable? For most people, it’s an easy question. Mother Teresa, famous for ministering to the poor in Calcutta, has been beatified by the Vatican, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and ranked in an American poll as the most admired person of the 20th century. Bill Gates, infamous for giving us the Microsoft dancing paper clip and the blue screen of death, has been decapitated in effigy in “I Hate Gates” Web sites and hit with a pie in the face. As for Norman Borlaug . . . who the heck is Norman Borlaug?

(Hint: Norman Borlaug is "father of the 'Green Revolution' that used agricultural science to reduce world hunger, has been credited with saving a billion lives, more than anyone else in history.")

A very fascinating article, read it here.

No Longer Lost, a Refugee Accepts Call to Leadership

In Grand Rapids, Mich., the Rev. Zachariah Jok Char serves an Episcopal congregation that welcomed Sudanese refugees.

Story by NEELA BANERJEE
Published by the NY Times: August 19, 2007

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — About 7,000 miles separate Grace Episcopal Church here, where the Rev. Zachariah Jok Char preaches most Sundays, from the small town of Duk Padiet in Sudan, where he was born.

Read it all here.

In the News...

Both articles are from the NY Times:

Episcopal Church Rejects Demand for a 2nd Leadership
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: March 22, 2007

Bishops rejected a demand to create a parallel leadership to serve the minority who oppose their church’s liberal stand on homosexuality.


Money Looms in Episcopalian Rift With Anglicans
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN and NEELA BANERJEE
Published: March 20, 2007

As leaders of the Anglican Communion hold meeting after meeting to debate severing ties with the Episcopal Church in the United States for consecrating an openly gay bishop, one of the unspoken complications is just who has been paying the bills.

In the news...

From Episcopal News Service:

New York Times carries weekend interviews with our Presiding Bishop and Southern Africa's Archbishop.

The New York Times carried an interview on Sunday with Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, while Saturday (February 10) editions include a profile of Southern Africa's Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane. The Presiding Bishop was interviewed by Times religion writer Laurie Goodstein, while the Archbishop's profile was written by Johannesburg-based reporter Sharon LaFraniere.

Check out the articles:

• Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori
• Southern Africa's Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane

Our new PB is really impressive. Please do check out the article and pray for her and all the primates at their meeting!