Celebrating 5 Years

Thank God we've had Barack Obama as our president for five years!

No, he hasn't done everything right, but he's done a hell of a lot better than John McCain or Mitch Romney would have done.

I'm so relieved that he hasn't yet been assassinated.  I pray that he may complete his second term and then serve in many other creative ways, as Jimmy Carter has done.

I'm eager to listen to his State of the Union address tonight.  He's a great orator, and I hope he'll have ideas on how to pass immigration legislation, in spite of the recalcitrance of Republicans in the House.

It's one of the seven talking points President Obama has been focusing on in the days leading up to his address:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/01/25/obamas-7-state-of-the-union-talking-points-no-4-immigration/

It appears that John Boehner is trying to get his party to stop stalling on the issue:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/01/28/us-usa-immigration-boehner-idUSBREA0R19G20140128

Pete Seeger

Pete Seeger--anti-war, pro-people, troubador of the twentieth century.

He died today after 94 years on this earth, singing folk songs that recalled America to her better self.  He performed with the Almanac Singers, the Weavers, and others.

His family held hands and sang at his bedside in New York Presbyterian Hospital, according to this report in the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/29/arts/music/pete-seeger-songwriter-and-champion-of-folk-music-dies-at-94.html?hp&_r=0

Pete wrote "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" and "Turn, Turn, Turn" (taken from Ecclesiastes and performed by the Byrds) and co-wrote "If I Had a Hammer."

He was also committed to feminism, singing this song composed by his sister Peggy Seeger in 1970:   (Thanks to the blog feministing for reminding me.)

http://feministing.com/2014/01/28/rip-pete-seeger/?utm_source=hootsuite&utm_campaign=hootsuite

Steve Martin tweeted, "I bought his book How To Play the 9-String Banjo when I was 16.  American hero in so many ways."

Thanks to my husband, John Arthur, for reporting Steve's tweet and also reminding me that Steve "is a tremendous banjo player and won a Grammy last night."

John also sent me this YouTube video of Pete last November singing "Turn, Turn, Turn" with five verses composed by his wife for their young children in the early 1950s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7pzic4mf7o

It's great--especially the verse about "a time for candles on the cake."

Pete sang for "Okies" fleeing the Dust Bowl and trying to get farm work in the San Joaquin Valley.  Later he sang for the United Farmworkers movement.  He cared about the homeless and hungry; he tried to lessen the gap between the wealthy and the poor.

See this obituary in the LA Times:

http://www.latimes.com/obituaries/la-me-pete-seeger-20140128,0,2122566,full.story#axzz2rjp6RC9u

In 1968 I had never heard of Pete Seeger.  The only music played at my house in the 1950s and 60s had been the jazz that my father loved and groups like the Beatles that were just emerging and scorned by father.

If my father ever thought of Pete Seeger, it would have been to condemn him for being a Communist.  He joined the Young Communist League at age 17 in 1936 but turned to other political expression by the mid-1950s.

When I was a junior in college, John invited me to attend a concert given by Pete Seeger, and I turned him down, hoping that another guy I liked might ask me out.  

What a mistake!  I never heard Pete Seeger in concert.

Syria: Rukiya's Story

Prayers today for the people of Syria and for peace negotiations in Switzerland.

http://womensenews.org/story/peace/140127/video-syrian-woman-recalls-horror-homs?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=email#.UufvcBDTmUk

Thank you to Women's eNews for posting this report and video interview with Rukiya, a woman from Homs now a refugee in Jordan.  Here's a summary:

In this video, a Syrian woman who fled war-torn Homs describes her work washing the corpses of women. Negotiators in Geneva have just agreed to provide a relief corridor for women and children to leave districts that have been besieged since June 2012.

May the two sides and the intermediaries continue to meet.

May they agree that a process must begin in which Bashar al-Assad steps aside.

May the new government end bloodshed and torture of its people--something like 110,000 deaths in the last three years.

May there be safety and justice for Sunnis, Shi'as, Alawakis, Christians and others--for men as well as for women and children.

Gospel According to Jefferson, Dickens & Tolstoy

I love to imagine putting people like Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Judi Dench in the same room and listening to their conversation.  

In fact, that's the kind of exam I often give at the end of a course in Religion & Literature or Women & Religion.  Write a conversation among five women you've met in this course.

Playwright Scott Carter wrote a play using the same kind of format: putting Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens, and Leo Tolstoy all around a table and letting them talk about their views of the Bible.  It was reviewed in the LA Times this weekend:

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-cm-theater-review-discord-at-noho-arts-center-20140121,0,151780.story#axzz2rdtuzsA9

These three are interesting because Jefferson selected his favorite Scriptures to produce his own take on the Bible.  Dickens also gathered his favorite passages together, and Tolstoy learned Hebrew and Greek to translate and put together his own version of the Gospel.

I'm planning to see this play before it closes on February 23.  Anyone want to join me?

http://www.thenohoartscenter.com/

Good News from Trader Joe's

$165 billion in food that is past its expiration date or overripe gets thrown out every year in the US, acccording to this report from NBC.

http://www.nbcnews.com/video/nightly-news/54186865?from=en-us_msnhp#54186865

But Trader Joe's is starting a new store where food recently past its date will be sold at a substantial discount.

Yesterday's The Moth Radio Hour featured an account by Elisa Hunter of dumpster-diving and recovering much valuable food from a Trader Joe's dumpster.

http://themoth.org/posts/stories/one-womans-trash

Looks as if Trader Joe's is responding in a good way to the publicity about its food waste.  Hooray!

My friend Walter Hearn in Berkeley has been collecting good food from grocery story dumpsters for forty years as part of his commitment to simple living within a framework of radical Christianity.

I'm happy that a major food outlet is taking responsible action to make sure that healthy food goes to those who need it at steeplyl discounted prices.

Mandela and Baby Jakes

So good to hear the reflections of my friend Xana McCauley on the passing of Nelson Mandela and of the boxer Baby Jake Matlala in South Africa:

http://www.eewc.com/viewpoint/reflections-from-south-africa

Recipe for Christmas Zest

If your Christmas spirit lacks zest, add a dash of Judaism.

1.  Listen to the prayer Jesus taught sung in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke.  It's on the CD Scriptures by Covita Moroney from Renewal Records, cut three.  http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/covita2/from/greatindiemusic

2.  Learn to count to ten in Hebrew, thinking especially about the number one, ahat or ehad.  Reflect on Jesus' words to Martha: "Only one thing is needed" (Luke 10:42).

3.  Memorize the Shemah, the most important prayer in Judaism, which begins, Shemah Israel: YHWH ehad (Deuteronomy 6:4-9). Listen to it sung on the album above, cut two.

4.  Watch the sunrise looking east toward Jerusalem.

5.  Visit Bethlehem--online if not in person.  Reflect on the Hebrew meaning of the town's name Beit Lechem (House of Bread because it is in a grain-growing area).

6.  Visit Nazareth--online if not in person.  Remember that Jesus was originally called a natzrati, which is still the Hebrew word today for a Christian.  Practice saying, "Ani Natzrati"--"I'm a Christian."  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazareth

7.  Learn to gamble for chocolate coins using a dreidel.  Learn why the letters gimmel, nun, heh, and shin are on the dreidel. (Gadol nes haiyah sham - "A great miracle occurred there.")  http://www.wikihow.com/Play-Dreidel

8.  Visit the Holocaust Museum nearest you.  There are currently 41 in the US and more in 24 other countries.   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Holocaust_memorials_and_museums

9.  Ask a Jewish friend to help you find someone who observes the Shabbat meal on Friday evening and would let you attend.  Participate in lighting the candles and welcoming in the Shabbat (day of rest and remembering the presence of God).

10.  Memorize Psalm 27:4 and listen to it sung in Hebrew: "One thing have I asked of YHWH, that will I seek after: that I may live in the house of YHWH all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of YHWH and to seek in God's temple."   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PW_6-dSq6khttp://www.hebrewsongs.com/?song=achatshaalti   http://www.hebrew4christians.com/Scripture/Ketuvim/Psalms/Psalm_27/psalm_27.html

Front Pages: Mandela

There's one thing everyone on earth agrees on: Mandela's importance.

Here's a compilation of front pages today from around the world as noted on the website of The Week, a British weekly news magazine:

http://theweek.com/article/index/253793/remembering-nelson-mandela-the-worlds-newspaper-front-pages

Mandela: 1918-2013

What a lifetime--born in rural Transkei in 1918, herding sheep as a child, fighting against racial oppression, imprisoned 27 years, dying in a world filled with cell phones and Twitter feeds.

A map of South Africa showing the state of Transkei on the southeastern coast:
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~ad15/south_african_homelands.gif&imgrefurl=http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~ad15/SApolitics-contents.htm&h=1234&w=1014&sz=221&tbnid=8DWbbKOiLPzlBM:&tbnh=90&tbnw=74&zoom=1&usg=__4RNIlfclDaRbuM9hrrkFb8K4Z0k=&docid=tLEb0CuPsqE3TM&sa=X&ei=lnajUvX6HMn1oASrroDgDQ&ved=0CDYQ9QEwBA

I was moved to watch President Obama's tribute to him this morning.  The depth of Obama's feeling for his friend and role model was apparent.

He chose these words of Mandela to remember: "I'm not a saint unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying."

Concluding, he paraphrased the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., to describe Mandela as "a man who took history in his hands and bent the arc of the moral universe toward justice."

http://theweek.com/article/index/253791/watch-president-obamas-remarks-on-the-death-of-nelson-mandela

In his death we all continue to learn from the retrospective accounts of his life. 

The Taj Mahony

I have never visited Ex-Archbishop Roger Mahony's fancy new cathedral in downtown Los Angeles, and I never will.

It opened in 2002 while Mahony was still covering up the names and specific criminal acts of priests accused of sexual abuse of children.

Not until January of 2013 did a court order force the archdiocese to make public "thousands of pages of priest personnel files" that had forced Mahony to settle litigation in 2008 with a payoff of $720 million to 500 persons who had been abused as children.

http://graphics.latimes.com/mahony/

That cathedral reeks with Mahony's pride and echoes with the whispers of church officials trying to silence adults pursuing justice for their stolen childhoods.

Thank you to Harriet Ryan, Ashley Powers, and Victoria Kim for putting together a powerful retrospective on the ambition and cover-up of Mahony as archbishop.

One anecdote stood out to me, when Mahony was meeting with wealthy parishioners from La Canada/Flintridge to raise money for the $720 million settlement.

One woman challenged him to resign for being in essence a CEO who had mismanaged his business causing a loss of three-quarters of a billion dollars.

It's about accountability, another woman said.
Mahony slammed his hand on the table, scattering his charts.  You self-righteous... he began.  Keep your money, he told them.

That's what journalism is about--research and interviews that report the truth about and behind current events.

In 2013 Mahony enjoyed traveling to Rome for the conclave to choose a new pope, despite calls for him to stay home instead as penance for his role in covering up child sexual abuse.  

During the nearly nine years I taught at a Catholic college in Los Angeles, Mahony was the leader of the church in Los Angeles.  He spoke up for immigrant rights but clamped down against any suggestion that women should be allowed to become priests.  

In 2000 he and other California bishops joined with the Mormon Church to raise financial support and votes for Proposition 8, the effort to enshrine marriage as "only between a man and a woman."

That hypocrisy--defining marriage and priesthood while protecting child abuse by priests--was part of my decision to leave my job as a tenured professor at Mount St. Mary's College.  

Another part was American bishops' plan to enforce Ex corde ecclesiae, "The Apostolic Constitution of the Supreme Pontiff John Paul II on Catholic Universities."  The goal was to preserve the heart of the Roman Catholic Church by firing professors and college presidents who did not toe the Church's line on social issues.

I was not going to continue taking a paycheck while professors in theology and religious studies had to ask Archbishop Mahony for a mandatum--permission to continue teaching, perhaps granted only to those who did not speak out on contraception, abortion, married priests, women priests, and other issues.

I sent Mahony a letter explaining my reasons for resignation.  

He never answered, too busy with his new cathedral and with fending off police investigations of priests who had abused children.