VOLUNTARY CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP

  For decades now I have often attended Vespers on Saturday and Feast day evenings at the local Orthodox Church.  The pastor considers me an associate member of the parish, so I am on their e-mail list. Ohio is part of the Midwestern Diocese of the Orthodox Church in America. The bishop is located in Chicago. Bishop Paul, who was trained as a social worker before becoming a priest, was chosen as its bishop a few years ago.  He puts his social work background to good use in his weekly post on his website called Orthodox Family Life.  I get it as part of the local parish's weekly e-mail. WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BELEIVE IN THE SANCTITY OF LIFE? “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?  If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For God’s temple is holy, and that temple you are” (1 Corinthians 3:16-17).   There is a depth to these words from Saint Paul that leads me to see that the Sanctity of Life is much more th...

  When we observed the change-over to the year 2000, a lot of attention was paid to midnight as it came in around the globe beginning on Christmas island. At our parish and some others in the area there was a midnight Mass to usher in the New Year. I got the idea then of observing a World Day of Prayer for Peace beginning at when it touches down at Christmas Island, praying for people in that time zone as the time zone came into the new  year. https://www.worldtimezone.com/newyear24.html   gives you the current years places (since time zones occasionally change). In the Eastern Time Zone it works out well.  New Zealand comes in at 6am,  Australia at 8am, Japan at 10am, China at 11am.  Bangladesh at 1pm, Iran at 3pm, Russia at 4pm, Jerusalem at 5 pm, Rome at 6pm, London at 7pm,  Brazil at 9pm  Chile at 10pm, East Coast at Midnight, Chicago at 1am. On the East Coast, I would start the observance by having prayer around 8am on New Year's eve. for Aus...

  A New Catholic Moment  Why Prosecutors Are Taking Bold Steps on Sex-Abuse Paul Moses writes: As the Justice Department launches an investigation of clergy sexual abuse of minors in Pennsylvania’s Catholic dioceses, it is worth noting that victims have called for such a probe for at least fifteen years. Leaders of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, told Attorney General John Ashcroft in a November 2003 letter that the Justice Department was in a “unique position” to plumb the secrets within the church’s organizational structure. “We believe that senior management within the Church…have not been held institutionally accountable for these practices, and as a non-profit corporation continue to selectively circumvent our Nation’s laws,” their letter said. This article is an excellent summary of the bold steps that prosecutors are taking. However it does not really tell us why this is a justice issue. The paper that Commonweal needs to publish is an updated ve...

  Letter of His Holiness Pope Francis to the People of God " the suffering endured by many minors due to sexual abuse, the abuse of power and the abuse of conscience perpetrated by a significant number of clerics and consecrated persons" has inflicted pain not only upon them by also their families, and the larger community of believers, and non believers.  Francis powerfully identifies the cry of the victims with the Magnificat: "The Lord heard that cry and once again showed us on which side he stands. Mary’s song is not mistaken and continues quietly to echo throughout history. For the Lord remembers the promise he made to our fathers: “he has scattered the proud in their conceit; he has cast down the mighty from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty” ( Lk  1:51-53). We feel shame when we realize that our style of life has denied, and continues to deny, the words we recite." He identifi...

  Imagine There Is No Clergy: Two Views   by Willam Shea and David Cloutier is the topic for April's meeting of the Cleveland Commonweal Local Community.  I want to avoid a discussion in which everyone projects their gripes about aspects of Catholicism unto the "clergy" and "clericalism', and so I have also sent everybody these two links to help center the discussion upon what Francis means when he criticizes clericalism.  I am interested in your reaction to these two talks and my interpretation of them?.  Do you have a different take upon what he means? Do you have better examples either in terms of talks, quotes, or actions that could help define what Francis means by clericalism? Pope Francis has been particularly critical of clericalism in Latin America. His talk to the bishops of Chile is a recent example. This example as well as the next indicate that for Francis, "elitism" of all kinds including a non-ordained elite of men and women religious is ...

  World Day of Peace

  Pope Francis Christmas Greeting to Roman Curia Full Text The annual Christmas "greeting" of Pope Francis has always been one of criticism. The subject is always church reform, specifically the reform of the Roman Curia. While people delight in seeing the Curia being humbled if not humiliated, we should keep in mind that Francis sees the diseases of the Curia and its cures as applying to the whole Church. The Curia are part of a bigger problem of clericalism in the Church.. This years greeting focuses upon "diaconal primacy."  Now anything the Pope says about the deaconate needs to be taken very seriously as applying to the whole Church.  It has been obvious to me from early on that he intends to restore women deacons to the Church. His emphasis upon giving greater dignity to women, coupled with saying no again to the priesthood, and the absence of anything about women deacons was the first clue. So I was not surprised that he granted the request of women religious...

 In the 1970s, when I was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst we had a young faculty member who grew up in Budapest, took a non-tenure track position at Harvard, then a tenure track position at U Mass. He joked about faculty members who had a cabin in the woods. "This is the woods! Why do you need a cabin somewhere else?" Six years earning a doctorate at University of Missouri, Columbia plus three years at U Mass formed a large state university template that shaped but did not control my life. Teaching at Franklin College in Indiana, I lived about 15 minutes from Bloomington. No classes on Wednesdays meant a day at the Indiana University library (free to anybody with an Indiana drivers licensee), lunch with a senior faculty member who shared my research interests, and evening free concerts of the University School of Music. When working in the mental health system during the 80s in Toledo,...

  Future Life Expectancy in 35 Industrialized Countries The original  Lancet article ;  Telegraph ,  CNN , and  WAPO  coverage. Best coverage with graphs award to  VOX ; but the best single graph award goes to  The Economist .  The study uses 21 forecasting models and past data to come up with a best prediction of future life expectancy. This study, which does not make America look good, was funded in part by the US Environmental Protection agency which had no role in the study design, etc.. None of the forecasting models attempted to predict the behavior of North Korean and American leaders. There is a 57% probability that life expectancy at birth among South Korean women in 2030 will be higher than 90 years! This achievement would continue the impressive past gains in South Korean women’s life expectancy. It has increased by on average 3·7 years per decade since 1985, when they were ranked 29th. The probability that Sout...

  TV (and CNN) is the problem, not the solution I have not watched CNN since the election! CNN Had a Problem: Donald Trump Solved It Link above Jonathan Miller, New York Times In  Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community  Robert Putnam documented that decline of many different types voluntary organizations. He saw Television as the big culprit. In 2011 in a PrayTell post  Television, Time Use, Lent and the Divine Office , I reviewed the literature on time use. Across 20 developed countries both paid and unpaid work had declined, leisure as the remainder had increased (sleep was constant). In 1960, well educated people (both men and women) had more leisure than less educated people. This reversed by 1990. Less educated people now have more leisure than well educated persons. (No, it is not simply because the less educated are more likely to be unemployed.) In the US, much leisure time was channeled into...

  Photo of My Personal Icon* Early in my graduate education as a social psychologist, I read the newly published  THE DESERT A CITY   by Delwas J. Chitty.  It became a classical study in the field of desert Christian monasticism and the beginning of my life-long interest in this topic (1) . I  quickly realized I was a solitary, but in a social rather than a physical desert.    Two years as a Jesuit novice after high school told me I was a contemplative in action, but destined not to live in the Society of Jesus.   U ndergraduate years at Saint John's University, Collegeville Minnesota convinced me I was  Benedictine; the Divine Office is the center of my life. These three strands of DNA like a triple helix form the backbone of my spiritual life. The proportion of Americans who live alone has grown steadily since the 1920s, increasing from roughly 5 percent then to...

  PrayTell Blog Posts  Date Title  12/7/2012 Book Review: Same Call Different Men 8/5/2012 Why We Are All Nuns: Catholic Pride 7/21/2012 National Black Catholic Survey and Congress 6/12/2012 Communion Across Generations: Intergenerational Dialog 5/16/2012 CARAs Parish Data the New-Evangelization Social Network Approach   4/30/2012 Two Petitions Liturgy and Nuns 3/8/2012 Vatican Reverses Cleveland Church Closings/ 11/10/2011 American Religion and Church Attendance 10/2/2011 An Implementation Vignette and Reflection 6/25/2011 Global Survey of Evangelical Protestant Leaders/ 3/28/2011 Television, Time Use, Lent and the Divine Office 12/6/2010 Secularism, Fundamentalism or Catholicism? the USA-in-2043 11/5/2010 American Grace: How Religion Divides and-Unites Us 7/19/2010 The Liturgical Year and Average Church Attendance 7/4/2010 The Church: is it the Bishops? the People? or Buildings