Seeking Justice in the Wake of Tragedy; Do the Next Thing: A Mother’s Gratitude for Elisabeth Elliot...more

Seeking Justice in the Wake of Tragedy
A horrible tragedy occurred earlier this week, when a young white male walked into Emanuel A.M.E. church in historic Charleston, South Carolina, and killed nine congregation members. Unfortunately, many common responses to the massacre threaten to undermine efforts to seek real, substantive justice.

First, many people have condemned the act as “senseless violence.” Calling the violence “senseless” implies that the shooter did not have moral agency. What occurred on Wednesday night was not “senseless violence”: it was a cold, calculated, act of racial hatred...

Photos: Mourning and forgiveness in Charleston


Jun 19, 2015

Dylann Roof bond hearing. CHARLESTON —‘I forgive you.’ Relatives of Charleston church shooting victims address Dylann Roof The relatives of people slain inside the historic African American church in Charleston, S.C., earlier this week were able to confront the accused gunman Friday at his first court appearance. One by one, those who chose to speak at a bond hearing did not turn to anger. Instead, while he remained impassive, they offered him forgiveness and said they were praying for his soul. I forgive you,” Nadine Collier, the daughter of 70-year-old Ethel Lance, said at the hearing, her voice breaking with emotion. “You took something very precious from me. I will never talk to her again. I will never, ever hold her again. But I forgive you. And have mercy on your soul.”  (What Christian forgiveness looks like...)

Church of England to introduce monthly fast for planet Earth as vicars trained in ‘eco-theology’  The Church of England is to urge worshippers to dedicate the first day of every month to fasting and prayer for planet Earth as part of a major drive to instill green ideas in its followers.

Candidates for ordination as priests are also set to be trained in “eco-theology” while plans are being considered to install solar farms across parts of the Church’s extensive land holdings, in addition to existing wind farms.

Details of the green initiatives emerged in papers sent out to members of the Church’s ruling General Synod, ahead of its annual summer gathering in York next month.
 

It comes a day after Pope Francis published a long-awaited encyclical on the environment in which he threw the weight of the 1.2 billion-strong Roman Catholic Church behind the fight against climate change and called for fossil fuels to be phased out... (So twisted-whatever happened to prayer and fasting for the purpose of seeking a closer walk with God?) 

Do the Next Thing: A Mother’s Gratitude for Elisabeth Elliot...Here was a woman who knew the Lord. Here was a woman willing to serve the Lord no matter where he called her. Here was a woman who suffered the loss of her young husband as a martyr on the mission field, and then stayed for several years to share the good news of Jesus Christ with the same people who killed her beloved Jim. A few years later, she lost a second husband to cancer. Elisabeth Elliot suffered beyond what I could even have imagined as a wife and mother. And her response to it all? Trust in God, obey him, and do the next thing.

“Do the next thing” became a mantra at our house. My husband and I still use it more than twenty years later to encourage each other. Elisabeth would always have a Scriptural basis for her counsel which was straight-forward, no-nonsense, and unsentimental. It was easy for young, exhausted, me-generation mothers of toddlers to fall into self pity, but each day Elisabeth Elliot would graciously, but firmly, pick me back up. She’d remind me that my lot was a calling from God, and that it was nothing that millions of women hadn’t done before me with fewer resources and conveniences...

How Pixar Enchants Us
...As parents and grownups still vividly in touch with their childhoods, the gifted artists at Pixar know that the most universal chords to be struck revolve around change and its companion that is loss; around innocence and experience; around the necessity of relationships and the inclines and declines of life. And around the fact that Joy leavens our lives, yet Sadness deepens the journey. In striking these chords, Pixar plays an emotional symphony of dualities...  (I'm a Pixar junkie-can't wait to see Inside Out)