I was using StumbleUpon today and stumbled upon the WayBack Machine. It's a huge repository of "snapshots" of the internet over time. Here's one of my blog (back when it was called Scribbled Lines) from Thursday, June 13, 2002. I'm not sure why the title font is so big. It didn't look that way back in the day. *shrug* You'll also notice that I was even worse at proofreading than I am now. 😛
At choir practice this evening, Donna, of Quenta Narwenion, informed me that Gerard, of A Catholic Blog for Lovers and caretaker of St. Blog’s Parish, had died. I must confess that I didn’t know him well. I tried to help him set up RSS for his blog. We never did get that working for him. I read all my regulars through RSS these days, so I haven’t read his blog in quite some time.
Anyhow, I’ve only ever heard good things about him and, regardless of whether or not we were friends, it’s sad when a parish loses a loyal, long-time member. As a tribute to Gerard, I’ve collected links to posts about his death from other members of St. Blog’s.
Open Book (Amy Welborn)
The Curt Jester (Jeff Miller)
Quenta Narwenion (Donna Lewis)
Living Catholicism (Jay Allen)
Dei Gratia (Josh LeBlanc)
Catholic Light (Sal Ravilla)
Catholic and Enjoying It! (Mark Shea)
Some of the comments made it apparent that some of my points were unclear. I’ve made some minor changes and a few additions in the hopes of making myself clear. – Funky]
I was wandering through the Book of Acts last night and a few things jumped out at me. I’ll be posting about them over the next few days or weeks. For now, I’ll limit myself to what appears to be an indictment of how most Christians live their lives, i.e. richly.
"And all who believed were together and had all things in common; and they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all, as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they partook of food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved." – Acts 2:44-47
"Now the company of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things which he possessed was his own, but they had everything in common." – Acts 4:32
This certainly seems to advocate a communal lifestyle for Christians. Tying this into the Red vs. Blue craziness, I find it interesting that Red Christians get most of the moral teachings right but disregard the economic teachings, and the Blue Christians get the economic teachings while mostly ignoring the moral teachings. As a Purple Christian, I find this to be very frustrating.
I’ve heard more lame defenses of free market capitalism from Red Christians than I care to remember. I don’t buy it. Tell me why redistribution of wealth is wrong. Tell me why market forces are reason enough to pay off-shore workers peanuts. Tell me why consumerism isn’t unChristian. Tell me why there aren’t more fiery sermons against commercial Christmas.
I’m not just talking about all the sales and products being pushed, but the very giving of "wants" as gifts. Why isn’t more emphasis put of making charitable donations? volunteering time? giving heartfelt, homemade gifts? Being poor shouldn’t be the only reason your kids don’t get a new video game system. We all, young and old, have too many toys. How do they profit our souls? I’m trying very hard to make do with what I have and stop drooling over technological goodies I don’t have.
Recently, I have found myself increasingly convicted by this. I humbly ask of my readers – shouldn’t we all be? Please don’t think I’m giving moral imperatives lower priority. I’m just refusing to ignore social justice. I refuse to believe government doesn’t have a part to play in Christian charity. A lot of conservatives seem to disagree with me. Convince me.
On a related note, I’d like to point out the following:
WORD-FM (101.5) [Pittsburgh area] talk host Marty Minto will do several live broadcasts from area rescue missions next week with the goal of raising more than $30,000 for feeding the hungry and homeless on Thanksgiving. The programs will air from New Castle City Rescue Mission on Monday, Washington City Rescue Mission on Tuesday and Light of Life Rescue Mission on Wednesday.
WE NEED YOUR HELP NOW!
PLEASE CALL AND DONATE WHAT YOU CAN
1-866-496-7336
Christian
Carnival 44 is up at ChristWeb. Go check it out. 🙂
Some commentators on Funky’s
blog have complained that pro-life Christians have found themselves
voting Republican
whether they wanted to or not. Mr. Bush’s actions in Iraq had me
wondering if we
could somehow find a pro-life Nader, but unlike Nader, who would have
the Democrats
become more liberal (at least with economic issues), perhaps our
pro-life Nader
would help pull the Republicans to a more moderate set of social and
international
policies–i.e., maybe tug them to the left. Or, this pro-life Nader
could rally
pro-life Democrats and even encourage that party to get a little more
open-minded
about its abortion plank.
Well, with that in mind, check out this article in Wired.com about the
still-undetermined
role of blogs
in elections, and the Washington
Post article on how Evangelicals often campaigned for Bush
independently of
the GOP or Bush’s own staff. The latter is comforting, since it means
that many
Christians are not in lock-step with the Republicans so much as they
thought that
the Republican candidate was a better pick. They worked independently,
behold, here
is an
NY Times article about how the Dems can woo the church-goers yet
again. Of particular
note are the candid comments from Fr. Richard Neuhaus, editor of the
influential
journal First Things
(and a personal
favorite of this contributor!).
So with this in mind, we should draw some hope that pro-life Christians
may use
their leverage to get a better candidate. The trick is now to work on
finding and
supporting some good ones.