WALLPAPERS(by munawar 9949935350)

“This is our tsunami,” said Biloxi mayor A. J. Holloway.

In the New Orleans Superdome where the homeless were herded, the toilets overflow and the water rises to a meter outside; as food relief diminishes and the hospital electrical generators fail.

Remember the lesson of the tsunami. America showed its heartlessness to the world when Bush’s contributions failed to match those of small countries in Europe. American volunteers flocked there in mass, only to be seen pounding their bibles and refusing food and shelter to anyone who didn’t come to Bible Study.

Progressives can do better than this. Natural disasters demonstrate what we all know, progressive humanist and progressive Christian alike, that man doesn’t live on his own but in the company of fellow human-beings for whom he has a responsibility. Tragedy strikes for obscure reasons, and tragedy, above all other incidents, ought to remind us of the constant peril in which each of us lives, of our need for one another to survive, of our duty to take up responsibility for the well-being of other human beings. Whatever our political philosophy, whether we think that overarching institutions or local fellowships ought to take responsibility, we all agree that responsibility ought to be taken.

Jesus said, “As you do unto the least of these you have done it unto me.”

We all need to do a reexamination, facing this disaster, of how American cities rate in their responses. The New Orleans tragedy is demonstrating that we have utterly failed Jesus’ commandment. Leaving the drowning city, we left behind the poor, the weak, the sick, and the incarcerated, to starve and drown among the toxic waters.

I put out a call for congregational action towards three groups that represent the least of our society. If we fail here, we demonstrate ourselves before the eyes of the world to truly have failed as a Christian nation, not even capable of caring for our own in their time of direst need:

- The poor and homeless who, left behind as their fellow-citizens have fled, have been starving in the Superdome while the structure was ripped apart. Think for a minute about those who try to plan ahead but can’t, about the cramped shuttles leaving the city, about what it would be like not to have enough money for a bus ticket out when the warnings were sounded? You see doom coming, and you look around, and no one remains to help you. The city is evacuated and still you wait. Where were the churches that could have organized buses to transport the poor to safety?

- The prisoners evacuated today only after standing in rising water for hours. In advanced nations, we claim that our prisons are supposed to correct and not merely to torture. The man standing in rising water, thinking himself forgotten by his society for wrongs committed far in the past, abandoned, alone, and facing death in totally abysmal conditions — how will he ever gain faith in society again? What could possibly reclaim him for society? Now, herding them into armored vans, transported to already crowded prisons in Texas, we sew the seeds of irredeemable anger and viciousness towards society. Church, activist, and state need to intervene to make reparations to the prisoners for the way they’ve been treated in this crisis.

- The sick and elderly who are in hospital, while the windows were blown out and the electric generators failed.

I am putting this out there as a wake-up call. The progressive churches of America aren’t organized in a way that allows them to deal with disasters on a great scale. But we do have on our side the quick flow of information, the internet, the local networks of concerned activists, clergy, and lay people, and the growing realization in America that our government isn’t able or willing to represent the poor and disenfranchised.

Share this message, I ask you, to your congregations, your ministers, your charities, and let some response be heard. The responsibility for right action in this tragedy rests entirely with progressives, Christian and humanist alike: the radical right has disowned the crisis, claiming that Florida deserved to be hit by a hurricane. Don’t let their reaction of armored poison prevail as the formatted response. Theirs is a message that kills mercy, wastes the soul, and annihilates civil society.

We have a better answer than that. Let Christ’s message, of putting others’ needs before our own, ring through the churches of America. Let’s show that progressive Christians can do better than this. The survival of a Christian message true to Jesus’ teaching is at stake, in America. The survival of a civil society capable of healing the wounds of economic division is at stake.

Please visit and help us draft a solution: http://www.crossleft.org

Please say a litany for Katrina’s victims offered by a friar in the Episcopal Brotherhood of St Gregory.

American newssources have tended to focus on political fingerpointing. For those concerned with keeping up with the actual effects of the disaster and counts of who’s in greatest need, I highly recommend the Canadian press, which has done a remarkable job of cutting to the chase:
Canada TV on Katrina
The National Post on Katrina
Canadian blogger Jeff Wells has summarized their findings rather bitterly.

“This is our tsunami,” said Biloxi mayor A. J. Holloway.

In the New Orleans Superdome where the homeless were herded, the toilets overflow and the water rises to a meter outside; as food relief diminishes and the hospital electrical generators fail.

Remember the lesson of the tsunami. America showed its heartlessness to the world when Bush’s contributions failed to match those of small countries in Europe. American volunteers flocked there in mass, only to be seen pounding their bibles and refusing food and shelter to anyone who didn’t come to Bible Study.

Progressives can do better than this. Natural disasters demonstrate what we all know, progressive humanist and progressive Christian alike, that man doesn’t live on his own but in the company of fellow human-beings for whom he has a responsibility. Tragedy strikes for obscure reasons, and tragedy, above all other incidents, ought to remind us of the constant peril in which each of us lives, of our need for one another to survive, of our duty to take up responsibility for the well-being of other human beings. Whatever our political philosophy, whether we think that overarching institutions or local fellowships ought to take responsibility, we all agree that responsibility ought to be taken.

Jesus said, “As you do unto the least of these you have done it unto me.”

We all need to do a reexamination, facing this disaster, of how American cities rate in their responses. The New Orleans tragedy is demonstrating that we have utterly failed Jesus’ commandment. Leaving the drowning city, we left behind the poor, the weak, the sick, and the incarcerated, to starve and drown among the toxic waters.

I put out a call for congregational action towards three groups that represent the least of our society. If we fail here, we demonstrate ourselves before the eyes of the world to truly have failed as a Christian nation, not even capable of caring for our own in their time of direst need:

- The poor and homeless who, left behind as their fellow-citizens have fled, have been starving in the Superdome while the structure was ripped apart. Think for a minute about those who try to plan ahead but can’t, about the cramped shuttles leaving the city, about what it would be like not to have enough money for a bus ticket out when the warnings were sounded? You see doom coming, and you look around, and no one remains to help you. The city is evacuated and still you wait. Where were the churches that could have organized buses to transport the poor to safety?

- The prisoners evacuated today only after standing in rising water for hours. In advanced nations, we claim that our prisons are supposed to correct and not merely to torture. The man standing in rising water, thinking himself forgotten by his society for wrongs committed far in the past, abandoned, alone, and facing death in totally abysmal conditions — how will he ever gain faith in society again? What could possibly reclaim him for society? Now, herding them into armored vans, transported to already crowded prisons in Texas, we sew the seeds of irredeemable anger and viciousness towards society. Church, activist, and state need to intervene to make reparations to the prisoners for the way they’ve been treated in this crisis.

- The sick and elderly who are in hospital, while the windows were blown out and the electric generators failed.

I am putting this out there as a wake-up call. The progressive churches of America aren’t organized in a way that allows them to deal with disasters on a great scale. But we do have on our side the quick flow of information, the internet, the local networks of concerned activists, clergy, and lay people, and the growing realization in America that our government isn’t able or willing to represent the poor and disenfranchised.

Share this message, I ask you, to your congregations, your ministers, your charities, and let some response be heard. The responsibility for right action in this tragedy rests entirely with progressives, Christian and humanist alike: the radical right has disowned the crisis, claiming that Florida deserved to be hit by a hurricane. Don’t let their reaction of armored poison prevail as the formatted response. Theirs is a message that kills mercy, wastes the soul, and annihilates civil society.

We have a better answer than that. Let Christ’s message, of putting others’ needs before our own, ring through the churches of America. Let’s show that progressive Christians can do better than this. The survival of a Christian message true to Jesus’ teaching is at stake, in America. The survival of a civil society capable of healing the wounds of economic division is at stake.

Please visit and help us draft a solution: http://www.crossleft.org

Please say a litany for Katrina’s victims offered by a friar in the Episcopal Brotherhood of St Gregory.

American newssources have tended to focus on political fingerpointing. For those concerned with keeping up with the actual effects of the disaster and counts of who’s in greatest need, I highly recommend the Canadian press, which has done a remarkable job of cutting to the chase:
Canada TV on Katrina
The National Post on Katrina
Canadian blogger Jeff Wells has summarized their findings rather bitterly.

60-80% of homes in and around New Orleans will be destroyed. Not damaged, destroyed.

Without news, studying in my rooms in Pembroke, having no thoughts at all of hurricanes or the Atlantic or North America, for days I’d been thinking about my grandmother’s apartment in Louisiana, a place where I haven’t been for a decade at least — revisiting all the rooms, running my hands over every surface, trying to recall the city, the low oak branches slung with spanish moss, the farmhouses of my aunts, the empty dirty streets of the busted downtown.

I read James’s entry, and then lay down for a couple of minutes, till I found the City of New Orleans, a frowning statue of white marble, and we sat at the bottom of the ocean together, looking up at the sunlight filtered through grimy water, looking around for what might have been a place, for all the seedy motels, for all the homeless people in the poor hospital, for the garden district, the streetcars, the avenues lit up with lamps.

And I felt suddenly angry at the rest of America; why couldn’t *it* wash into the ocean? If only the Hamptons and the houses of the Murdochs and movie stars would wash into the sea. It would be glorious, like a de Mille disaster. It would scare the American people into self-examination and reform. If a tornado swept Dallas away it’d do the city good. But New Orleans, waiting for it, expecting it all these years. So I kissed the belly of the City of New Orleans and felt how red-hot it was with steam and venom and salt and spew, and I went outside to smoke half a pack of cigarettes and drink a full glass of whiskey in honor of my dead grandmother.

Outside the Japanese students and the work-study Brits were playing croquet, and the sun was bright, and I could only imagine that the whole of this place was paper thin, and melting away on the wind.

My grandmother would’ve put down the bourbon and cigarettes and gone out to drive ambulances through the swamp for the next several weeks. I want to be there too, driving an ambulance through the flooded swamp.

And I saw all of the people leaving New Orleans, and I thought about all the people who had passed through, I thought of Johnny Cash and Lucinda Williams and William Faulkner and my ex and the dirty motel and the trailer park underworld we shared there, and the New Englander friends who visited the South in their convertible on a lark, and the church camp kids giggling over mardi gras as they winged their way past the brothels, and I thought about that city as a soul, or an angel, holding onto everything morbid and hateful and contradictory in America. Going under water like the first angel to blow the first trumpet of the apocalypse of global warming. But I hate that it had to be *her*.

I love her for her sense of doom. I love her for her exaggerated passions. I love her when she’s mistaken by the outside world for a cutesy tourist attraction but stays trigger-happy and murderous and fucked up on drugs. She’s the contradiction of twentieth-century America in one go: the evangelical preacher in the midst of social diseases for which he has no cure. I’m cradling that city in my mind.

60-80% of homes in and around New Orleans will be destroyed. Not damaged, destroyed.

Without news, studying in my rooms in Pembroke, having no thoughts at all of hurricanes or the Atlantic or North America, for days I’d been thinking about my grandmother’s apartment in Louisiana, a place where I haven’t been for a decade at least — revisiting all the rooms, running my hands over every surface, trying to recall the city, the low oak branches slung with spanish moss, the farmhouses of my aunts, the empty dirty streets of the busted downtown.

I read James’s entry, and then lay down for a couple of minutes, till I found the City of New Orleans, a frowning statue of white marble, and we sat at the bottom of the ocean together, looking up at the sunlight filtered through grimy water, looking around for what might have been a place, for all the seedy motels, for all the homeless people in the poor hospital, for the garden district, the streetcars, the avenues lit up with lamps.

And I felt suddenly angry at the rest of America; why couldn’t *it* wash into the ocean? If only the Hamptons and the houses of the Murdochs and movie stars would wash into the sea. It would be glorious, like a de Mille disaster. It would scare the American people into self-examination and reform. If a tornado swept Dallas away it’d do the city good. But New Orleans, waiting for it, expecting it all these years. So I kissed the belly of the City of New Orleans and felt how red-hot it was with steam and venom and salt and spew, and I went outside to smoke half a pack of cigarettes and drink a full glass of whiskey in honor of my dead grandmother.

Outside the Japanese students and the work-study Brits were playing croquet, and the sun was bright, and I could only imagine that the whole of this place was paper thin, and melting away on the wind.

My grandmother would’ve put down the bourbon and cigarettes and gone out to drive ambulances through the swamp for the next several weeks. I want to be there too, driving an ambulance through the flooded swamp.

And I saw all of the people leaving New Orleans, and I thought about all the people who had passed through, I thought of Johnny Cash and Lucinda Williams and William Faulkner and my ex and the dirty motel and the trailer park underworld we shared there, and the New Englander friends who visited the South in their convertible on a lark, and the church camp kids giggling over mardi gras as they winged their way past the brothels, and I thought about that city as a soul, or an angel, holding onto everything morbid and hateful and contradictory in America. Going under water like the first angel to blow the first trumpet of the apocalypse of global warming. But I hate that it had to be *her*.

I love her for her sense of doom. I love her for her exaggerated passions. I love her when she’s mistaken by the outside world for a cutesy tourist attraction but stays trigger-happy and murderous and fucked up on drugs. She’s the contradiction of twentieth-century America in one go: the evangelical preacher in the midst of social diseases for which he has no cure. I’m cradling that city in my mind.

J needs to study, and won’t be blogging again until after September 7.

In the meantime, please visit CrossLeft for daily political, churchy commentary, plug into StreamingChristianity for the latest progressive news, or join the heated discussion at SocialRedemption.

(don’t forget to buy your tickets to Washington, DC for the Oct 13-17 Values Conference!)

J needs to study, and won’t be blogging again until after September 7.

In the meantime, please visit CrossLeft for daily political, churchy commentary, plug into StreamingChristianity for the latest progressive news, or join the heated discussion at SocialRedemption.

(don’t forget to buy your tickets to Washington, DC for the Oct 13-17 Values Conference!)

Okay, so here is my question. Why wasn’t the Episcopal Youth Event (EYE) covered by Episcopal News Source? I have only found one mention of it at all and it was during a ‘Weeks Ahead’ update.

– Episcopal Princess: Why No News?

Dude. Mainline Protestants are well-educated, coherent, sophisticated lovers of institutions. We can do better than this.

We have two enemies: institutionalization of the media, who are sadly mistaken in thinking the Religious Right is the mainstream in America; and our own reluctance to talk big.

So shoot us. We’re modest. We don’t go around telling other people that they need to convert to River Valley Church of Me or tiny devils with pointed sticks will torture them for thousands of years.

But we *do* believe, need I remind you, gentle reader, in the conversion of the world. We believe in a better future. And we ought to figure out how to use the media better to create it.

Okay, so here is my question. Why wasn’t the Episcopal Youth Event (EYE) covered by Episcopal News Source? I have only found one mention of it at all and it was during a ‘Weeks Ahead’ update.

– Episcopal Princess: Why No News?

Dude. Mainline Protestants are well-educated, coherent, sophisticated lovers of institutions. We can do better than this.

We have two enemies: institutionalization of the media, who are sadly mistaken in thinking the Religious Right is the mainstream in America; and our own reluctance to talk big.

So shoot us. We’re modest. We don’t go around telling other people that they need to convert to River Valley Church of Me or tiny devils with pointed sticks will torture them for thousands of years.

But we *do* believe, need I remind you, gentle reader, in the conversion of the world. We believe in a better future. And we ought to figure out how to use the media better to create it.

The 14 Commandments of the Religious Left By Rush Limbaugh

Honor thy mother. If she is dysfunctional, it is thy father’s fault.

The 14 Commandments of the Religious Left By Rush Limbaugh

Honor thy mother. If she is dysfunctional, it is thy father’s fault.

At last… Christian underwear which proclaims loud and clear that you are a virgin and intend to remain so. Why not show it to a special friend?

Ship of Fools: Gadgets for God

At last… Christian underwear which proclaims loud and clear that you are a virgin and intend to remain so. Why not show it to a special friend?

Ship of Fools: Gadgets for God

Hey! Take a look at my nifty sidebar over there ——–>

Yeah, that’s right. Scroll down a little. See all those extremely elegant links to progressive Christian news stories, clergy bloggers, and new websites? See how many of them there are in the last 24 hrs?

Sort of makes you feel like progressive Christianity is an actual movement, doesn’t it?

This is the first fruit of SocialRedemption / CrossLeft’s work — we’re trying to get the progressive Christian movement in touch with itself.

The feed aggregates some 200 independent bloggers, Christian columnists, and news sources filtered for news of Christian politics, all with a progressive bias.

“Let Justice roll down like waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream” Amos 5:25

- Don’t you think it would be nice to read Christian progressive reactions to the news every day?

- Wouldn’t you like to share it with everyone you know?

- What if your own writing could be part of it?

Good news! Progressive Christianity is an energetic, active movement transforming the world, and you *can* plug in! What you can do:

1) bookmark this address: http://feeds.feedburner.com/StreamingChristianity

2) if you’re technologically sophisticated, you can use that address to read news stories from this address daily on your feed aggregator, handheld device, or mobile phone

3) We encourage those of you with websites to syndicate the newsreel. Does your church have a webpage? Why not create a “news” page where visitors can get tuned in to progressive Christian reactions to the news as it happens?

Sophisticated scripts are available. You add them to your blog template or website html, and voila! Regularly updated, Streaming Christianity. Just ask.

In return, we ask you to post the banner below, linking your guests to http://www.CrossLeft.org

4) If your website already produces regular content — in the form of articles, weekly sermons, blogs, or discussion forums — make sure that other people can read it by having us plug you in to Streaming Christianity.

First you will need to make sure that the content is produced in the form of an RSS feed (talk to your IT person or go to the FAQ section of your blog host). They you can send your rss address to us, and we’ll plug you in!

In return, we ask you to post this banner linking your guests to http://www.CrossLeft.org

The design sophistication and powerful bandwidth necessary to provide this service is due entirely to the magnificent generosity of that most excellent, well-designed, and easy-to-use service FeedDigest. I highly recommend them — super guys.

Hey! Take a look at my nifty sidebar over there ——–>

Yeah, that’s right. Scroll down a little. See all those extremely elegant links to progressive Christian news stories, clergy bloggers, and new websites? See how many of them there are in the last 24 hrs?

Sort of makes you feel like progressive Christianity is an actual movement, doesn’t it?

This is the first fruit of SocialRedemption / CrossLeft’s work — we’re trying to get the progressive Christian movement in touch with itself.

The feed aggregates some 200 independent bloggers, Christian columnists, and news sources filtered for news of Christian politics, all with a progressive bias.

“Let Justice roll down like waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream” Amos 5:25

- Don’t you think it would be nice to read Christian progressive reactions to the news every day?

- Wouldn’t you like to share it with everyone you know?

- What if your own writing could be part of it?

Good news! Progressive Christianity is an energetic, active movement transforming the world, and you *can* plug in! What you can do:

1) bookmark this address: http://feeds.feedburner.com/StreamingChristianity

2) if you’re technologically sophisticated, you can use that address to read news stories from this address daily on your feed aggregator, handheld device, or mobile phone

3) We encourage those of you with websites to syndicate the newsreel. Does your church have a webpage? Why not create a “news” page where visitors can get tuned in to progressive Christian reactions to the news as it happens?

Sophisticated scripts are available. You add them to your blog template or website html, and voila! Regularly updated, Streaming Christianity. Just ask.

In return, we ask you to post the banner below, linking your guests to http://www.CrossLeft.org

4) If your website already produces regular content — in the form of articles, weekly sermons, blogs, or discussion forums — make sure that other people can read it by having us plug you in to Streaming Christianity.

First you will need to make sure that the content is produced in the form of an RSS feed (talk to your IT person or go to the FAQ section of your blog host). They you can send your rss address to us, and we’ll plug you in!

In return, we ask you to post this banner linking your guests to http://www.CrossLeft.org

The design sophistication and powerful bandwidth necessary to provide this service is due entirely to the magnificent generosity of that most excellent, well-designed, and easy-to-use service FeedDigest. I highly recommend them — super guys.

Residents of a Westmont public housing complex for seniors said in a federal lawsuit filed Monday that they were coerced and harassed by management into practicing Christianity and pressured to attend Bible study classes.

– A Lie a Day: Forced into Faith?

Yes. Okay, so:

37 Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? 38 And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? 39 And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’

40 And the king will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’

41 Then he will say to those at his left hand, “You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; 42 for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’

And so sayeth the Lord to the religious fundamentalist:

Yea, I was hungry and you did dangle food before me and beat me until I promised to agree with your political opinions.

I was poor of spirit and you did taunt me.

I needed lodging and you did kick me out.

I was thinking my own ideas and you did abuse me for it.

Get thee behind me, Bigot.