Category: Items

Last week, a friend asked: Do Catholic Workers go to church? His impression was that the answer was No, and that “not going to church was part of the thing.”

I would say, by-and-large, the answer is Yes.

• The Catholic Worker movement is decentralized, and there’s nobody in a position to enforce these things.
• Many folks in Catholic Worker communities are not Catholic or not church-goers.
• That said, based on visits to dozens of communities and meetings with hundreds of Catholic Workers, I think that most Catholic Workers are at least occasional churchgoers.
• Some Catholic Workers make churchgoing a priority. Co-founder Dorothy Day attended mass every day. There are Catholic Workers who are priests, nuns, and deacons. On this website, we have archived many homilies from masses at the Mustard Seed Catholic Worker in Worcester. I think most of those who go to mass there on Fridays also attend at their own churches on Sundays.

Continue reading “Do Catholic Workers go to church? and other items”

This week’s This American Life has a great piece on activist Brandon Darby, who became an FBI informant whose work led to the conviction of 2 young RNC 2008 protesters.

I’d never heard of him before fellow RNC arrestee Drew Wilson told me about him; turns out several of my friends worked with him and admired him.

If you’ve listened to the radio piece, it’s worth reading Scott Crow’s critique. (Scroll past the first few comments to see it.)

Worcester Chopped Sea Clams
Holmes looks up trademarked items named after Worcester.

The Foundation of All Activism . . . Dental Floss
Erik Marcus makes a point about taking care of yourself.

P&C’s Michael Paulukonis was part of the team behind Skipscreen, the red-hot “free Firefox add-on that lets you skip all the clicking and waiting on sites like RapidShare, Zshare, MegaUpload, and Sharebee.” 120,000 downloads this week–congrats!

Mozart: music pirate
Charming musical post about “Gregorio Allegri’s arrangement of Psalm 51” from Rocco Palmo, just in time for Holy Week.

Are protests effective?
Management prof Brayden King says yes. I’m eager to dig into the research to see if any strategies seem to be more effective than others.
Continue reading “Good Friday items”

Linda LeTendre, in DC this week to join the 100 Days Campaign, reviews the recent antiwar march in DC, which I skipped:

There was a “standoff” between some demonstrators and some police officers, with the demonstrators taunting the officers. This was high idiocy for two reasons: (1) It did not promote peace, and (2) The officers were armed, the taunters were not. The officers were called to some other part of the event and as they left the taunters cheered as if they had won some great victory — further raising their level on the idiocy scale.

Continue reading “A march to nowhere and other items”

“The coming evangelical collapse”
Michael Spencer:

Being against gay marriage and being rhetorically pro-life will not make up for the fact that massive majorities of Evangelicals can’t articulate the Gospel with any coherence. We fell for the trap of believing in a cause more than a faith.

Michael Bell runs the numbers. As a New England Catholic, whose own church is in steep decline while local evangelical churches seem to be thriving, these articles were full of surprises for me.

During last summer’s Catholic Worker National Gathering it struck me that the Catholic Worker movement is one of the few things about my church that’s not either in decline or in a defensive mode–the CW communities are doing great, with a good mix of ages, marked by openness, faith, and courage. I wish I could say the CW is a good model for the “future of the Church,” but interest has waxed and waned over the decades, and most people number their association with the CW in years rather than decades, so I think we’ll have to look elsewhere for that.
Continue reading “Three items of interest: Church, Guantanamo, Action”

A personal note
The 100 Days is going great. Nice to be working so hard on something positive. Starting to think about what I should do (for money or for free) when I return to Worcester in May. Ideas? You know how to reach me.

I’ve been thinking about how we pick our causes, inspired by the following 2 articles about causes that have arguably not done well.

Save Darfur Can’t Save Darfur:

In all the activist rhetoric about genocide, one critical fact is lost – as bad as the situation is, it could be far worse. If you don’t understand this simple point, you don’t understand the stakes involved.

(See also Some Defend Save Darfur and The Janjaweed Speak, by the same author.)

Life For March:

At 36 years old, the pro-life movement is still energetic and indignant—and trapped. Every year of Republican rule has increased the suspicion that pro-lifers are the GOP’s useful idiots.

Continue reading “Items and gadgets”