February 2006

Most Catholics in the US give up eating bird and mammal meat on Fridays during Lent. Since I became vegan five years ago, my friends and co-workers have teased me: “You’re not giving up anything! Maybe you should eat meat on Fridays!”

Adam Villani suggests that I give up soy on Fridays during Lent, and I’m going to take his advice. For a vegan, that’s giving up an especially satisfying part of the diet.

This year I was surprised to receive a birthday cake that was both vegan and decorated with Gamera. Cake: The Bean Counter, Worcester. Photo: Claire Schaeffer-Duffy.

On Saturday 25 February 2006, a few of my friends and I joined about 50 others at St John’s College, Oxford, for the Christian Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament conference ‘Trident Replacement? What does theology say?’. One new development: WMD Awareness Programme. If the gentle readers read one website because of this report, it should be this. Read the rest of this entry »

This week’s Items includes more Mr. Hetero.

Institutional Linens: has been demolished. It took only a few days.

The yellow house at left is on the corner of Mason Street and Mason Court, in Worcester. My house is the white house just left of the yellow house.
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It is still a few weeks to St Patrick’s Day, but today the Revd Fleur Houston preached on the saint’s life with the topic “Interacting with the past” at the Mansfield College chapel. May I please request the gentle readers to also remember, in the weekend following the feast of Patrick (18th to 21st of March), James Laidlaw Maxwell Snr and George Leslie Mackay, apostles to Formosa (Taiwan).

To get you in the mood, here is a link to Matthew 28:18–20 and a photograph taken at the Misión Nuestra Señora Reina de los Ángeles. (By the way, is that Óscar Romero on the left?)

Further, may I also please remind the gentle readers to pray for the 9th Assembly of the World Council of Churches currently taking place in Porto Alegre.

On page 19 of the new book The Catholic Worker Movement: Intellectual and Spiritual Origins is an old Peter Maurin piece that I hadn’t seen before, or at least didn’t remember:

Easy conversations
about things that matter
would keep people
from going to the movies,
from talking politics,
from cheap wisecracking.
Easy conversations
about things that matter
would enable Catholics
to understand Catholicism,
to give an account of their faith,
and to make non-Catholics curious
about Catholicism.

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