September 2007

A Bible study sheet written in 2000, with some amendments. If you use this in your Bible study group, please leave a note here about your group and any constructive feedback.

508 is a show about Worcester.

You can download the mp3, subscribe to the feed, or see other formats.

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You can add your two cents by e-mailing pieandcoffee@gmail.com, or leaving a voicemail message at 508.471.3897.

This week, Brendan Melican and I talk about the city:

• At-Large City Council candidate Grace Ross has come under fire (T&G, WoMag) for a statement she made about Israel’s war with Hezbollah, and her party’s statement on Darfur. (Relevant Wikipedia page: International response to the Darfur conflict)
• Brendan: “I think it’s gonna be a shame if she does lose any votes, and especially if she gets knocked off . . . because of something that really doesn’t seem to have a lot to do with the city.”
• Mike tells the joke about Mike Perotto and Darfur.
• Worcester Magazine’s Scott Zoback, who’s done most of the local reporting on Grace Ross’s foreign policy positions, is now defending himself on the Telegram & Gazette message boards. (The Speakeasy, aka The Sewer. I can’t find the thread mentioned; can someone send it to me? There are whole 30-post threads on there written by a single person. Crazy.) Update: Scott Zoback denies he’s posted anything. Our mistake.
• In positive news, the Worcester Cultural Coalition is making lots of grants available to individuals and organizations for cultural endeavors.
• In other positive news, you can now buy tasty, vegan, boxed lunches each day at noon at the Artichoke Food Co-op.

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This interview, by Jeff Dietrich and Susan Pollack, was originally published in the December 1971 Catholic Agitator. You may want to compare this with the portrait drawn of her in Cardinal O’Connor’s application for her sainthood.

CATHOLIC AGITATOR: I’d like first to ask you, are you an anarchist? And what does that mean to you in terms of your daily action?

DOROTHY DAY: Do you want me to go back into history? When I came from college, I was a socialist. I had joined the socialist party in Urbana Illinois and I wasn’t much thrilled by it. I joined because I had read Jack London—his essays, The Iron Heel, and his description of the London slums. I also read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. All of these made a deep impression on me. So when I was sixteen years old and in my first year of college, I joined the Socialist Party. But I found most of them “petty bourgeois.” You know the kind. They were good people, butchers and bakers and candlestick makers—mostly of German descent—very settled family people. And it was very theoretical. It had no religious connotations, none of the religious enthusiasm for the poor that you’ve got shining through a great deal of radical literature.

Then there was the IWW moving in, which was the typically American movement. Eugene Debs was a man of Alsace-Lorraine background. A religious man, he received his inspiration from reading Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. That started him off because he could have been a well-to-do bourgeois, comfortable man. But, here you have this whole American movement. The IWW has this motto: “An injury to one is an injury to all.” That appealed to me tremendously because I felt that we were all one body. I had read scripture, but I don’t think I’d ever really recognized that teaching of the “Mystical Body”—that were are all one body, we are all one.
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David Griffith, author of A Good War Is Hard to Find, points to a recent podcast interview with him and Wayne Kostenbaum. He doesn’t point to the mp3, so I’ve linked to it here [mp3]. You can also subscribe to the podcast feed and listen to more of the “Onword” podcast.

Another recent review of Good War at Not a Walking Encyclopedia.

Onword with Griffith and Kostenbaum [ 0:01 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

508 is a show about Worcester.

This week, Mike Benedetti talks with Brendan Melican, Kevin Ksen, and Bruce Russell.

You can download the mp3, see other formats, or subscribe to the podcast feed.

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Topics:

• Worcester Technical High School students “opt out” of military recruiting process in record numbers.
• Is Worcester’s homeless population on the decline? Mike doesn’t think so.
• Gary Rosen’s “Dukakis” moment.
• Why Grace Ross isn’t running for mayor.

Images: AP/Telegram & Gazette

The Catholic Peace Fellowship has printed some nice Franz Jägerstätter holy cards. They are asking a donation of 25 cents per card plus something for shipping.

Jägerstätter was an Austrian Catholic beheaded by the Nazis for not joining their army. He will be officially beatified next month.

Today let us remember Constance Coltman, the first woman ordained to Christian ministry in Britain, who was ordained 90 years ago this day.

(See also this earlier entry: Florence Li Tim-Oi.)

Just got back from a great weekend in Iowa at the Midwest Catholic Worker gathering.

Here’s a video taken during the group portrait, which hopefully shows both the setting and the 160+ people who were there.

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• More photos
• Video in more formats

508 is a show about Worcester.

On this debut episode, Mike Benedetti talks about resistance to a Worcester Wal-Mart with Shannon Senior, and about the preliminary City Council election with Brendan Melican.

You can download the mp3, see other formats, or subscribe to the podcast feed.

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You can contact the show at pieandcoffee@gmail.com, or leave a voicemail message at 508.471.3897.

Topics:

• Options for stopping or mitigating a Worcester Wal-Mart are running out
• The preliminary Council election was dominated by one big factor
• How much did the candidates spend per vote?
• The District 5 race: Rich Ball and baseball
• “I have a funning feeling we’re gonna see Gary—unless he pulls himself off the list—as mayor.”
• Bill McCarthy has no chance of winning, either because he fills to niche (Brendan) or because the Worcester Republican Blog’s endorsement is a curse (Mike)
• Telegram & Gazette misreports election results, then makes like Mirthala Salinas
• Brendan says nice things about Bill Coleman

The Worcester Telegram & Gazette printed a box on the front page today with the results of the preliminary election.

These results were totally wrong. However, the front page article got the results correct.

You can find the correct results at the City website (PDF) or at Worcester Activist.

The only “Who didn’t” listed correctly was Maritza Cruz; the other 5 all made the top 12, and are thus on the ballot. Supporters of Alaimo, Callahan, Dellasante, Grandone, and Mahoney must have all been pretty sad when they found out their candidates did not, in fact, “make the cut.”

If you had randomly assigned people to categories, you would have done better than this chart.

This especially distorts the performance of Grace Ross, who was the most successful challenger, coming in at #6 and beating 2 incumbents in the process.

T&G online correction:

A chart on the front page of some editions of today’s Telegram & Gazette gave incorrect results.

They owe people a pretty serious correction.

Thanks to an anonymous friend for the scans of the paper.

Update: The apology includes a nice chart:

The template had been produced earlier in the day to determine space needs and was mistakenly left on the page by the editor.