September 2007

Congrats to Claire and Scott Schaeffer-Duffy! Past recipients of the Paulist Center’s Isaac Hecker Award for Social Justice include Dorothy Day, Cesar Chavez, Sister Helen Prejean, Father Fred Enman, and Paul Farmer.

Ken Hannaford Ricardi, Claire Schaeffer-Duffy, Scott Schaeffer-Duffy

Announcement:

The 2007 Isaac Hecker Award for Social Justice will be presented to Claire and Scott on Sat., Sept. 29 during the 6pm mass. A reception will follow in the auditorium. The Schaeffer-Duffys founded the Sts. Francis & Therese Catholic Worker, a lay Catholic community which shelters the homeless, promotes peace and justice, prays and lives simply in community. The Schaeffer-Duffys’ lives have exemplified faithful living, risk taking, living in solidarity with the poor and leading others toward action on behalf of peace and justice.

Claire on TV

See also:

• Father Isaac Hecker at Wikipedia
• SS. Francis & Thérèse: The first 20 years
• T&G article announcing the award (scroll down)

Bruce, Scott, and a cake

On Sunday morning, I went to a united service of Collinwood Road United Reformed Church, Oxford Korean Presbyterian Church, United Asian Evangelical Church, and Brazilian Assemblies of God. We were blessed four times at the end of the service, in turn English, Portuguese, Punjabi, and Korean. It was encouraging and exciting. There was a lunch feast afterwards with yummy Korean food. Then in the afternoon, I went to a service of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of England meeting at my church, Saint Columba’s United Reformed Church. Note that this is not the Evangelische Synode Deutscher Sprache in Großbritannien which has a congregation meeting at the University Church of Saint Mary the Virgin.

(This Saturday, I went into London to see the exhibition Sacred at the British Library, and the film Helvetica.)

The South Bend Catholic Worker today announced that they’re spinning off their drop-in center, Our Lady of the Road, as a nonprofit.

Mike Baxter announces the plans just before the end of mass at OLR.

They’re actively seeking donations to help them buy the drop-in center outright. You can’t make a tax-deductable donations at the moment, but you will soon be able to. Please contact peterclaverhouse@gmail.com for details.

OLR is open Friday and Saturday mornings, and is at 744 South Main Street in South Bend, Indiana. If you’d care to make a small donation right away, please bring by any of the following items:

• Coffee
• T-shirts
• Small canisters of shaving cream
• Dish soap
• Laundry soap
• Socks
• Trash bags (13 gal and 30 gal)

Grab yourself a cup of coffee while you’re there and hang out awhile.

New GI Rights Hotline number/website
GI Rights Hotline: 877.447.4487

See also: our interview with Mike Schorsch of the GI Rights Hotline on “How to Support the Troops.”

Tin Cup at Our Lady of the Road

I love this dog. More Our Lady of the Road pix.

Two from Doc Searls
On valuing freedom more than cushy jail cells: “. . . I believe that the final success of Linux, and of free and open source software, will be an economy that values freedom and choice as much as it values scarcity.”

Maybe they should call it ButtBook: “What we call ‘online social networks’ mostly are not. They are private walled gardens that exist for reasons that are far more commercial than social. We need to remember that.”

Good Globe article about Northboro Netflix facility
Apparently staffed by temps from Worcester:

The Northborough hub processes between 60,000 and 110,000 DVDs daily, and weekend returns make Tuesday the busiest day. Even as Cotto and her colleagues are tearing through hundreds of returned DVDs, they take moments to read the angry notes (“This doesn’t play – defective!”) or occasional rave reviews (“Very funny movie, check it out!”) that customers scribble on the paper sleeves.

“Mr. Hetero” huckster’s church robbed
An interesting blog post about a lousy event.

Great City Council quotes #1: Rick Rushton
A reader writes: “I offer up this stellar quote from the pool meeting at City Hall.”

“The word betterment is a good word, because you have the word better in it.”
—City Councilor Rick Rushton

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m pleased to say that the Catholic Peace Fellowship is launching a new web project, We Go on Record: An Online Community of Conscience.

The site is both a database of conscientious objector statements from people who were in the military, and a place for people who object to war to publish their own statements of conscience. Some civilians publish CO statements so that if there is ever a draft, they will be able to establish that they’ve opposed war for some time, which is supposed to make it easier for the military to decide that you are, in fact, a conscientious objector to war.

You can send suggestions and bug reports to me at pieandcoffee@gmail.com. More CO statements will be added in the next few days.

Related:

• Archibald Baxter
• Catholic Peace Fellowshop conference podcast: Joshua Casteel, Jonathan Lace, Daniel Baker
• Warcast #4: Conscientious objection, Marinus, and the sword
• Memories of Joseph Zarrella

Today on the 349th anniversary of his death, let us remember Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector, Commonwealth of England, who prayed:

Strengthen us O God, to relieve the oppressed,
to hear the groans of poor prisoners,
to reform the abuses of all professions;
that many be made not poor to make a few rich;
for Jesus Christ’s sake.
Amen.