Month: April 2007

Catholic street church news

Here are some reader submissions. Thanks!

Tent city at St. Jude Catholic Church in Redmond, Washington:

St. Jude Catholic Church welcomed Tent City 4 to its Redmond location on February 10th. The city of Redmond, where a one bedroom apartment generally rents for $911 to $1188 a month, issued a permit, but then rescinded it, threatening to fine St. Jude up to $500.00 a day for occupying the space. The stay could end up costing the church more than $37,000, which it says it will pay with donations, not parish funds.

In March, I visited tent city and interviewed pastor David Rogerson and three residents of tent city.

Redmond tent city, Indymedia photo
Indymedia photo

Spanish archbishop shuts down parish with unorthodox priests:

The archbishop of Madrid has shut down a parish where priests said Mass in street clothes and handed out cookies as the holy communion, his office said Monday.

The parish of San Carlos Borromeo, in the working-class Vallecas district of Spain’s capital, was popular among poor people, former prisoners, recovering drug addicts and immigrants.

Misa 1 Abril
Parish of San Carlos Borromeo photo

Liturgical abuse bugs me, but there’s always so much going on in a situation like this, you never know the real story.

San Francisco greens plastic shopping bags

WorldChanging has a good roundup:

This week the San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved the Plastic Bag Reduction Ordinance, which bans the use of plastic shopping bags by large supermarkets. The ordinance requires these grocery stores to use either compostable bags, made from corn starch or other vegetable-based materials and containing no petroleum products, or recyclable paper bags containing a minimum of 40 percent post-consumer recycled content.

[…]

The San Francisco Department of the Environment estimates that currently about 180 million plastic shopping bags are distributed in San Francisco each year. About 774,000 gallons of oil are used to produce this number of shopping bags.

It’s been pointed out that the Supervisor who sponsored this legislation is a Green:

Supervisor [Ross] Mirkarimi cofounded the California chapter of the Green Party over 14 years ago . . . .

Personally, I’d like to see people switch to greener shopping bags voluntarily, rather than through force. (Retailers would, too.) Maybe this will make greener bags more widely available to retailers elsewhere. Who knows.

Discussing “A Good War Is Hard to Find”

goodwar_small.pngThis week we’re publishing some thoughts on David Griffith’s book A Good War Is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America. We’ll be featuring Dave’s response, too.

The first reviews are from Mike Benedetti and Christine Lavallee.

Several of the essays in the book are available on-line, in excerpted or adapted form:

See also:

God, violence, and what I watched growing up

goodwar_small.pngMost young Americans don’t have a firsthand experience of war. Many grow up with no experience of intense violence at all. Their attitudes towards these things are shaped by art: books, TV shows, the news, and movies.

David Griffith, author of A Good War Is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence In America, is one of those people. So am I.

My peers and I really didn’t question violent entertainment while we were growing up, I think in part because we figured the stories told by adults were probably a good reflection of the world. (Today’s young people may be naturally more skeptical of these sorts of stories, since they can easily share their own videos with their peers over the Internet, and because their video games are more immersive—they can all use adult tools to act out their own stories. For people of my and Griffith’s generation, access to these tools implied some sort of legitimacy.)

In the essay “Some Proximity to Darkness” in Good War, Griffith revists the movies that shaped his sensibilities as a young man, this time taking a cold, hard look at them. I was shaped by many of these movies, and while reading the book I felt that Griffith was taking a cold, hard look inside my own head. Quite a trip.
Continue reading “God, violence, and what I watched growing up”