An hour with the extraordinary humanity of Congressman John Lewis. The civil rights movement he helped animate was — as he tells it — love in action. He opens up the art and the discipline that made nonviolence work then — and that he offers up for our common life even today. John Lewis so gives voice to the meaning of Passover and Holy Week.
Krista Tippett interviews civil rights legend and Congressman John Lewis in Montgomery, Alabama during the Congressional Civil Rights Pilgrimage. Amazing man!
~Trent Gilliss, senior editor
“I hope the conclave will not go on too long. All I know is that I’m just taking in a small ‘carry-on’ piece of baggage. If we’re in there too long, and if they show photographs of St. Martha’s from outside Vatican City, my room will be the one with the laundry hanging in the window to dry!”
~Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York, from his blog
Today, 115 Roman Catholic cardinals attended the Mass for the election of a new pope. The cardinals then entered into conclave while singing “Veni Creator Spiritus,” a Christian hymn invoking the blessing of the Holy Spirit.
Photo by George Martell, licensed under Creative Commons (BY-ND 2.0)
Bracketology at its best. Who’s going to start a pool on The Sweet Sistine? Much respect to David Gibson, Daniel Burke, and David Herrera at Religion News Service for this light-hearted take on the papal conclave:
More than 100 Roman Catholic cardinals will gather in the Sistine Chapel in March. One will emerge as pope. Who will it be? The “Sweet Sistine” is our guess at the top candidates from each continent.
You can vote below for who you think would move on to the next round in each matchup. First-round voting closes at midnight Eastern on Friday (March 1).
~Trent Gilliss, senior editor
This man is a voice for all ages and all seasons. Sadly, most people have probably never heard of this great civil rights leader. Vincent Harding wrote speeches for Martin Luther King Jr. and was one of his closest friends. But, he doesn’t live in the past. He is teaching new generations about the lessons of that time — and how those lessons can repair divisions in America today. He finds hope in young people today and says they are his answer to the question that drives him: “Is America possible?”
Wow. This SuperBowl commercial is a testament to the power of religious language, Paul Harvey, and the dream of America presented through rural imagery:
And on the eighth day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, “I need a caretaker.” So God made a farmer.
God said, “I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, milk cows, work all day in the field, milk cows again, eat supper, then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the school board.” So God made a farmer.
God said, “I need somebody willing to sit up all night with a newborn colt and watch it die, then dry his eyes and say,’Maybe next year,’ I need somebody who can shape an ax handle from an ash tree, shoe a horse with hunk of car tire, who can make a harness out hay wire, feed sacks and shoe scraps. Who, during planting time and harvest season will finish his 40-hour week by Tuesday noon and then, paining from tractor back, put in another 72 hours.” So God made the farmer.
God said, “I need somebody strong enough to clear trees and heave bales, yet gentle enough to yean lambs and wean pigs and tend the pink-comb pullets, who will stop his mower for an hour to splint the leg of a meadowlark.”
It had to be somebody who’d plow deep and straight and not cut corners. Somebody to seed, weed, feed, breed, and brake, and disk, and plow, and plant, and tie the fleece and strain the milk, . Somebody who’d bale a family together with the soft, strong bonds of sharing, who would laugh, and then sigh and then reply with smiling eyes when his son says that he wants to spend his life doing what Dad does. “So God made a farmer.”
Prague, Czech Republic
(via travelbyfoldingamap)
Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else’s suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, you take communion, you make a community with others.
— Mary Karr from her 2010 interview with Judy Valente on PBS’ Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.
(via trentgilliss)
All this journalistic analysis around the ‘Nones’ as the demise of religion. But so many of them are ethically and spiritually passionate. The new non-religious represent the evolution of faith, not its demise. They will restore the great traditions to their own deepest truths.
What makes me a believer is that from time to time, there have been glimpses I’ve had which have made me suspect the presence of something extraordinary and beyond the realm of the immediate. You encounter the holy in various forms, which, unless you have your eyes open, you might not even notice.
—Frederick Buechner, writer and theologian from 
