Easter Sunday needs to happen

“The times are tough but Easter needs to happen”

encouraged The Right Reverend Mark S. Sisk his parishioners to make offerings on the Easter Sunday mass in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

Sisk was installed as the Bishop of New York in the Cathedral on September 29, 2001.

The Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine

Consecrated hand in his small pants. What’s the price?

For a teacher from Wisconsin it is $25,000.

The man, who wrote a letter to the bishop in the Diocese Superior some 40 years after Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy had sexually abused him, asked a compensation of $25,000 from the Church:

“so I can forgive you and not be angry when I see the church.”

The man served as an alter boy at a church in Boulder Junction, in the Northwoods of Wisconsin when he encountered Father Murphy. He wrote the letter at age 52, in 2002, four years after the death of Murphy.

Only governments and laywers try to convert pain (emotional or physical) to dollar, but they do it and the amount is in any way bigger than nothing.

The $25,000 that the teacher asked for is nearly half of what the crime victim compensation program of Wisconsin offers to victims. The program pays up to $40,000 for expenses for out-of-pocket costs resulting from a violent crime including:

♦ Medical expenses
♦ Lost wages/support
♦ Mental health counseling
♦ Replacement services: homemaker and childcare services
♦ Attorney fees: up to 10 percent of award

Bringing a civil lawsuit against the institution responsible for the criminal is a costly and riskier way to proceed but in the world of money risk always equals to better earnings. In the case of the Diocese of Wilmington that serves about 230,000 Catholics in Delaware and the Eastern Shore of Maryland, a sex abuse case meant bankruptcy in October 2009.

Since 2002, the Diocese of Wilmington has settled eight cases for an average of about $780,000 each.

So God created LEGO

Brand-building at its best:

When Ericcson makes Swedish “fact-tanker”, Hans Rosling, tell his take on the drivers for the future, and he turns dry numbers into animations, two intangible assets increase their values. That of the Ericcson brand, and that of Rosling’s Gapminder. And at least for three minutes or so, one feels as if statistics make sense of the world.

Then you ask: At what speed is the number of the poorest one billion people increasing?

Our Faith in Flying

When Avianca Flight 21 took off from New York City on its way to Bogota people all around a European passenger crossed themselves.

The woman with a small dog in a carrier at her feet crossed herself twice. Her young son followed her example. So did the two businessmen in freshly ironed shirts and the elderly women who had interrupted their loud discussion only long enough for this briefest of religious rituals, before they went on chatting until the flight landed.

People’s religious acts does not disturb the airline business, in most cases. Making the sign of the Cross is certainly one of the most discrete forms of expressing faith.

Prayer, however, often comes with weird sounds and objects. This is an occasion when knowledge of religious observance would come in handy for a flight crew.

In January 2010 a flight landed in Philadelphia instead of Kentucky, its final destination, because the aircrew suspected a bomber in a young man affixing a small black box on his forehead and one on his arm with leather straps. His bowing up and down and unfamiliar incantations was cause for alarm for the unknowing flight attendants. They were forced to witness the morning prayer of 17-year-old Caleb Leibowitz, the US Airways Express flight’s Orthodox Jewish passenger.

As soon as someone’s safety rituals have the potential to create discomfort in other passengers, the airlines take action.

“It is somewhat “normal” for people to perform their own “safety” rituals prior to stepping on the plane. i.e.–Kissing the outside of the plane, crossing themselves & kissing the outside of the plane, knocking on the outside of the plane & then kissing it, doing a visual inspection of the doorway & then kissing the outside of the plane.”  Tyler Clark, flight attendant

A woman who held up the line by stopping at the door of the plane, tapping her foot up and down, had to leave — tells another unusual experience Tyler Clark, a blogger who claims to be a flight attendant.

“It really was more like she was moving her whole foot up and down. I tried to get her to move forward. But, it wasn’t going to happen until she had finished exorcising the evil from the plane with her foot,” Clark wrote.

Even such traditional figures as the Hare Krishna people of the Los Angeles International Airport were banned from soliciting in March, after 10 years of active presence.

Among the reasons of prohibiting the Hare Krishna from asking for support at the airport, Justice Carlos R Moreno listed the inconvenience travelers have to face while in a hurry, the possibility of missing flights, intimidation, fraud  and panhandling which may increase congestion.

“It can distribute literature and speak to willing travellers. It can even seek financial support, as long as it does not request the immediate exchange of funds,” Justice Moreno said.

"Remember," said the father, "never to fly very low or very high, for the fogs about the earth would weigh you down, but the blaze of the sun will surely melt your feathers apart if you go too near."

But so long as faith does not conflict with the airlines’ business interest, it is still free to be taken on board. Fortunately. For flying requires a huge amount of faith, whether one puts it in the airlines, in the pilot or in God.

Why is that pot boiling, explain it to me.

“Well, at one level, you can say it’s boiling, because the molecules of H20 are moving around excitedly, and they’re making the transition from the liquid state to the gaseous state. But you could also have answered just as readily, “The pot is boiling, because I turned the gas on,” or you could go a little further and say, “The pot is boiling, because I want tea.”

Religion, yes, it does—like every living system, it deserves to be treated in an evolutionary way, but to say that now that we have an evolutionary understanding of religion, we can dispense with theology is almost like saying, “Now that I understand how the pot is boiling, because of molecular motion, I can just dismiss as irrelevant the fact that I want tea.”

John Haught, theologian on NPR’s The Really Big Questions.

Thiruvananthapuram: where religion friends a communist

A communist Minister of Finance introducing a pro-religion budget for 2010-11?

This can only happen in a place called Thiruvananthapuram. The ancient South-Indian city was built on seven hills of the west seaside and today is the capital of the state Kerala. It was here that Finance Minister T.M. Thomas Isaac, a member of the Communist party, presented next year’s budget proposal on Friday with tax reductions and allocations that support religious activities.

Finance Minister, Thomas Issac presenting the state budget in the Kerala Assembly in Thiruvananthapuram on Friday. Photo: C.Ratheesh Kumar

The finance minister want to exempt several religious items from tax, such as rosaries, japa mala (Hindu and Buddhist prayer beads), vibhooti (sacred ash placed on the forehead in Hinduism) and robes priest wear for the Holy Mass.

Sales of objects serving spiritual purposes are not significant contributors to state trading anyway.

But the former economist didn’t stop here.

The  proposal also suggests a 10 percent tax increase for liquor, which makes sense in a state where on average a person consumes 8.3 litres a year. The number seems minor beside the 12.2 litres of pure alcohol per Scots in 2009, although drinking measures in different parts of the world cannot be perfectly compared. Kerala is the top drinking state in India and the Christian Church has been vehemently fighting the spread of drinking culture.

If the market of Kerala’s drinkers is as insensitive to prices as the Finnish — Fins have never been drinking less because of the high taxes on liquor — Isaac’s move would only benefit the state government, which receives a large portion of its revenue earnings from liquor consumption.

Sales of Kerala State Beverages Corporation are tipped to touch $115.77 million (Rs 5,300 crore) this fiscal, which will mean tax and excise earnings of over $87.37 million (Rs 4,000 crore) for the state government, The Economic Times reports.

But for beer and also for wine, an essential ingredient for holy communions, Isaac proposes a 10 percent tax reduction.

The Jama-at mosque in Kerala

He would also give an allocation of $43,865 (Rs 20 lakh) both to the Haj committee that makes arrangements for the pilgrimage of Muslims and the Wakf Board that ensures that buildings or plots of land for Muslim religious and charitable purposes (wakfs) are properly maintained.

“I have got the satisfaction of having done this much,” said Isaac at the end of his proposal, “Still more to be done.  Sir, I am very optimistic:

Let time sound its big bell / Let the winds come and shake everything / Sleeping in the darkness of the covering mist / Are fruits, trees and all this world / Is the cold night standing still? / Why is the noble dawn so delayed? / How I long to hug lovingly / The daylight I saw so clearly in my dream.“

The name of Kerala’s capital, Thiru-anantha-puram, means ’the city of Holy Anantha, another name for Vishnu, the Supreme God for the Vishnu follower tradition of Hinduism. While the origins of Kerala’s religious life is traced to Hinduism and more than half of its population are Hindu, Islam and Christianity also play a significant role on its religious palette. Apparently, on its political stage too.

St. Mary's Forance Church in Bharanamganam, one of the most ancient places in Kerala, attracts thousands of pilgrims from all over India.

Is it lean or is it “complean”?

One year after a majority of Americans said they hoped the sour economy wouldn’t impact their church giving, three in 10 Americans now say they’re putting less in the offering plate, the Religion News Service reported recently.

Well, three in 10 in 1,008 Americans is the right way to put it.

The news came from the Barna Group,  a for-profit research organization focused on the intersection of faith and culture, who had  showed a 45 percent increase in the percentage of Americans who have reduced their donations and a 20 percent cut in contributions of almost one-quarter of church donors.

To get to this result Barna Group interviewed “a random sample of 1,008 adults selected from across the continental United States, age 18 and older from January 26 to February 2, 2010.”

Meanwhile a group of nonprofit researchers (the Alban Insitute, The Lake Institute on Faith & Giving and The Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University) found that most of the congregations had an increase in fundraising receipts in the first half of 2009 compared to 2008. They interviewed 1,442 Protestant congregations about the financial impact of the recession.

Meanwhile  the writer of these lines visited Catholic, Lutheran and Presbyterian churches in the Bronx at the end of last year and found out about a powerful argument of why people are unlikely to change their traditions of generous year end donations any time soon: