To make the most impact, I give to only a few charitable organizations, and one is the Friends of the World Food Program. The World Food Program has a good history of food relief, with an excellent record of efficiency and the capacity to make a real difference. The Friends is the US support affiliate.
With […]
I’m looking at some major Christian united-uniting churches to see how they define church membership and turned to the ever-interesting Uniting Church of Australia. More about that later; I found something even more interesting.
As you may know, the Australian interior is multi-ethnic but very thinly populated, making for special social accommodations — like radio schools […]
There’s a truism I heard at seminary of the ol’ days — Victorian, Edwardian eras — when women weren’t widely ordained that they could do overseas what they couldn’t do at home. Lay ministry meant more if you were a missionary.
A bit closer to North American and European shores — but not too close — […]
A few days ago, Andrew Sullivan quoted an Orthodox chanted litany of a monk condemned to a Soviet gulag.
It sounds like the words I imagine the apostles sang on Holy Saturday and the prayers of people lost in great suffering.
The gold-plated record we sent into space in 1977 said more about the the people who sent it than any realistic hope that it would be found and interpreted.
Now we have coming a seed vault on Spitsbergen, in the Norwegian Svalbard archipelago, to preserve the world’s agricultural genetic heritage, a.k.a. the “doomsday seed bank.” What […]
Stephen Lingwood’s reportage of a new Unitarian chapel and retreat center in the Orkney Islands appeals to me in a lot of ways.
While this would be the most northerly outpost for Unitarianism in the British Isles, the Unitarian Unitarian Fellowship of Fairbanks (Alaska) is father north, and perhaps too the small group in St. Petersburg. […]
I have written before about Qaanaaq, the palindrome formerly known as Thule, in Greenland. Last night I found this website for the Thule (United States) Air Force Base “next door” to Qaanaaq. The base command has a “lifestyle” suite of pages on its site, including information about accomodation, dining, shopping and the chapel. Nice to […]
For churches in far-flung places, nobody gets more mileage than the Orthodox. I’ve been poking around the Internet looking at Orthodox Church in America parishes and chapels in remote Alaska (after watching an episode of Deadliest Catch; but more about them later) but then cast my net back to “familiar” grounds: the Antarctic.
Another reason I like out-of-the-way churches (if not so out of the way as Tristan da Cunha or South Georgia Island) is that they tend to cut through to essentials. If there are only a scant number of English speaking Christians in Country X, you had better not appeal to a strict form of churchmanship […]
Tristan da Cunha is a veritable metropolis next to South Georgia Island, which has no permenant residents but a museum and research station, yet more tourists, and countless penguins. The only settlement — if you can call it that — is Grytviken.
It has a little church of Norwegian origins, and remarkably enough, witnessed its first […]
