In the Sudan, you must work with a broken heart
Change or Who moved my cheese?
The Pope in America on the Religion Report
To PNG with love
Signatures for peace
Hope comes in surprising guises
Leading Religious men named in Time 100
In the Sudan, you must work with a broken heart
When Melbourne Sister of Mercy Cathy Solano began work in early 2005 as Education Co-ordinator for the Diocese of El Obeid in central Sudan, she embarked on a journey that would affect her profoundly. Based in the Nuba Mountains, an area that had been traumatised by a 21-year civil war, she experienced an "overwhelming and exhausting frustration" and "many black periods of doubt". But accompanying these emotions was "an anger fuelled by hope".
In October 2007, as she was finishing up, Mercy Works Inc., the relief and development arm of the Institute of Sisters of Mercy of Australia, invited Cathy to reflect on her time
in Sudan.
"You must be courageous" and "you must work with a broken heart". These two pieces of advice I heard recently have helped me to make sense of the range of experiences and emotions I have encountered during my two and a half years in the Nuba Mountains ...
Cathy's reflections are currently posted on
Voices, the ejournal of John Garratt Publishing. To read her reflections, please
CLICK HERE.
Change or Who moved my cheese?
The latest newsletter from Encompass,
The Encompass Connection, is available on the web. Use this link to go to its feature article on
Change by clinical pyschologist, Jacqui Winship. The article starts on page 2.
CLICK HERE
The Pope in America on the Religion Report
CLICK HERE
To PNG with love
Would you like to help a group of young women from Wewak in Papua New Guinea achieve their goal of completing Year 10 so they can continue on to matriculation and tertiary studies?
Sister Kaye Bolwell, Co-ordinator of the Mercy Education Programme in Wewak, outlines an initiative whereby young women are making and selling bilums to help fund their education.
CLICK HERE
Signatures for peace
We, the undersigned, church leaders and representatives of our different denominations and organisations, join together on the 60th anniversary of the Israeli state to offer a contribution to that which makes for peace.
London, UK - Thurs May 8, 2008L More than 140 Christian leaders have made a unified call for a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians, to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the state of Israel. Their declaration is published today in The Independent newspaper. Never before has such a diverse range of prominent Christians acknowledged that for Palestinians, Israel's celebration has become a 'Catastrophe' (Nakba). They seek a shared solution to the longstanding conflict.
Signatories include Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire, New York Times' bestselling author of 'God's Politics' Jim Wallis, Evangelicals for Middle East Understanding, biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann and Oxford professor Christopher Rowland, 'emergent church' writer Brian McLaren, and the Primate of the Anglican Church in Australia, Phillip Aspinall ...
for details, and a complete list of the signatories,
CLICK HERE
Hope comes in surprising guises
(Recently) I (peace activitist John Dear SJ) drove up the mountain to the town of Los Alamos, birthplace of the bomb, along Trinity Drive past Oppenheimer Road near the National Nuclear Weapons Labs. I was there for a very unusual speaking invitation - to talk about peace and disarmament to a group of students at Los Alamos High School. I approached the doors with a vague sense of dread, but left exhilarated. These bright young students gave me hope.
to read what brought about the transformation,
CLICK HERE
Leading Religious men named in Time 100
by Ecumenical News International (in
Ekklesia), 8 May 2008:
Bartholomeos I, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, has joined the Dalai Lama as one of two international religious figures named in the "Time 100" list, the people deemed by Time magazine to be the world's most influential persons - writes Chris Herlinger.
In a tribute to the 68-year-old Bartholomeos, appearing in the 12 May issue of the US-based news weekly, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury and leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion, praised the Eastern Orthodox Patriarch by noting Bartholomeos' commitment to addressing issues related to the environment.
"In a way that is profoundly loyal to the traditions of worship and reflection in the Eastern Orthodox Church, he has insisted that ecological questions are essentially spiritual ones," Williams wrote about Bartholomeos, who is sometimes called the "Green Patriarch", because of his because of his public support for the environmental cause.
"He has stressed that a world in which God the Creator uses the material stuff of the universe to communicate who he is and what he wants is one that demands reverence from human beings," Williams wrote. "Probably more than any other religious leader from any faith, Patriarch Bartholomeos, has kept open this spiritual dimension of environmentalism."
Istanbul-based Bartholomeos is not a figure as well known in the West as the Dalai Lama or Pope Benedict XVI - a fact noted by Williams, who wrote: "The Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople enjoys a resonant historical title but, unlike the Pope in the Roman Catholic context, has little direct executive power in the world of Eastern Orthodoxy. Patriarchs have had to earn their authority on the world stage, and, in fact, not many Patriarchs in recent centuries have done much more than maintain the form of their historic dignities."
for further details, click on the name
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