The Associated Press reports that Temple Emanu-El, the only synagogue in Dothan, Alabama, has found a way to reverse their shrinking attendance and aging membership trends: offer “Jewish families as much as $50,000 to relocate and get involved” in the congregation.
The Guardian posed this question to four writers this past week. The question mirrors similar concerns in the United States where Christians often find negotiating a secular, pluralist society jarring.
Here is a collection of some of the good things that Episcopalians and their congregations that have made the news in their communities this past week.
The downturn is giving us fresh excuses for moral flagellation, of ourselves and others. If yesterday’s White House proselytized shopping, today’s is shaming bankers for their greed.The message: We sinned with profligacy, and now we repent in parsimony. Thrift is the new abstinence.
When I was around seven-years-old, I began praying every night for a baby sister whom I promised God would be named Hope Ann McDonnell with initials that would give her the nickname of HAM. Although I have no idea where I got that name and she never arrived, I realized as an adult that I stayed stuck in hope with no actualization.
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Life must be something more than dilettante speculation. And religion (ought to be if it isn’t) a great deal more than mere gratification of the instinct for worship linked with the straight-teaching of irreproachable credos. Religion must be life made true; and life is action, growth, development—begun now and ending never. And a life made true cannot confine itself—it must reach out and twine around every pulsing interest within reach of its uplifting tendrils.