Religion and Global Warming: A Wager

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by
Ben
2 days, 17 hours ago
in Politics, Recommendations, Religion, Social Commentary and The Environment
. 10 Comments

This column also ran on UPI’s Religion and Spirituality Forum.

Sometime this fall, HarperCollins’ imprint, HarperOne, will be releasing a “Green Bible,” in which all of the scriptural passages that speak to the Christian responsibility to care for creation will be printed in green letters. Also bound between the eco-friendly covers of this Bible will be several essays and a couple of poems by great Christian thinkers such as St. Francis, Desmond Tutu, and Wendell Berry.

Last week HarperOne interviewed me for a short video that will be used as part of its advance publicity for the Green Bible.  During the interview I had to answer questions about the connection between faith and environmentalism, and for the most part, I think I gave responses worthy of my being the pastor of one of the most intentionally and publicly green Presbyterian congregations in the United States (and perhaps the world).

On one question, however, I think I stumbled: “why,” the interviewer asked, “should Christians care about global warming?” For an answer I sort of mumbled through what I hoped would make for a good sound byte, something about global warming being an issue in which care for the earth and care for humanity intersect. It’s not a bad answer, but my thoughts about global warming are a little more complex than the answer I gave. Continue reading ‘Religion and Global Warming: A Wager’

Fingerprinting Roma in Italy: A Time For Outrage

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by
Ben
3 weeks, 4 days ago
in Peacemaking, Politics, Social Commentary and Social Justice
. 6 Comments

This column also ran on UPI’s Religion and Spirituality Forum

“What the duck?”

Those were my exact words (except that I made no mention of water fowl) when, on my car radio, I heard that the newly re-elected Italian Prime Minister’s government, in emulation of Nazi Germany, has begun fingerprinting and registering Roma people living in Italy –—citizens and immigrants alike. (In English the Roma often are called “Gypsies,” a term I’ll avoid using here because most Roma people find the word offensive.)

I’ll admit it: I dropped the F-bomb, the mother of all cuss words. It is language that didn’t exactly match the white dog collar I happened to be wearing at the time (I was driving home from a graveside funeral), but I said it anyway, and I think the sentiment was appropriate, especially for a man of the cloth.

After all, this is 2008, almost seventy years after the Holocaust, when as many as 500,000 Roma people died alongside European Jews in Nazi concentration camps. The human family—especially in Europe—was supposed to evolve beyond such ethnic bigotry. The Holocaust is still a living memory for many people in the world today. What’s wrong with our collective recollection? Continue reading ‘Fingerprinting Roma in Italy: A Time For Outrage’

A Meal Born Free

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Ben
1 month ago
in General
. 17 Comments

This column also ran on UPI’s Religion and Spirituality Forum.

There is, then, a politics of food that, like any politics, involves our freedom. We still (sometimes) remember that we cannot be free if our minds and voices are controlled by someone else. But we have neglected to understand that we cannot be free if our food and its sources are controlled by someone else. The condition of the passive consumer of food is not a democratic condition. One reason to eat responsibly is to live free. (Wendell Berry, “The Pleasures of Eating,” from What are People For? Berkeley: North Point Press, 1990.)

At the end of June a group of green-minded Presbyterians from around the United States took an eco-tour of Silicon Valley. They came to see the restoration of wetland habitats in downtown San Jose and to learn about high-tech recycling. Then they visited my church.

The congregation I serve has a large community garden and we were the first officially recognized green business in Silicon Valley. Our eco-friendly Calvinists visitors were interested in learning what it looks like when a church goes green. Continue reading ‘A Meal Born Free’

Ben Daniel, Cub Reporter.

Published
by
Ben
1 month, 2 weeks ago
in General
. 2 Comments

I was recruited by the Presbyterian Church’s news service to cover a bit of business at the General Assembly this week. Here is the report I filed.  The one bit of innovative reporting I was able to achieve involved the translation of the Heidelberg Catechism in Spanish. No one at the committee meeting (including the experts) knew that the official PC(USA) Spanish translation of the Heidelberg Catechism is different from the English translation in Question 87.  In English all “homosexual perversion” is condemned. In Spanish only sex between men is mentioned. It’s an interesting twist…

Salvation by Beer

Published
by
Ben
1 month, 2 weeks ago
in Peacemaking, Religion and Social Commentary
. 10 Comments

This post was also published on UPI’s Religion and Spirituality Forum on June 22, 2008.

In the brave new world of blogging, there is an emerging breed of friendship, one in which a person writes an entry on her or his blog, a complete stranger leaves a response, and, after some cyber chat, the two people meet in person, bringing the conversation out of the internet’s ether and into real life.

This happened to me last Thursday.

Earlier in the week I had published a column in which I quoted a sermon by John Calvin as a way of supporting the notion that Presbyterians ought not break fellowship with one another over our divergent views on human sexuality. The column was (by my standards) well-read and it generated a lot of comments on my website.

One of the responders—who wrote a thoughtful dissent—gave his full name and mentioned that he was planning to be in my hometown of San Jose for the Presbyterian Church’s General Assembly, the mammoth biennial meeting of the denomination’s highest governing body. I invited him for coffee but we went out for a beer instead, Continue reading ‘Salvation by Beer’

To the Presbyterians Meeting In My Hometown.

Published
by
Ben
1 month, 3 weeks ago
in Religion, Social Commentary and Social Justice
. 18 Comments

This column was also published on UPI’s Religion and Spirituality Forum.

On June 20th the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) will convene its biannual meeting in San Jose. For the following nine days something like five thousand Presbyterians will be in my hometown, working, arguing, worshiping, and partying.

When the General Assembly meets this year I’ll have a front row seat because I have the odd distinction of being the Presbyterian Minister of Word and Sacrament who lives closest to the convention. This is not an accomplishment that makes me eligible for any kind of recognition or honor. I’m not even going to get a tee shirt, let alone fifteen minutes in a pulpit at one of the Assembly’s several worship services, but if my proximity awarded me the opportunity to address the General Assembly of the PC(USA) I’d remind those gathered to be inspired by our Calvinist tradition and set aside any talk of schism. Continue reading ‘To the Presbyterians Meeting In My Hometown.’

A Clergyman’s Support for Striking Janitors

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by
Ben
2 months, 1 week ago
in General
. 11 Comments

This column also ran on UPI’s Religion and Spirituality Forum on May 26, 2008. 

Last week Maria stopped by my office to talk to me about her desire to get out of poverty.  For thirteen years she has worked 40 hours a week as a janitor at the Palo Alto headquarters of Hewlett Packard, one of Silicon Valley’s largest and wealthiest corporations. Under the terms of her current contract with Somer Building Management, the janitorial contractor who employs her, she is unable to earn more than the eleven dollars an hour with which she supports a disabled husband and a teenaged son.

Those eleven dollars an hour don’t go very far. Continue reading ‘A Clergyman’s Support for Striking Janitors’

Book Review: “The Family” by Jeff Sharlet

Published
by
Ben
2 months, 1 week ago
in General, Politics, Recommendations, Religion, Social Commentary, Social Justice and The Arts
. 5 Comments

This column was first published on UPI’s Religion and Spirituality Forum on May 26, 2008.

Jeff Sharlet is the best journalist currently covering American religion. Among those who connect subject to predicate, there are few who do so with Sharlet’s grace, insight, or humor. His recently published book, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Harper Collins, 2008, $25.95 cloth) was every bit as good as I expected it to be. Often, while reading The Family I found myself interrupting the conversations of those around me to read aloud Jeff’s well-crafted insights.

The subject of Sharlet’s book is “The Family,” also called “The Fellowship,” a self-identified “Christian Mafia” which, for seven decades, has operated in the shadows of American power, exerting great influence without accountability or oversight. They are evangelists and powerbrokers with a theocratic agenda, a lust for power, and a strange fondness for such creeps of history as Adolf Hitler, Mao Tsedung, and Genghis Khan. Continue reading ‘Book Review: “The Family” by Jeff Sharlet’

From the Archives: A Perspective on Proposition 22

Published
by
Ben
2 months, 3 weeks ago
in General, Politics, Religion, Social Commentary and Social Justice
. 5 Comments

In celebration of the California Supreme Court’s decision to strike down laws baring same-sex marriage, I have pulled the transcript of my first radio commentary from the archives. This commentary was broadcast in February of 2000. An extended version of this commentary ran on Beliefnet, opposite a piece by James Dobson, who–naturally–supported California’s Proposition 22, which provided for a strictly heterosexual definition of marriage in California


Soon Californians will be privileged to vote on a ballot initiative, dubbed Proposition 22, which, if passed, would enact a statute whose entire wording, written in ten point font, could fit inside a fortune cookie: Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.

And so it is that our own dear state which gave the nation the Free Speech Movement, the legalization of medical marijuana and Boogie Nights now stands poised, at the cusp of a new millennium, ready to position itself in the avant garde of the Reactionary Right. Continue reading ‘From the Archives: A Perspective on Proposition 22′

Rejecting the Racist vote

Published
by
Ben
2 months, 3 weeks ago
in General, Peacemaking, Politics, Social Commentary and Social Justice
. 6 Comments

This column also was published on UPI’s Religion and Spirituality Page on May 12, 2008

OK, so the Democratic primary season is just about over, and this may be a moot point, but as Hillary Clinton wages her final efforts to convince Democrats that she should be the nominee in November, I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with her rhetoric because it seems to contain a racist subtext which panders to the worst elements of American society. Continue reading ‘Rejecting the Racist vote’