Health Care Clinic...

Peace,
A.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Ecce No Homo...

Here is the Daily Show's take on the recent offer from the Roman Catholic Church to former Anglicans seeking a home.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Ecce No Homo
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

"I believe that's Anglican for..."

Peace,
A.

Who Are We...

Check out this new video from The Episcopal Church.



And now check out Around One Table for more information and videos about The Episcopal Church.

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A.

God and Dog...

Here is a cute little video:



H/T Seven Whole Days

Peace,
A.

A Note from Michael Moore...

It's been a little while since I was last around. What can I say? Life is busy. I'm in the thick of seminary life again, and I am loving it. I could write about all that has happened in the past month or so since I last updated, but I won't. Instead I offer this letter from Michael Moore. Enjoy!

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For Those of You on Your Way to Church This Morning ...a note from Michael Moore

Friends,

I'd like to have a word with those of you who call yourselves Christians (Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Bill Maherists, etc. can read along, too, as much of what I have to say, I'm sure, can be applied to your own spiritual/ethical values).

In my new film I speak for the first time in one of my movies about my own spiritual beliefs. I have always believed that one's religious leanings are deeply personal and should be kept private. After all, we've heard enough yammerin' in the past three decades about how one should "behave," and I have to say I'm pretty burned out on pieties and platitudes considering we are a violent nation who invades other countries and punishes our own for having the audacity to fall on hard times.

I'm also against any proselytizing; I certainly don't want you to join anything I belong to. Also, as a Catholic, I have much to say about the Church as an institution, but I'll leave that for another day (or movie).

Amidst all the Wall Street bad guys and corrupt members of Congress exposed in "Capitalism: A Love Story," I pose a simple question in the movie: "Is capitalism a sin?" I go on to ask, "Would Jesus be a capitalist?" Would he belong to a hedge fund? Would he sell short? Would he approve of a system that has allowed the richest 1% to have more financial wealth than the 95% under them combined?

I have come to believe that there is no getting around the fact that capitalism is opposite everything that Jesus (and Moses and Mohammed and Buddha) taught. All the great religions are clear about one thing: It is evil to take the majority of the pie and leave what's left for everyone to fight over. Jesus said that the rich man would have a very hard time getting into heaven. He told us that we had to be our brother's and sister's keepers and that the riches that did exist were to be divided fairly. He said that if you failed to house the homeless and feed the hungry, you'd have a hard time finding the pin code to the pearly gates.

I guess that's bad news for us Americans. Here's how we define "Blessed Are the Poor": We now have the highest unemployment rate since 1983. There's a foreclosure filing once every 7.5 seconds. 14,000 people every day lose their health insurance.

At the same time, Wall Street bankers ("Blessed Are the Wealthy"?) are amassing more and more loot -- and they do their best to pay little or no income tax (last year Goldman Sachs' tax rate was a mere 1%!). Would Jesus approve of this? If not, why do we let such an evil system continue? It doesn't seem you can call yourself a Capitalist AND a Christian -- because you cannot love your money AND love your neighbor when you are denying your neighbor the ability to see a doctor just so you can have a better bottom line. That's called "immoral" -- and you are committing a sin when you benefit at the expense of others.

When you are in church this morning, please think about this. I am asking you to allow your "better angels" to come forward. And if you are among the millions of Americans who are struggling to make it from week to week, please know that I promise to do what I can to stop this evil -- and I hope you'll join me in not giving up until everyone has a seat at the table.

Thanks for listening. I'm off to Mass in a few hours. I'll be sure to ask the priest if he thinks J.C. deals in derivatives or credit default swaps. I mean, after all, he must've been good at math. How else did he divide up two loaves of bread and five pieces of fish equally amongst 5,000 people? Either he was the first socialist or his disciples were really bad at packing lunch. Or both.

Yours,
Michael Moore

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Peace,
A.

Centering Prayer 101...

Here is a short little video by Father Matthew Moretz introducing some basics on centering prayer:



Peace,
A.

On being a Middler...

So it has been awhile since I last posted. I arrived safely back at Sewanee from Naples about two weeks ago. I had planned on writing a long post about my CPE experience during the summer, but I have decided that I am getting tired of talking about it.

So here's the skinny on CPE instead of just a really long post: It was good. It was hard. It was long. I learned a lot. I had fun. I got angry. I cried quite a bit. I laughed quite a bit. My colleauges were excellent. My supervisor sucked (most of the time). Naples is really nice. Florida is really hot in June-August. The beach was great. The end.

Since getting back to TN my router in the house has been acting up and so I have had internet service that has been touch and go (and that is really the reason why I haven't updated my blog). Thankfully they [internet technician folks] arrived today only two days after they were supposed to be here, and after quite a bit of complaining on my part about their tardiness (I did manage to score 6 months of free internet service the company because of their error).

Classes at the School of Theology started last Thursday--it is going to be a busy semester. And I'm officially a middler--only two years to go! Here is the schedule:

- Monday: Episcopal Church History
- Tuesday: Pastoral Theology
- Wednesday: Homiletics and a course on the Resurrection
- Thursday: New Testament Foundations II
- Friday: no classes

On top of my classes I am herding children acolytes again for the school, starting my field education in a local parish, and serving on a few committees.

Teddy is back--my parents brought him down last Saturday. It is good to have him back and it was good to see mom and dad last week.

Well that's all for now. I have to finish reading for class this evening. I will write more soon.

Peace,
A.

The debate over universal healthcare is raging on here in the States, and Salon.com has an excellent article up about former British PM Winston Churchill and his work to bring socialized medicine to the UK. Here is the link to the article.
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Winston Churchill was a Bolshevik

Guess who helped launch socialized healthcare in the U.K.? The ultimate conservative icon -- and he was proud of it

By Joe Conason

Aug. 14, 2009 | Long before many of today’s frothing right-wing demagogues were born, American conservatives came to idolize Winston Churchill, the late Tory prime minister whose wartime leadership of the British people transformed into the living symbol of democracy armed. That reputation was cemented by his legendary Missouri speech in 1946 warning of the “Iron Curtain” drawn by the Soviet Communists across Eastern Europe. Indeed, journalists and bloggers on the right admire the old warhorse so much that he has even outpolled Ronald Reagan as their “Man of the Century.”

Yet by the standards of the present moment, as these same conservatives mobilize against health care reform to “stop socialism,” that same great man was actually a raving Bolshevik. For among his most enduring legacies was the founding and sustenance of the system that became the National Health Service. Arguably as much as any other British politician, it was Churchill who established “socialized medicine.”

Perhaps it is a forlorn hope that facts and history can make any impression on the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Chuck Grassley, or Bill Kristol, but let’s try anyway -- because it is worth understanding that despite the low quality of our own so-called conservatives, there was once another kind.

Churchill was renowned as a politician who put country and civilization above party. The government he led during World War II was a broad coalition of the British parties, from his own Conservatives to the democratic socialists of Labor. Midway through the war, Churchill’s government asked Sir William Beveridge, a Liberal Party social reformer and economist to study systems of social insurance that could reduce poverty, disease, unemployment and illiteracy in Britain.

In 1942, Beveridge issued an far-reaching report that proposed a national health service to provide medical care to every man, woman and child, regardless of means -- much as the coalition government had done during the medical emergency brought on by the German bombings of their cities, hospitals and clinics.

Although Churchill endorsed the idea of a national health system, his party lost the first post-war general election in 1945, partly because British voters didn’t trust the Tories to implement the Beveridge report. Instead a Labor government established universal care under the NHS in 1948.

Only three years later, the Tories returned to power with Churchill restored as prime minister. At that point, the NHS could still have been killed -- and many members of the Tory party, not to mention the British Medical Association, were eager to do so.

But Churchill asked Claude Guillebaud, a Cambridge economist, to head a committee to study the performance and efficiency of the NHS. The Gillebaud committee found that the NHS was highly effective – and needed additional funding to insure that effectiveness would continue. There was no more talk of dismantling the very popular service, and instead the Tories under Churchill and his immediate successors allocated more money to build additional clinics and hospitals. Even Margaret Thatcher, the most ideological Tory prime minister of modern times, promised voters that “the NHS is safe in our hands.”

As a lifelong conservative with a strong dedication to enterprise and merit (and a host of less admirable right-wing prejudices), Churchill would have bristled at anyone who dared to describe him as a socialist. Why then did he promote and protect the NHS? Partly out of political expediency, no doubt, but also because he felt an ethical obligation that seems not to trouble the contemporary conservatives who profess to admire him.

In March 1944, he eloquently explained his views on medicine and society to the members of Royal College of Physicians in London:

The discoveries of healing science must be the inheritance of all. That is clear. Disease must be attacked, whether it occurs in the poorest or the richest man or woman simply on the ground that it is the enemy; and it must be attacked just in the same way as the fire brigade will give its full assistance to the humblest cottage as readily as to the most important mansion. Our policy is to create a national health service in order to ensure that everybody in the country, irrespective of means, age, sex, or occupation, shall have equal opportunities to benefit from the best and most up-to-date medical and allied services available.

That is what he helped to do -- and for the rest of his life, he fought against the impression that his old adversaries in Labor had established the system alone.

Lately, the subject of the NHS erupted into the American debate over health care when Investors Business Daily, a hard-line right-wing financial publication based in New York, suggested in an editorial that a statist system like Britain’s would have left Stephen Hawking, the Nobel physicist and popular author, to die of Lou Gehrig’s disease, which has afflicted him since he was 21 years old. That ignorant screed prompted Hawking -- who has of course lived in Britain all his life -- to declare that the NHS had saved his life. Furious Britons of all political parties leaped forward to defend their medical system, mocking the dumb American right-wingers and overwhelming Twitter with messages hashmarked “I love the NHS.”

Whatever the marvels and defects of the NHS may be – and most experts agree that it does a superb job despite inadequate funding -- its importance for the debate over American health care reform may be moral rather than practical. Imagine what kind of country we would inhabit if those who claim to represent conservatism in America possessed even a small measure of the human compassion and political decency of Churchill at his best. It is a standard that they do not even attempt to achieve these days.

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Peace,
A.

Julie and Julia...

So I saw Julie & Julia earlier today, and I loved it! Meryl Streep is brilliant as Julia Child, and Amy Adams is cute as a button playing Julie Powell.

In honor of the movie and Julia Child here is Dan Akroyd playing Julia on SNL.



Here is the Salon.com review of the movie.

Go and see it!

Peace,
A.

Nazism is not a metaphor...

Rachel Maddow interviews Frank Schaeffer about the Right's comparison of President Obama to Adolf Hitler. It is an excellent interview and I would encourage you to listen to Mr. Schaeffer's powerful words.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Peace,
A.