From Roseann

When In Doubt, Sing: Prayer in Daily Life by Jane Redmont. This book is so spirit renewing!

I'm riding the health roller coaster again. Had some tests done and should get the results today. Hopefully I won't have to go back to the hospital. I'm having a hard time keeping my chin up right now. Gary has gone back to work which is great. I miss him so much though. Poor baby me, can't stand to be away from him for 8 hours. LOL It is probably really good for him though to be away from me and around healthy people.

Leave a word at Give Peace a Chance, Please.

Update on Roseann:

From Sue:

Mimi,

Roseann is being admitted to the hospital this afternoon. I'll keep you posted. She must have her laptop with her, because she told me she'd send me a room number when she could.

Sue

Lest We Forget Too Soon

From the Guardian:

faces of the dead and detained

We want to put a face to each of those hundreds - possibly thousands - killed or arrested since the Iranian election.

Have a look at their website.

Remember and pray for the safety and release of the detained and for the families of the dead.

And Did You Know...?

From a reader.

Obama Family Chooses A Church

From Time:

For the past five months, White House aides and friends of the Obamas have been quietly visiting local churches and vetting the sermons of prospective first ministers in a search for a new — and uncontroversial — church home. Obama has even sampled a few himself, attending services at 19th Street Baptist on the weekend before his inauguration and celebrating Easter at St. John's Episcopal Church.

Now, in an unexpected move, Obama has told White House aides that instead of joining a congregation in Washington, D.C., he will follow in George W. Bush's footsteps and make his primary place of worship Evergreen Chapel, the nondenominational church at Camp David.

A number of factors drove the decision — financial, political, personal — but chief among them was the desire to worship without being on display. Obama was reportedly taken aback by the circus stirred up by his visit to 19th Street Baptist in January.
....

Each week, regardless of whether the President is on-site, Evergreen Chapel holds nondenominational Christian services open to the nearly 400 military personnel and staff at Camp David, as well as their families. A music director from nearby Hood College coordinates adult and children's choirs (Clinton sang occasionally with the choir when he visited). In December, the kids in the congregation put on a Christmas pageant and the chapel holds a candlelight service on Christmas Eve.

A wise decision, I believe. Had he chosen a DC church, he would have created a media circus each time he attended, and he and his family would have had no privacy in their worship.

Camp David's current chaplain, Lieut. Carey Cash, leads the services at Evergreen. If the White House had custom-ordered a pastor to be the polar opposite of Jeremiah Wright, they could not have come as close as Cash. (As it is, the White House had no hand in selecting Cash. The Navy rotates chaplains through Camp David every three years; Cash began his tour this past January.) The 38-year-old Memphis native is a graduate of the Citadel and the great-nephew of Johnny Cash. He served a tour as chaplain with a Marine battalion in Iraq and baptized nearly 60 Marines during that time. Cash earned his theology degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth — and, yes, that means Obama's new pastor is a Southern Baptist.

Johnny Cash's great-nephew? I don't know about you, but I find that exciting, inveterate celebrity-watcher that I am. Kinship counts, you know.

Let's all hope that Obama doesn't make a habit of following in George W. Bush's footsteps.

H/T to Nicholas Knisely at The Lead at the Episcopal Café.

UPDATE: Paul the BB posted this link from a diary at Daily Kos concerning Lt. Carey Cash in the comments. I don't much like his ideas about evangelization.

UPDATE 2: "Not so fast", says Nicholas Knisely at The Lead, with a link to the Christian Science Monitor:

“The President and First Family continue to look for a church home. They have enjoyed worshipping at Camp David and several other congregations over the months, and will choose a church at the time that is best for their family,” Deputy White House Press Secretary Jennifer Psaki said in a statement.

"Complaint from a Voter :>)"

Words fail me.

I think I'll just go pick some chips off the Doritos tree in the backyard to go with the stiff drink I think I need right now.

Word! - from Doug.

UPDATE: A reminder from Erp.

40th Anniversary Of Stonewall

Photo from Counterlight's Peculiers.

From Frank Rich at the New York Times:

LIKE all students caught up in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, I was riveted by the violent confrontations between the police and protesters in Selma, 1965, and Chicago, 1968. But I never heard about the several days of riots that rocked Greenwich Village after the police raided a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn in the wee hours of June 28, 1969 — 40 years ago today.

Then again, I didn’t know a single person, student or teacher, male or female, in my entire Ivy League university who was openly identified as gay. And though my friends and I were obsessed with every iteration of the era’s political tumult, we somehow missed the Stonewall story. Not hard to do, really. The Times — which would not even permit the use of the word gay until 1987 — covered the riots in tiny, bowdlerized articles, one of them but three paragraphs long, buried successively on pages 33, 22 and 19.

I mostly missed the Stonewall stories, too, and when I read Counterlight's amazing series of posts on the history of the gay liberation movement, I received an education. I had only vague memories of hearing or reading about the riots.

The younger gay men — and scattered women — who acted up at the Stonewall on those early summer nights in 1969 had little in common with their contemporaries in the front-page political movements of the time. They often lived on the streets, having been thrown out of their blue-collar homes by their families before they finished high school. They migrated to the Village because they’d heard it was one American neighborhood where it was safe to be who they were.
....

After the gay liberation movement was born at Stonewall, this strand of history advanced haltingly until the 1980s. It took AIDS and the new wave of gay activism it engendered to fully awaken many, including me, to the gay people all around them. But that tardy and still embryonic national awareness did not save the lives of those whose abridged rights made them even more vulnerable during a rampaging plague.

The stories passed from my memory, too, until AIDS began to strike gay men down. My cousin, who was straight, so far as I know, had by-pass surgery in the early 1980s, received several units of blood, and contracted the disease. When he first got sick, my mother went to visit him in the hospital. When she asked him if he had a diagnosis, he said, "The doctors think I may have AIDS," and then he laughed as though it was impossible. She told me later, "I hope I don't catch it." He died a few years later, and his immediate family never said what he died of. They were so ashamed that they had a private funeral for him, but the extended family knew that he died of AIDS.

I read, The Boys in the Band in the late 1980s, an exposé of the government's failure to address the seriousness of AIDS. And then, in the 1990s, I saw Andrew Sullivan in an impressive interview on TV, Charlie Rose's show, maybe, pushing his book, Virtually Normal, which I purchased and read. Next came Maurice by E. M. Forster. I love Forster's novels, and I thought I had read all of them, but I'd missed the gay novel, which was published only after his death. I paid only sporadic attention to issues involving gays, and I was ashamed at how little I knew of the gay liberation movement when I read Counterlight's series of posts. I was ashamed, but I believe that Frank Rich and I had lots of company in ignorance amongst the citizenry of the US.

Then, Gene Robinson was elected bishop of the Diocese of New Hampshire, the House of Bishops consented, and he was consecrated Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire. Well, that got my attention, and the attention of the people in my church, and the attention of people in Episcopal churches across the land, and in the whole of the Anglican Communion, even to the point of obsession some might say, because those in opposition to equality for LGTB folks never seem to stop talking about the evils of same-sexuality.

Our president, Barack Obama, who promised to be gay-friendly during his campaign, has not kept his promises, except for throwing the gay community a bone in the form of certain partnership rights for federal employees, but stopping short of full health-care benefits.



Gay Pride parade New York City today.

Note: Counterlight's posts can be read at his blog by clicking on the pictures of the riots on the right of his sidebar.

As IT Says, "Yee-Haw!"

The rappsure fixin' ta happen in Anaheim, an' iffen yer not thar, yer a-gonna be lef' behind. Don't be tore up, now, on account o' ah warned yo'.

And I'm waiting for Arkansas Hillbilly to check in and correct my dialect. I'm sure to have something wrong.

Arkansas Hillbilly's version:

"The rappsure afixin' ta happen in Anaheim, an' iffen ye ain't ther, you'uns is gonna be lef' behind. Don't be tore up, now, on account o' ah warned ye'."

He was late, but he weighed in. He and the missus are busy waiting for Sprout and all, so I understand.

"Amurkans" Bash the Brits!

A lovely gift, just for me, from TheMe at Conscientisation:

US seniors bash Brits in memory test Enlarge photo

The trans-Atlantic gap, as measured in a "memory and awareness test," amounted to a decade of aging, according to the survey of 8,299 Americans and 5,276 Britons over 65.

75-year-olds in the US, in other words, scored far better than their sun-starved age peers, and equalled the performance of Brits 10 years younger, according to the study, published in London-based journal BMC Geriatrics.

Take THAT British pride! Of course, TheMe considers the study tainted and biased because it was conducted by an "Amurkan" university, as he puts it. But, I ask you, "Who exhibits bias in this instance?" The University of Michigan conducted the study. Michigan ain't no fourth rate bible college, you know.

Further:

The tests measured instant and delayed recall of a series of ten common nouns such as "tree", "village," "baby," etc. Participants were also asked what day, date, month and year it was.

I can tell you right off the top of my head the day, date, month, and year, and I do so know what a tree, a village, a baby, and etc. are. So there.

TheMe, when you reach my age, you'll be fortunate if you're one of the FEW Brits who can do that.

Cri du Cœur From Fran

Fran needs to find a home for Skittles, the Jack Russell pictured above, in the Albany or central New York state area. See her blog FranIAm for the story.

"Let The Earth Bear Witness"

Mike Scott, his wife Janette and Waterboys’ webmaster Ian Barratt have created a 3-minute video titled LET THE EARTH BEAR WITNESS in tribute to the Iranian protesters. The film shows fantastic images of the uprising in Iran to a soundtrack of a split-new Waterboys with a lyric by the great Irish poet WB Yeats. Says Mike: "Let The Earth Bear Witness is inspired by the amazing scenes of hundreds of thousands of Iranian people standing up for their rights and freedom. I took the words from two old Yeats poems, in which he was writing about Irish freedom fighters. But his words apply to any freedom fighters, anytime, anywhere in the world."

Warning: Contains scenes that are bloody and graphic.

H/T to MadPriest at Of course, I Could Be Wrong.