Seasonal Feature
TEMPTATION: A LENTEN MEDITATION
“Temptation does not usually come when we are ready for it. It does not come when we are strongest, when we are at our best. It comes when we are weak. It came to Jesus when he was hungry, very hungry. . . . When he had grown weak, when he was not physically strong, when it became hard to see straight and clearly in the dazzling sun of that sun-drenched land, it was then that temptation came.” *
I suspect that whether in the past or the present , temptation presents its greatest risk to us not when we are strong, but when we are weak and most vulnerable.
Read more at http://www.episcopalcafe.com/thesoul/ There you will find three meditations on Temptation by Diogenes Allen for the days, Feb. 10,11, and 12th.
* From Temptation by Diogenes Allen. A Seabury Classic from Church Publishing. Copyright © 2004. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY.
Our Religious Landscape
A dynamic religious landscape
The Wall Street Journal takes a closer look at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey of the religious landscape in the USA. Amidst all the trends and changes between and within religious traditions, they note a much bigger trend. They see "a country filled with dozens of minority religions, expressing diverse beliefs, and doing so free of coercion."
Some 60% of Americans say religion is "very important" to them. That's compared with 12% for the French and 25% for the Italians. The study describes a "competitive religious marketplace" in which 84% of Americans claim one of hundreds of religious affiliations -- from Pentecostalism and Judaism to Islam and Mormonism.
While they note the 44% of folks who have switched to another religious affiliation from the one they grew up with, the WSJ also notes that:
There are reasons to find this statistic troubling. People who leave one denomination for another may be more concerned with fulfilling their boutique church-going desires than with meeting the moral obligations of a religious group or the demands of a doctrine. That almost a third of respondents also said they were married to someone of a different faith suggests religion has become more a matter of individual conscience than of continuity and tradition.
Yet there is something remarkable about so much religious diversity. Elsewhere in the world, religious difference is often a cause for violence and ostracism. America so honors the principle of religious tolerance that it has brought it into the home. Pew's statistic about church-switching may be less a sign of spiritual flakiness than an emblem of freedom.
It should be noted that a third of the survey's "converts" have gone from one Protestant congregation to another. In short, America is not, on the whole, giving up serious worship for the sake of New Age platitudes. Half of Americans who grew up without any religious affiliation adopted one in adulthood. Clearly Americans are still convinced there is a such a thing as religious truth -- and it's worth their time to search for it. Sorry, Mr. Hitchens.
Read: The Wall Street Journal: God's Country.
See previous coverage in the Cafe here and here.
Millennium Development Goals
The MDGs represent a global partnership that has grown from the
commitments and targets established at the world summits of the 1990s. Responding to the world's
main development challenges and to the calls of civil society, the MDGs promote poverty reduction,
education, maternal health, gender equality, and aim at combating child mortality,
AIDS and other diseases.
