Spirituality
Speaker: Divisions erode commitment to poor
Infighting among Christians has distracted religious leaders, preventing them from fulfilling their duty to help the poor, according to a speaker at the Community of Christ world conference.
Jim Wallis, editor of the liberal Sojourners religious magazine, compared the divisions among Christians with those among gangs. He said he saw a lesson for religious leaders at a gang peace summit he attended, where rivals threw off their colors and vowed to work together to improve the community.
“If Crips and Bloods can get together, why can’t the evangelicals and the liberals, the blacks and the whites come together?” Wallis said. “We sometimes behave like gangs, and our children are falling through the cracks.”
Wallis has organized the Call to Renewal, a national coalition of church groups working to fight poverty. The Community of Christ formerly the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints participates in Wallis’ program.
Thousands of people representing about 50 countries attended the Community of Christ’s world conference this week at its Independence, Mo., headquarters.
Dalai Lama’s personal choir on U.S. concert tour
The Tibetan Buddhist monks stand over their just-completed artwork a gorgeous sand mural, painstakingly arranged color-by-color and grain-by-grain over three days.
Among their tools are old implements brought from their Gyuto monastery in Dharamsala, India and dust masks from an American hardware store.
“You don’t want to sneeze without one when you’re doing this kind of work,” one of the monks, Thupten Donyo, says with a chuckle.
The contrast between established traditions (the mural, called a sand mandala, above, is made on special occasions) and modern life pop up again and again for the monks.
The Dalai Lama’s personal choir, the monks are trying to familiarize American audiences with their faith through prayers, chants and rituals that have been performed for hundreds of years.
But they’re doing it via a concert tour of the United States along with CDs and a Web site. They are making a swing through the Pacific Northwest, before coming to the East Coast.
At the concerts, the monks don colorful ritual robes and headdresses and recite their prayers. These age-old chants take center stage, captivating audiences with a vocal style largely unheard of in the West.
Christians arrested on Mormon church’s plaza
Two protesters distributing Christian pamphlets were recently arrested on a stretch of Main Street in Salt Lake City that the Mormon church bought from the city to restrict protests and other activities there.
Sunday’s trespassing arrests on the plaza were the first since the church paid $8.1 million for the site, gaining exclusive rights to distribute literature and broadcast speeches on the block.
The purchase prompted several lawsuits over free speech rights, because the city retained the right for the public to walk across the property. One lawsuit challenging the rules is pending and another, which the church won, is on appeal.
The Christians who were arrested, Kurt Van Gorden, 48, and Melvin Heath, 46, were part of a group that had been distributing evangelical literature during the semiannual General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.