Having seen four family members die early, she wanted to understand how to adapt.

As it turned out, the degree perfectly prepared her to enter one of Ireland’s emerging professions.

Wojnar is now a registered civil celebrant, presiding over funerals and weddings for people who refuse to associate with Ireland’s scandal-tarred Roman Catholic Church. She’s not alone; many newly minted civil celebrants are starting their own businesses as part of Ireland’s “post-Catholic” economy.

Although many observers have noted the impact of secularization and child abuse scandals on church membership and finances, only now are the Irish seeing the cultural and socioeconomic reverberations. These include a class of people willing to observe life’s most significant milestones outside the church.

image courtesy of Wikipedia

Irish funeral directors estimate that 10 percent of the nearly 30,000 funerals conducted annually are nonreligious. Government data show that about 30 percent of the 21,000 weddings annually are outside any church, up from 5 percent two decades ago.

The growth has come amid a backdrop of church decline. The number of people who call themselves Catholics is at an all-time low. Seminaries have grown barren. And as the government scales back church control of schools, fewer children may be exposed to Catholic rites of passage.

Wojnar takes an occasional interior design assignment to supplement the $500 for each ceremony. But some among the few dozen civil celebrants in Ireland have turned full time.

Brian Whiteside, the director of ceremonies for the Humanist Association of Ireland, led more than 100 weddings, funerals or naming ceremonies in 2012.

“We’re busier than we ever thought we would be,” Whiteside said. “I thought I would do this as a sideline, but it’s taken over my life.”

Humanists – who believe in ethical values and a sense of compassion – have been at the forefront of performing nonreligious ceremonies. Whiteside said he and his 10 fellow Humanist-sanctioned celebrants have seen consistent growth, topping off at 78 funerals and 200 weddings in 2012.

Deirdre Lonergan is among those who chose a nonreligious wedding because she felt disillusioned with the church. But she needed two ceremonies to marry Eoghan Murphy.

The couple had a government-sanctioned ceremony in a small, unadorned government office without rings, vows, music or a priest. Three days later, they had a ceremony at a hotel with friends, a civil celebrant and all the normal regalia.

The dual ceremonies were needed because Ireland requires someone from the government’s Register of Solemnizers to perform an “official” marriage. Of the 5,600 people on the government’s roster, 4,300 are Catholic clergy.

Until last December, only religious leaders or government workers could become registered. Whiteside performed his first official wedding this spring, meaning couples such as Lonergan and Murphy now have a secular option that allows them to avoid the drab government ceremony altogether.

Funeral directors, chaplains, government registers and singers are among those who have signed up to become nonreligious celebrants. Hotels have hosted wedding fairs to showcase themselves as possible secular locales, and a few funeral directors have also recognized that customer preferences are changing.

Massey’s, a Dublin funeral home, spent $200,000 last year to open the first venue designed specifically to host civil funerals. Another Dublin funeral home, Legacy, launched a first-of-its-kind service last May that allows people to book funerals entirely online.

These entrepreneurs see themselves replacing the shrinking pool of priests. By one estimate, the number of Irish parish priests will drop from 2,000 today to a few hundred by 2042. If they want to bury a loved one without a lengthy wait for a priest, Wojnar said many families may soon have to choose a civil celebrant.

Compared to a church service, civil celebrations are more likely to include poems, pop music and personal messages. Wojnar has led ceremonies where families played songs by Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones. She’s even performed a funeral for an animal lover with dogs and cats in the room.

The church is still debating its response to the cultural shifts. Some priests have relaxed church protocols to allow similar personalization, but at least one leader prefers that people who lack a commitment to Catholicism stay away.

“I don’t want a church which people use at particular moments or use as a comfort zone,” said Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin.

Meanwhile, leaders on the religious right in Ireland say the move toward liberalization will come to an end, and religious institutions will once again thrive.

“It will eventually dawn on people that our dominant philosophy of individualism at all costs is doing no good,” said David Quinn, who runs the Iona Institute, a conservative think tank.

Yet even if religion rebounds under pressure to reform, Wojnar said her new profession is here to stay.

“People who respect, even practice a religion, will and do choose the civil option for many reasons,” she said. “I see this as a profession in growth despite what happens on the religious map.”

After more than six hours of debate, more than 700 commissioners attending the Presbyterian church’s 2013 General Assembly in Edinburgh voted in favor of gay ministers, but in a mind toward compromise agreed to allow parishes that disagree to opt out of the new rules.

The decision will now need to be endorsed by the church’s 48 regional presbyteries and, if it survives the regional ratification, will become official at next year’s General Assembly.

Echoing similar controversies that consumed the life of the Presbyterian Church (USA) for more than a decade, the church’s new moderator, the Rev. Lorna Hood, said: “This is a massive vote for the peace and unity of the Church.”

The debate over gay ministers has been simmering in Scotland for years. It exploded in 2009 when the General Assembly voted to uphold the appointment of an openly gay minister, the Rev. Scott Rennie, to Queen’s Cross Church in Aberdeen. That led two congregations and six ministers to leave the Church of Scotland.

In 2011, the General Assembly agreed to allow openly gay ministers appointed prior to 2009 to remain in their posts but placed a moratorium on further appointments of any gay clergy. Upwards of 60 congregations have already threatened to split from the Church of Scotland.

“This was a major breakthrough for the church but we are conscious that some people remain pained, anxious, worried and hurt,” Hood said. “We continue to pray for the peace and unity of the church.”

Some of those rely on faith to help them through their grief. Others look to psychiatrists, who offer therapy or prescribe antidepressants to help ease their patients’ pain.

On Saturday (May 18), in a move that could add to the tension between religion and science, the American Psychiatric Association changed a controversial diagnosis regarding how grief relates to mental health.

The change “will affect every single person in the country, because at some point we’re all going to be bereaved,” said Joanne Cacciatore, founder of the Center for Loss and Trauma in Phoenix and a professor of social work at Arizona State University.

At issue are questions as fundamental as how long we grieve, what clinical label we assign to sadness, and when grief transforms into mental illness.

image courtesy of Shutterstock

The modification also rekindles long-standing debates about whether spirituality or medicine offers the best pathway out of bereavement.

The debate comes down to a small edit to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a guidebook that is considered psychiatry’s diagnostic bible.

After 14 years of work, the fifth edition of book — called DSM-5 — was unveiled in San Francisco at the annual meeting of the 36,000-member American Psychiatric Association.

Changes in each revision are important because most insurance companies require a DSM diagnosis before they reimburse doctors. The manual is also seen as the definitive psychiatric reference by other professions such as law, government and journalism.

Psychiatry historically has refrained from calling normal grief a mental disorder. Since the last DSM was published in 1994, the guideline has been that when symptoms — sadness, distress, insomnia, trouble concentrating, lack of appetite — begin within two months of a loved one’s death, but do not persist beyond those two months, psychiatrists should not diagnose “major depressive disorder.” In earlier decades, psychiatrists waited a year before such a diagnosis.

The revision narrows that window to two weeks. So a person who has five of nine symptoms that define depression — regardless of the reason behind those symptoms — could be diagnosed as mentally ill.

That change could give psychiatrists earlier access to grieving patients, critics say, heightening a perception that medical responses to grief are encroaching on turf traditionally held by faith.

“It’s in the realm of the spiritual that we learn to accept the unanswerable questions,” Cacciatore said. “People can get help without being labeled mentally ill. That’s what churches are for, that’s what community is for, that’s what spiritual leaders are for.”

The shrinking window for grief has stoked what psychotherapist Gary Greenberg describes as an insurgency against the DSM, fueled, in part, by accusations that the changes would help funnel money to manufacturers of psychotropic drugs.

But supporters of the revision to the DSM say the change has been misunderstood. Narrowing the grief window, they say, is about improving psychiatry’s response to major depression. And the change does not interfere with the role of faith-based supports.

“There is nothing in the recognition of major depression that precludes the patient’s receiving love and comfort from friends, family and clergy,” Ronald Pies, a professor of psychiatry at SUNY Upstate Medical University, said in an email.

‘Medicalizing grief’

Normal bereavement and major depression share many of the same symptoms. And because of those similarities, psychiatrists have historically carved out what is known as a “bereavement exclusion.” Its purpose was to reduce the likelihood that normal grief would be diagnosed as clinical depression.

But critics of that thinking say the greater danger is missing the signs of mental illness simply because a person is experiencing grief. Such grief, they say, may even trigger a major depressive disorder bringing more symptoms — a preoccupation with worthlessness, or thoughts of suicide.

Removing the exclusion, Pies and others argue, will allow psychiatrists to cast a wider net by more quickly diagnosing mental illness and offering treatment.

But critics have charged the APA with “medicalizing grief” by bypassing traditional methods of healing that come from friends, family or theology.

Greenberg, author of “Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry,” said psychiatry “never figured out how to distinguish mental illness from normal suffering.”

“We want to identify disorders and then eradicate them as if they were smallpox,” he said. “The idea is that the nature of suffering is to be eliminated, rather than valued, used and incorporated into a person’s life.”

‘A boon to the pharmaceutical industry’

Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine last May, Richard Friedman, a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, said the change would “erroneously label healthy people with a psychiatric diagnosis.” And Cacciatore said such labels have lasting effects.

“Once you say someone has a mental illness and bill their insurance company, that’s on their record,” she said. “They could be denied a job, lose custody of children or be denied insurance.”

Last May, in a concession to such arguments, the APA panel that worked on the issue said that a footnote would be added in the new DSM, a reminder that sadness and other mild depressive symptoms are not necessarily indicators of major depression.

But that hasn’t silenced broader concerns over labels and medication.

In December, Allen Frances, a professor emeritus of psychiatry at Duke University and a high-profile critic of DSM-5, wrote in Psychology Today that the APA will be “substituting pills and superficial medical rituals for the deep consolations of family, friends, religion and the resiliency that comes with time and the acceptance of the limitations of life.”

That concern was shared by Friedman, who wrote that the change would “no doubt be a boon to the pharmaceutical industry, because it will encourage unnecessary treatment with antidepressants and antipsychotics.”

The APA asked those revising the DSM to provide financial disclosures of any grant money, consultation fees and stock ownership that could be perceived as a conflict of interest.

In an analysis of the disclosures, Lisa Cosgrove, a professor of counseling and school psychology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, found that of those who served on the DSM-5 panel that eliminated the bereavement exclusion, 67 percent had ties to pharmaceutical companies that make the drugs used to treat mood disorders.

The APA did not respond to a request for an interview.

Cacciatore said those suffering from traumatic grief heal more quickly through human contact, often with a nod to the divine. Psychiatrists, she said, “can’t do someone’s grieving for them.”

“Nothing can comfort someone about the great mysteries of life like a relationship with another human being — sitting with someone, crying with someone,” she said. “We have to let people go through the dark night of the soul.”

(Tim Townsend writes for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.)

The religious expression case, which comes to the court from the town of Greece, N.Y., focuses on the first 10 words of the First Amendment, ratified in 1791: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

That Establishment Clause was violated, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last year, when the Greece Town Board repeatedly used Christian clergy to conduct prayers at the start of its public meetings. The decision created a rift with other appeals courts that have upheld prayer at public meetings, prompting the justices to step in.

Alliance Defending Freedom, an Arizona-based Christian nonprofit group, appealed the case to the Supreme Court. It is supported in separate briefs by 49 mostly Republican members of Congress and 18 state attorneys general.

Supreme Court building in Washington, DC (2009).

RNS photo by Mark Fischer / courtesy Flickr

“A few people should not be able to extinguish the traditions of our nation merely because they heard something they didn’t like,” said the ADF’s senior counsel, Brett Harvey.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a Washington, D.C.-based watchdog group, is representing the two women who challenged the town’s practice, Susan Galloway and Linda Stephens.

“A town council meeting isn’t a church service, and it shouldn’t seem like one,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United, who noted that between 1999 and June 2010, about two-thirds of the 120 recorded invocations contained references to “Jesus Christ,” “Jesus,” “Your Son” or the “Holy Spirit.”

Kenneth Klukowski, a lawyer for the Family Research Council who filed a brief on behalf of the 49 U.S. House members, said the Supreme Court was correct to take the case to clear up differences among lower courts on the issue of religious expression. It represents the first such case to reach the high court in a generation, he said.

“If the Second Circuit’s decision is what the Establishment Clause requires, then Congress has been violating the Establishment Clause since it was ratified in 1791,” Klukowski said. His brief notes that in the 112th Congress, 97 percent of the prayers used to open House sessions were Christian, as opposed to Jewish or Muslim, yet the practice is widely accepted.

The court will hear the case in its next term, which begins in October. Its decision, expected by June 2014, could have broad implications for public schools and events, as well as for individuals who seek to convey religious messages.

(Richard Wolf writes for USA Today.)

Making shirts in this packed metropolis of 12 million people, Sheuli Akhter, 20, made decent money — about $140 a month — by the impoverished standards of rural Bangladesh. But she missed the family benefiting from the wages of her hard work.

Her mother, Ranjana Akhter, was found sobbing near the rubble of the Rana Plaza factory where her daughter worked, days after the eight-story complex collapsed and killed more than 1,100 workers. Viewing dozens of corpses a day, the 35-year-old woman still hoped her daughter had somehow survived.

The victims retrieved from the debris were crushed and unrecognizable in the South Asian heat.

Ranjana Akhter, 35, holds a picture Wednesday of her missing daughter Sheuli Akhter, 20, while standing opposite the ruins of Rana Plaza where Sheuli worked. The building, packed with garment factories on illegally built additional stories, collapsed April 24 in a suburb of the Bangladesh capital Dhaka. Photo by Calum MacLeod/USA Today

“I am looking for her body, but they are all decomposed now. It’s getting harder to identify,” said Ranjana Akhter, tears falling from her eyes.

The scale of the mismanagement and breadth of the human tragedies in Bangladesh powerfully illustrated what years of abuse, inhumane conditions and unthinkable danger could not: Garment workers in Third World countries take enormous risks to earn a living in Bangladeshi-owned companies that produce clothing for Western retailers.

At the end of this global production line stand millions of American shoppers whose favorite companies and brands — Benetton, The Children’s Place, Gap, J.C. Penney, Mango, Target and Sears — use Bangladesh as a launching pad for the goods Western consumers crave.

Clothing manufacturers in North America and Europe — operating with scant supervision of their operations — have made Bangladesh the second-largest exporter of clothes in the world. The enormity of this tragedy is already beginning to change the country’s free-for-all business climate.

Many international retailers rushed to embrace a labor-backed factory safety proposal after the April 24 collapse, the world’s deadliest industrial accident since India’s Bhopal chemical plant disaster took 2,260 lives in 1984.

4 million jobs at stake

More than 30 retail chains including H&M, the largest clothing producer in Bangladesh, agreed to sign onto the proposal, which requires public disclosure of factory inspections and company-paid renovations when problems are found.

But talks broke down between the labor coalition IndustriALL and trade groups representing U.S. retailers like Gap over language that might make stores liable for conditions in Bangladeshi factories while requiring union-style management restrictions. The retail groups said they could improve worker safety by conducting more rigorous inspections of their factories.

A major pillar of Bangladesh’s economy, the garment industry employs roughly 4 million people. Only China exports more clothing than Bangladesh, which has 5,000 factories of varying sizes producing for other major chains.

These global brands thrive in a place where the average worker earns the equivalent of 24 cents an hour, according to the Worker Rights Consortium, a worker advocacy group that criticized U.S. retailers for failing to sign onto the proposed changes. The wage for garment workers is much higher — sometimes four times that — which is why so many people are drawn to the industry.

Many of the garment operations have sprung up in the past decade in buildings sometimes refurbished in a hurry to capture customers. Western retailers contract with myriad unconnected workshops to get fabric and buttons and fasteners needed for their products. Though many importers require inspectors to check on working conditions, they do not oversee all aspects of building safety. Those laws are the authority of the government, which works hand-in-hand with the industry.

In fact, a consortium of Bangladesh factory owners is also a lobbying group that consults with the government on working conditions and safety matters. Government oversight is notoriously weak.

Rana Plaza was showing structural cracks before the collapse. They prompted some businesses to move out of the building, but that wasn’t enough for the factory to shut down. The owner was captured trying to flee across the Indian border and is under arrest on charges that he built illegal additional floors on a building not designed for manufacturing.

Since 2005, at least 1,800 garment workers have been killed in factory fires and building collapses in Bangladesh, according to the advocacy group International Labor Rights Forum. That includes the toll from Rana Plaza.

Despite this carnage, the retail industry has found a needy home in Bangladesh, a nation of 140 million mostly Muslim people that’s home to regular political strife and overwhelming poverty. Sixty million Bangladeshis are classified as “very poor,” and per capita income is $1,700 a year.

Its garment firms, which make up 80 percent of total exports, face pressure from foreign buyers to retain the nation’s chief selling point: the cheapest place to make clothes. The disaster highlights the perilous choice for Bangladeshis in the garment sector, 80 percent of them women who work as seamstresses and support entire families.

Some survivors say the jobs are no longer worth it.

“I will never work in a garment factory again, and never again in a multistory building,” said Asma Akhter, 22, who lay trapped in the rubble for three days before rescue.

‘This can’t be justified’

After a factory fire last November killed 117 people who were making T-shirts and jackets, “the government didn’t take any steps to prevent this type of incident. Another disaster like this can still happen,” she said.

“The garment factory owners sell the products abroad at a high price, but we get low wages. This can’t be justified,” said Asma Akhter, who hopes her secondary school education, unusual among her colleagues, will aid her job hunt.

Others see it differently.

Seamstress Asma Akhter, 25, who is no relation to the woman of the same name above, said she would be “helpless” without the garment sector.

“I don’t know what I could do,” she said. “If you want to survive you have to work.”

But nothing says world retailers have to stay in Bangladesh.

International companies must contend with a volatile political environment of frequent street agitation and confrontation. Regular strikes called by opposition parties wielding street power hamper production.

“We must stop the killing,” said Nazmar Akter, president of Sommilito Garments Sramik Federation and general-secretary of the Awaj Foundation of workers’ groups.

“It’s a global business. Everybody has the responsibility,” Akter said. “Workers in Bangladesh are unsafe, hungry, with bad living and working conditions. We are human. We want respect and dignity; that’s our demand.”

(Calum MacLeod writes for USA Today. Jayne O’Donnell contributed to this story.)

In an online post on the First Things  site, John Turner argues that mainline (i.e., “liberal”) Protestantism's emphasis on social justice, tolerance (e.g., of homosexuality and abortion) and religious pluralism seems fairly well anchored in American culture (for the moment, at any rate).

But the price has been pretty steep. The seven mainline denominations are dying. Membership is collapsing. They walk and talk and look alive, but their God-centered life has been sucked out of them by a vampire culture that prefers God-less ideas. And these ideas now prosper, having been freed from any required acknowledgment of God by a culture that is increasingly hostile toward any notion of the divine.

The goal would appear to justify the means. For example, the goal of social justice is more important than worshiping the God who demands it. Tolerance demands that its adherents ignore the God who doesn't tolerate other gods. Religious pluralism forces you to deny Christ's singular role as savior by asserting that all religions ultimately lead to the same end. (An Episcopal priest once told me that this was what she believed.)

If that notion sounds familiar, it should. It's Mahatma Gandhi's quotation on this Web site: “The soul of religion is one, but it is encased in a multitude of forms.” (As regular readers know, I vehemently reject that sentiment.)

Thomas Jefferson once predicted that Unitarianism would be the nation's great religion. Unitarianism has Christian roots but has always rejected Christ's divinity and therefore the idea of the Trinity, and now it has evolved into a “religion” where any member can believe and advocate almost anything, whether linked to God or not. By that definition, Unitarianism sounds a lot like modern-day liberal Protestantism. Hmmm, maybe Jefferson was prescient.

This reminds me of something a priest said decades ago about the late love guru Leo Buscaglia. “He's trying to recreate Christianity without Christ.”

Do you have on your listening ears to give heed to the gospel?  Are you at all tuned in to God’s Spirit?  We can be like distracted children when it comes to the voice of God.  We get so wrapped up in the demands, opportunities, enjoyment, and sorrows of our lives that we can’t even hear that God has something to say.

The Book of Revelation, at the very end of the Bible, often gets neglected because it can seem cryptic.  The opening chapters, however, deliver a word that is strong and clear.   Christ speaks from heaven to John, who is in prison on the Isle of Patmos, with seven letters to seven churches in Asia Minor (see chapters 2 and 3).  Christ affirms the spiritual strengths of each of the seven congregations but then delivers a rebuke.  The letters are a spiritual corrective for us in the church.  The seven letters all end on this note:  “Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches.”

Jesus issued a similar warning throughout his earthly ministry.  After teaching in parables he would say, “Let anyone with ears to hear listen!”  (e.g., Mark 4:9, 4:23, 7:16).  Once, when the disciples remain clueless about the meaning of his mission, Jesus gets exasperated:  “Do you still not perceive or understand?  Are your hearts hardened?  Do you have eyes, and fail to see?  Do you have ears, and fail to hear?  And do you not remember?” (Mark 8:17-18).

What is it about your mind and heart that tunes out God?  Does the noise of the world drown out the message of hope and new life coming from God’s Word and Holy Spirit?  As my mother used to say, “Put on your listening ears!”

Over and over they chanted " First God then Saint Sebastian." But there was no mistaking that Saint Sebastian, their beloved Christian patron saint,  took all the glory.

“He's our miracle man,  said  82-year-old- Viola Listiano.

Listiano was among the thousands who attended the Feast of Saint Sebastian in Middletown, a three-day event that honors the saint pierced by Roman arrows. 

The annual festival featured a colorful display of worshipers clad in white outfits and red sashes running  through downtown Middletown to Saint Sebastian Church in bare or stocking feet. They ran to thank their protector for cancers cured, sick family members, and money problems solved.

“Saint Sebastian looks out for us,” said Paul Antogiovanni, who ran to praise the saint for past miracles and his continued protection over his family..

Ken Vaughan, a church usher, said legend has it that the small town of Melilli, Sicily where many Italians in Middletown call their ancestral home, claimed St. Sebastian its patron saint when villagers were able to lift a statue of the saint that had washed ashore during a shipwreck in the Mediterranean sea.

“No one could lift the statue. Only the people of Melilli could because they believed in his sainthood,” Vaughan said.

A church was erected in Melilli on the very spot villagers could no longer carry the heavy statue. For centuries villagers believed the saint  protected them misfortune: shielded them from the eruption of Mt. Etna and the invasion of German soldiers during World War I I. Those who immigrated to Middletown took with them the adoration of Saint Sebastian.

Anthony Labbadia, 32, said he ran for sick family members and for the continued protection of the saint.

"It's about giving back to the saint, " Labbadia said.

The Gathering in Waterbury drew thousands to celebrate the city's ethnic diversity.

When the Wilmington atheist couple decided to join their lives a year ago, they knew they wanted a secular wedding celebrant, but their families weren’t so sure.

Her family is Methodist and his is “generally spiritual.” And they worried about even telling Mike’s grandmother, who is Eastern Orthodox.

So they found a wedding celebrant ordained through the Humanist Society, Han Hills, who allowed their family members to read a spiritual poem.

“Nobody seemed to notice that we didn’t mention God,” Holowaty said. “People came up afterward and said it was one of the best weddings they’d seen.”

With the rise of the “nones” — the 20 percent of Americans without a religious affiliation — more couples are looking for wedding celebrants who don’t mind skipping God’s blessing of the ceremony altogether.

More national atheist and humanist agencies such as the Humanist Society and the Center for Inquiry are developing ordaining programs to establish nontheist ministers in most states to perform weddings and funerals. CFI began its certification program in 2009.

There are currently 138 celebrants listed as ordained through the Humanist Society, and some perform weddings in multiple states. The Center for Inquiry has 23 celebrants.

Because of the demand she’s seeing for marriage and funeral celebrants, Florida humanist writer and blogger Jennifer Hancock is considering writing a book about the secular approach to marriage.

What’s missing, she says, is advertising for leaders in the humanist community who can fulfill ceremonies for life cycle events. Only a handful of the ordained celebrants listed on the society’s website also advertise their services on a personal page.

Former Army medic Richard Cotter advertises his services in and around New York at humanistcelebrations.com. California Humanist minister William Rausch advertises his memorial, baby naming and wedding services at ebcelebrant.com.

“As soon as you do the advertising, people are like yeah, I want that. When I got married, I was worried. I didn’t want any religious references in my wedding because I didn’t want to start out the most important relationship of my life with a lie,” Hancock said.

“Some of my most popular posts are about grief, marriage relationships and parenting. That’s all stuff that a traditional minister would help you with.”

The creative elements of a humanist wedding don’t differ much from a religious one. There are sand-mixing ceremonies, candle-lighting ceremonies and walking down an aisle in a white dress. Vows are typically written by the couples themselves, said Hills, whose company is called Leap of Humanity.

Hills already has eight weddings booked this year across North Carolina and is starting to book weddings for 2014. And he’s only been formally advertising his services for a few months.

“You need a certain personality to do this. If you’re mousy, and you can’t think in a crisis, this isn’t for you,” he said, laughing. “It’s the only job where you can look out and if you see old ladies crying, then you’re doing a good job. It’s an honor to be given this place of reverence.”

North Carolina’s celebrant numbers have grown to seven, while New York and California have the most, at about 20 each. But there are some states without any Humanist celebrants listed, such as Wyoming, West Virginia or Wisconsin.

Humanist Society program coordinator Sadie Rothman said she gets at least two requests for Humanist celebrant applications each month. But the process to become a celebrant requires five character references and training sessions.

Becoming a wedding celebrant outside of an established faith system can present legal challenges, depending on the state. In North Carolina, marriages performed through the online Universal Life Church before 1981 are considered valid. But the legality of ULC marriages after that date is in question, according to state marriage laws.

Because the Humanist Society is a religious nonprofit associated with the American Humanist Association, they are considered a valid marrying entity in the state. But Indiana Humanist celebrants certified through the Center for Inquiry lost a legal battle in December 2012 over the validity of the marriages they performed.

Mike Werner, past president of the American Humanist Association, said the demand for Humanist celebrants will grow to include traditional ordained ministers interested in officiating nontheist ceremonies.

Amanda and Mike Holawaty didn’t want to settle for a justice of the peace. They wanted to celebrate their values in a scenic wedding near the ocean.

“You see weddings in movies and on TV, the bride being given away and walking down the aisle,” she said. “It was really the same desire for us, just minus the religious aspect.”

(Amanda Greene is the editor of Wilmington Faith & Values.)

Well don’t feel bad. You can follow the spiritual journey on the Archdiocese’s of Hartford’s website, Facebook page and Mansell’s Twitter account.

On May 20,  Mansell will lead a group of 80 people through the sacred sites in Rome, Assisi, Siena, Florence, Padua and Venice.

Highlights of the tour include the Papal Audience with Pope Francis, the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi, Giotto’s Bell Tower of the Cathedral of Florence, the Basilica of St. Anthony in Padua, and St. Mark’s Square in Venice.

To follow the group's spiritual journey, visit the Archdiocese's website and follow the Archbishop on Facebook, twitter (@archmansell), and his blog.

Those seeking pray from Mansell during the pilgrimage can visit  www.archdioceseofhartford.org and click in the Year of Faith box to fill out a special intention form and email it.

The Connecticut Council on Clergy is fighting to get state lawmakers to raise the minimum wage.  The Rev. Sam Saylor of Hartford has said the a rise in the minimum wage would help poor. Do clergy have a moral obligation to lobby for the increase?

Until now.

As the BSA decides this month whether to allow openly gay boys into its program, Sefranek is among those who say the controversial move would cause him to quit the venerable Scouting program.

Sefranek, a former Scoutmaster who currently serves on his local Catholic Committee on Scouting in Peoria, Ill., recently submitted a contingent letter of resignation that will go into effect if and when the Boy Scouts adopt the new proposal.

“Under the proposed policy change, one cannot remain a faithful Catholic and serve as a Catholic BSA leader,” Sefranek said. “The proposed change will only lead to confusing boys as to who they really are.”

The proposal, which would allow gay Scouts but continue to exclude gay adults as leaders, has the unanimous support of Boy Scouts’ top officials, and will be voted on by the group’s 1,400-member national council on May 23.

But lower in the scouting ranks, dissension abounds — particularly among faith-based groups that sponsor more than 70 percent of Boy Scout troops in the country.

Already suffering a long-term membership decline, the Scouts’ proposal is an effort to appeal to younger parents who increasingly support gay rights. But the current two-pronged ban has strong support among existing members and volunteers, many of whom believe accepting gay members will clash with their religious convictions.

The Boy Scouts’ leadership said it considered input from faith-based groups when shaping its policy.

“We believe that this policy remains true to the virtues, the core principles of scouting, not of any one religion, but of Scouting,” said BSA executive committee member Nathan Rosenberg, in a webcast urging support for the plan.

Leaders from the Scouts’ largest faith-based sponsoring organization — the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — have said they will accept the new policy if it is implemented.

But the Scout’s second- and third-largest sponsors — the United Methodist Church and the Roman Catholic Church — have stayed on the sidelines in recent months.

At St. Raymond of Penafort Catholic Church in Springfield, Va., the Rev. John De Celles announced in his church bulletin that the parish troop would end its relationship with the Boy Scouts if membership standards change.

“The new policy, if approved in May, would be a statement that’gay is okay,’ and would severely limit (if not completely prohibit) chartering organizations, like St. Raymond’s, from passing on its moral teachings about same-sex attraction and homosexuals,” De Celles wrote.

As many as a quarter of the 273,000 Boy Scouts connected to Catholic-run troops could leave, some leaders estimate. Still, many Catholic parishes welcome the move to allow openly gay scouts into their troops.

“If it changes, that’s fine with us. In fact, I’m hoping they do change it,” said Monsignor Donald Romito of St. John Neumann Catholic Church in Irvine, Calif. “We’re welcoming to everybody, and everybody’s welcome to join the Scouts. It wouldn’t impact our relationship with the troop at all.”

Views of homosexual behavior among Catholics are wide-ranging. A majority — 54 percent — of U.S. Catholics support gay marriage, compared to 47 percent of all Americans, according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll. But Catholic Church teaching calls same-sex attraction “an objective disorder” and condemns homosexual activity as immoral, though it also calls on Catholics to welcome and respect gays and lesbians in their faith communities.

So far, the group dedicated to preserving the church’s relationship with the Boy Scouts — the National Catholic Committee on Scouting — has been vague in its public statements regarding the proposed membership policy.

Other faith-based groups have been much more aggressive in their positions. On May 5, the Washington-based Family Research Council hosted a “Stand With Scouts Sunday” webcast, calling for the preservation of the gay Scout ban. The event, which included a cameo by Texas Gov. Rick Perry, was simulcast at churches around the country.

At St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Richmond, Va., the Rev. Robert Novokowsky watched the program alongside his parish’s troop leaders.

“The proposed changes are such that they will lead inevitably not only to acceptance of open homosexuality but also the tacit approval of that sinful lifestyle,” Novokowsky said. “That’s where compassion must draw a line. We cannot promote something we’ve defined as a sin.”

But when Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin signed a similar measure, one that its sponsor said would forbid Shariah, on April 19 of this year, no legal challenges were mounted.

Why the change?

The biggest difference is that the older bill — and others like it — singled out Islam and Shariah, but also raised concerns that they could affect Catholic canon law or Jewish law. Many early anti-Shariah bills also made references to international or foreign law, which worried businesses that the new bills would undermine contracts and trade with foreign companies.

Anti-Shariah demonstrators rally against a proposed mosque near Ground Zero in New York. RNS photo courtesy Asterio Tecson

The new bills, however, are more vague and mention only foreign laws, with no references to Shariah or Islam. They also make specific exceptions for international trade. All of that makes them harder to challenge as a violation of religious freedom.

“These bills don’t have any real-world effect. Their only purpose is to allow people to vilify Islam,” said Corey Saylor, CAIR’s legislative affairs director, of the more recent bills.

The change in language seems to have helped such bills advance in several states. And while these bills no longer single out Shariah, it is often understood that Shariah is the target, which many legislators make no secret of.

The driving force behind these new versions of anti-Shariah laws is “anti-Muslim bigotry plain and simple,” said Daniel Mach of the American Civil Liberties Union, speaking on a panel in Washington Thursday (May 16). To those agitating for such measures, “Islam is the face of the enemy,” he said.

To date, Oklahoma is the sixth state — joining Arizona, Kansas, Louisiana, South Dakota, and Tennessee — to adopt a law prohibiting courts from using foreign or international law, with some exceptions, in their decisions.

This year, at least 36 anti-foreign law bills have been proposed in 15 states, down from 51 bills in 23 states in 2011. While most of this year’s anti-foreign law bills have failed, several others, have advanced:

* A North Carolina legislative committee on Wednesday sent a bill to the House that would prohibit consideration of foreign laws in custody and other family law cases.

* On May 9, the Missouri legislature passed an anti-foreign law bill that goes next to Gov. Jay Nixon, who has until July 14 to decide whether he will sign or veto it. Nixon, a Democrat, has not indicated what he will do, and did not reply to a request for comment.

* In Alabama, Indiana and Texas, anti-foreign law bills have made it through the state senates, and are now either in house committees or awaiting full floor votes.

* An anti-foreign law bill in Florida that needed a two-thirds majority to pass fell one vote short, 25-14. Besides Florida, anti-foreign law bills have been introduced but were defeated, died, or are languishing in Arkansas, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Carolina, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

Despite the losses, David Yerushalmi, the Washington-based lawyer who drafted template legislation used for the anti-Shariah and anti-foreign law bills, said the anti-Shariah movement “is growing every day” and expects more states to adopt such bills in the future.

“People see the threat and also know that a bill that simply protects U.S. citizens and residents from constitutionally offensive foreign laws and judgments can only be a good thing,” Yerushalmi said.

But CAIR’s Saylor said that victory may prove elusive for the anti-Shariah forces. By stripping all references to Islamic law, the anti-Shariah movement has failed to restrict Muslim religious rights. “In terms of substance, it’s already been beaten,” he said.

Nevertheless, some observers worry that even these watered-down bills could still be interpreted in ways that impinge on Muslims’ religious freedom.

For example, according to the Gavel to Gavel website that covers state legislatures, many of the new anti-foreign law bills specify that the prohibition on courts using foreign laws applies only to certain case types, such as family law or domestic relations. Shariah, as well as Jewish law, is widely used in these types of cases.

“While the foreign law bans are certainly less of a frontal assault on religious freedom than the anti-Shariah bills, they continue to raise concerns about bias towards minority faiths,” said Faiza Patel, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

“The bans cast a cloud of uncertainty over a myriad of arrangements, including family and business-related matters, simply because they have foreign or religious origins.”

She added that some bans on foreign law seem to require judges to reject any foreign law or judgment that comes from a country that does not protect rights in the same way the United States does, even if the case being considered does not raise any rights concerns.

“This could deprive many Jewish and Muslim couples of a wide range of benefits — lower tax rates, immigration benefits for foreign partners and the ability to make life-and-death decisions on behalf of each other in medical emergencies,” Patel said.

Even CAIR won’t rule out the possibility of future legal challenges.

“If someone tries to use these laws to undermine a person’s religious rights, we’re keeping all of our legal options on the table,” Saylor said.

(Lauren Markoe contributed to this report from Washington.)

Situated adjacent to Yale University, Grove Street Cemetery is recognized as a cultural, historical and religious landmark. Incorporated in 1797, the cemetery is the final resting place for several ministers, theologians and Connecticut notables, including cotton gin inventor Eli Whitney and the inventor of vulcanized rubber, Charles Goodyear. 

Hartford Faith & Values will host a Walking Tour of New Haven’s Historic Grove Street Cemetery from 2 to 3 p.m. June 15, 2013.

Hartford Faith & Values will host a Walking Tour of New Haven’s Historic Grove Street Cemetery from 2 to 3 p.m. June 15, 2013. For more information click here.

Sarah L. Woodford, a Yale Divinity School graduate and HartfordFAVS contributor, will lead the hour-long tour of one of the earliest burial grounds in the nation to have a planned layout. The tour will feature many of the cemetery's famous residents, along with Victorian-era rituals surrounding death, funerals, burial and mourning. Water will be provided.

Tickets are a $10 suggested donation (cash or checks made payable to Religion News LLC accepted). The event is a fundraiser for Hartford Faith & Values.

The United States has often taken the military and security approach but this only goes so far. You can’t kill them all. So what is a political culture like the United States to do if it is going to address these problems politically? Political Islam stresses international grievances and includes their own anger, frustration, and humiliation. Surely broad scale international relations are part of the answer: American drone attacks, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, stability in Iraq and Afghanistan, and genuine engagement with Iran are all part of the equation that might lead to dignity and moderation. 

But this is not enough. These rigid authoritarian political systems, that produce frustration and violence, must be more directly confronted. In essence, these Muslim countries characterized by extremist religious parties are failing to provide economic development, political voice, and human rights. Something more direct must be done but that something must be moral and politically viable. Members of these authoritarian cultures typically report feeling humiliated and hopeless. In places like Algeria, Egypt, and Pakistan large segments of the population are young and in need of jobs as well as a sense of self-worth that comes from something other than confrontation with the West.

Our military efforts in Iraq might be characterized as noble attempts to begin the process of regime change and redress of injustices heaped on the people by corrupt and authoritarian leaders. But American military presence just exacerbates the claims of imperialism and humiliation. That’s why political solutions are more important than military ones. And although no single approach or strategy will solve the problem the best way to achieve lasting change is through good democracies that protect freedom, control corruption, and have effective systems of checks and balances. These democracies cannot be what are called “illiberal” democracies; that is, democracies in name only but really have unfair elections, authoritarian leaders, and laws that limit personal freedom.

Democracy promotion in these countries is not easy. It is slow and risky and fraught with dangers. But here are some steps in the right direction:

1. There is much distrust of the United States and we must restore trust by not promising more than we can deliver.

2. We have to find better ways of stabilizing political cultures than supporting authoritarian figures such as Mubarak and Egypt. Support for Mubarak was of course practical but costly in terms of trust.

3. Our knowledge of other cultures must improve. As diverse and multicultural as the United States is, we still have shallow understanding of many cultures, and Muslim cultures in particular.

4. There must be a way to talk to Islamist political parties. This is not naïve. There are some Islamist parties who do not envision a new caliphate but would prefer to accommodate others. Moreover in the era of new technology there must be more creative ways to make contact.

5. Some people, and I include myself, consider the basic tenets of democracy to be universal values. We need to use new media to broadcast these values.

6. Most of the world is highly sensitive to basic human rights and the rights of women. The argument that women should be liberated and have increased freedoms should be pressed such that cultural and legal repression is challenged wherever it occurs.

Wherever possible the United States must push for transition to democracy. There are a variety of paths to democracy and different countries must move at different speeds. But principles such as the rule of law, an independent judiciary, constraints on corruption, and protection of human rights are easy enough to defend. The United States is an important player on the international scene and is in a position to intelligently and seriously push for Democratic reforms. This takes skill and nuance but it’s possible with some rethinking of how to promote democratic principles.

But in the minds of many journalists, religion is either irrelevant or a topic that can be covered by the dumbest reporter on staff.

Terry Mattingly has been covering religion for most of his professional life. But in a recent blog looking back on 25 years of writing a nationally syndicated religion column he said journalism still suffers from idiotic thinking when it comes to religion.

Mattingly not only covers religion these days; he teaches about it and, more importantly, is cofounder of a Web site – getreligion.org   that is dedicated to correcting the bad reporting of religion news. The name comes from a complaint he once heard that journalists don't get religion. It is a site that is well worth your time.

I say this because I am embarrassed to be have been part of a profession that treats religion with contempt. That's really the only word for it. When I left my last newspaper job I gave the company six months' notice, and yet it took them another six months after I left to find a replacement. And not long after she was hired, the religion beat was eliminated.

That kind of contempt is the reason this Web site exists. Religion-related Web sites abound but this simple fact is lost on “professional” journalists. Their contempt is one reason why most American newspapers now struggle to survive. Church attendance still dwarfs the “gate” at professional sports events, and yet newspapers devote huge amounts of space, time and staff to the latter, but hardly any to the former.

Journalists still don't get religion, which is one big reason why readers no longer get the local paper. Consumers no longer believe newspapers have any interest in what interests them.

Then, he had a vision.

“Why not build a garden and people can learn to be self-sufficient and we can grow food?” Henderson said.

With an 80-year-old congregant heading the project, the congregation planted its first garden in 2008: watermelons, tomatoes, okra, squash, strawberries and blueberries.

Volunteers harvest at Holy Name Church in Cedar Lake, Ind. Photo by Debra Rubin

By the second year, even after the gardening chief had passed away, congregants were getting guidance from the Virginia Cooperative Extension; this year, the church has at least two dozen raised beds, with the bulk of the harvest used for the church’s Monday-Friday soup kitchen.

The nutrition program serves at least 70, rising to 250 people in the summer when kids don’t have access to school lunch programs, Henderson said. Extras are available for congregants, food program participants and the community, for a donation. A flower garden provides pollination for the plants and flowers for the sanctuary.

Henderson’s congregation is one of a growing number throughout the country that are raising fruits and vegetables for soup kitchens and food pantries in what are often called food justice programs; in some synagogues they’re known as mitzvah gardens.

The gardens serve a multifold purpose. In addition to providing fresh food to those who might not otherwise have access, the gardens are educational tools; they increase awareness of land sustainability; they teach congregants about farming and remind them of religious imperatives to care for the land.

One of the largest is at Chicago’s KAM Isaiah Israel synagogue, with a food program that supports gardens in its own yard as well as in that of two churches just blocks away.

The food program began in 2009 when Robert Nevel, the synagogue’s social justice coordinator, and a group of volunteers ripped out much of the synagogue’s lawn to create the Star of David vegetable garden in the shape of a six-pointed Star of David, with produce grown in each 30-square-foot point.

The congregation has since planted a second vegetable garden and an herb garden on other sides of its 1923 building, which sits directly across the street from the Hyde Park home of the nation’s gardeners-in-chief, President and Michelle Obama.

In 2011, with a grant from the community group One Chicago, One Nation, KAM helped Kenwood United Church of Christ establish its garden, and last year assisted St. Paul and the Redeemer Episcopal Church in creating one.

“We think of all the gardens in the neighborhood as one farm for purposes of plant rotation and harvesting,” Nevel said. “Together, we remain a network for the harvesting and distribution of the food.”

The produce is distributed to six different hot-meal programs, four of them affiliated with houses of worship and all of them within a mile and a half of KAM, Nevel said.

Through the combined 5,000-square-foot-plus gardens, KAM’s food justice and sustainability program last year donated — within an hour or two of harvest — 4,500 pounds of produce. This year’s plantings include six or seven varieties of tomatoes, collards, kale, chard, squash, okra, lettuces, carrots, peas, pole and bush beans, radishes, herbs, onions, cucumbers and peppers.

“We are probably the sole source of fresh food for four or five months of the year for a significant number of people in Chicago,” Nevel says.

At Chicago’s Living Room Cafe, a nonprofit that provides dinners twice weekly and breakfast on weekends, chef Royal Green calls the produce a “big plus.”

“They’re saving us a lot of money; it’s fresh and it’s more nutritious” than canned goods that otherwise would be used, he said.

Citing a line from Leviticus 25, “for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and settlers with me,” Nevel said, “The synagogue doesn’t own that land, the church doesn’t own that land, no one really owns it; we need to be stewards of the land.”

Nan Onest, the pastoral associate at Holy Name of Jesus Catholic Church in Cedar Lake, Ind., which began its garden last year, makes similar comments.

“Some of the key principles of Catholic social teaching speak to importance of caring for God’s creations,” she said, also noting that its food program deals with “proper use of the land, food distribution justice issues and human dignity issues all at once.”

The congregation, which donates its harvest through its own ministry for shut-ins, as well as to a local soup kitchen, food bank and a home for unwed mothers, more than doubled its garden from 1,300 square feet last year, which yielded 1,000 pounds of produce, to 3,000 square feet this year. The number of volunteers also has tripled from about a dozen to 35.

“It’s been an amazing experience,” says Anita Torok, the garden’s organizer. “Some like the spiritual solitude of seeing the plants grow and working with soil. Some like the family experience; a grandmother brings her grandchild and they hunt for the food to harvest. Some like the sense of purpose they’re involved with a good cause.”

Organizers at all the gardens say it’s not just congregants who volunteer to do the farming, but members of the larger community.

“The thing I feel most proud of about the garden is that a true marker and measure of a buy-in by our community is we have no fence around our garden. People watch it and keep us from being robbed blind,” Henderson, of Richmond, said. “The community has allowed us to keep our garden for the needy.”

Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley, point man for the U.S. Catholic bishops on bioethical issues, said Wednesday (May 15) that “this means of making embryos for research will be taken up by those who want to produce cloned children as’copies’ of other people.”

Human cloning “treats human beings as products,” O’Malley said on behalf of the bishops, “manufactured to order to suit other people’s wishes. … A technical advance in human cloning is not progress for humanity but its opposite.”

Critics argue there are other ethical techniques for creating stem cells that may help cure illnesses like Parkinson’s disease and diabetes and that the alternatives do not require cloning human embryos or destroying them. The most popular alternative is harvesting adult stem cells from the same patient. your articles. 

“Given that science has passed cloning by for stem cell production, this announcement seems simply a justification for making clones, and makes reproductive cloning and birth of human clones more likely,” said David Prentice of the Family Research Council.

The cloning breakthrough was accomplished by scientists at Oregon Health & Science University and was announced Wednesday in the journal Cell. It followed 15 years of failed experiments and the infamous case of fraud when a South Korean biologist falsely claimed to have cloned human embryos.

To achieve their breakthrough, researchers had to refine techniques that had been used on monkey embryos: This time they were able to take DNA from a human patient and splice it into a human egg that had its DNA removed. The egg then grew into an early-stage embryo whose stem cells — a virtual genetic copy of the original patient — were then harvested.

Many Christian experts, especially Catholic bioethicists who believe life begins at conception, object to the destruction of human embryos for any purpose.

But they also say the new technique could lead to the cloning of replica human beings because it is similar to the process used to produce the cloned sheep named Dolly in 1996. That technique has since been used to clone a dozen other animal species.

The lead researcher on the team, Shoukhrat Mitalipov, said he does not believe the new technique could lead to cloned babies, in part because scientists have not yet been able to do that with cloned monkey embryos. The cloned primate embryos do not develop sufficiently to implant into the uterine wall.

But others say the innovation opens the door to human cloning scenarios that were once confined to the realm of science fiction.

“The reasons why primate-cloned embryos won’t implant are probably just technical barriers,” William Hurlbut, a consulting professor at Stanford University and former member of George W. Bush’s Presidential Council on Bioethics, told Christianity Today. “Science is clever at figuring out what goes wrong and fixing it.”

Hurlbut, who has worked with Mitalipov on developing ethically acceptable adult stem cell techniques, said the breakthrough will “mark the beginning of a whole new chapter of moral scientific controversy.”

On a recent Monday evening, a side room in the non denominational church on Meriden Road was transformed into a coffee house with fresh-brewed coffee, plenty of popped kettle corn and the thorny subject of racism on the table. For an hour about  20 people gathered around tables and shared personal experiences about racism, watched a short documentary and answered questions meant to stimulate conversation and challenge their views.

The evening was as a Lifetree Cafe, a fairly recent venture by Group Publishing, the Loveland,Co.-based Christian publishing company, which is tapping into people's yearning for community and face-to face connections.

“There’s a cry out there. People are looking for hope and meaning. Lifetree Cafes create a safe place where people from all walks of life can have a conversation in a physical environment and talk about the struggles we deal with,” said Craig Cable, a Lifetree Cafe representative.

A Lifetree Cafe at Christ Community Church in Waterbury, Conn HartfordFAVS photo by Ann Marie Somma

Group Publishing tested the first Lifetree Cafe  in 2007 and began licensing the program in 2010. Since then, some 350 churches have purchased the program, with one church being added every day, said Cable.

When churches sign on, Lifetree Café provides them with all the material they need to host a weekly conversation cafe. Churches are given  videos, scripted questions, name tags for attendees, and marketing and promotion tools to promote the event.  The cost is between $300 to $ 400 a month, a fraction of what churches pay for coffee hour after Sunday services or pizza parties for youth groups, Cable said.

Lifetree Cafes are open to the pubic and held in churches, community centers, hotels and coffee shops throughout the country. ( A Lifetree Cafe in Loveland, Co. is held at a homeless shelter.) Lifetree Cafes discuss the same topic every week.  Past and future topics include Atheism, gun violence, domestic abuse and marijuana use.

Cable said the topics appeal to all denominations, don’t “feel preachy” or draw conclusions, but they do have a Christ-centered message.

Deric Mendes, an Atheist blogger in California, said he couldn't resist attending a Lifetree Cafe in a local church when he saw one advertised earlier this year, especially since the week’s topic was:  Giving up on God: the rise in Atheism.

Mendes wrote about his experience on his blog Vicarious Redemption- an Atheist goes to church for you.

Besides finding the cross-edited video of an Atheist college student debating Holly Ordway, an English professor and Christian Apologist dreadfully flawed, Mendes said he enjoyed the experience and found the people friendly and welcoming.

But there was something strained about the evening, he said.

“It felt like a bunch of white neighbors in the 1960s discussing the black family who had just moved into the neighborhood,” Mendes said.

Casey Sabella, the pastor of Christ Community Church and the host of  its Lifetree Cafe, said he is offering the program toget his congregation talking about subjects not generally discussed during church services.

 "There's no altar call, no passing of the plate to collect offerings," Sabella said. "The cafe is where people come together to have a conversation."

While the recent Lifetree Cafe at Sabella's church attracted only members of his congregation, he hopes to reach out to the greater community and invite them to join in the conversation every week. A schedule of future Lifetree Cafes topics can be found on the church's website.

Bill Tooker, a Christ Community Church member, said he found the racism conversation helpful.

"Change happens when people start talking about something," he said

Jesus shocked his disciples and enraged the authorities when he prophesied the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.  Turn to Mark 13:1-2.  It was the week that ended with his arrest and crucifixion.  Jesus spoke out every day in the Temple complex.  The disciples expressed awe at the scene:  “Look . . . what wonderful stones and what wonderful buildings!”  Jesus replied, “You see these great buildings?  Not one stone will be left here upon another.  All will be thrown down.”  That is just what happened.  In 70 AD, retaliating for a Jewish armed revolt by the militant Zealot faction, Roman troops bulldozed the Temple.  It was never rebuilt.

Early in his ministry, Jesus told a Samaritan woman he met at a well that faith, worship, and life with God do not depend on the buildings we erect and maintain to embody these ideals.  He said, Your people worship on a historic mountain in Samaria and we worship in Jerusalem, “but the hour is coming, and now is here when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth. . . .  God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:21-24).

Faith is not about nostalgia for monuments of the past.  Buildings must serve a living purpose.  The gospel is about fellowship in Christ, mission in the world, and worship “in spirit and truth.”  Pray for this spirit for yourself and for the church.