|
Posted: 22 Sep 2015 10:41 AM PDT
By Doug Porter
Eighteenth century Franciscan missionary Junipero Serra will be canonized by Pope Francis this week. Hailed by the church as “the evangelizer of west in the United States” and reviled by descendants of the indigenous people living along the coast, Serra’s ascension to sainthood is a controversial move. The expulsion of the Jesuit order from the Spanish colonies by King Carlos III brought Serra to Baja California. In 1769, the government, fearful of intrusions by Russian traders to the north, dispatched the Franciscans to what we now call California. Serra founded nine missions, starting with the Mission San Diego de Alcalá and went about the business of ‘civilizing’ the local inhabitants. Tales of the conquest of California by Spanish soldiers and Catholic missionaries by supporters of the church tend towards laying the blame for much of the ensuing slaughter on the military. Serra viewed the native population as children, children who needed the kind of brutal discipline meted out by the Franciscan order in order to find salvation. [Read more...]
|
shared from
Posted: 22 Sep 2015 05:19 AM PDT
By John Lawrence The Pope is visiting the US this week to make the case that we should take climate change seriously and start doing something about it. He is really making the case that we should change our paradigm from one of individual self-fulfillment to one of "we're all in this together," from individual salvation to collective salvation of our earthly home. This has far-reaching implications. We need to be concerned about what's happening to the earth as a whole, to humanity as a whole, and not just to our own family, town, state, country. The Pope doesn't mince words. Far from being the conservative head of a 2000 year old bureaucracy, he is using his moral megaphone and authority to speak out on the major problems of our day - global warming and capitalism - and the two are interrelated. You can't have the entire sum of people on the planet involved with saving the planet from runaway climate change without getting involved with the collective plight of all those people in their daily lives. The Pope is putting the emphasis and focus on the plight of the poor, which is really what Jesus was all about. Finally. [Read more...]
|
|
Posted: 22 Sep 2015 05:19 AM PDT
< By Lauren McCauley / Common Dreams One of the greatest contradictions of our time is that while world leaders profess concern over a rapidly warming planet, they continue to spend hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars subsidizing the fossil fuel industries that are driving climate change. In fact, according to a new report released on Monday by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)—a global forum on economic policy—the world's richest nations spend roughly $160-200 billion each year supporting fossil fuel consumption and production. "We’re totally schizophrenic," said Angel Gurría, secretary-general of the Paris-based organization. "We’re trying to reduce emissions, and we subsidize the consumption of fossil fuels. These policies are not obsolete, they’re dangerous legacies of a bygone era when pollution was viewed as a tolerable side effect of economic growth. They should be erased from the books." [Read more...]
 |
|
Posted: 22 Sep 2015 05:18 AM PDT
By Ernie McCray I saw "Blueprints to Freedom: an Ode to Bayard Rustin," at the La Jolla Playhouse a week ago. I was never so ready for a play to begin as I was that night because Bayard is a huge hero of mine, someone, whose memory, I've cherished for a long time. To me, he was about as outstanding a human being as anyone could be. Ghandi, personified. So tirelessly alive and brilliant and loving and wise, a master as to how to organize, able to gather what he called "angelic troublemakers" together against all kinds of odds, in all kinds of weather. He brought us the moment when Martin envisioned a world, aloud, where "little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers." [Read more...]
|
|
The TRUTH will set you FREE.
No comments:
Post a Comment