Have a green Lent
The Natural Resource Defense Council has compiled a list of “green” resolutions for the environmentally conscious individual observing Lent.
Lent, the 40 days preceding Easter Sunday, is a time when many Christians from some faith traditions abstain from certain things. Some people abstain from certain foods or perhaps they abstain from certain behaviors during a season marked by prayer, reflection and pentinence.
The suggestion on the council’s list is to give up plastic and paper bags.
“Do you opt for paper or plastic when at the grocery store? Neither is a good choice,” the council says on The Daily Green’s Web site. “Twelve million barrels of oil were used to make the 88.5 billion plastic bags consumed in the United States last year. And it takes four times more energy to make paper bags.
The best choice is reusable shopping bags made of cotton, nylon or durable, meshlike plastic. Put a few reusable shopping bags in your car so you have them handy on your next shopping trip. And if you happen to forget your reusable bag (as we all do!), choose paper if you will recycle it or plastic if you will reuse or recycle it.”
This is a simple tip, definitely something to think about.
Get more tips on the council’s complete list by clicking here: Green Lent.
Look for more Lent-related blog postings here on the Religion and Values blog in the days ahead.
Carla Hinton
Religion Editor
Meat-less recipes for Lent, courtesy of Humane Society
Many Roman Catholics traditionally abstain from eating meat on Ash Wednesday and Friday’s during Lent.
The Humane Society of the United States offers meat- and dairy-free recipes on its Web site.
A message on the site reminds those who fast thatchoosing meat-less meals during Lent “is not only a symbol of self-sacrifice but is a means to proactively help millions of animals who suffer on factory farms in the United States each day.”
For meat-less recipes from the Humane Society’s kitchen, click here: Veggie recipes for Lent. Scroll down to the bottom of the page.
Look for more Lent-related blog postings here on the Religion and Values blog in the days ahead.
Carla Hinton
Religion Editor
Religion reporter loses faith
Reader, before you wonder if the blog title is referring to me, read on:
A story came over the wire yesterday that immediately captured my interest because it involved another religion writer (or former religion writer).
The story really hit home.
The Religion News Service had an interesting story about a new book by former religion reporter William Lobnell.
Lobnell writes about his crisis of faith in “Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America — and Found Unexpected Peace.”
According to the RNS, Lobnell wrote that he lost his faith while covering the Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal as a journalist for the Lost Angeles Times. Lobnell had been an evangelical Christian and was going through the process of converting to Catholicism when he began reporting on an Orange County priest accused of molesting boys.
The book’s premise, released just a day before Ash Wednesday, might seem like a downer during Lent. However, I found that it pushed me to think about those times that I’ve had my own crises of faith and how they were resolved.
None (and I can count them on one hand) had anything to do with a story I was reporting on. Rather they were spurred by personal disappointments within my own family and circle of friends. Some I brought on myself, a sort of internal combustion.
Each time, the resolution was basically the same: You will lose your faith if you place your hope in mankind, even yourself. Faith is placing hope in God, no matter what the circumstances look like.
Hey and often a story I worked on actually increased my faith. One in particular was last year’s story about the relatives of Stephen Beachboard, who found out what happened to him after reading my story on the Internet. I’ve blogged about it so I won’t go into details here, but suffice it to say that there are many times when faith is strengthened through the work of sharing these stories.
Sure there are some stories that are not so positive and downright ugly, so I can’t judge Lobnell. Everyone’s faith journey is different.
For those curious about Lobnell’s story, I’ve included the RNS article below.
For reporter, abuse scandal prompted a crisis of faith
By Andrea Useem
Religion News Service
What if you felt God called you to a task — and then you lost your faith while carrying out that very task?
That’s what happened to William Lobdell, a former evangelical Christian and aspiring Catholic, while he covered religion as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times. His new memoir, “Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America — and Found Unexpected Peace,” tells the tale.
Lobdell, now 48, became an evangelical in his late twenties, after reaching a personal crisis point. “I had married a volatile woman whom I was divorcing, my career was going terribly, and I had gotten my girlfriend pregnant,” he said in an interview. “At age 27, I thought, `I could not have screwed up my life more.“’ Lobdell said a friend told him he needed God in his life — a bit of advice that led him to an Irvine, Calif., megachurch and a conversion experience during an evangelical men’s retreat.
Working in journalism at the time, Lobdell wrote that he began to see all around him amazing stories of faith at work in people’s lives — and he prayed that God would allow him to become a religion reporter to tell those stories. By the time that dream came true in 2000, Lobdell was a married father of four, but spiritually restless, and he began the process of joining the Catholic Church in search of a deeper, more authentic faith life.
Soon those two forces were on a collision course. On the religion beat, Lobdell was covering the story of an Orange County priest and Catholic school principal, the Rev. Michael Harris, accused of molesting young boys. After Harris’ diocese settled with an alleged victim for $5.2 million in August, 2001, Lobdell attended a meeting of survivors of clergy sexual abuse.
Up until that time, Lobdell wrote, he didn’t feel the bad actions of one priest affected his own faith: “I saw exposing what Harris did as cleaning up, not hurting, Catholicism.” But sitting in the room with seven abuse survivors, he wrote, was a “spiritual body blow.”
“I had written so much about the redemptive power of faith, but I had never seen, in a real and personal way, the opposite: the damage religion could do in the hands of bad people,” he wrote.
Only a few months later, in early 2002, the abuse scandal broke in earnest, driven by reporting in the Boston Globe, and Lobdell eventually told his “sponsor” in his Catholic conversion process that he couldn’t go through with it. “My long honeymoon with Christianity had ended,” he wrote.
Lobdell is not the only journalist to admit publicly that covering the abuse scandal critically damaged his faith. Dallas Morning News religion columnist Rod Dreher announced in October, 2006, in a widely read blog post at Beliefnet.com, that he had left his Catholic faith, in part because he had allowed the abuse scandal to “destroy” his belief. (He is now a member of the Orthodox Church in America.)
“I think many reporters experienced something like PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) because of hearing first-hand from people whose lives had been changed in a tragic way by people wearing a clerical collar,” said Debra Mason, executive director of the Religion Newswriters Association, a professional group for religion reporters. “Anecdotally, some reporters left the 1 / 8religion 3 / 8 beat after covering the scandal because they were just burned out.”
Michael Paulson, the Boston Globe religion reporter who received, along with a team of co-workers, the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2003 for reporting on the scandal, noted that while newsrooms sometimes provide debriefing for reporters who cover wars and natural disasters, he and his team members did not have any “formal preparation” for dealing with “heart wrenching and angry-making” stories they heard. “The emotion was much more raw than what we encountered on other stories,” Paulson said.
But Terry Mattingly, a syndicated religion columnist and director of a Washington D.C.-based journalism center for Christian universities and colleges, rebutted the idea that religion reporting necessarily leads to a traumatic loss of faith.
“I have only known one or two professionals who felt their faith was threatened by covering religion news,” he wrote at the website GetReligion.org after Lobdell’s first account of his loss of faith was published on Page One of the L.A. Times in July, 2007.
Lobdell not only decided to forgo his Catholic conversion, but he also resigned from his post as religion reporter in 2006 and now embraces a non-dogmatic atheism, he said in an interview. “If I were a postal worker who did his job everyday and went to church on Sunday, I like to think I would still have gotten where I am today, but it would have taken decades,” he said. Being a religion reporter, “I went through it in warp speed.
“The truth can be very uncomfortable sometimes, and for me that’s what my journey has been about,” said Lobdell, noting that while some readers have applauded his decisions, others have chastised him or invited him to a new faith. “Have I come to the truth? I guess we’ll find out.”
Giving up is hard to do
Fasting during Lent is a way for Christians to identify with Jesus in the suffering He experienced to redeem mankind.
Most folks fast from eating certain foods during Lent.
A few years back we talked to several readers and found that chocolate and sweets, in general, were some of the food items many people vowed to stay away from during the season. One young lady hoped to give up soft drinks for the season.
Lots of other people abstain from other things like certain behaviors or habits.
I used to attend a United Methodist church here in the city and I found the Lenten season very meaningful.
With those memories in mind, I have wondered if I might sacrifice or give up something for Lent.
I don’t think giving up some type of food would be very meaningful because I am doing that anyway as part of a weight loss program that begins this week.
However there are a few habits that I could forego that would reflect a great sacrifice.
One of them is my penchant for watching old sitcoms at the end of the day.
I tape some of my favorites like “Frasier” and then I might catch “The Cosby Show” on Nick at Nite or “The Golden Girls” on Lifetime.
Now giving up my nightly ritual of watching those shows — that I’ve probably seen a thousand times — would be a sacrifice.
I could instead use that time to entend my prayer time and bible-reading.
It’s something to think about.
I’ll decide soon. The night wears on and my handoften creeps to the remote about this time …
Leaders offer Lenten reflections
Read what religious leaders in Oklahoma and others are saying about Lent:
– Read the Most Rev. Eusebius Beltran’s remarks about Lent, go to the Sooner Catholic Online: The liturgical season of Lent. Beltran is archbishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. – The Rev. Robert Hayes Jr., bishop of the Oklahoma United Methodist Conference, discusses the Lenten season in his recent online column: Bishop Hayes on Lent. – The Rev. David Nehrenz, pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church in Norman had this to say: “Our Epiphany Light — Jesus!.”
– The Rev. Mark McAdow, pastor of First United Methodist Church of Oklahoma City, blogged about Lent … or ist it lint?: Lent or Lint.
– Father Hamilton at St. Peter and Paul Catholic Church in Kingfisher offered general Lenten comments: Time for Lent.
– A Lenten Devotional Booklet is offered on the Episcopal Diocese of Oklahoma’s Web site. To read the devotional, created by Daughters of the King at St. John’s Episocpal Church in Tulsa, go to the diocese’s Web site: Lenten Devotional.
– The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops offers information about Lent information on a Web site: Lent.
(PHOTOS: From left to right, the Rev. Mark McAdow, the Most Rev. Eusebius Beltran and the Rev. Robert Hayes Jr.)
Look for more Lent-related blog postings here on the Religion and Values blog in the days ahead.
Carla Hinton
Religion Editor
Encouraging Lenten generosity
An interesting initiative begins today, the first day of Lent.
It has a simple name that isn’t easy to forget: ”Love Life Live Lent.”
It’s a new way of marking Lent.
“Instead of giving up chocolate or going on a detox, it encourages people to undertake a simple act of generosity each day. The actions are small and fun to do, but make a real difference in homes, families and communities,” the Love Life Live Lent Web site says.
The initiative began in Birmingham in 2006. A colleague of mine found out about it on the Church of England’s Web site. She was looking for some fresh ideas to mark Lent this year.
She got on the Love Life Live Lent site at www.livelent.net and signed up for a Twitter alert to get suggestions for simple acts of generosity that she can do each day.
Check out the Love Life Live Lent site for suggested Lenten season family activities, recipes, prayers and Lent and Easter facts.
Look for more Lent-related blog postings here on the Religion and Values blog in the days ahead.
Carla Hinton
Religion Editor
Facebook fast
It’s Lent for the modern, techno-savvy times.
Some Facebook enthusiasts (It seems wrong to call them “junkies” doesn’t it?) are abstaining from Facebook for the 40 days of Lent which begins today.
The urge to click must be quenched.
The need to share must be stifled … if only for 40 days.
In a recent story in The Wall Street Journal, one Facebook faithful mom admitted that her time on Facebook kept her from playing with children.
One wonders how they will make it that long at a time when the popularity of such social sites as Facebook and MySpace just keeps growing.
For those who need help, Steve Johnson at the Chicago Tribune recently posted his 10 suggestions for quitting Facebook this Lenten season.
Click here to read Johnson’s tips: Quitting Facebook.
What are you giving up, by the way?
Facebook or are you on a more traditional Lenten fast of meat, sweets or alcohol?
Let me know.
Carla Hinton
Religion Editor
Lent begins today
It’s Ash Wednesday, the day marking the beginning of the Lenten season.For many Christians, Lent is a time of reflection and prayer in the days leading to Easter.
There are an abundance of Ash Wednesday services today, followed by a host of Lenten programs, services and activities.
Here are just a few in the Oklahoma City metro area:
– An Ash Wednesday worship service will be held at 7 tonight at Northwest Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), 2828 NW 30.
The Rev. Zena McAdams, the church’s pastor, will preside over the service.
Beginning March 4, a noon prayer service will be held each Wednesday during the Lenten season, McAdams said. For more information, call 943-4477.
– Church of the Saviour will host an Ash Wednesday service and Communion at 7 tonight at 5600 NW 63. This is a special service titled “Questions for Reflection” by the Rev. Jim Newby.
And for something different:
– First Presbyterian Church is offering a free Ash Wednesday tour of the church’s stained-glass windows at 11 a.m. today at 1001 NW 25.
The tour will be about 45 minutes long. ”Lenten Journey Through Faith and Color” will be similar to a Stations of the Cross service. The tour will travel from station to station, window to window, meditating on Scriptures and relating the stories of faith. For more information, call the Rev. Matt Meinke at 525-6584 or go online to www.fpcokc.org. – Messiah Lutheran Church will host an Ash Wednesday service at noon and 7:15 tonight at 3600 Northwest Expressway.
