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TOWN OF LEEDS — With its ornate woodwork, folding French doors and expansive veranda, the 104-year-old country house near DeForest could be the setting for a wedding or social gathering, and indeed has been many times. The house isn’t flashy, but it is stately and well-maintained, and it has had exactly one owner its entire life — Spring Prairie Lutheran Church, which built it in 1906.
C. S. Lewis said that Christianity was about achieving perfection in God, not happiness. Even so, a survey in this month’s American Sociological Review (ASR) suggests that a “high rate of life satisfaction” is at least a byproduct of the Christian life. Researchers Chaeyoon Lim, sociologist at the University of Madison-Wisconsin, and Robert Putnam, author most recently of American Grace and most famously of Bowling Alone, found that people who frequently attend church and other places of worship are happier than those who attend less frequently.
Devotional poetry is as old as the Psalms. The discipline of using words in a precise way to praise God can be an intensely meaningful act of worship. Now a Cottage Grove man has taken an obscure poetic discipline not typically known for its devotional nature and created something different. It’s published in a new book called Christian Haiku, the 17-syllable devotional.
There are two Caesareas in the Bible, both named after Caesar Augustus, the Roman ruler of 2,000 years ago. Caesarea Maritima is mentioned over a dozen times in the Acts of the Apostles. It was a seaport on the Mediterranean coast. Caesarea Philippi is mentioned one time each in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark. It was located at the headwaters of the Jordan River, near Mt. Hermon. An archaeologist who spoke in Madison Sunday afternoon believes an excavation taking place in Israel over almost a dozen years offers a new perspective on Caesarea Philippi.
Christmas? Hanukkah? Or Winter Solstice? They are all represented at your very own State Capitol. In the rotunda of the Capitol, surrounding the state’s forty-foot, decorated “Holiday Tree,” five displays stand sentinel for the month of December, as they have for a number of years now. A giant, lit Menorah, three signs celebrating Christmas and a gloomy brass display condemning religion and promoting the Winter Solstice engage in a silent, but epic, battle yet again.
When George Wirz, the retired auxiliary bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Madison, died last week at age 81, his passing got only brief notice in the local news. He had been retired for six years, after all, and even before that, he had a pretty low profile in the public arena. An auxiliary bishop is essentially a helper to the main bishop. And Wirz was not given to plunging into the public debates that tend to get one’s name in the headlines. Yet his impact on Catholics in the southwestern Wisconsin area that comprises the 11-county Madison Diocese was…
Los Angeles is a more religious city than Madison. No, really, it’s true; you can look it up.
For the past 10 years, 280 low-income families living on Madison’s north side have filled out a Christmas wish list for $25 gifts. Fulfilled anonymously by city churchgoers, the list produces $11,000 in Christmas cheer for households in the Northport and Packers Apartments whose incomes average $10,600-$11,700.
Mad City Church, a small church plant that began meeting in Emerson School 14 years ago, grew and moved to East High School, grew some more and moved to LaFollette High School, exists no more. Members of the church held their last service yesterday, November 28, 2010, and then marched or drove to Lake City Church at 4909 E. Buckeye Road. The two churches have united into a new congregation that will be called City Church.
madisonchristians.com invites Christian ministries in the Madison area to promote community-wide events with a banner advertisement on madisonchristians.com. Events that qualify will reflect MC’s scripture focus, Romans 12:5: “In Christ, we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all of the others.”