News
If you let loose your imagination, you might hear a desert wind blowing across Milwaukee and smell the scent of ancient parchments – and maybe just a whiff of old camel.That’s because curators and artists are re-creating part of the Middle East in the halls of the Milwaukee Public Museum for the "Dead Sea Scrolls and The Bible," the largest temporary exhibit ever produced by the museum staff.
Technology is becoming more common in churches across the country, but church leaders in Madison do not believe that this addition has changed the fundamental religious experience for their congregations.
Any jazz fan who has been paying attention at all during the past half century will recognize the quirky 5/4 riff that means the Dave Brubeck Quartet is swinging into its classic "Take Five."But there’s another tune the pianist keeps playing that is completely different: "Forty Days," the most famous piece in his first sacred oratorio, "The Light in the Wilderness."
A Yale librarian who cast doubt last year on the origins of the Serenity Prayer, adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous and reprinted on countless knickknacks, says new evidence has persuaded him to retain the famed Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr as the author in the next edition of The Yale Book of Quotations.The provenance of the prayer, which begins, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,” became a subject of controversy last year with the publication of an article by the librarian, Fred R. Shapiro, who is also the editor of the book of quotations.
Town of Ashippun – Why would 600 Norwegians and Norwegian wannabes flock to a remote country church on a Saturday afternoon in December to eat lye-soaked cod, drenched with melted butter?For the same reason Green Bay Packers fans trek to Lambeau Field and huddle around Weber grills by the frozen tundra.It’s tradition.
Close your eyes and picture a Christmas creche, or its animated embodiment, the Christmas pageant. Baby Jesus, Mary and Joseph are there for sure. Three wise men, a few shepherds. Maybe a donkey, ox and lamb stand nearby in the stable.Centuries of Christmas carols, creches and pageants — among countless other works of art — have ensconced this scene in the heart of the Nativity for generations of Christians. But the Bible doesn’t.
Although the Urbana Student Missions Conference is no longer held in Urbana IL, the nuts and bolts of the conference still come together in Madison WI, as they have for the past four decades. The Urbana conference moved from the University of Illinois campus to the Edward Jones dome and the Americas Center in St. Louis in 2006. It will be held again at the same location later this month, December 27-31.Today there are Christian conferences held almost every week of the year. But few have been around as long as the Urbana Student Missions Conference, and have impacted as…
PASTORAL COMMENTARY Dane County is an amazing community for African American babies to be born into. It is a horrible community in which to live if you are an adult African American male. As an African American who is both a male and a father, I find this stark contrast appalling.Recently, I was at a Healthy Births Outcome event. We gathered that morning to discuss the fact that Dane County has the absolute best African American infant survival rate in the entire country. In fact, we are the only community in the nation where white and African American infants have…
When a Los Angeles pastor decided his church needed a boost in membership, he did a little soul-searching and decided man’s best friend should be part of the fold. Now, his Sunday service at Covenant Presbyterian Church is attracting new parishioners — and their faithful pooches.
Near the end of the annual Catholic bishops’ meeting in Baltimore last week, Brother Paul Bednarczyk, executive director of the National Religious Vocation Conference (NRVC), came to the podium to say what’s working and not working in terms of drawing men and women into religious orders. Speaking from findings in a recent survey: "Recent Vocations to Religious Life: commissioned by the NRVC and carried out by Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA), he described how dire the situation is.