San Jose, CA
Yeah, why would we expect the world’s most successful social media site to follow its own policies and remove bogus news from its pages? I mean, besides independent fact checkers calling out fraudulent news, artificial intelligence to sort through posts, and 50,000 plus Facebook employees, there simply isn’t anything Facebook can do to monitor this kind of activity! (Warning – some snark may be present in this post!)
See this important article from Buzzfeed
Most of us have lots of questions about the Bible that we have parked somewhere and left to collect dust.
There are elements in the Bible that are challenging to accept (or sometimes even understand! Some of those parables…) given the experiences that we have had in our lives. This is not a wrong way to feel, and is important to explore to explore these feelings and thoughts and the questions they spawn. Questions that are hidden and not discussed are a barrier to our connection with Spirit.
During our current series, we are going to explore some of this. No question is wrong. Dana wrote this sample in the e-letter about the series:
Here are some points about the Bible Dana shared to get us thinking.
???????? The Bible is our stories about God, not God’s stories about us.
???????? We take the Bible seriously, but not always literally.
???????? God is still speaking; do not put a period, where God has put a comma
How do you feel about these? Do you agree, or disagree?
Join us for this series these coming weeks if you can.
Thanks to everyone from Urban Sanctuary that participated in Thursday’s protest outside of the Wells Fargo’s branch in San Jose, calling on the bank to stop funding Climate change and fossil fuel infrastructure projects.
Sharing some thoughts from Jim Thompson: “What we did Thursday was reach out to more than 200 people (and more than 300 on Friday) with flyers explaining why we were protesting at a Wells Fargo branch. We had positive conversations with lots and lots of people and we got a lot of reinforcement for what we were doing. We also picked up a bunch of people who wanted to get on our mailing list. This is especially important because we need to grow this movement.
A bunch of thank-you’s: To Sara Bruce who was ill Thursday (hope you’re felling better today, Sara) and unable to be present for making the text into a lovely flyer; Linda Lappin for running off a LOT of flyers on her home printer; Kevin Haley for adding pizzaz with his saxophone playing on Thursday; Stew Plock for doing an eerily effective job of being Oily Wells (& Doug Neilson for speaking for Oily); Sandra Hietala for going in alone to the WF branch to try to talk with the branch manager; Dana Bainbridge for a lovely blessing at Thursday’s conclusion; Rita Foster Sharkey for bringing so much energy to Thursday’s event; Ruth Priest for showing us that the 80s is a perfectly good age for protesting; Walter Hudson for bringing a friend to the Thursday event; Peter Wood for your idea about having conversations at branches about moving your money; Rush Rehm for an example of how to get a lot of people closing their Wells Fargo account at the same time; and many more individual acts of solidarity.
What we did on Thursday and Friday were part of a big movement that is building. Many of you signed letters to the CEO of Chase and 1,500 of them were delivered to his two homes last week. There are a lot of actions being take on behalf of the planet and many more to come as this is a year of action to stop the money pipeline: (https://www.stopthemoneypipeline.com/).”
Christmas at Stritch is fast becoming a favorite holiday tradition at Urban Sanctuary! This year on the 24 at 5pm, we’ll be enjoying a “jazz Christmas,” with readings about the season by members interspersed with Scripture. And of course, we’ll be singing carols together–classics like Angels We Have Heard on High, Joy to the World and The First Noel–not to mention enjoying free snacks! Come celebrate an urban Christmas with us, with plenty of time left that evening to rush home and put out cookies for Santa!