Religion

I’m beginning to think either I’m getting old or I’ve been living under a rock, but apparently I missed the obituary for the age-old adage, “We need to disagree without being disagreeable.”

Pope Francis on Saturday advised against making the pursuit of money, a career or success the basis for one’s whole life, urging in his Epiphany remarks to also resist “inclinations toward arrogance, the thirst for power and for riches.”

Our national leaders, many of them public Christians, have just enacted legislation that amounts to the opposite of a Jubilee, concentrating more wealth among the wealthy and increasing the financial burden on the already poor.

Pope Francis urged Latin American and Caribbean Catholics to celebrate and defend their diversity, saying Tuesday the face of the Catholic Church is indigenous, mestizo and black.

Q: It seems to me that if anyone has a right and a reason for protesting and marching in the streets (it) is the Jewish people, considering all the horrible things done to and said about them, and yet it doesn’t happen here in the U.S. How do Jews manage anger and indignation? A: We tweet! Just kidding. Sort of.

Buddhist Institute of Universal Compassion on Spokane’s north side offers yoga, Buddhist teaching and meditation.

DETROIT – A priest known for his steadfast devotion to the needy cleared a threshold on the way to possible sainthood Saturday as the Roman Catholic Church beatified Solanus Casey, who is credited with the miraculous cure of a woman with a chronic skin disease. More than 60,000 people attended a Mass in Detroit where Father Solanus, as he was known, has an extraordinary following, decades after his death in 1957. Many insist their prayers to him have led to remarkable changes in their lives. Some of their stories were told on the scoreboard screens at Ford Field.

Pope Francis on Thursday urged lawmakers to ensure that health care laws protect the “common good,” decrying the fact that in many places only the privileged can afford sophisticated medical treatments.

Perhaps #MeToo is the result of 5 million women marching in January this year saying they’d had enough. We’re done being silent; done laughing it off; done pretending it hasn’t happened.

Recently, I was grieved to hear about five teenage football players in Creston, Iowa, who were photographed wearing KKK hoods with a burning cross and a Confederate flag, and who then shared that photo and video on social media. Their football coach kicked them off the team, the harshest discipline that he could consider. Then I learned that the devastating fire that has consumed the Columbia River Gorge was started by teenagers – boys and girls – who threw a firecracker into the dry gorge, laughing as they did so, filming it, showing it to others on social media.