Brother Fire

In the Catholic world, we will be talking about the Beatitudes in a couple of weeks (4th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Cycle A, 2/3/2008) and I found this profound blog post, American Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, Part 1 from the Justice & Compassion blog. It's a vivid illustration how we Americans have distorted Jesus' message in His name. Please take a look at it and comment. Peace.

Many of the Independent Sacramental Movement (ISM) email groups & blogs have been pretty quiet. I was thinking the other day how it’s been a long time since there has been any talk of unity. But sure enough, it seems that the talk has restarted again. For those of you who are new to the ISM, you may not know that the I ndependent Sacramental Movement (a.k.a. Old Catholicism, Autocephalous Church Movement, Independent Catholicism, Independent Orthodoxy, etc.) in North America is not a church denomination, but rather a group of small churches that are loosely linked by apostolic succession and sacramental theology. While the churches are diverse and indeed independent of each other, most of its clergy have longed for some form of unity with their catholic sisters and brothers. Many have tried to ‘legislate’ unity by forming associations and councils but have failed miserably. It is usually early in the process of forming these associations that theological and ideologica...

An address at the march on Washington, DC for jobs and freedom (Aug 1963): Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed - we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. This will be the day, this will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning "My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring!" And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every tenement and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last, f...