c. 2007 Religion News Service
Lawmakers Issue a `Call to Prayer for America’
WASHINGTON (RNS) For one group of congressmen, the buck doesn’t stop at the Capitol or the White House: It stops with God.
The Congressional Prayer Caucus, formed in 2005 by Rep. Randy Forbes, R-Va., on Wednesday (March 28) asked Americans to pray for five minutes weekly for the benefit of the United States.
The prayer caucus, made up of 38 lawmakers from both parties, has a new Web site, http://www.prayercaucus.org, where people can sign up for a five-minute block of time each week to pray for the nation. The goal _ a “call to prayer for America” _ is to have Americans praying for their country 24 hours a day, according to the group’s charter.
“Our newspapers, televisions, and computers are overwhelmed with negative voices. We have become cynical and lost credibility in many of our institutions,” said Forbes. “We hope that God will hear our prayers and heal our land.”
Said Rep. Todd Akin, R-Mo.: “We deal with all kinds of problems in Congress, but I’m still like a little kid in Sunday school. Jesus is always the answer.”
The prayer caucus members are all Christians _ one, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., is senior pastor of St. James United Methodist Church in Kansas City _ but they urged people of all faiths and political persuasions to join in prayer for the nation, especially during the war in Iraq.
“Prayer knows no political boundaries,” said Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind. “These are anxious times for our nation, but we are called by God not to be anxious.”
The Rev. Barry Lynn, head of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, said lawmakers should “stick to their constitutional duties and leave religious decisions to individuals.
“Religion is too important to become a political football,” Lynn said.
_ Philip Turner
Famed Chapel in `Da Vinci Code’ to Get a $14.1 Million Makeover
LONDON (RNS) A medieval Scottish chapel that became a tourist magnet after its starring role in “The Da Vinci Code” is about to get a state-funded $14.1 million overhaul.
The 15th century Rosslyn Chapel, in Scotland’s Midlothian area, has been granted the restoration money by the Heritage Lottery Fund, set up by the British Parliament 13 years ago, and Historic Scotland, established by the province to safeguard and promote its own heritage.
Under a five-year conservation program, the chapel will get a new roof and repairs to its stained glass windows and stonework _ plus a new visitors’ center to cater to the tens of thousands of tourists that now turn up every year, thanks largely to the Da Vinci Code phenomenon.
Author Dan Brown gave Rosslyn Chapel a key role in his novel, which has sold more than 40 million copies, and the hit movie that followed. His suggestion that the church and its elaborate carvings contained secrets and treasures surrounding the relationship between Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene triggered massive interest.
Some 120,000 tourists visited Rosslyn last year, up from just 30,000 six years earlier, before the book came out. Currently, as many as 1,000 visitors on peak days troop along the chapel’s floors inside its increasingly fragile walls.
There have been growing concerns that the chapel has become the victim of its own popularity. Andrew Russell, managing trustee of the Rosslyn Chapel Trust, told The Scotsman newspaper that he hopes to “manage down” the number of visitors closer to about 60,000 annually.
Whether the restoration funding will help him meet that goal may be questionable, since a considerable amount of the money will go to building a new reception area, exhibition space and cafe.
“We hope that the association with `The Da Vinci Code’ will die away into a more targeted kind of audience,” he said.
_ Al Webb
More Israeli Jews Donating `Hametz’ Food During Passover
JERUSALEM (RNS) More and more Jewish Israelis are making an effort to donate food they cannot consume during the Passover holiday to non-Jews, according to local aid organizations that care for the needy.
Jews are obligated not to consume “hametz,” or food containing leavening ingredients, during the eight-day Passover holiday, which begins on Monday night (April 2). The holiday recalls the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt.
Although many Jews in the Diaspora routinely give their hametz to non-Jewish friends and neighbors or to organizations that provide food to non-Jews, Israelis have been slower to adopt this custom, partly due to the tensions between Jews and non-Jews, the latter overwhelmingly Arabs.
“There is a lot more awareness about donating food before Passover, rather than discarding it,” says Daniel Schwartz, assistant director of Table to Table, an organization that “rescues” tons of excess food from weddings, supermarkets and farms and orchards, and donates it to food kitchens and other places that feed the poor.
Schwartz says at least 35 Jewish organizations and synagogues are taking part this year in Table to Table’s second “Hametz Initiative,” compared to just a handful last year.
While the Table to Table program is somewhat new, some groups have been donating hametz to needy Christians and Muslims for several years.
“We’ve been doing this for at least 10 years,” says Rabbi Levi Weiman-Kelman, the spiritual leader of Congregation Kol Haneshama, a Reform synagogue in Jerusalem.
“Most Jews sell their hametz in the legal fiction of getting ready for (Passover),” he said of the provision that enables Jews to symbolically sell their food to non-Jews. “We encourage people to give it away rather than sell it because there are so many needy non-Jews in Israeli society.”
Hunger has grown in Israel as the government has slashed social welfare benefits, especially to families with many children. Ultra-Orthodox families and Arab citizens, who tend to have large families, have been particularly hard hit by these cuts.
A 2003 survey, conducted before the budget cuts by the Brookdale Institute/JDC and government ministries, revealed that 22 percent of Israelis (400,000 households) reported living with moderate to severe food insecurity. Many families rely each week on food kitchens and food parcels.
Weimann-Kelman believes that in addition to alleviating hunger, donating hametz to non-Jews in Israel is good for the soul.
“People feel there is a real lack of hope, but just because there is no political solution on the horizon doesn’t mean that we can’t be concerned about Palestinians in and outside Israel on a humanitarian level,” the rabbi said.
_ Michele Chabin
Groups Angry After Home-schooled Girl Removed from Family
BERLIN (RNS) Christian groups are angry after a German court removed a home-schooled girl from her family, saying the decision hurts the girl and highlights German antagonism toward home schooling.
The girl, Melissa Busekros, 15, was held back in the seventh grade at the end of 2004 because of poor grades. Her parents, Hubert and Gudrun, opted to home-school her. The girl’s siblings continued to attend class normally.
However, the Youth Services Department of the southern German city of Erlangen decided earlier this year that the arrangement was harming the girl. She was placed in a psychiatric facility Feb. 1 and transferred to foster care two weeks later. That decision was upheld by a superior court on March 12, according to a Web site run by the International Human Rights Group.
Home-schooling groups see this as a direct attack. “This is the worst thing the home-schooling movement has ever faced in Germany,” Joerg Grosseluemern, who is active in groups like The Initiative for German Home School Families and the Network for Educational Freedom, told Spiegel Magazine.
In a posting on its Web site, the city of Erlangen says the case is more complicated. It said the decision to remove Melissa from her family had nothing to do with home-schooling; under German law, she is old enough that she no longer has to attend school.
Rather, the city argued, officials were concerned about the girl’s welfare and felt she should go to psychiatric counseling. Citing a lack of cooperation from the parents, the city went to court to separate her from her family. She has since been diagnosed as having a “school phobia” and an unnatural dependence on her father.
U.S. Christian groups have rallied around the family, organizing prayer meetings, letter-writing campaigns and even proposing a boycott of German goods until the girl is returned to her family.
_ Niels Sorrells
Quote of the Day: Rep J. Randy Forbes, R-Va.
(RNS) “Every politician says `God bless America.’ But do you really mean that? If you don’t, maybe we should start saying, `Have a good day,’ or something like that.”
_ Rep. J. Randy Forbes, R-Va., about what he called an effort to bring “America back to prayer.” Forbes, an organizer of the Congressional Prayer Caucus, was quoted by The Washington Times.
KRE/LF END RNS
