December 3 is the day to visit a local church and support alternative Christmas giving. Give gifts of service, activism, and fair trade to your loved ones, and make it a truly memorable Christmas! And for a list of local fair-trade stores, online alternative shopping, and respected activist and faithful charities, click here. We will continually update this list, so please your suggestions if you do not see your favorite store or charity on it!
First Christian Church in Riverside
21st Annual Alternative Gift Fair: Buy Something Day
4055 Jurupa Avenue, Riverside
Corner of Brockton and Jurupa Avenues
(951) 686-0646 http://www.rivdoc.org/
Sunday, December 3rd
Noon to 4 p.m.
Fellowship Hall
Neighborhood Congregational Church, Laguna Beach
Alternative Holiday Market
340 St. Ann’s Drive, Laguna Beach
949-494-8061 http://www.ncclaguna.org/
Sunday, December 3rd
11 a.m. to 1 p.m.
St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church, Corona del Mar
Alternative Gift Fair
3233 Pacific View Drive, Corona Del Mar
949.644.0463 http://www.stmikescdm.org/
Sunday, December 3rd
Following the 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. worship services
Tustin Presbyterian Church
Christmas Market
225 W. Main Street, Tustin
714-544-7070 www.tustinpresbyterian.org
Sunday, December 3rd
10:30 a.m. (following 9:30 worship service)
Benefits church’s missions programs
All Saints Church, Pasadena
Alternative Christmas Market
132 N. Euclid Street, Pasadena, CA 91101 www.allsaints-pas.org
Sunday, December 3
8 AM to 2 PM
First Church Long Beach
241 Cedar Avenue, Long Beach, CA www.firstchurchlb.org
December 3, 10, 17, and 24 Westwood United Methodist Church has an alternative Christmas giving opportunity called Scattered for Service. “Scattered for Service provides the opportunity for you to give a gift to the special people in your life that allows support of important missions in the community and the world. The gift will come with an acknowledgment card from you, and the ministry/agency will receive your financial support for use as directed.” The catalog is available on the website at www.westwoodumc.org.
You can tell it’s Thanksgiving, because the stores are playing Christmas carols…ever think that maybe Christmas, like life in general, should be about something besides shopping and credit card debt?
Buying Christmas presents is a great tradition, but it can be much more meaningful and connected to the real spirit of Christmas than a trip to Wal Mart. We’re developing a list of alternative gift ideas — Alternative Christmas Markets, where you can choose gifts of service, or buy crafts from individual vendors or fair-trade organizations; Alternative Stores, like Ten Thousand Villages or A Road Less Traveled, which focus on fair trade and environmentally sustainable consumer goods; Alternative Gifts, like donations to particular charities; Just Really Alternative, like the famous but elusive traveling Anti-Mall. Got ideas? Send them to — we’re hoping to have a full list by late November!
Our thoughts about creating an Alternative Christmas come out of the realization that we weren’t born to shop. Since 2000, a growing cadre of activists has memorialized this fact with the annual Buy Nothing Day, 24 hours in which we consciously commit to Not Shopping and/or taking part in anti-consumerist or alternative consumer activities. In America and Canada, Buy Nothing Day is the Friday after Thanksgiving — also known as Black Friday, traditionally the busiest shopping day of the year, the day which puts retailers in the black (although it has a different meaning to exhausted and overworked hourly retail staff).
What might you do with the time and energy that you would spend shopping? Maybe just spend time with your family; cook or exercise or read or write or paint or travel…or do something really radical to disrupt the shopping culture, like the folks from adbusters. If you take part in Buy Nothing Day, we’d love to hear what the experience was like for you. Email us at and tell us about it!
And to learn more about the theological basis for a Christian response to our culture’s materialism, check out PCU’s position paper, Christianity and Consumerism. All of our position papers are available online!
As a former passionate Catholic (still passionate), I was disturbed and disappointed, though not surprised, to hear about the newest decision on homosexuality offered by the American Catholic Bishops. In a paper ironically entitled “Happy are Those who are Called to His Supper,” the words used to invite the congregation to the Eucharistic feast, gay and lesbian Catholics are explicitly invited not to come to the table — that is, not to present themselves to receive Eucharist. I can think of nothing more hurtful and demeaning than this for a devout Catholic. And as the final insult — as though to rub salt in the wound of being cordially invited to leave God’s banquet — this was wrapped in rhetoric of love and an explicit intention to offer better pastoral care to gay and lesbian Catholics. With pastoral care like this… Read the rest of this entry »
Several things happened over the last week that caused me to think again about what it means to “do justice”…something the prophet Micah reminded God’s followers was required of them.
First, I was incredibly pleased last Wednesday when all the results came in from Tuesday’s election and it was confirmed that the Democratic party would take control of the House and the Senate. This turn of events brought me hope that justice could possibly be delivered upon those for whom I care so much.
While we all have issues that touch us deeply, as a volunteer at a school for homeless children, economic justice has become my passion. I watch how families at the school struggle to make ends meet, most being forced to live in motels or homeless shelters because their wages are so low that they cannot ever afford to save first and last month’s rent and security deposit to allow them to move into a stable living environment.
As one burdened for the working poor, I was horrified when Congress earlier this year refused to raise the federal minimum wage (currently $5.15/hr.), which is nearly $10,000 a year under the poverty line. Is it “just” I wondered, not to guarantee workers a wage above the poverty line? I realized then that without a change in leadership in this country, the families of the children at my school would have little opportunity to get out of the cycle of poverty. Mere charitable handouts of gifts, food and money, while still important, are not enough to lift the estimated 37 million Americans out of poverty.
This blog also appears on the Huffington Post.
OK, let me say I thought Pelosi was pretty great on her first day as second in the line of presidential succession. She was succinct, composed, unwilling to retract her harsh descriptions of Bushian ineptitude, and clear that proper governance forward cannot occur without at least some hearings on past executive misconduct.
And yes, passing some kind of minimum wage increase is a good place to start, even an inevitable place to start given the “New Direction” pledge the top Democrats made avant the voting—and given the huge boost given to minimum wage politics by six state ballot measures Tuesday. So now: a minimum wage hike, some kind of health care fix, and somehow shortcircuiting the worst of the Bush tax cuts. Brava. A good starter kit.
This is DEFINITELY going to increase the spam quotient of our blogsite, but sometimes you have to do what you have to do. And what we need to do is talk, yet again, about the religious and moral aspects of that most basic and most complex of human realities.
Some reports from the front line:
Reverend Ted Haggard is now the former head of the National Association of Evangelicals and the former head of the megachurch he founded in Colorado, because he gave in to the “darkness” of his desires for a same sex relationship by three years of soliciting a male prostitute for drug enhanced sex.
Despite popular myths about sexuality in this modern world, the first world-wide epidemiological study on sexual behavior, published in British medical journal The Lancet, shows that average worldwide age of loss of virginity has remained steady (between 15 and 19), that rates of sexual promiscuity are not tied to rates of sexually transmitted diseases, and that married people have more regular sex than singles. In fact, some two-thirds of African unmarried men and women — despite the raging epidemic of AIDS on that continent — are sexually inactive, supporting the case that the highest risk group for infection in Africa is young married women.
Statistics from the World Health Organization show that over half a million women each year die from complications in pregnancy and childbirth, and that some 120 million couples cannot get the contraceptives they would like to be using; yet support for family planning is very low on the agenda of governmental agencies.
The United Nations has released a new study on the global epidemic of violence against women, much of it sexual — a pandemic of rape, murder by intimate partners, sexual slavery, and genital mutilation, which we barely notice anymore because it’s simply the way things are.
The Vatican is considering a relaxation of its rules on condom use in certain circumstances in order to save married women from AIDS infection via their husbands. (LA Times)
Measures to add state constitutional amendments which define marriage as between a man and a woman are on the ballot in eight states, and are expected to pass — but narrowly. (New York Times)
The worldwide Anglican communion continues to be split by divisions over gay and lesbian inclusion in the church. In a strange-bedfellows moment, the movement against gay and lesbian Christians is vocally fronted by Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria and other church leaders largely in Africa, and funded and directed by superwealthy conservative Americans, such as Howard Ahmanson. (The Observer)
So: Gays and their evil desires are at the root of all the problems of marriage and religion, while women the world over can simply fend for themselves. Money and resources should be directed to keeping gays and women powerless. This will make everything in the world better and, furthermore, is God’s will.
The progressive religious blogosphere is all but overflowing today with charity toward the Rev. Ted Haggard and his family and flock in the wake of the assertion by a former male escort that he engaged in gay sex for money with Haggard over a three-year period. My blogging colleagues are doing the “judge not, lest ye be judged” thing, which seems reasonable and right, as does the principle of “innocent until proven guilty.” The only problem, it seems to me, is that Pastor Ted has done a heck of a lot of judging in his run as head of the 30-million-member National Association of Evangelicals and also as pastor of the 14,000-member New Life Church in Colorado Springs. So he doesn’t quite start off as a total innocent.
I’ve always needed mentors, whether they are close at hand or far away, whether I know them or not, whether they are living or have passed to the “great beyond”. Life is difficult, as Scott Peck famously announced, and life is especially difficult when we want to make a difference for justice and peace in a world of hurt and heartache. Some people negotiate the difficulties better than others, and I need such people in my life.
One of my mentors, for some years now, has been Dorothy Day. I’ve had a love relationship with her for quite some time. My good wife understands this and is unthreatened. For one thing, Dorothy died in 1980 at the age of 83.
To be honest, if I’d been young when she was young and we had met, she would not have brought out the best in me nor I in her. As an activist, she was something of a dilettante. She hung out with the bohemian set, she had her share of lovers, and she was floundering. She had dropped out of college, was often unemployed, and ran with a fast and footloose crowd.
But she changed. She really changed. So much so, that she exemplifies ways for us to persist and prevail in the struggle. Read the rest of this entry »
Our thoughts about creating an Alternative Christmas come out of the realization that we weren’t born to shop. Since 2000, a growing cadre of activists has memorialized this fact with the annual Buy Nothing Day, 24 hours in which we consciously commit to Not Shopping and/or taking part in anti-consumerist or alternative consumer activities. In America and Canada, Buy Nothing Day is the Friday after Thanksgiving — also known as Black Friday, traditionally the busiest shopping day of the year, the day which puts retailers in the black (although it has a different meaning to exhausted and overworked hourly retail staff).