Today is the beginning of 7-day SOLIDARITY FAST for the people of Darfur. This week is an opportunity for students, faculty, staff, and recent college graduates to come together to reflect on the connection between our own humanity and the humanity of those suffering in the region of Darfur.
How is it possible for a group of American Christian students from more privileged backgrounds to understand the suffering that men, women, and children of Darfur experience each day for the past three years? Consciously abstaining from food for 7 days will only be a tiny fraction of the pain and hunger that Darfurians go through daily. So why are we fasting?
Through the Solidarity Fast Week we hope to start the process of the type of spiritual transformation that connects us our being and sense of survival with that of the world. As Americans, some of us do not experience the level of suffering and injustice the rest of the world faces each waking day (e.g. ethnic cleansing, war, national hunger, the AIDS epidemic, displacement, and extreme poverty). As Arundhati Roy most humbly said when many Americans experienced devastation and national heartache probably for the first time in their lives, “Welcome to the world.”
This is Christ’s invitation to us. Welcome to the world, he says to us when we enter the wilderness with God. Welcome to the world, he says to us when we try to make sense of the destruction in places like New Orleans, Guatemala, Sudan, Uganda, Mexico, Southeast Asia, Lebanon, Gaza, and Iraq. Welcome to the world, he says to us as an invitation to a deep and transformative experience with the Creator of the world.
The season of Lent is a time of reflection, confrontation, and realization of our vocational call to the world. Where will your faith take you this week? Will your faith bring a deeper connection to life around you? Will it bring a recognition of your over-consumption and waste? Will it be a determination to act and affect lasting change? Will it call you out of your passive slumber and stand for an end to genocide forever?
Many of the students participating in the Solidarity Fast (regardless of the amount of days they choose) have expressed their deep commitment to justice, equality, and dignity of all peoples-regardless of ethnicity, race, religion, and citizenship. But our commitment to justice and peace struggles might still be disconnected from the actual experience of pain, injustice, fear of death, hunger, and international neglect and indifference.
As Carter Heyward said, “As we withstand and experience our connectedness with Jesus’ life of love and death of love and our connectedness with those who suffer, so that becomes our primary resource for compassion and healing, the raw material of solidarity and liberation. And there lies the possibility of transformation.”
WE NEED YOUR HELP!! Please help offset the cost for the college students attending. To draw a larger student participation to the BREAK THE FAST event, we are promoting it as a free event, but donations will be accepted. If you can help us with $35, $50, $100 to take care of some of the catering costs, rentals, promo materials, etc. Please click here if you would like to donate online.
Or mail your check (payable to Progressive Christians Uniting; memo: Solidarity Fast 2007) to our office at 1501 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90017 ATTN: Solidarity Fast. Thank you.
Join us April 1, 4-8 PM, at Pasadena Presbyterian Church, to become part of a movement to deepen and strengthen Christian commitment to environmental justice! Download a flyer here for all the information and help us get the word out.
From 4-6 PM, we will gather to listen to speakers on issues particularly important to environmental justice in Los Angeles: parks and wilderness conservation, local food availability, and air pollution — and learn about how these local issues are connected to national and international ones. We’ll have plenty of time for question and answer, and each speaker will conclude by suggesting concrete action and advocacy. We’re excited to welcome our speakers:
Juana Torres, The Sierra Club
Andrea Azuma, Urban and Environmental Policy Institute, Occidental College
Andrea Hricko, Keck School of Medicine, Southern California Environmental Health Sciences Center
After a break for food and networking from 6-7, at 7 PM we welcome our keynote speaker, Christian environmentalist, activist, authorBill McKibben, who calls for a new environmentalism based on a commitment to justice and an understanding of the interconnectedness of all creation, in his new book Deep Economy. Bill is the author of The End of Nature, one of the first books on global warming, translated into over 20 languages, and has written on sustainability, overpopulation, and the need for community in response to globalization. Deep Economy: Wealth and the Durable Future, will be available for sale at the event.
This event is FREE and open to all; there will be a freewill donation. Contact at (213) 989-1630 for more information, or to help as a volunteer. We look forward to seeing you there!
Our next action, to protest global warming and show our care for the earth, is April 14. Our tree care and meditative hike is one action of a nationwide protest in over 1000 locations. Check it out on our Events page — and RSVP online!
Prop 36, California’s innovative program in restorative justice, allows non-violent drug offenders to receive treatment rather than incarceration. Despite its successes — including saving taxpayer money — since voters authorized it six years ago, the program is being de-funded by the Governor of California. If you would like to support Prop 36, please consider signing on to the following letter by emailing with your name and address by April 4.
We are also organizing a Local Prop 36 Lobby Day on April 13 — contact if you would like to be part of a PCU team in your area!
Dear Member of the California State Senate and the California State Assembly:
Writing as people of faith, we respectfully urge you to expand—and not let Governor Schwarzenegger reduce—our state’s commitment to addiction treatment via Proposition 36, California’s six-year-old treatment-rather-than-incarceration program for non-violent drug offenders.
Addiction affects all families, all congregations, all communities. Its victims need the opportunity to achieve long-term recovery. The treatment made possible by Proposition 36 has saved lives and brought healing to tens of thousands of individuals and families. We have seen Prop 36 working successfully to achieve what the state’s voters wanted it to achieve over the past five years: we have seen lives turned around, families reunited, and former addicts returned to their neighborhoods and faith communities. Read the rest of this entry »
This past Sunday, the Orange County Chapter of PCU was honored to have Dr. Rita Nakashima Brock, Founding Co-Director of Faith Voices for the Common Good, address a gathering at Irvine United Congregational Church.
While there are plenty of Biblical scholars and church history experts out there, Dr. Brock just may be one of the best! The audience was incredibly impressed by the breath of knowledge Dr. Brock was able to pull from her memory during the rally. The bulk of her hour-long talk was without the use of notes.
Dr. Brock explained to the event attendees the sequence of events over the last 2000 years that has molded and defined (conservative) Christian doctrine and theology.
While the early church, as Dr. Brock explained during the question and answer time, was “life affirming, THIS worldly, and optimistic,” conservative Christians today affirm a theology of violence. Instead of loving God’s creation…PARADISE…they are anxiously awaiting and praying for ultimate violence (destruction of this world through Armageddon…their mis-understanding of the Book of Revelation). Read the rest of this entry »
Join us April 1, 4-8 PM, at Pasadena Presbyterian Church, to become part of a movement to deepen and strengthen Christian commitment to environmental justice! Download a 