July the Fourth is NOT a Liturgical Holiday... So Why Do So Many Congregations Treat It Like One?
In their book, Baptizing America, authors Brian Kaylor and Beau Underwood suggest actions congregations can take to combat the growing threat of Christian Nationalism.
1. Learn Your Congregation’s Story
2. Educate Your Church and Community
3. Preach a Prophetic Word
4. Stop Flying the Flag
5. Pay Attention to Language and Liturgy
6. Urge Institutional Responses and Repentance
In this Labor Day edition, Vanderbilt Divinity School's Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice’s Interventions, provides a series of reflections on the assigned scripture readings based on the Revised Common Lectionary in the Christian tradition for September 1, 2024. The intention behind providing clergy and faith leaders with different readings of common passages, is to provide alternative lenses to scripture and to open up interpretative possibilities for how the Bible speaks to the reality of working people.
In this series, Wilson Dickinson, Ansley Quiros and Joerg Rieger all offer new readings on familiar texts.
For American Labor, the Past Isn’t Past
Organized labor is having a moment. In the last half-year alone, baristas at more than 200 Starbucks filed for union elections, software engineers at The New York Times formed the largest bargaining unit of tech workers in the country, and, despite pushback from the world’s biggest retailer, workers at a Staten Island “fulfillment center” voted to form the first Amazon union in the United States.
ALSO
A worship resource for Veterans Day is available in PDF and Word formats and includes several prayers and hymn suggestions that may be incorporated in worship on the Sunday closest to Veterans Day, Nov. 11.
On the ELCA Worship blog: "Our Collective Healing on This Veterans Day.”Chaplain Aaron Fuller has written a blog post with guidance for observing Veterans Day following the 20th anniversary of September 11 and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.