Student Play, “Signs from God,” at the Newman Center this week

“Signs from God,” a play written, produced and performed by students will be at the Newman Center in Columbia this week. The story line is about a group of friends becoming aware of their vocations.

All 12 students in the play are from the University of Missouri.

Performances will be held at 7:30 p.m. from Feb. 11-13 at the Newman Center.  Admission is free but donations are appreciated.

Faith based organization sponsors ad during the Super Bowl

What are your thoughts?

The Christian group Focus on the Family has sponsored an ad during this year’s Super Bowl game.

According to the Associated Press, Florida quarterback, Tim Tebow, and his mother will be in the ad discussing his birth. Reportedly Tebow’s mother gave birth to him after it was advised that she have an abortion due to medical reasons.

Focus on the Family’s Jim Daly said in an article on their Web site that this message is coming at the right time because “families need to be inspired.”

However, many women’s groups and groups in support of abortion launched a protest against CBS’s to try and get them to remove the ad from their broadcast.

Planned Parenthood has even posted a video on their Youtube site in response to the Tebow ad.

Share your thoughts below:

Should this ad be aired during the Super Bowl?

Lent film discussions

Olivet Christian Church will be holding film discussions about race and class on the Sundays leading up to Easter.  The sessions will be at 5 p.m. starting Feb. 21 and ending on March 28.

Films that will be discussed include: “Grand Canyon,” “Frozen River,” The Station Agent,”The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada” and “The Shawshank Redemption.”

Due to the content of the films, this series is only for adults.

The series will be held at Olivet Christian Church and is free to the public.

For more information please go to the Columbia Missourian or Olivet’s Web site.

Columbia Catholic School celebrates Catholic Schools Week

Columbia Catholic School marked Catholic schools week with fun activities and service projects.  Catholic Schools week was held this week.  For more information go to MyMissourian.

Voting for this year’s Beliefnet Film Awards begins this week

The fifth annual Beliefnet Film Awards voting begins this week. Beliefnet allows viewers to vote for films they believe are the most inspiring and spiritual. There are three different categories; best spiritual film, best inspirational film and best spiritual documentary. Viewers can vote from Feb. 3 to Feb. 26 on their Web site. The people’s choice award will be given to the film that receives the most votes. A panel of judges will give out the Judge’s Award will also be given to films in each category.  Awards will be announced on March 1, 2010.

Nominees in each category are as follows:

Best Spiritual Film: “Avatar,” “The Road,” “The Stoning of Soraya M.,” “A Serious Man,” “The Blind Side”

Best Spiritual Documentary: “More Than a Game,” “Enlighten Up!” “Oh My God,” “Unmistaken Child,” “Earth”

Best Inspirational Film: “Precious,” “Up,” “American Violet,” “Away We Go,” “Invictus”

Hanukkah? Chanukah? Khanukkah?

Each language has its own sound, and each sound makes perfect sense to a native speaker. However, issues often arise when trying to translate one language to another. Often mistranslations abound and texts are translated, re-translated and re-translated but still errors can be found. One issue may be that some sounds from languages cannot be accurately translated into English. One of these languages is Hebrew.
There are two more days left in Hanukkah (or is it Hanuka?) and some of you may have noticed that there is more than one way to spell it.

Classical Hebrew translates closer to Hanukkah than modern Hebrew, which uses Chanukah. It’s all because the Hebrew letters that spell out the holiday are pronounced differently in classical Hebrew than in modern Hebrew. The “Ch” was adapted at the beginning of Chanukah because the first letter, in modern Hebrew, sounds like “ch” in loch.

Robert Siegel from NPR spoke to Rabbi Daniel Zemel in Dec. of 2005 about this very subject. In the interview they discus the phonetic ways people try to use to translate Hebrew into English.

In the end, no matter how you spell it, it is still the festival of lights. So happy Hanukkah or Chanukah or Khanukkah to you all.

Benedictine sisters to close monastery

On Friday, it was announced that Our Lady of Peace Monastery will be closing after establishing itself in Columbia in 1969.

In their final newsletter, the sisters cite its aging membership and lacking new membership as the main factors for closing the monastery. Because of these two reasons, the affect on the monastery’s finances and the ability to function as necessary have worsened. The monastery will remain open until all the sisters successfully transfer to a new monastery and join a new Benedictine family.

Back in October, the Missourian published a piece on the declining interest in the Catholic sisterhood. The article mentions that a decline in interest is occurring worldwide, not just the United States. Some statistics show the percentage of women wanting to become nuns has decreased by 50 percent in the last 50 years. The article adds that, today, there are approximately 68,000 nuns in the United States.

In our article, Sister Agnes Schlereth of Sacred Heart Catholic Church attributes different and changing approaches of churches as the key to sustaining interest among the youth in religious vocations.

For decades, the Catholic church has seen a dwindling of interest in the sisterhood, and the reality of the changes are now apparent in mid-Missouri. You have to wonder whether it’s modern society and culture that is the main reason for what’s happening or whether the church should hold some responsibility for what is happening. Or maybe both?

Hand bells ring, are you listening?

A little late for tonight’s performance, but the Columbia Handbell Ensemble is performing its 20th annual Winter Concerts this weekend at First Baptist Church. One concert was tonight at 7 p.m., another Sunday at 2 p.m., with a third tomorrow night in Hermann. For details and more on the hand bell choir, read our story on today’s ColumbiaMissourian.com.

Hand bells make up a marvelous musical medium that is popular among churches. In the story, CHE director Ed Rollins describes the sound of hand bells as attempting to replicate, with five or six musicians, the sound of a single instrument’s melody. He explained it to me like this: “Let’s say you’re a violin player, and the violin gets the melody. So one person’s responsible for the melody. In a hand bell group, that melody is going to be split between five or six people. What you’re trying to do is make it sound … like one person is playing the music.”

That music can be quite impressive sometimes. Rollins said one of their selections for this year’s Winter Concerts was originally performed on the organ: “One is an organ transcription, and man, if you get that done well on bells, it’s so good.”

For a preview of CHE’s sound, check out this 2008 slide show of Christmas offerings at local churches, which features a snippet from last year’s CHE Winter Concerts (and which I admit I really just wanted an excuse to repost). Not to be missed if you go: The group typically does at least one sing-along number, and the effect is pretty moving.

Are religious wars now fought with words??

After learning about Nicholas Kristof in my reporting class last week through a documentary, I became very interested in reading his view point on things in his Opinion column for the New York Times. Today, while I was looking through his archive, I found an interesting article called “The Religious Wars.” Knowing that Kristof is famous for his coverage of human tragedies such as Darfur and other human rights violations in countries such as Africa, I assumed that this would be about violent religious wars and his opinion of them. Not surprisingly, I was wrong.

Kristof’s article dealt more with the idea that religious wars are now being fought through the written word, in the form of battling books that challenge the existence of God or challenge some commonly accepted religious practices. He uses several books as examples of differing viewpoints that have become mainstream novels, shaping our religious culture. Many of the examples he uses don’t follow the typical image of God as a loving father figure. Instead, they try to uncover where the idea of God comes from, and where our religion in general comes from.

What do you think of this idea that religious wars are no longer being fought with swords and armies but instead with pens and words? It is an interesting way to look at things. I don’t think I ever considered these competing books to be on opposite sides of a battle line. However, it is a more civil way to fight and express opinions.

No more Swiss minarets

I was browsing the New York Times Web site today, and found an article called “Swiss Ban Building of Minarets on Mosques” buried in the World Section. THis article about a new referendum that passed Sunday in Switzerland appalled me somewhat.

According to the article, Switzerland has a reputation for religious tolerance, yet the referendum, which bans the building on minarets on mosques in the county, passed by an overwhelming 57.5 percent majority, despite being opposed by the government.

Since I’ve not overly familiar with the Islamic faith, I did some research on what exactly a minaret is and why it is significant to the Islamic faith. According to an Encyclopedia Britannica online article about minarets, it is a tower from which the faithful are called to prayer by the muezzin, or crier. They are attached to the mosque, and have either a balcony or open gallery.

Several online sources say that they are rarely used for this purpose anymore, and are just symbolic. The call to prayer can be made from elsewhere in the mosque, and is sometimes done from a loudspeaker.

The referendum passed by the Swiss this weekend had little to do with the religious aspect of the minarets and more to do with political motives. The referendum was proposed by the rightist Swiss People’s Party.

According to the article, the referendum is thought to have passed because of popular fear of fundamentalist Islamic activities. However, it sends a message against the community as a whole.

What do you think about the referendum? According to the NYT article, there are currently only 4 mosques that have minarets, and only 2 more are planned to be built. The Swiss People’s Party says the minarets are a political symbol, which goes against the constitution of the country, according to a CNN article. Both the NYT and CNN articles say that the party has been responsible for a lot of anti-Islamic propaganda.

There  has been considerable backlash against the referendum. According to a Yahoo! news article, Amnesty International has the vote violated freedom of religion. They think it will likely be overturned by the Swiss supreme court or the European Court of Human Rights.

What do you think will happen to the referendum? Will it stand? Or will it get overturned? How do you feel about the obvious anti-Islamic action in a country known for religious tolerance? Will it be well received around the world? Do you think others will copy it?