Freedom of Religion?

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution states the following:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievance.

Once upon a time, a whole lot of people with the same beliefs moved across the United States to present-day Utah. Utah Mormons are being targeted again, only this time, they're being sent anti-Mormon DVDs.
http://www.deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,660206841,00.html

It's an interesting read if you have a moment.

Welcome to Spring Quarter!

Hello, Everyone! Just sent out the Weekly Email for this week. I'm looking forward to seeing you all on Thursday evening at 7 in the Chapel. George will join us for Dessert, Discussion, and Eucharist. Peace. Pam

LibraryThing

I meant to post this earlier but only got around to it now...

Last Thursday, Kim mentioned the website that let's you post a list of the books you own (your personal library) online, and then you can see who else has a similar library/books to you. It's called LibraryThing. Here's an article about it. It seems like a pretty neat idea, and I couldn't resist posting my own personal library on the site. Unfortunately, you can only list 200 books for free, and it costs $10 a year (or $25 for life) to add books over 200.

It was brought up in the conversation because the article mentions the Book of Common Prayer (BCP). As Kim mentioned, the top 6 books that are owned by the most people on the site are the first six Harry Potter books. I believe she also mentioned that the BCP is in the top 25 books (I thought) owned by the most people. To clarify, according to the article the BCP (along with The Complete Calvin and Hobbes and Neil Gaiman's The Absolute Sandman Vol. 1) is among the top 25 books with the highest ratings by members. This means that members can rate books on how much they like them, and the BCP is a highly-rated book. It's rating is 4.37 (out of 5) on the site. Currently, however, only 528 (out of about 160,000) members have the BCP (any edition) in their library, and there are 1,809 more popular (i.e., owned by more people) books on the site than it.

And, while we decided that a lot of Episcopalians (certainly at St. Stephen's) are librarians and therefore possibly more likely to have used LibraryThing and posted their libraries--and thus they would have a copy of the BCP--it appears that it's less that there are lots of Episcopalians who are LibraryThing users but rather that the majority of BCP users find it to be a very quality book and highly rate it. Interestingly, Episcopalians actually don't appear to be as well represented as users of LibraryThing as in the general U.S. population. Episcopalians (as based on those who have the BCP as part of their library) make up only 0.3% of LibraryThing users, while the 2.4 million Episcopalians in the denomination (according to church statistics, though U.S. census figures give about twice that much) are 0.8% (or 1.7%) of the U.S.'s 301 million population.

Next Week

Just a reminder to everyone that we will not be meeting this Thursday because of finals and then the following week during spring break. Our next Thursday meeting will be the week after (3/29). Hope everyone has a good spring break!

She's back

Maybe we're too saturated with death penalty discussions, and it IS close to the end of the quarter, but this caught my eye. It might be a lot of the same stuff that we heard at St. Stephen's, but if you're looking for something to do. (Note - Reservations are required and I don't know when the cutoff is.)

COLUMBUS, OH – Sister Helen Prejean, a Sister of St. Joseph in Medaille, Louisiana and a noted author, will speak at Ohio Dominican University as part of its Dominican Life of the Mind Series. Her lecture, entitled The Death Penalty: How Just is our System of Justice?, will be presented on Tuesday, March 6, at 7:00 p.m. in the Matesich Theatre of Erskine Hall, located on ODU’s main campus,1216 Sunbury Road.

...

For more information or to register, please contact the Director of the Center for Dominican Studies, Sr. Catherine Colby, O.P. at (614) 251-4722, or email colbyc@ohiodominican.edu. Free parking is available in the Visitor’s Lot west of Sunbury Road.

Ohio Dominican website.

Free Pizza?

Alas, it appears that the OSU Free Pizza group (officially, Students for Free Pizza...sort of reminiscent of Students for Freethought) is no longer. Perhaps it needs to be restarted!

(To those who missed tonight's fellowship meeting, I apologize for what may seem totally random and irrelevant.)

The group is no longer listed among the student organizations on the Ohio Union/SOURCE student org directory. But, to learn about the wonder of this former group, I direct you to this 2003 Lantern article about it here. Considering the whole rigamarole involved in getting a student group registered (with advisers and training sessions, etc.) and the restructuring and restricting of rules regarding funding for groups at OSU, it's not a huge surprise that the group is no longer in existence (especially if they could no longer pay for the pizza with the money from SOURCE), though it is kind of sad.

OSU Dance Performance

I saw this in the OSU email news today and thought I'd share it. Sarah Hixon is the dance grad student who came to one of the Thursday fellowships last quater.

HAPPY HOUR GRADUATE DANCE PERFORMANCE MARCH 1-3
MFA dance students Jeff Fouch and Jaclyn Thompson along with Sarah Hixon will present a Graduate Dance Performance of "Happy Hour" at 8 p.m. today (3/1)-Saturday (3/3) in Sullivant Hall Theatre. The production includes a restaging of "Cafe Barcelona," an excerpt from Sophie Maslow's work "Folksay" (1942), "Sebastian" performed on stilts, and "Within the Interstice," a new choreographic work by Hixon. Tickets are $5 at the door. Contact: 292-7977.

Here's a link that tells more about the performance: http://dance.osu.edu/6_calendar/06-07%20events/happy_hour.html. It sounds like some interesting performances.

I talked with Pam over email, and she said that she and Bill are interested in going, as am I, and that she's willing to pay admission for anyone else interested. I'm sure it will be mentioned at fellowship this evening. If you've got a free Friday evening, it should be worth it.