By CAIR – The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, announced today that a coalition of 82 civil liberties, human rights, immigrant rights, faith, and cultural organizations (see list of signatories below) sent a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch asking her to investigate the growing phenomena of so-called “Muslim-free zone” businesses nationwide. The coalition, which includes prominent national organizations such as the ACLU, NAACP and the YWCA USA, requested that the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division’s Housing and Civil Enforcement Section conduct a full federal investigation into all businesses that have declared themselves as “Muslim-Free Zones” and “bring civil enforcement proceedings against business owners who have violated the law.”
By Lindsay Abrams in Salon – Low-income and communities of color are on the front lines of climate change. They have, for that matter, been disproportionately shouldering the burden of our reliance on dirty energy since the beginning: nearly 40 percent of the people living and breathing in the vicinity of coal-fired power plants are people of color; not unrelatedly, asthma rates for African Americans are 35 percent higher than they are for Caucasians. Fighting climate change, and the energy revolution that doing so requires, is for many such communities a question of environmental justice. It’s also, Rev. Abrose Carroll tells Salon, an incredible opportunity. Carroll is the founder of Green the Church, a movement that’s “tapping into the power and purpose of the black church” as a moral and social leader on climate issues.
By Various in The Shalom Center – Islamic leaders from 20 countries today launched a bold Climate Change Declaration to engage the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims on the issue of our time. The Declaration presents the moral case, based on Islamic teachings, for Muslims and people of all faiths worldwide to take urgent climate action. It was drafted by a large, diverse team of international Islamic scholars from around the world following a lengthy consultation period prior to the Symposium. It has already been endorsed by more than 60 participants and organisations including the Grand Muftis of Uganda and Lebanon. The Declaration is in harmony with the Papal Encyclical and has won the support of the Pontifical Council on Justice and Peace of the Holy See.
By Moral Action Climate – Beyond Extreme Energy will be conducting a fast at FERC that will run from Tuesday September 8 until Friday the 25th, which is the day after the Pope’s speech to Congress. Those fasting in DC will spend the day in front of FERC at 888 1st St. NE. On September 25th we are calling upon people to join us at FERC as we end our fast and try to deliver copies of Laudato Si’ to the five FERC Commissioners. Our rationale for undertaking this action can be found at http://beyondextremeenergy.org. As we say there, “Beyond Extreme Energy has decided to organize a long-term, water-only “Fast for No New Permits” this September in front of FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. We also encourage people to fast individually where they live and/or to organize local solidarity fasts during this same time period.
Interview with Saul Aleman by Greg Elliott – I was born in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. I came to the U.S. at the age of 3, and part of the reason my parents took the big step and decided to come to the United States was that we had very few resources, like we didn’t have enough food for me or my Mom. I decided to join the immigrant rights movement after I graduated from high school. It really shook me that there was no opportunity for me to go to college. My dad was always the person to tell me that as long as you have good grades, everything will go swell, don’t worry about the rest. In our situation, being undocumented was something we knew about but didn’t really understand, or I didn’t really comprehend what that would really mean for me, and so I couldn’t go to college. Luckily, I met a brave warrior. His name is Diego Sanchez, and he recruited me into the movement and helped me go to school, and since then I’ve been involved with the movement. I
By Sean Kirst in Syracuse – For years, Jerry taught composition, literature and Shakespeare at Onondaga Community College. He and Carol were close to Rev. Ray McVey, a selfless Catholic priest who embodied the Dorothy Day philosophy. They joined McVey in visiting prisoners in jail. They helped him establish Unity Acres, a place of respite for homeless men. Jerry was arrested and jailed so often for taking part in peaceful protests that he’s lost count, he said, of how many times he wore handcuffs. From all of it, this treasury of stories, he said the greatest moment in his life occurred in that back yard in East Syracuse. For years, Jerry and Phil studied to join the Josephites, an order of Catholic priests dedicated to the African-American community. Eventually, Jerry decided to step away.
By Al Jazeera – Pope Francis cast himself as the spiritual and political leader of the world’s oppressed on Thursday evening with a remarkable mea culpa for the sins and crimes of the Catholic Church against the indigenous peoples during the colonial conquest of the Americas. Francis “humbly” begged forgiveness at a gathering of indigenous leaders in Bolivia in the presence of Bolivia’s first-ever indigenous president, Evo Morales, the climactic high of Francis’ weeklong South American tour. In the speech, Francis noted that Latin American church leaders in the past had acknowledged that “grave sins were committed against the native peoples of America in the name of God.” St. John Paul II, for his part, apologized to the continent’s indigenous for the “pain and suffering” caused during the 500 years of the church’s presence in the Americas during a 1992 visit to the Dominican Republic.
By Gan Golan in Indypendent – Pope Francis has released his long-awaited encyclical on climate change, entitled “Laudato Sii: On The Care For Our Common Home”. The 183-page “teaching letter” is vast in it’s scope, declares climate change a moral issue, and covers a broad range of global crisis from the destruction of biodiversity to the unacceptable treatment of the poor, immigrants and climate refugees. Most scathingly, the paper offers an uncompromising indictment of free markets, accusing capitalism of plundering the planet, driving global inequality, and serving only the ‘very few’ that have obstructing desperately needed action on climate change. It urges humanity to begin phasing out fossil fuels “without delay”. At moments, the unapologetic yet meticulously researched paper reads like it could have been written by a cross between St. Francis of Assisi and Naomi Klein.
By Stephanie Kirchgaessner and John Hooper in The Guardian – Pope Francis will this week call for changes in lifestyles and energy consumption to avert the “unprecedented destruction of the ecosystem” before the end of this century, according to a leaked draft of a papal encyclical. In a document released by an Italian magazine on Monday, the pontiff will warn that failure to act would have “grave consequences for all of us”. Francis also called for a new global political authority tasked with “tackling … the reduction of pollution and the development of poor countries and regions”. His appeal echoed that of his predecessor, pope Benedict XVI, who in a 2009 encyclical proposed a kind of super-UN to deal with the world’s economic problems and injustices.
By David Dagan in Huffington Post – Many of today’s black pastors, some young activists argue, have moved away from the black church’s traditional role as a center for African-American mobilization. “Today, what we see is churches being appendages of the kind of status-quo body politic,” said Dayvon Love, 28, director of public policy at the Baltimore think tank and activist group Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle. “This has happened generally post-integration, post-civil rights. You have cadres of individual back people who get positioned in white-dominated institutions, and their presence is used as a way to deflect from structural change.” It sounds like a radical critique, but senior clergy have similar concerns.
Proponents make broad claims for consensus process. They argue that it is intrinsically more democratic than other methods, and that it fosters radical transformation, both within movements and in their relations with the wider world. As described in the action handbook of an Earth Day 1990 action to shut down Wall Street, which included a blockade of the entrances to the Stock Exchange and led to some 200 arrests, “Consensus at its best offers a cooperative model of reaching group unity, an essential step in creating a culture that values cooperation over competition.” Few, though, know the origins of the process, which shed an interesting and surprising light on its troubled real-world workings.
Megan Rice, an 85-year-old nun who broke into the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in 2012, along with fellow anti-nuclear activists Michael Walli and Gregory Boertje-Obed, was charged with sabotage and damaging federal property and spent about two years in federal prison. They were released on May 16 after the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned their sabotage convictions while upholding their convictions for the less serious crime of injury to government property and ordering the original court to resentence them on the lesser crime. They don’t regret their actions, and remain devoted to their cause.
By Chris Crass in Truthout – With tens of thousands of white people coming into consciousness and thousands of experienced white anti-racists trying to figure out how to step up, this interview with Unitarian Universalist leader Ashley Horan, and this series of interviews with white racial justice leaders and organizers around the country who are engaging and moving white communities, are some of my efforts to meet the need my comrade Opal Tometi and so many others have made plain. I first came into my own Unitarian Universalist faith when I was brought in as a member of Catalyst Project to lead anti-racist organizing trainings for hundreds of fired up, passionate UU youth from around the US and Canada.
The chimes atop St. John’s Cathedral in Saskatoon will ring out this week in honour of Canada’s missing and murdered aboriginal women. As part of national initiative by the Anglican Church of Canada, the bells in Saskatoon will ring 1,017 times — one chime for each aboriginal women and girls murdered between 1980 and 2012, according to a press release by the church. The chimes will also ring for 105 times for the women and girls “classified as missing in suspicious circumstances.” The chimes will ring for five sessions over a span of 22 days, starting May 31, the day Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s closing events commence.
The Vatican officially recognized the state of Palestine in a new treaty finalized Wednesday, immediately sparking Israeli ire and accusations that the move hurt peace prospects. The treaty, which concerns the activities of the Catholic Church in Palestinian territory, makes clear that the Holy See has switched its diplomatic recognition from the Palestine Liberation Organization to the state of Palestine. The Vatican had welcomed the decision by the U.N. General Assembly in 2012 to recognize a Palestinian state. But the treaty is the first legal document negotiated between the Holy See and the Palestinian state and constitutes official diplomatic recognition. “Yes, it’s a recognition that the state exists,” said the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi. The Israeli foreign ministry said it was “disappointed” by the development.
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