Frontpage, Sept. 15, 2019

Sept. 15, 2019 – Pentecost 13

Ireland Pilgrimage, Sunday, Sept. 15, 2019

Pictures and text from this Sunday, Sept. 15, 2019

Videos from this Sunday, Sept. 15, 2019

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The Week Ahead…

Sept 18 – 10:00am – Ecumenical Bible Study

Sept 18 – 3:00pm – 5:00pm Village Harvest

Help needed: 9:30ish, help needed to unload the truck. Many hands make light work. 1PM, help needed to set up. 3-5PM help needed for the distribution itself. Help the shoppers gather what they need. You can still bring cleaning supplies on the day since these are not available at the Food Bank. Thank you for your contributions of both food and time. Everyone can share in making this important St Peter’s ministry happen.

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Sept 22 – 10:00am – Family Vacation – Guatemala

Sept 22 – 11:00am – Holy Eucharist, Rite II

Sept 22 – 4:00pm – Gospel on the River – Heimbach home

Sunday, Sept. 22 Readings and Servers

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 Celebrating Hildegard -1098-1179) – musician, writer, prophetess – and saint

We celebrate Hildegard’s life on September 17.

Accounts written in Hildegard’s lifetime  (1098-1179) and just after describe an extraordinarily accomplished woman: a visionary, a prophet (she was known as “The Sibyl Of The Rhine”), a pioneer who wrote practical books on biology, botany, medicine, theology and the arts. She was a prolific letter-writer to everyone from humble penitents looking for a cure for infertility to popes, emperors and kings seeking spiritual or political advice. She composed music and was known to have visions

Hildegard commanded the respect of the Church and political leaders of the day. She was a doer: she oversaw the building of a new monastery at Rupertsberg, near Bingen, to house her little community, and when that grew too large she established another convent in Eibingen, which still exists today (though the present building dates from 1904).

Read more about Hildegard..

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“Family Vacation” on Sept 22, 10am goes to Guatelama

In August ,2018 Catherine spent two weeks in Antigua, Guatemala doing a Spanish language immersion.  The next month she share experiences and food in a program entitles “An Afternoon in Guatemala. Here are the slides from the presentation

Historically, Guatemala has been predominantly Catholic since the Spanish arrived.  Founded in 1527, Antiqua was a colonial capital until 1773 when an earthquake demolished it. A new capital was built 30 miles away which is now Guatemala City. It has recovered in the last century as a museum of Spanish colonial history with its many ruins but remains within 10 miles of a major volcano. Antigua is located in the highlands 5,000 feet above sea level with both active and inactive volcanos. It is known for it Spanish Baroque influenced architecture as well as ruins of colonial churches

The Jesuits founded the school of “San Lucas of the Society of Jesus” in 1608, which became famous and was unrivaled in terms of literature and grammar lessons; it was attended by the elite nobles of the city society, On 18 July 1626, the Jesuit temple was inaugurated; along with the rest of the city, it suffered and was damaged by continuous earthquakes that struck the city between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.

The monks of San Juan de Dios founded their hospital and monastery in 1636 and thereafter were in charge of the hospitals in the Kingdom of Guatemala.

One significant religious building Church and Convent of our Lady of the Pilar of Zaragoza (Las Capuchinas).  Designed in 1731 by the Mayor Architect Diego de Porres, was the last religious building founded in the city in 1736.  The church was dedicated to the Archangel St Michael.  The facade of the temple was manufactured in worked stone instead of the traditional stucco.  The main cloister has low and stout columns, designed to resist earthquakes.  The “retirement” tower, a circular shaped building unique to this region, has 18 cells around a central patio, each one had its own toilet.  The temple was damaged by the earthquakes in 1773; despite all, the Capuchinas is one of the monuments that is well conserved.  Since 1972, the monument is the headquarters of the National Council for the Protection of Antigua, Guatemala.

The Santa Catalina Arch is one of the distinguishable landmarks in Antigua located on 5th Avenue North. Built in the 17th century, it originally connected the Santa Catalina convent to a school, allowing the cloistered nuns to pass from one building to the other without going out on the street

While the Catholic influences are still dominant, Guatemala today currently contains the largest number of Protestants (approximately 40%) than any other Latin American country. The largest Protestant denominations present in Guatemala today are Presbyterians, Pentecostals, Lutherans, Baptists, and Episcopalians. Protestants first began to arrive in Guatemala in 1882 as a result of the president’s desire  to challenge the power of the Catholic Church

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Read the Time Magazine story on climate change solutions

Related Story – BBC – “Climate change: Where we are in seven charts and what you can do to help”. From the BBC Story:

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6 Key Environmental Issues –

1. Climate Change

2. Deforestation

3. Pollution

4. Water Scarcity

5. Loss of Biodiversity

6. Soil erosion and degredation

Read about the other issues

This week we will look at pollution and water

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6 Key Environmental Issues – Pollution

1. Air pollution

JUST Capital measures and ranks companies on the issues Americans care about. “In our polling, 80 percent of Americans agreed that air quality was an important factor to consider in evaluating environmental impact, with 79 percent aligning on human health as another key measure of those impact”

Two of the planet’s main environmental problems, climate change and air pollution, are linked.

To begin with, though, it‘s important to distinguish clearly between them to understand the links they have, in what way they differ, and the solutions they might share. First, climate change is the global variation of the climate of the Earth due to natural causes and also human actions. It has many consequences with global impact, mainly due to changes in climate patterns, the rising sea level and more extreme meteorological phenomena. Climate change is not only an environmental phenomenon, its negative impacts have social and economic consequences, too.

For its part, air pollution is the presence, in the air, of substances or particles that imply danger, damage or disturbance for humans, flora or fauna. The main sources of atmospheric contamination are tropospheric ozone gases (O3), sulfur oxides (SO2 and SO3), nitrogen oxides (NO and NO2), benzo(a)pyrene (BaP) and particulate matter (PM). These gases result mainly from emissions caused by the burning of fossil fuels (including emissions generated by transport), industrial processes, burning of forests, aerosol use, and radiation.

New research reveals that 800,000 people die prematurely from air pollution in Europe each year. A previous study also confirms that dirty air kills 8.8 million people per year globally.

Scientists used three sets of data to reach their conclusions: population density and age, exposure to air pollution and the health impacts of foul air. While the lungs are the initial body part to suffer, once pollutants get in the bloodstream they can lead to strokes and heart disease. These latter consequences account for twice as many air pollution deaths as respiratory diseases. Scientists estimated that air pollution lops off an average of two plus years of life for these 800,000 Europeans. The rate of deaths linked to air pollution is especially high in Europe due to dense population.

What can be done ?

A carbon tax is a tax levied on the carbon content of fuels and, like carbon emissions trading, is a form of carbon pricing. As of 2018 at least 27 countries and subnational units have implemented carbon taxes. Economists generally argue that carbon taxes are the most efficient and effective way to curb climate change, with the least adverse effects on the economy. Carbon taxes offer a potentially cost-effective means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The simplest approach, administratively, is to levy the tax “upstream,” where the fewest entities would be subject to it (for instance, suppliers of coal, natural gas processing facilities, and oil refineries). Alternatively, the tax could be levied “midstream” (electric utilities) or downstream (energy-using industries, households, or vehicles).

Under a carbon tax, the government sets a price that emitters must pay for each ton of greenhouse gas emissions they emit. Businesses and consumers will take steps, such as switching fuels or adopting new technologies, to reduce their emissions to avoid paying the tax.

Taxes on greenhouse gases come in two broad forms: an emissions tax, which is based on the quantity an entity produces; and a tax on goods or services that are generally greenhouse gas-intensive, such as a carbon tax on gasoline.

One of the challenges of a carbon tax is forecasting the resulting level of emissions reduction from a specific tax rate

Carbon tax proposals have been introduced in Congress for several years without success, but supporters hope that the need for new revenues to pay for tax reform or infrastructure will make it more politically appealing.

2 One of forms of pollution is plastics pollution

They contribute to air pollution

Since its invention in the 1950s, over 9 billion tons of plastic have been produced.

• Ninety-one percent of all plastics are not recycled, meaning almost all plastic ever produced is piled up in our landfills and oceans
• Americans use 100 billion plastic bags every year. If you tie all these bags together, they reach around the Earth 773 times.
• By 2050, there will be more pounds of plastic in the ocean than fish.

Plastics are a problem mostly due to their un-biodegradable nature, the materials used for plastic production (hydrocarbon molecules—derived from the refining of oil and natural gas), and the challenges behind properly discarding the

Read more about pollution…

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6 Key Environmental Issues – Water

1 Water Scarcity

As the population increases and climate change causes more droughts, water scarcity is becoming more of an issue.

Our water resources are being depleted and degraded as a consequence of our agricultural and industrial use of water, deforestation and climate change, over- consumption, waste, and pollution. Only three percent of the world’s water is fresh water and 1.1 billion people lack access to clean, safe drinking water.

Global agriculture uses nearly two quadrillion gallons of rainwater and irrigation water annually—enough to cover the entire United States with 2 feet of water and accounting for 70 percent of global water use.  Some of the products that demand the most water are coffee and rice. Coffee requires 2500 gallons of water to pro- duce a pound of coffee and rice requires 650 gallons of water per pound of rice.

Certain energy development uses a huge amount of water. Hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, is a process that uses a pressurized mixture of water, sand, and chemicals to extract natural gas from the earth. A 2009 report noted that each natural gas well requires approximately 2-4 million gallons of water

And nearly every region in the country has experienced water shortages in the last five years. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

By the middle of this century more than a third of all counties in the lower 48 states will be at higher risk of water shortages with more than 400 of the 1,100 counties facing an extremely high risk.

2. Conditions

Water is one of life’s most vital resources. Water pollution, however, is devastating to the environment and to the health and well-being of people in every nation and community. The federal government invests annually in water pollution mitigation and water treatment; however, the current funding is not enough to conduct even routine maintenance and clean up pollution.

Most of our large scale agriculture  production uses fertilizers and pesticides to protect the crops from harm and ensure high yields for the farmers. In addition, our cars and vehicles leave oil and other products on the roads. Both of these contaminants are washed into streams and rivers by rain resulting in what is known as stormwater. This threatens the health of the fish and other aquatic life by degrading the water quality.

Stormwater is a leading source of water pollution nation- ally. The Great Lakes, the largest group of freshwater lakes on  earth, suffer from stormwater runoff, and in  many places stormwater is the primary source of water pollution. Using less fertilizer, building rain barrels and rain gardens, and being aware of products around your home that would add to stormwater pollution (such as pet waste) are key to addressing the United States’ stormwater problem

Read more about Water…

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Other Climate Change Links

1. Summary Change from the 4th National Climate Change Assessment
This is required to be published every 4 years.

2. How to be green without giving up life’s luxuries?

3. Climate Change and Children’s Health

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Lectionary, Sept 22 2019 – Season of Creation 4, Year C

The theme this week is “the reversal”

1. God is an active force reversing the tide of history. God hears the plea of the tenant farmers in the Psalm suffering the Babylonian exile and the childless couple. In the Gospel, God is pitted against the Roman authority and those who exploit and have made their riches dishonestly since that will determine how you deal with true riches in the future. God reverses the role of the rich and poor looking at the riches in heaven as oppose to this life where the poor have little.
2. There is the need as spelled out in Amos to reverse the idea of collective guilt. The key in the lectionary is the effect of harsh relations with the poor and “Surely I will never forget any of their deeds.”

In the Gospel we need to use wealth effectively to serve the needs of other which will bring about more trusting and equal relations. This is the key with the dishonest manger reducing debt to his manager. One he was building his own wealth unethically he now works to enrich others, reducing their bills to his master and building a relationship of mutual benefit. Luke is all about the proper use of wealth. As David Lose writes “Except that it’s not just the use of wealth; it’s more like Luke is concerned with our relationship to wealth and how that affects our relationships with others.”

3. In the Epistle, Christians offer prayers for everyone but is clear that at the pinnacle is God who desires all to be saved. The request in 1 Timothy 2:2 to pray “for kings” instead of “to the kings” , thus bringing down in prestige the Imperial forces at Rome. And it would include the poor. The word about “a quiet and peaceable life in goodness and dignity” in 1 Tim 2:1-2 may be what we are looking for.

Read more about the Lectionary….

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