Easter Season week 3 - Africa challenge

During the great 50 days of Easter, U2 Sermons is celebrating the power of the risen Christ to change lives by supporting an AIDS education program in Cameroon whose focus is training teachers to use computers to deliver information on HIV-AIDS. 97% of teachers in Cameroon do not have any computer skills, and 90% of students graduate from high school without ever having seen or touched a computer in the classroom. We did fine with donations the first week, but not so well the second week. The great thing about this project (other than that it's through the cool hands-on GlobalGiving site) is that their goal is only $1000: if half of our daily readers gave $10, we'd be there in a heartbeat.

NPR : Sunday Sermons, No Longer Unplugged

From our homiletics and pop culture department: I missed this at the time, but during Holy Week NPR actually managed to run a fairly reasonable story on normal clergy using the kind of normal media normal people are familiar with in normal sermons for normal congregations of normal people who are normally familiar with normal media.

TheBolgBlog: MP536: The Spiritual Journey of U2

Ryan Bolger gives an update on how his co-taught MP536: The Spiritual Journey of U2 mission class has been going at Fuller Theological Seminary.

"United 93" -- "See you for a swim"

I was quoting another blogger's earlier post about "One Tree Hill" when I said "It takes an unusual consciousness to garner comfort from apocalyptic imagery...." Well, check out this sidebar to a United 93-related interview with a California man who lost his wife and the couple's unborn child on that flight. It ends up dipping into that kind of comfort-via-eschatology by way of answering why "One Tree Hill" turned up once (only) on the Vertigo tour, in U2's Oakland concert last November. (Hat tip to scatter o' light.)

Caritas: U2 and Lament

I posted some weeks ago a description by an audience member of Greg Stevenson's recent U2 presentation at Abilene Christian University. Well, Greg, who has a lot to say in the overall field of religion and popular culture (here's his book on Buffy), is now blogging and offers two related posts himself, focusing on one of the more popular topics among people who write on the Christian perspective in U2's work -- U2 and Lament, and Lament part 2.

Easter season, week 2

A reminder that during the Easter season we're trying to spread some Resurrection life through Global Giving by seeing how far our little U2 Sermons community can get towards funding one of their Africa projects, an AIDS education program in Cameroon whose focus is training teachers to use computers to deliver information on HIV-AIDS. (Some donors are leaving a comment on the original post after they have given.)

I'm happy to say that after our first week, the Cameroon project now has less than $400 of its desired $1000 funding left to go.

wandering church: U2 and hebrews

Playing catch-up: Isaac at blip reflects on "I Still Haven't Found," wondering if years of listening to it "predisposed me to the Epistle to the Hebrews."

prayerbookproject: the church has left the building

If nothing else, Worshiping with Benedict, Wesley and Bono: Exploring Ancient Future Liturgies is a great title for a workshop.

sydneyanglicans.net: Grace vs Karma

Nothing too new in this reflection plus review of Bono on Bono from Greg Clarke of the Centre for Apologetic Scholarship and Education (CASE) in New South Wales... but since it mentions Get Up Off Your Knees, why not link it?

Grace Notes: U2 and liturgy

A thoughtful post on U2 and liturgical planning from one of our contributors.

Easter week update

Happy Easter Monday. Just to say, the link to the AIDS education program in Cameroon in yesterday's challenge post is now working.

GlobalGiving - an Easter Season challenge

Christ is risen! Easter is here, and there are 50 days -- great ones, according to liturgists -- until Pentecost. I want to propose that we celebrate it together in a particular way. I've become pretty enthusiastic about the GlobalGiving site, which offers a very direct way to make donations to projects in the developing world that, in essence, help work towards the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals. You can search for projects that need funding by theme or region, and you can even email the actual people running them in Asia or Africa or Central America or wherever. Here's a BBC article about the concept.

My suggestion is that we do a little experiment during the Easter season, and spread some Resurrection life by seeing how far our little U2 Sermons community can get towards funding a Global Giving project in Africa. I've chosen an AIDS education program in Cameroon whose focus is training teachers to use computers to deliver information on HIV-AIDS -- in part because their entire goal is only $1000, and in part because if you're reading this you have access to a computer and know how to use it, unlike 90% of high school students in Cameroon.

U2 Sermons gets in the neighborhood of 150-200 hits a weekday; we could make a significant impact or even enable the iEARN-SchoolNet-Cameroon folks to reach their $1000 goal. I've already given a first donation to start us off. Click through and check it out; you can enter your own choice of amount and give by credit card or Paypal. If you're willing to leave a comment here (even anonymously) we could track how many have taken part. Happy Easter!

when the soul wants, the soul waits

And while we wait: 2006 Amnesty International Easter Action

Good Friday: what once was hurt, what once was friction, what left a mark...

I've linked many examples of a wide variety of different kinds of church service using U2 in Christian worship over the years, and for today here's yet another: the Seabreeze Church band in Huntington Beach CA covers "Grace." It's much less ambient than the U2 version. (The sermons are online as well but not cross-indexed to the music that went with them.) This church, of Southern Baptist parentage, seems to have a live music repertoire that also incorporates Coldplay and others, as seen here.

[Edit: title fixed; wasn't awake yet!]

"It takes an unusual consciousness to garner comfort from apocalyptic imagery..."

This post from a general blog about which I know nothing (I've only very briefly skimmed anything but the post I just linked) reflects on a couple of songs about reactions in the face of mortality, "Closer To The Light" by Bruce Cockburn, and "One Tree Hill" by U2. I love the story about the elderly man in the writer's church around the time Joshua Tree was released.

Via Crucis Grid Blog: the Way of the Cross online

Today the U2 Sermons blog for the book Get Up Off Your Knees is particiating in the Via Crucis Grid Blog - a global, multi-site, media-rich, thoroughly ecumenical walk through Holy Week.

Quae maerébat, et dolébat,
Pia Mater, dum vidébat
Nati poenas inclyti.

Quis est homo, qui non fleret,
Matrem Christi si vidéret
In tanto supplicio?

The Fourth Station: Jesus Meets His Blessed
Mother
am I still your son
You know I've waited for so long to hear you say so


(Youtube, which is hosting the above media, has inconveniently closed for part of the day this station has to be posted, to work on their site. If you're here and it's not running yet, you could visit again later.)

previous station: Jean, Maggie, PmPilgrim
next station: Preston, Annie, Elena, Martha2, PmPilgrim, Only Wonder Understands, Jimmy
whole schedule here

One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic

A student at Covenant Seminary in St. Louis -- site of previous U2 and Christian faith-related audio talks by Ned O'Gorman and Nathan Tiemeyer -- preaches on unity using John 17 and the U2 song "One."

Bread for the World Offering of Letters

This has probably been up for ages, but I was on the Bread for the World site recently and discovered a "Message from Bono" promoting their 2006 Offering of Letters. (Are you asking: What offering of letters?)

"one but not the same"

A reader has motivated me to clarify something. I'm sure many of you who visit here are aware of this, since I've hammered on it ad infinitum, so I ask your patience. But for those who may have gotten the wrong impression: Get Up Off Your Knees represents the work of laypeople and clergy from many, many Christian denominations, ranging from Roman Catholic to Presbyterian, from Church of Christ to Anglican, from evangelical to mainline, from liberal to conservative. It seeks to honor and draw on the work Christian leaders from diverse perspectives all over the English-speaking world were doing in using U2 in liturgy and worship for decades, long before Raewynne and I thought of putting a collection together documenting one aspect of that longstanding work. Anyone who links Get Up Off Your Knees with the idea of cheerleading for any particular denominational perspective, or, God forbid, recruiting new members for any particular institutional church, has missed the point.

Angels, Cowboys, and Christians

Readers interested in U2's artistic collaborators may have already seen this Wim Wenders profile and retrospective at Christianity Today Movies, but there's a much fuller version of it at Looking Closer (which also links a great interview of Wenders from Image journal where among many other things he discusses how his angel films transformed his spiritual life, and his eventual movement from Catholic to Protestant Christianity.)
A Wenders quote from the Looking Closer version of the piece: "It’s the nature of Christianity that it needs to work through conviction, and because of the way you approach it, and not by trying to become a missionary through your work."