Called To Be a Public Church: 2008 ELCA Voting and Civic Participation Guide
A resource guide to encourage, empower, and equip Lutherans to engage responsibly in the 2008 election cycle. “Called To Be a Public Church†is intended to encourage congregations to participate in voter registration drives, voter mobilization campaigns, and poll monitoring. This guide also contains nonpartisan issue briefs on issues related to the ELCA social statements.
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Vatican nativity does away with the manger
For 25 years, the Christmas Nativity scene in front of St Peter’s Basilica has shown the infant Jesus in a manger in Bethlehem. This year, however, the Vatican has decided to radically change the scene, shifting it to Nazareth, and placing Jesus in his father’s carpentry shop.
When Pope Benedict XVI inaugurates the life-size Nativity scene on Christmas eve, the sheep and hay will be gone.
In their place will be a model of three rooms.
Jesus will lie in Joseph’s shop, complete with “the typical work tools of a carpenter”.
On one side, the shop will be flanked with a “covered patio”, while on the other there will be the “inside of a pub, with its hearth”.
The news came in an official statement from the State Department of the Vatican, which organises and builds the giant presepe, or Nativity scene.
The new setting was inspired by two verses in St Matthew’s gospel, Chapter 1:24 and 1:25, the Vatican said, which state: “When Joseph woke up, he did as the Angel of God ordered and took Mary into his house. Without them knowing each other, a child was born and he called his name Jesus”.
The gospel goes on to mention Jesus’ birthplace as Bethlehem, but a spokesman for the Vatican said a decision had been made to place the scene in Nazareth regardless.
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After 45 years, woman gets haircut
For 45 years, Darka Jakymchuk refused to cut her hair, growing the auburn tresses down to her ankles and pinning them up in an enormous bun each morning. That all changed yesterday with one snip of the shears when the 59-year-old Queens woman walked into a salon and left with a giant braid in a gold box.
She wept and trembled as the stylist chopped off her crowning glory – but was grinning ear to ear minutes later at her bouncy, chin-length do.
“It feels so much lighter,” the modern-day Rapunzel marveled. “I’m glad it’s so curly.”
Jakymchuk, who was born to Ukrainian parents in a German camp but raised in the United States, had her last serious haircut in 1962 when her father lopped several inches off a waist-skimming shank.
The longer it grew, the more attached to it she became, even though it took hours to dry and caused some embarrassments.
There was the time she set off a metal detector at the airport because of all the bobby pins, and the time the hair got caught in the wheel of her office chair and the maintenance man had to free her.
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