Recent Posts

Most Used Categories

Tag: History

You are Here :
Perspective, Political, , , , ,

What Sen. Enzi really wants

M. Patricia Smith’s nomination as Solicitor of the Department of Labor has moved forward with a cloture vote today along party lines. There should be an up-or-down vote on the nomination tomorrow or the day after. See SENATUS for details on the vote.

Senator Enzi, the leading Republican on the Senate HELP Committee, had been blocking the nomination, for no good, valid, or honest reason. As both Republicans and Democrats have done in recent years, he has abused the whole practice of filibuster (I’ll write more on that later).

To respond to his ignorant criticism would take volumes. Frankly, he is scandalous in his use of innuendo and distorted facts to paint those he doesn’t like as incompetent managers and liars (an example of his blathering at the Washington Examiner). I would hate to be his child and have made a mistake. Of course his blather is par for the course in Washington (a pox on both houses). If someone won’t bow to your personal agenda, destroy them by whatever means possible.

Sen. Harkin, no flaming liberal, provided the facts that refute Sen. Enzi line by line during his pre-cloture vote statements. The Congressional Record should have his factual testimony in-full by tomorrow. I encourage you to check it out.

So to my title above, ‘What does Sen. Enzi really want?’ I believe he wants the following:

  • That workers not be educated as to their rights under the law.
  • That low wage workers have no recourse when their wages are stolen.
  • That any person or organization providing assistance only do so according to an approved script and to approved eligible individuals.
  • That employers who skirt the rules, especially those who hire low wage and immigrant workers presuming that they can abuse them, be free to establish a system of indentured servitude.
  • That disreputable, race-to-the-bottom, employers be free to re-establish the company store and a chit and voucher program.
  • That rights are only for those in Sen. Enzi’s social and economic demographic.
  • That the law is only a set of suggestions and optional guidelines, especially laws that protect the lower classes.
  • That truth be subservient to agenda.
  • That the United States be known as the land of permanent masters and servants.
  • That the Republican Party abjure its tie to the abolition of slavery.

Amy Traub, writing at Huffington, gives a great narrative on the things Ms. Smith has done and works to prevent in New York in New York’s Hidden Crime Wave

And we thought crime in New York City was low. According to the NYPD just 418 robberies were reported in New York last week, along with 695 incidents of grand larceny. Not bad for a city of more than 8 million people. But the rosy numbers overlook a devastating series of thefts that never make it into the police statistics: last week the city may have experienced just 375 burglaries but it also saw an estimated 317,263 cases of employer wage theft from their own low wage workers. More than $18.4 million were stolen from wages in that week alone. And because the wage violations are systematic and ongoing, the crimes recur every week throughout the year.

The shocking new wage theft data come from research [pdf] unveiled this morning by the National Employment Law Project. After a rigorous study involving thousands of front-line workers in New York’s low wage industries, researchers documented the prevalence of New York City’s workplace violations for the first time.

The study reveals a crime wage centered on the city’s most vulnerable workers. More than one in five workers in the city’s low-wage industries was paid less than the minimum wage. More than three in four were denied the overtime pay they were legally owed. When workers tried to stand up for themselves (for example, by filing a complaint with a government agency or attempting to organize a union) they faced a high risk of illegal employer retaliation: being fired, getting their hours cut, or having the boss threaten to call immigration authorities. Not surprisingly, many workers decided to remain silent, even as they continued to work in dangerous conditions or saw their earnings stolen.

Imagine the destructive impact on New York’s families and communities. Although the average worker in the city’s low-wage industries earns just $20,644 a year, they lost an average 15 percent of that to wage theft. That amounts to an average $3,016 annually stolen from some of the lowest-income working families in the city…

Are you ready for your employer to arbitrarily cut your salary by 15%? That 15% cut isn’t for any good economic reason, and certainly no legal reason. It is just so you can continue to work the same hours at less pay, and he can take it home to buy himself a better bottle of scotch. Maybe he’ll share that scotch with Sen. Enzi. Wonder if he hypocritically likes it neat.

Funny that my son was recently studying indentured servitude. I can’t wait till my son learns about human trafficking. I will be able to point to Sen. Enzi (if he’s still there) as a proponent of the very things that aid in its continuance.

Christian Witness, Perspective, ,

Should have caught that

I absolutely got a kick out of the recent story of a plane that was “forced” to land because an Orthodox Jew was doing his morning prayers. The story from the BBC covers it succinctly. There’s a lot of other ones out there too.

My immediate thought is that Christians should know this. Not sure any of the flight crew was Christian, there’s fewer and fewer of us around anymore, but if they were they should have recalled Jesus words in Matthew 23:5

They do all their deeds to be seen by men; for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long

In other words, they should have known better.

Of course Jesus was talking about the hypocrisy of the Scribes and Pharisees who did things in big ways only to be seen and recognized, not because they believed in what they were doing. Don’t get me wrong, I am absolutely against Christians doing any type of Jewish ritual (we don’t need no Seders or tefillin for salvation), but we should know these things because our roots are in these very rituals. We should also take the time to know what Jesus was talking about, what He practiced, and what He was referring to.

For the uninitiated, from Wikipedia:

Phylacteries or tefillin (Hebrew: תפלין—Ž) are two boxes containing Biblical verses and the leather straps attached to them which are used in traditional Jewish prayer. This practice is derived from commands found in the Biblical books of Exodus and Deuteronomy (Exodus 13:9, Exodus 13:16, Deuteronomy 6:8, Deuteronomy 11:18).

Art, Political, ,

The Art of Gaetano Porcasi

I received a comment on a post in relation to the art of Gaetano Porcasi. The comment really didn’t fit the post, and does not really appear to be a spam comment either. I checked out the artist’s website and enjoyed what I found there. You may as well – sort of a retrospective on Sicilian village life and the affect of corrupt power on the lives of common people.

Gaetano Porcasi is a Sicilian artist and school art teacher. His paintings are considered unique not only for their social and political commitment but also for the technique and choice of typical Mediterranean colours from which a strong and deep Sicilitudine (Sicilian mood) emerges.

The 2003 itinerant exhibition Portella della Ginestra Massacre is a good example: in 1947 a group of Sicilian farmers was shot and killed in Portella by the outlaw Salvatore Giuliano and his men under orders from the local Mafia mobsters and big landowners in order to stop the farmers’ attempts to occupy and plant uncultivated local land. His historical paintings which denounce the violence and oppression of the Mafia find their counterpart in his paintings which depict sunny Sicilian landscapes rich in lemon, orange and olive trees, in prickly pear, agave and broom plants. They show the wealth of a land that has been kissed by God but downtrodden by man.

In painting the sky of his native Sicily Gaetano uses several different hues of blue and it’s from this sky that his pictorial journey starts. In his paintings the history of Sicily, which has always been marked by its farmers’ sweat and blood and by their struggles for freedom and democracy, finds its pictorial expression in the fusion of the red flags of the workers with the Italian flag in a sort of Italian and Mediterranean epopea. The red flags and the Italian flag stand out against the blue sky that changes its hues according to the events, the seasons, the deeds and the moods that are painted on the canvas. The luxuriant nature of Sicily with its beautiful, sunny, Mediterranean landscapes seems to remain the silent, unchangeable and unchanged witness to events and the passing of time. Here people are only accidenti, they aren’t makers of their own life. Thus Gaetano makes a clear-cut metaphysical distinction between a benign, merciful nature and Man who breaks the natural harmony to satisfy his wild, unbridled ambition and selfishness and who becomes the perpetrator of violence and crime. Gaetano is also an active environmentalist and his fight against all forms of pollution has already cost him a lot.

Poland - Polish - Polonia, Political, , ,

What is Eastern Europe

From The Economist: Wrongly labelled: The economic downturn has made it harder to speak sensibly of a region called —eastern Europe—

IT WAS never a very coherent idea and it is becoming a damaging one. —Eastern Europe— is a geographical oddity that includes the Czech Republic (in the middle of the continent) but not Greece or Cyprus (supposedly —western— Europe but in the far south-east). It makes little sense historically either: it includes countries (like Ukraine) that were under the heel of the Soviet empire for decades and those (Albania, say) that only brushed it. Some of those countries had harsh planned economies; others had their own version of —goulash communism— (Hungary) or —self-managed socialism— (Yugoslavia).

Already unreliable in 1989, the label has stretched to meaninglessness as those countries’ fortunes have diverged since the collapse of communism. The nearly 30 states that once, either under their own names or as part of somewhere else, bore the label —communist— now have more differences than similarities. Yet calling them —eastern Europe— suggests not only a common fate under totalitarian rule, but a host of ills that go with it: a troubled history then; bad government and economic misery now.

The economic downturn has shown how misleading this is. Worries about —contagion— from the banking crisis in Latvia raised risk premiums in otherwise solid economies such as Poland and the Czech Republic—”a nonsense based on outsiders’ perceptions of other outsiders’ fears. In fact, the continent’s biggest financial upheaval is in Iceland (see article, article), and the biggest forecast budget deficits in the European Union next year will not be in some basket-cases from the ex-communist —east— but in Britain and in Greece. The new government in Athens is grappling with a budget deficit of at least 12.7% of GDP and possibly as much as 14.5%. European Commission officials are discussing that in Greece this week…

Of course Eastern Europe was always a political construct arising from a natavist world view coupled with anti-communist politics of the Cold War. Geographically, the center of Europe is in Lithuania, and Poland is resolutely in the middle of Central Europe.

It is also interesting to note that several Cold War constructs still prevail. Poles are the last “Eastern Europeans” who need a visa to travel to the United States, and at a prohibitive cost at that. Also, there is still a lack of degree equivalency so that Poles coming to the U.S., as doctors, dentists, and in other professions, must finance a whole second education. All of this is what’s left of an unfortunate history, one, as the article suggests, that we must get beyond.

PNCC, , ,

Ironbound – Newark and St. Paul’s PNCC

The Ironbound BID has included a Historical Review of the Ironbound Section in Newark, NJ on its website. This article was prepared by the Newark Preservation and Landmark Committee, and was originally published with a grant from the Newark Bicentennial Commission.

Section 5 of the history includes a mention of the defunct PNCC —“ St. Paul’s Parish of the PNCC (ca 1940). St. Paul’s was the third parish of the PNCC in Newark, NJ and incidentally was the only parish named St Paul’s in the PNCC.

EMILIO SERIO’S ART STUDIO, 30 Houston St. In one of the most imaginative transformations in the city, this onetime church and school is now the home and studio of a Newark painter and sculptor. The wooden building was erected as a public school in 1879, and served later as a tinsmith’s shop, Greek Catholic Church, social club, and Polish National Catholic Church. The structure had fallen into disuse when it was bought by Serio in 1970, but he remodeled and furnished it as a charming place for himself and his patrons. The old church is furnished with antiques and an abundance of art.

The Studio’s website includes pictures of the building and the history of its adaptation into an art studio.

Poland - Polish - Polonia, , ,

Respecting the silence, telling the stories

Dr. John Z. Guzlowski recently posted a short blog about journalist Justine Jablonska’s series of online articles about four Poles who survived the Nazi and Soviet invasions of Poland. In The Stories of Four Poles he notes:

The population of Poland was about 36,000,000 when the Nazis decided to destroy the country and its people. Six million of them died. The ones who didn’t die lived unimaginable lives for decades and decades to come, first under the hammer of the Nazis and then under the hammer and sickle of the Communists.

Not all of them want to talk about what happened. Some Poles don’t want to remember the killings, brutality, deportation, enslavement, deprivation, and suffering that many of them felt would never end. My mother was one of these Poles. If I asked her about what those years under the Nazis were like, she would wave me away and tell me simply, “If they give you bread, you eat it. If they beat you, you run away.”

I respect the silence of those like my mother who wouldn’t talk about those years. I’m sure she felt that she was protecting my sister Donna and me from the kind of sorrow few can bear.

Other Poles, however, were like my dad. He was a man who felt that it was his duty to let people know about the terrible things that were done. He didn’t want people to forget the evil that came down upon the Poles.

Justine Jablonska, a graduate student in the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, recently published a series of reports about four Poles who, like my father, feel that they must keep the memories of what happened alive.

These reports are gathered together under the title “Four stories: The nurse, the child, the Resistance fighter and the Home Army soldier.”…

PNCC, Poland - Polish - Polonia,

Interesting historical coincidences

On October 11, 2009 Bishop of Rome, Benedict XVI, proclaimed five new Roman Catholic saints among which was Archbishop Zygmunt Szczęsny Feliński of Poland. Among his virtues was the defense of the Polish subjects of Russian occupied Poland in the lead up to the January Insurrection of 1863 (Powstanie Styczniowe), which was brutally put down by Russian troops. Abp. Feliński was Archbishop of Warsaw at the time and protested in vain to the Czar. When his protests fell on deaf ears he resigned from the appointed City Council and soon was exiled from Russian-ruled Poland to what is now Ukraine where he remained for over twenty years. After being granted a czarist amnesty he was required to remove himself to Austrian-ruled Poland where he spent the remainder of his life mainly in a small community tutoring children.

In the photo to the left, taken a few weeks before his departure for the United States, Seminarian Franczisek Hodur (front center) is seen with three of his closest friends. Second from left is Gerard Feliński, nephew and ward of Archbishop Feliński. Abp. Feliński died in 1895 and it is quite possible that Seminarian Hodur had met him while a student in the Kraków seminary, attached to the Jagellonian University. According to Vincentian sources it is reported that conditions in that seminary, managed by the Vincentians, were quite harsh.

Everything Else, Media, Perspective, PNCC, Poland - Polish - Polonia, , , , , ,

Catching up

On some older news in my inbox:

The irony

From Reuters: Republicans urge Obama to roll back “Buy American”

Republicans urged President Barack Obama on Thursday to roll back “Buy American” provisions of this year’s economic stimulus package that they said were delaying public works projects and costing American jobs.

“Clearly these provisions are creating problems for our domestic companies and employees that must be addressed,” Representative Wally Herger said at a “roundtable” Republicans organized to hear industry concerns about the measure.

Representative Kevin Brady urged the White House to exempt state, county and city governments from the Buy American requirement “so that we can get those dollars working, create these jobs, get these projects in place and move this economy.”

…

The Buy American provision included in the $787 billion economic stimulus act requires all public works projects funded by the bill use only U.S.-made goods.

As a result, many local jurisdictions receiving Recovery Act funds are faced with ensuring that their projects comply with the Buy American mandate.

That’s not as simple as it sounds because many products contain components from around the world.

…

Groups calling for changes in the Buy American provisions include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Emergency Committee for American Trade, which together represents most of the biggest U.S. companies.

They said they feared other countries would retaliate by passing their own “buy domestic” provisions, as Canadian cities are threatening to do because their firms are being shut out of U.S. stimulus projects.

So, don’t do anything to stimulate and create manufacturing jobs in the U.S., and ensure those jobs keep getting shipped off-shore, while at the same time you decry the immigrant for “stealing” the last McDonald’s job left in the U.S.. Complete hypocrites.

On Ukrainian history:

From The Day: Mazepa: Architect of European Ukraine?

…Peter I’s Russia found its ideal dimension in Imperium, a —great form— with its inertial imperative of constantly developing supranational schemes aimed at compressing all conquered space into a single ideological whole.

Victorious as it was, Peter I’s Russia built its society out of —subjects— and —serfs.— Defeated as it was, Mazepa’s Ukraine was potential society of citizens.

Mazepa’s Ukraine had thus taken a resolute and decisive step in the direction of Europe at a time of anti-absolutist revolutions. Peter I’s Russia realized itself in an imperial structure whose messianic concept was generally anti-European.

It was a bolt of lightning that split the family tree of Old Rus’. Since then the confrontation between Ukraine and Russia has been systemic and conceptual. The gist of this confrontation is that Ukraine was not an obedient territorial unit open for colonization. Ukraine was Europe’s last bulwark retaining a political tradition that was absolutely unacceptable for Russian absolutism and thus very dangerous for centralized governance. It was a republican tradition. Rooted in the philosophic legacy of European culture, this tradition became the basis of the Ukrainian idea, i.e., a republican and consequently national idea, which has since been in opposition to the Russian Idea as an imperial and consequently immanently supranational one…

It is a complex article which attempts to draw the currents of the Reformation, Humanism, Orthodoxy, Polish-Ukrainian history, and the Khmelnytsky revolt into one large bundle giving rise to Mazepa’s movement. I’m really not sure how the Reformation and humanism play out here. I would ascribe the influence of Cossack independence and self-determination as well as the philosophies already existent in the Polish-Lithuanian, (later Ruthenian) Commonwealth. Those philosophies were already well settled, and well known in the Ukraine, when the rest of Europe met the Reformation and the advent of humanism as a philosophy.

Learning about your new neighbors:

From the Times: Polska! Year comes to London

Slap-bang in the centre of Warsaw there’s a striking neo-Gothic skyscraper called the Palace of Culture. Poles are forever debating whether to demolish it —” it was a gift from Stalin, whose memory is not lovingly tended in these parts. But they could equally well celebrate it. Within its imposing walls it hosts three theatres, a cinema, bars and museums. What other capital city’s most prominent edifice is an arts centre? —Theatre is the national sport,— says Piotr Gruszczynski, a critic and dramaturge at the high-flying Nowy Theatre. —Poles still believe that theatre can change the world.—

Britons can now enjoy the fruits of this devotion in the form of Polska! Year, a 12-month arts festival that cashes in on the wave of immigration that has left Brits eager to know more about our new neighbours. Poland, we’re being told, is no slumbering ex-Soviet satellite, but Europe’s sixth-biggest country and a star in the international arts firmament.

…—Poland needs to kill its idols,— says Katarzyna Szustow, one of a triumvirate now running the Dramatyczny Theatre, based in the Palace of Culture. Here they like their drama more political. In the 19th century, Szustow says, when Poland was partitioned between Germany, Russia and Habsburg Austria, —it was to the theatre that you went to hear Polish spoken. Then, under the Soviets, theatre was the focal point of dissent. Post-1989 theatre was suddenly meaningless —” the real ‘theatre’ was happening in the public sphere.—

…

The remaining taboos in Polish theatre include homosexuality and Poland’s relationship with its Jewish population. The former is broached by Szustow’s new regime, which programmes live art about gender and the body; the latter by a new play at the National Theatre in London, Our Class by Tadeusz Slobodzianek. His play, which confronts the country’s complicity in Second World War atrocities, hasn’t been staged in Poland —” Slobodzianek is loath to apply for state funding because of the controversy it would generate. All theatres are state-funded and highly bureaucratic, which means plenty of activity, but a lack of flexibility.

The only other taboo is laughter. —Making comedy in Polish theatre means you are not an artist,— Gruszczynski says. He’s exaggerating —“ perhaps for comic effect. But for Britons striving to reduce our own theatre to a branch of the leisure industry Polish drama takes some getting used to. And yet, the sense of a thriving, passionate scene, and of a younger generation exploiting the public role theatre has retained from the Soviet years is exhilarating. If Polska! Year can communicate that excitement, its shows will be well worth seeing.

A fitting tribute:

Dr. Jerzy J. Maciuszko – Ambassador of Polish Culture and one of the most dedicated members of the Kosciuszko Foundation by Olga Teresa Sarbinowska

Those of us who were raised in Communist Poland have much in common. We are direct, act with a characteristic ease, and we tend to pay little attention to manners. The Polish post-war generations stand in direct contrast to the Polish pre-war intelligentsia. To many of us the pre-war intelligentsia is an abstract notion often associated with rigid etiquette and snobbism. When at the end of the eighties I arrived in Cleveland, the first representative of Polonia who reached out to me was Doctor Jerzy Maciuszko, a charming, courteous man full of gentleness, humbleness, politeness, and inherent high culture.

A Warsavian by birth, Jerzy Maciuszko, is a 1936 graduate of the Department of English Language at the University of Warsaw. He began his American career in 1951 as a lecturer of Polish Literature at Alliance College in Pennsylvania. Soon thereafter, he moved to Cleveland where he enrolled in the doctoral program in library sciences at Case Western Reserve University and worked in the department of foreign literature at the Cleveland Public Library. Upon defending his Ph.D. dissertation, Maciuszko was promoted to director of the prestigious John G. White Department at The Cleveland Public Library and continued his academic career teaching Polish literature at Case Western Reserve University.

In 1969, Dr. Maciuszko accepted the position of Chairman of the Slavic Studies Department at Alliance College in Pennsylvania. It should be noted that Alliance College was established by the Polish National Alliance. An informational brochure published by the College at the beginning of the seventies explained that “Slavic studies” at most American universities amounted to “Russian studies” while at Alliance College the emphasis was on “Polish studies.” …

Unfortunately in 1974 Dr. Maciuszko left Alliance College and returned to Cleveland where he accepted the directorship of Baldwin-Wallace College’s Ritter Library. Soon after his departure, Alliance College, together with the Center for Polish Studies, closed down. The magnificent Alliance College campus was sold out and the entire complex was turned into a women’s prison.

Accepting a position as the library director at Baldwin-Wallace College, Professor Maciuszko seemingly departed from his involvement in the Polish cause. However, this was not the case. He plunged into the life of Polonia like a missionary driven by an inner fire. He wrote, published, became active in many Polonia organizations, and quickly established himself as a foundation of cultural and intellectual life for the Polish-American community in Cleveland… Furthermore, as an active member, he was involved with the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in New York, Polish-American veteran organizations in Cleveland, the Association of Polish Writers Abroad, and the Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, and others.

…

As a writer, Dr. Maciuszko dedicated his works primarily to Poland and Polonia. Since 1957, he has been publishing reviews of Polish literature in the quarterly World Literature Today. Reviews by him also appeared regularly in The Polish Review and other leading literary journals. In addition, as a prolific writer Dr. Maciuszko has authored numerous forewords and commentaries to various editions of classical literature. …

This prominent Cleveland Pole also wrote a chapter entitled “Polish Letters in America” for the book Poles in America, Frank Mocha, editor (Worzalla Publishing Company, 1978), as well as a chapter entitled “Polish-American Literature” for the book Ethnic Perspectives in American Literature, Di Petro, editor (Modern Languages Association of America, 1983). Numerous encyclopedic entries on Polish writers and poets authored by him appeared in Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century (Unger Publishing Company, 1975). The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, John Grabowski, Editor (Indiana University Press, 1987) included an entry by Dr. Maciuszko. He was also a founding member of Choice, the official journal of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL). Choice was first issued in 1964, and since then Dr. Maciuszko has been a regular contributor, writing primarily reviews of Polish literature. He also has served as Chairman of the Slavic Division within ACRL organization.

In 1969 Dr. Maciuszko published The Polish Short Story in English; A Guide and Critical Bibliography (Wayne State University Press). This compendium consisted of summaries of Polish short stories published in English. The work was published within the Millennium Series of the Kosciuszko Foundation. Professor of Polish Studies at Columbia University, Dr. Anna Frajlich, called the book “a monumental work indispensable to all American teachers and students of Polish literature.”

A most puzzling fact is that a significant literary achievement of Dr. Maciuszko’s, to this day, remains completely unknown. To solve this mystery we must travel back in time to the beginning of World War II. In August of 1939, twenty-six-year-old Maciuszko was a member of one of the first military units to stand up to the Nazi war machine. Unfortunately, on September 4th, he was taken prisoner of war, and for the next five and a half years he remained in the German POW camps.

In 1943, the international Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) headquartered in Geneva announced a literary contest among all prisoners held in German POW camps. At night, by candlelight, after an exhaustive work day, while his comrades slept, Maciuszko wrote a short story which he entitled Koncert F-Moll (Concerto in F-minor). He was thrilled to find out later that it had been selected as a winner.

…

In 1974, an American professor wrote in a letter of recommendation that Dr. Maciuszko “still maintains his old-world dignity.” Never giving in to the pressures of the American culture, he has remained faithful to the ideals of his upbringing. Having known Dr. Maciuszko and his wife, Dr. Kathleen Maciuszko, throughout the years, I rediscovered the charm and splendor of Polish pre-war intelligentsia, this culture of mine that at first appeared very distant and incomprehensible, the culture that has been almost lost and forgotten. Today, I greatly value this engaging courtesy coupled with refined dignity and tremendous kindness. In today’s world of aggression, courtesy and kindness are invaluable assets. I salute Dr. Maciuszko for being able, against all odds, to preserve the most precious qualities of the Polish culture and pass them on to the next generations.

Zeal:

From Pew: The —Zeal of the Convert—: Is It the Real Deal?

A common perception about individuals who switch religions is that they are very fervent about their new faith. A new analysis by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life provides quantitative support for this piece of conventional wisdom often referred to as the “zeal of the convert.” The analysis finds that people who have switched faiths (or joined a faith after being raised unaffiliated with a religion) are indeed slightly more religious than those who have remained in their childhood faith, as measured by the importance of religion in their lives, frequency with which they attend religious services and other measures of religious commitment. However, the analysis also finds that the differences in religious commitment between converts and nonconverts are generally very small and are more apparent among some religious groups than others.

One of the most striking findings of the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, conducted by the Pew Forum in 2007, was the large number of people who have left their childhood faith. According to the survey, roughly half of all Americans say they have left the faith in which they were raised to adopt another faith or no faith at all, or if they were not raised in a religion, they have since joined one.

The new analysis finds that, overall, people who have switched religions consistently exhibit higher levels of religious commitment than those who still belong to their childhood faith, but the differences are relatively modest…

After joining the PNCC I went through strong convertitis. Affects others more strongly than others I suppose.

In Bridge news:

From the NY Times: Polish Wroclaw Team Blitzes, Winning Universities Title

The first European Universities Championship was played in Opatija, Croatia, from Oct. 4 through last Saturday. The 22 teams from 11 countries (Poland sent 7 teams) played a 10-board round robin.

With one round to go, Paris led Wroclaw-1 by 2 victory points. Paris played against Krakow (lying 15th), and Wroclaw-1 faced Munich (13th).

The final match started well for Paris. On Board 21 the Krakow East-West pair misdefended to let three no-trump through, giving Paris 13 international match points. And on the next deal this same Krakow pair missed three no-trump that was made at the other three tables in these matches, giving Paris another 10 imps.

…

On the penultimate board Wroclaw-1 gained 5 imps and Paris 7. So Paris needed a big swing on the final deal, but it was a dull three no-trump where the only fight was for an overtrick.

Paris had prevailed in its last match by 18 imps, which gave the team 20 victory points, but Wroclaw-1 had won a 38 to 0 blitz, gaining 25 victory points and the gold medals by 3 victory points.

The winning team comprised Zatorski, Nowosadzki, Wojciech Gawel and Piotr Wiankowski.

Bridge is hugely popular in Poland.

Perspective, PNCC, ,

Saving what can be saved

So this doesn’t happen (from the Young Fogey):

Destruction of Transfiguration church, Philadelphia, PA

In part why the PNCC was born. This doesn’t happen when the people own and care for the building. When the Bishop is the sole decision maker you get a merely dollars and cents approach. Even in situations where PNCC parishes have moved to the suburbs they’ve taken everything with them, the art and furnishings donated by their ancestors, and have integrated them into their new buildings.

From the Buffalo News: Windows from a bygone Catholic church and other relics find a safe haven

A Buffalo museum founded last year to preserve art and artifacts from area religious groups has made its biggest acquisition to date. More than 30 stained-glass windows from the former Queen of Peace Catholic Church on Genesee Street are now part of the growing collection of the Buffalo Religious Arts Center, which is housed in another former Catholic church on East Street near Amherst Street in Black Rock.

The center also recently received word that its home building, the former St. Francis Xavier Church, completed in 1913, has been added to the National Register of Historic Places.

Removing the ornate windows properly from Queen of Peace took months. The former church, which was sold in April to a Muslim group, now functions as a mosque and community center, and the windows depicting a variety of Christian imagery and Catholic saints were considered inappropriate.

So the Muslim group brokered a three-way deal with the Buffalo Religious Arts Center and church restorationist Henry Swiatek, who spent several weeks on the project.

—They’re in good hands now,— Swiatek said.

—These windows are of extremely high quality. Surprisingly, they were in very good condition. Some of them were in excellent condition.—

Most of the windows, crafted by Buffalo glassmaker Leo Frohe, eventually will be displayed at the center, which is still in an acquisition phase.

So far, the center has acquired more than 100 pieces of art from a dozen churches and a synagogue.

A few windows from Queen of Peace featuring Polish saints also have been installed in the chapel at Corpus Christi, a traditionally Polish Catholic church on the East Side.

—They really look like they belong here,— said the Rev. Anzelm Chalupka, pastor.

Organizers of the Buffalo Religious Arts Center initially planned to lease or sell a three-story, 33,000-square-foot school building next to the former St. Francis Xavier Church on East Street.

Now, they figure the school is large enough for them to rent some space for income and still have enough room for displays of stained glass. A full renovation of the school, however, is expected to cost about $3 million.

The historic designation of the basilica-style church, built in 1913, and its accompanying buildings, will help the center get access to more grant opportunities.

In addition to artwork, the center has started collecting vintage photographs of religious celebrations, such as weddings, baptisms and First Communions, church anniversary books and rosaries.

—Each and every church has a history,— said Mary Holland, executive director of the center. —It’s not only a museum of artwork, it’s also about history.—

All Right Reserved © 2005 - 2023