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By Mark Pattison, Catholic News Service

Faith in Action: Communities of Faith Bring Hope for the Planet Sierra Club, 36 pages

Don Conklin and Ellen Buelow are in good company -- and lots of it.

The two New Mexico Catholics are, like Catholics everywhere, doing their part to help the environment and to make others aware of potential ecological dangers that arise from wasteful habits.

Catholics, in fact, are prominently featured in nine chapters of a new Sierra Club book, Faith in Action, which highlights faith-led environmental action in each of the 50 states plus Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia.

Conklin and Buelow, members of Holy Rosary Parish in Albuquerque, N.M., helped engineer a light-bulb swap -- incandescent bulbs for energy-saving compact fluorescent bulbs, in March. Before the swap was over, 3,000 bulbs changed hands.

By Bronwen Dachs, Catholic News Service

CAPE TOWN, South Africa -- The South African Council of Churches has called on the international community not to recognize the presidency of Zimbabwe's longtime ruler, Robert Mugabe, who was sworn in for a sixth term after a runoff election in which he was the only candidate.

The June 27 election was "neither free nor fair, therefore this presidency is illegitimate," the council said in a statement released June 30 by general secretary Eddie Makue in Johannesburg.

By Bruce Nolan, Religion News Service

NEW ORLEANS — With food rations and toiletries stacked on a back pew, defiant parishioners of a church scheduled for closure as part of a post-Katrina downsizing plan angrily rejected all talk of closing their parish.

But after a heated meeting June 30, parishioners returned to their homes without seizing the church in protest, as they had said they might.

This week, in a very real way, I watched the world both come together and fall apart. The interesting thing is that the insight came from where I least expected it. In the middle of Atlanta, Ga., sits Drepung Loseling Monastery, a quiet little Buddhist community intent on reminding us that we may be ignoring one of the basics of life. Here? Us? How could that be? .

Psychologists tell us that it’s often exactly what we take for granted in ourselves that we find so surprising when we see it somewhere else. For instance, missionary work has been a staple of Christianity for centuries. We took it for granted that it was of our essence to go around the world, not to become something different ourselves, but to begin something different, to promote other values and insights somewhere else. And it worked.

A Post for NCRcafe: Exit to Entrance
By Marie Schickel Rottschaefer
Vol. 2 No. 3 July 7, 2008

The goal of these posts is to give a brief overview of developments that have relevance for us in the early 21st century, particularly in seeking solutions for pressing people and planet problems.

Faith Metamorphosis
Last time I proposed that humanity’s faith in the future as elaborated in Christianity is once again metamorphosing into a new faith -- a post-axial age one because of intellectual revolutions that are convincing us of the need to accommodate to the contemporary realities that we face. But the current metamorphosis is simply the latest in defining moments in the history of the changes in belief systems. The following are highlights.