short takes (religion, though I didn't set out to have a theme)

[cellio]

Why I am considering staying in the Methodist Church, written by a committed member of the church who is a target of their discrimination. (Link via kayre.)

Thomas Jefferson on church and state, posted by dglenn in honor of the national day of prayer.

For Pittsburghers: Panim el panim, a discussion/panel with my rabbi, someone from the Islamic Center, and an Episcopal reverend. May 15, 4pm.

Tomorrow night's Shabbat service is another musical one. This will be the third; I really liked the first two. It looks like we are going to do this after the summer, too; Tuesday night we held auditions for an in-house band. Got a dozen people, which is great! (I wasn't there, so I don't know what skill levels we're dealing with, but I know we've got some good musicians in the congregation. I decided I'm too busy right now.)

This summer there will be one Shabbat when both rabbis will be away (and the cantor will be two weeks past her due date, so if she's still pregnant she'll probably be grumpy). So the worship committee will lead that Friday's service. Usually when groups (committees, brotherhood, etc) lead services, someone in the office assigns parts and mails out annotated photocopies ("tell them to stand here", "read this in Hebrew", "read this responsively in English", etc). That kind of bugs me, so at last night's meeting of the worship committee I said: Look, we're the worship committee; if we can't just lead a service out of the siddur, there's something wrong. So if you want to participate in this service and you don't normally come on Friday nights, you should come a few times in the next two months. At the next meeting we're going to look at the siddur and assign parts. I expected at least a little griping, but got none. Yay.