Dark clouds and the threat of damaging storms hung in the sky the evening of May 1 — the day observed across America as the National Day of Prayer.
But the noise rumbling over the parking lot outside St. Joseph’s Riverside Church wasn’t thunder. It was drums and guitars and voices, joining together under worship leaders from seven churches and lifting up words that came to characterize the night.

Religion in brief for May 10, 2008

Politics and religion: They’re two items often on the top of the list of things not to talk about if you’re trying to avoid controversy. Put them together, and controversy seems inevitable — or at least it has been in the case of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the former senior pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, to which U.S. Sen. Barack Obama belongs. Speaking to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., last week, the Rev. Wright made a presentation and addressed journalists’ questions about views he’s expressed in sermons about issues such as race and the American government. But what is perhaps a bigger question for many is how much — if at all — political views should be expressed from the pulpit.

Phylecea Smith lives in one of the poorest parts of a very poor country, where $30 is a week’s salary and the primary mode of transportation is a pair of feet.
But Phylecea can’t walk far. She can’t keep up with her friends. She can’t run without gasping for air.
Or she couldn’t, at least, until a few weeks ago — when the efforts of two Heartland Regional Medical Center doctors and a number of other people changed her life forever.
Dr. Thomas Alderson and Dr. Francisco Lammoglia met Phylecea during a medical mission trip they made to Jamaica in November 2006. In a makeshift clinic set up in a church’s concrete auditorium, an echocardiogram machine revealed an artery in the 15-year-old’s heart that should have closed at birth remained open. As a result, her heart constantly pumped a portion of her blood out to her body without first sending it to her lungs for oxygen.

A $7 million construction permit secured last month by Heartland Regional Medical Center is the next step toward the hospital’s plans to provide long-term acute care.

A path past a stand of evergreens ends in a clearing overlooking a town that doesn’t exist anymore.
A century and a half ago, that town was Doniphan, Kan., a roaring river settlement not far from Atchison, Kan. It also was where monastic life began in Kansas, in the form of what would one day be St. Benedict’s Abbey in Atchison.
Although the town is gone, the abbey remains, and some of its monks gathered in that remote clearing last Saturday to remember the day almost exactly 150 years earlier when the abbey’s founding monks arrived at that site.
“We want to remember what it was like for those three men to be here and to begin something good,” Abbot Barnabas Senecal says. “It was the beginning of the development of our community.”

Religion in brief for May 3

St. Joseph is drawing national attention, but not for a scandal or for the quirky kind of story that sometimes makes headlines across the country.

Dorothy Blakesley doesn’t look like she’s dying.
The resident of St. Joseph’s Living Community relaxes in a recliner with her feet propped up for the doctor to see. Their swelling is down, and a stethoscope to her heart indicates the same thing: Ms. Blakesley is better.
Much better than when she was admitted to Hands of Hope Hospice — maybe too much better to be a hospice patient much longer.
“I think you’ve bounced back,” Dr. James McMillen, her physician and the hospice’s medical director, says.
“Well, you made me,” Ms. Blakesley replies. “You helped me an awful lot.”

Healthcare notes for April 29