Rev. Danny Fisher

The American Film Institute (A.F.I.) is currently inviting people to participate in their “100 Years…100 Movies” conversation by submitting videos about their favorite films to the A.F.I.’s YouTube channel. As an avid film buff, I just couldn’t resist participating. My video is below. (You can also watch it at YouTube or at iTunes.)

And for more on my favorite film, you can visit its official website here, and see its theatrical trailer on YouTube here. You can also watch modern master Martin Scorsese tell Roger Ebert why the film is his pick for the #2 Best Film of the 1990s on the Ebert & Roeper website.

From the Associated Press:

Clergymen struggling to comfort the afflicted in New Orleans are finding they, too, need someone to listen to their troubles.

The sight of misery all around them–and the combined burden of helping others put their lives back together while repairing their own homes and places of worship–are taking a spiritual and psychological toll on the city’s ministers, priests and rabbis, many of whom are in counseling two years after Hurricane Katrina.

Almost every local Episcopal minister is in counseling, including Bishop Charles Jenkins himself, who has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

enkins, whose home in suburban Slidell was so badly damaged by Katrina that it was 10 months before he and his wife could move back in, said he has suffered from depression, faulty short-term memory, and difficulty concentrating or sleeping.

Low-flying helicopters sometimes cause flashbacks to the near-despair–the “dark night of the soul”–into which he was once plunged, he said. He said the experience felt “like the absence of God”–a lonely and frightening sensation.

Churches and synagogues have played an important role in New Orleans’ recovery, supplying money and thousands of volunteers to rebuild homes and resettle families. But an April survey found 444 places of worship in metropolitan New Orleans–about 30 percent–were still closed 20 months after the storm because they were damaged or their congregations scattered.

As for the clergymen, “sometimes they’re having to hold it together and put up a great front to give people permission to fall apart, so they can be the great rock that their congregation can depend upon,” said Barney Self, who operates a counseling hot line for Southern Baptist ministers.

Still, Self said, he has received relatively few calls from New Orleans ministers, probably because it is hard to think about your own needs “when you’re up to your bahootie in alligators.”

[...]

Many clergymen are reluctant to ask for help, keeping their feelings bottled up the way doctors and firefighters often do, said Karen Binder-Brynes, a New York psychologist who specializes in post-traumatic stress and whose clients include the Episcopal Diocese of New Orleans.

She and others worry that that clergy members who do not get help could fall ill or resort to drinking or other “self-medication” for relief, and their marriages and other family relationships could suffer.

In a post from May, I mentioned the plight of former U.S. Army chaplain Don Larsen, who received a discharge ostensibly because he was unable to provide a formal ecclesiastical endorsement when he converted from Pentecostalism to Wicca. Some say, however, that the dismissal has more to do with religious intolerance than the lack of an endorsement. This seems a very reasonable assumption when one considers the fact that our commander-in-chief is on the record saying:

I don’t think witchcraft is a religion, and I wish the military would take another look at this and decide against it.

Well, Mr. Bush further marginalized Wiccan military personnel this past week when he excluded Roberta Stewart from a Nevada meeting he held with the families of soldiers killed in combat. Mrs. Stewart’s husband, Sgt. Patrick Stewart, a Wiccan, was killed in Afghanistan in 2005.

Stewart…was left off the invitation list for the private meeting Tuesday even though other members of her husband’s family were invited.

When she heard about the exclusion from her mother-in-law, Stewart said, she concluded that it was done because of her public fight to force the federal government to engrave the symbol for the Wiccan faith on her husband’s marker on a memorial.

“I was devastated,” Stewart said. “I was crying and upset. I couldn’t believe that my country would continue this discrimination.”

[...]

Stewart, also a Wiccan, fought an 18-month battle to get the Wiccan symbol–a five-pointed star within a circle–engraved on a brass plaque for war heroes at the veterans cemetery in Fernley, Nev. Patrick Stewart, who was in the Nevada Army National Guard, is believed to be the first Wiccan killed in combat. The helicopter he was riding in was shot down.

[...]

The Department of Veterans Affairs turned down Roberta Stewart’s request because the Wiccan symbol was not among the 38 emblems, including ones for atheism and humanism, allowed for inscription on military memorials or grave markers.

Americans United for the Separation of Church and State sued the department on behalf of Stewart and other Wiccan spouses, and in April, the VA agreed to add the symbol to its approved list.

The Department of Defense called Mrs. Stewart to tell her that her name was “inadvertently” left off of the invitation list, and Bush himself called her to apologize.

Mr. Bush must do more than simply make a private phone call to put things right here, however. It is time for the federal government to stop cherry-picking which religions to recognize and which not to. Anything less than honoring the full and diverse range of religious pluralism is not only wrong, it’s unconstitutional.

From Robert Reich, Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, and former U.S. Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton:

A young person asked me not long ago–only half in jest–whether Labor Day was named in honor of natural childbirth.

Most young people today have no memory of a time when Walter Reuther of the UAW and John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers were household names, when presidents jawboned labor to prevent agreements from causing wage-price inflation, when productivity gains pushed wages up, and when more than a third of the American workforce was unionized.

Now fewer than 8 percent of America’s private sector workers are in unions, median wage gains have fallen far behind productivity gains, and for most of us Labor Day means a long weekend.

What happened? Some say it started in the early 80s after Ronald Reagan fired the nation’s air-traffic controllers for striking–something they had no legal right to do–and thereby legitimized a wave of corporate union busting. Others blame it on a more pervasive ” greed is good ” aggressiveness that engulfed corporate suites starting right about then.

There’s no question that,ever since, and with ever greater alacrity, companies have fired workers for trying to form unions, even though that’s illegal, and have used or threatened to use permanent replacements if workers go on strike–which is legal but was rare before the 80s.

But don’t blame Ronald Reagan or corporate greed. Blame us–you and me. You see, starting about 30 years ago and with increasing efficiency, technologies have given us consumers a world of choice–low priced goods and services that often depend on low wages here and elsewhere.

Four-lane federal highways and long-haul trucks linking non-unionized manufacturers in the South to the rest of us. Container ships and cargo planes linking us to foreign producers. Big-box retailers using computers to find the best deals anywhere around the world. And now the Internet letting us find the best deals for ourselves from anywhere, too.

In other words, we as a nation have traded off lower priced goods and services, in place of a unionized workforce with the bargaining clout to get higher wages. So now, a lot of us get good consumer deals and lousy paychecks.

No one trumpeted this choice. It’s happened gradually. But is it the right choice? That’s what we ought to be asking ourselves–at least once a year, on Labor Day.