Liberal Christians raising hell

Just so you don't get the idea that the Episcopalians are the only Christians pushing the envelope, two pieces in the new National Catholic Reporter, the voice of the American RC church's liberal wing, are worth noting. St. Louis columnist Jeannette Cooperman writes:

The people streaming into the community center treat their medicines and herbs the way pagans treat fire; alchemists treat the philosopher’s stone; Catholics treat the Blessed Sacrament. One after another, they tell the pharmacist how they store their prescriptions, and they all emphasize that the cabinet is cool and dark, safe from sunlight and bathroom humidity. ...Even the most careful medicine takers are not sure exactly what they’re taking, how it works, why it was prescribed. Still, they insist that they “take it religiously.” Pills are, in ways both subtle and overt, replacing prayer.

And Joan Chittister, feminist and perhaps the country's most famous Benedictine nun writer, writes on food politics:

"No one," Woodrow Wilson wrote once, "can worship God or love his neighbor on an empty stomach." No one, Wilson was warning us, can possibly be the kind of person -- the kind of citizen--we all like to think we're developing in this country: God-fearing and kind, law-abiding and civil. Hunger, by this measure, is as much a political lesson as it is a social one. Too bad we seem to be forgetting it.