Prayer for Christchurch

The following prayer comes from the statement of the United Church of Christ's national setting condemning the white nationalist terrorist attack on Muslims worshiping in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which at least 50 people were murdered in their place of worship.

Holy One, called by many names,
our hearts are once again touched and broken
by events in our communities.
You created us from love and call us to love you
and to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.
Once again we find ourselves facing the reality

St. Patrick's Day

This flag represents the four provinces of Ireland.
Clockwise from top left:
Munster, Connacht, Leinster, and Ulster.

In many sports, Ireland fields all-island teams, which include members from the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom. When it comes time to play the pre-game national anthems, neither God Save the Queen nor The Soldier's Song would do, since either anthem would represent only part of the team. So in the 1995, the Irish Rugby Football Union commissioned Phil Coulter to write a song suitable to be played as an anthem that both sides could sing. Ireland's

For the King, Against the Emperor

The chair of Lajos Kossuth, preserved in the Great Church of Debrecen

Today Hungarians commemorate the Revolution of 1848. Led by Lajos Kossuth, the revolutionaries were defeated by the Austrians the following year, resulting in the oppression of the Hungarian people and the suppression of its language. Many Hungarian revolutionaries—including Kossuth himself—fled to the United States to avoid execution by the Austrians, and some even fought on the side of the Union in the Civil War.

One historically interesting aspect of the Hungarian Revolution was that, because the crown of St. Stephen had passed to the Hapsburgs, the Emperor

Thank God It's Pi Day

It's Pi Day in America. So why not celebrate by singing along to American Pi(e)?

Check This Out!

In order to turn Opossum Screed into more of a personal blog, I'm going to be posting daily devotions based on the psalter on a different site: Psalm Today. The URL is <psalm.today> and it will be exclusively devoted to meditations on the psalms. See you there!