My Church is fasting  this month, as part of our annual Oktoberfast. (Yes, we live in Wisconsin.) Tomorrow begins the most rigorous of all, the five-day, no food at all, “Lawd ha’ Mercy” fast.

Fasting without prayer, my pastor likes to say, is just not eating food. So we’re also holding a 24-hour prayer room open at our church building, with people booking one-hour slots all around the clock; and we’ve got a devotional booklet as well.

We’ve been stripping things away all month; the first fast was from meat, media (much harder than meat for me), and other delights like sweets. The idea was to learn to see the world without the little distractions we fill our lives with.

Next came a dinnerless fast, where we didn’t eat after 6 PM; then a no-food-before-six fast. Each of these extended from Monday through Friday.

Now the Lord Have Mercy fast, with no food (liquids are fine) till a corporate lunch at noon on Friday, where we’ll be break-fasting with stories from our month.

It’s important to remember throughout this whole list: it’s prayer that holds this all together.

Fasting gives us little pangs of desire, all the time. The empty stomach, the howling empty silence where I normally gorge on media, and the impulsive, popping nice things in my mouth. (For instance, I’m currently trying to bribe a toddler out of diapers with chocolate chips for every successful use of the toilet; when I give him a chip, it’s almost natural to eat one myself, because it’s there.

But as one goes before God, and asks to be renewed, and asks to be shown what God wants to show me, fasting helps open ones ears and eyes. It’s hard, but it’s good, and time-honored, and it works so much better in community. I recommend it heartily.

But I can’t wait till Saturday. And I still resent you, flaunting your coffee on the street in front of me.

In the absence of any positively unifying stories toward a Belarusian identity, and suffering under Europe’s only dictatorship, Belarus is embracing the Orthodox hierarchy.

Writing in Arche, Rashed Chowdury, who identifies himself as a Muslim, says embracing Christianity might be good for Belarus, but only at the level of popular conviction; not at the level of state-sponsorship.

Furthermore, the foundations of fascism are present when the church cynically aligns itself with the state, and, more significantly, when youth movements insist on an alignment of the culture with the faith:

President Alaksandr Lukashenka has been widening the role of the Orthodox Church in society, while the Church, in its turn, has been legitimising the regime, at times quite cynically. Belarusian TV news recently showed a spokesman for the Belarusian Orthodox Church, who, with an empty expression in his eyes, said that Belarus has the best legal structure in Europe. At the same time, one of the pro-opposition Belarusian youth organisations active in the United States, whose website is linked to by the sites of several independent Belarusian organisations and publications, as well as those of opposition parties, claims that every nation has its religion, that the religion of the Belarusians is Christianity, and that it is impossible to be a good Belarusian without being a Christian.

During a visit to Madison’s Juneteenth celebration on Saturday, I was left wondering, once again, where all the white people were, at least the ones like me.

Juneteenth is the celebration of African American emancipation from slavery, marked on the day when Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was finally enforced in Texas. It’s evolved in recent years to be a celebration of black life and history.

Juneteenth contrasts with Martin Luther King day in a few important ways: most Juneteenth celebrations are homegrown, and don’t take place with mayors and congressmen trying to look good. And for reasons probably more to do with summertime (vs. January’s MLK day), Juneteenth celebrations are a lot more fun.

Back to my question. There were indeed, as always, plenty of white people present; at least two percent, which in a big crowd, amounts to a decent number. But in a city with 85% white people, the disbalance still sticks out. The white people at Juneteenth generally fall into three categories: those somehow related to black people (spouses etc.); those left-leaning elite-ish types who fancy “solidarity”; and those with something to sell, like Obama t-shirts.

Notably absent are middle class white families, despite this being a terrific family event. I can only guess at why: people don’t think the celebration is for them; and most importantly, they don’t know anyone there. So it may be nothing more (or perhaps nothing less) than a segregation problem.

In recent years, evangelicals have begun reasserting their role in abolition, loudly talking about William Wilberforce and similar. So why not come and join in the fun? Well, perhaps folk don’t feel that the resolution of a moral evil is worth celebrating; that celebration seems somehow wrong next to all that suffering.

One of the best lessons I’ve learned during my decade-plus in a largely African-American church is the skill of celebrating in the midst of everything else being rough. Joy is an act of the will, and I don’t think I was taught much intentionality in joy while growing up in White Baptist circles.

And so, few white Christians come out to celebrate Juneteenth. The solution, I imagine, would be more interracial church socializing, and a mindset shift among white Christians that interracial anything is anything more than a downer. Come out and celebrate! Have some pie, enjoy some music, and celebrate life!

So we’re doing this project at my church, for healthy living. It’s fairly comprehensive, with a competitive biggest-loser-style weight-loss component.

One enterprising participant even managed to get a local donor to give 10 pounds of food to a local food pantry for every pound lost by our church, or other churches in town that we can get to join us. They were having weigh-ins after service yesterday.

This has to be a good thing, because while weight loss is not an across-the-board good, and is certainly not the holy grail of healthy living, getting a handle on obesity is fairly basic to health.

My church is very mixed in socio-economic status. It’s one of the things we don’t like to talk about, but there is a clear (but not absolute) relationship between poverty and obesity, and the relationship is somewhat visible at our church, which draws on blighted neighborhoods and the university in roughly equal measure.

The bottom line is that high-fat, high-sugar food is much more affordable, and is much easier to preserve and prepare, and is generally more accessible to poor neighborhoods, than fresh produce.

The Obamas are engaging in one of America's pastimes, church shopping.

It was the occasion for Slate to look at the history of church shopping and its impact on American souls.

Salesmanship sometimes degenerates into telling people what they want to hear and, in the case of religion, into a faith that never comes down too hard on the faithful. But competition among churches should be considered a good thing, at least if you are a fan of religiosity. The sheer number and variety of churches that sprang up in the American free market in religion ended up increasing the consumption of religion. In 1776, Stark and Finke write, fewer than one in five Americans belonged to a local church. Today, the figure is more like 67 percent.

[photo: library of congress, from flickr commons]