Calvary Baptist Church announces free summer day camp for children ages 6-12

Calvary Baptist Church is sponsoring a free Summer Day Camp for children in the community ages 6-12, starting weekdays, Monday-Friday, July 9 and extending through July 20, 8 a.m.-2 p.m.

The targeted area is Hadley to Burleigh; 10th Street to 25th Street. The church is located at 2959 North Teutonia. Reverend John R. Walton, Jr. is Pastor.

The Calvary Summer Day Camp registration is now open until spaces are filled. To register, parents may come to the church during the week, Monday-Friday.

Also, a special and mandatory orientation reception and registration for parents and children will be held on Sunday, July 8, 3-5 p.m., Calvary Church.

Reverend Walton said that this camp is designed to reach out to children and families and will help in the transformation of our community.

"The Calvary Summer Day Camp offers the opportunity for us to broaden our understanding of the plan that God has for us.

"It is an excellent vehicle for parents in the community and church to volunteer to serve and to provide not only spiritual opportunities but recreational, creative, personal and educational ones as well."

Special features of the free Calvary Summer Day Camp for all campers include a free T-shirt, breakfast, lunch and snack; Bible study and devotions, arts and crafts, sports activities, field trips and a daily structured fun and adventurous program with counselor to camper ratio of 1:10.

For additional information, please contact the church at 414-372-1450. Venora McKinney serves as Implementor for the Calvary Summer Day Camp and Cynthia Grant as coordinator.

 

Muslims should condemn Muslim violence

New York/Standard Newswire/--According to today’s New York Sun, Harvard professor Jessica Stern told a New York audience yesterday that criticism of Muslim clerics for not condemning Muslim violence was unwarranted.

"I’ve heard a lot of bashing of Muslim clerics for not stepping up to the plate and condemning extremist violence," she said.

"But Catholic priests are not stepping up to condemn those who kill abortion doctors...[and] rabbis are not condemning the violent settlers' movement."

Catholic League President Bill Donohue responded as follows:

"Forced moral equivalency is immoral, and that is exactly what Jessica Stern is promoting.

"The silence of Muslim clerics in the face of Muslim violence is well- known. But when it comes to killing abortionists, the Catholic clergy have an impeccable record.

"It should be noted, too, that as the "New York Sun" pointed out today, rabbis everywhere condemned Yigal Amir’s 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin--the very incident that Stern cited as an example of Jewish silence.

"To begin with, there has not been a single abortionist killed in the U.S. since 1998. When there were killings in the mid-1990s, Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles, chairman of the Pro-Life Activities of the bishops’ conference, said that such shootings make ‘a mockery of everything we stand for.’

"When there were two killings at Massachusetts abortion clinics, Cardinal Bernard Law not only denounced them, he ordered a moratorium on sidewalk protest vigils outside abortion clinics in Boston.

"Cardinal John O’Connor’s response in New York was profound: ‘If anyone has an urge to kill an abortionist, kill me instead.’

"Just this week, a report of Muslim violence against Iraqi Christians was released.

"The study, Incipient Genocide, describes in detail ‘the deaths of Christian children--including babies--laypeople, priests and nuns who were burned, beaten or blown up in car bombs throughout the past few years.’

"Moreover, Christian girls are being raped and having nitric acid thrown in their faces for not wearing veils. And the Muslim silence is deafening."

Study finds correlation between marriage, fatherhood and church attendance

A new study finds that religious attendance--especially among fathers--is associated with higher rates of marriage and with better quality relationships among married and unmarried urban parents.

"Religion seems to foster a code of decency encompassing sobriety, fidelity, and hard work among urban parents, especially fathers," said W. Bradford Wilcox, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, who conducted the research.

"This decency translates into better relationships among married couples and, much to my surprise, among unmarried couples." Specifically, Wilcox finds that churchgoing fathers:

o Are 95 percent more likely to be married when their child is born.

o Increase the likelihood that an unmarried mother will enter into marriage between the birth of her child and three years after birth by 67 percent.

o Have relationships in which both mothers and fathers are significantly more likely to rate their partner as supportive whether or not they are married.

o Have relationships in which both the mothers and fathers are significantly more likely to report that they have an excellent relationship with one another, whether or not they are married.

(Source: Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Survey)

African American parents are significantly less likely to be married or get married in the wake of a nonmarital birth.

However, churchgoing boosts the odds of marriage for African American parents in urban America in much the same way as it boosts the odds of marriage for urban parents from other racial and ethnic backgrounds.

Most striking, the research indicates that the current gap between White and Black marriage rates would be even larger were it not for the fact that African Americans attend church at higher rates than Whites.

Marriage provides an array of economic and social benefits to children, adults, and the communities in which they live, and these benefits extend to poor and minority communities in urban America.

However, there has been a dramatic retreat from marriage that has transformed family life in urban America and the rest of the United States in the last four decades.

o African American, Latino, and poor children in urban America are much more likely to spend time in a single-parent or a fragile family compared to White middle-class American children.

o In U.S. cities, 83 percent of children born out of wedlock are born into fragile families.

o Fragile families are defined as families in which parents cohabit or maintain a nonresidential romantic relationship with one another, or in which a residential parent cohabits with a romantic partner who is unrelated to the children in the household.

o Compared to married families, fragile families are typically marked by lower levels of commitment and stability between adult partners and by more economic strain.

Nevertheless, since the 1990s, religious attendance, out-of-wedlock childbearing rates, and child poverty rates in the U.S. have generally stabilized or even improved.

Now is the time to take stock of current trends in family life and to pursue a range of pastoral initiatives to strengthen marriage and family relationships in urban America.

Religious initiatives that seek to strengthen family relationships will serve the welfare of countless children and communities who depend upon strong and healthy families to survive and thrive.

These results reinforce the impression that paternal church attendance is particularly important for urban relationships.

Not only is fathers’ church attendance more strongly associated with entry into marriage than mothers’ attendance, it is also more predictive of high-quality relationships for both mothers and fathers.

No research has yet determined the effect of religious belief and practice on marriage formation and marital quality among African American and Latino parents in urban America even though many married Black and Latino urban parents are regular churchgoers.

Likewise, no scholarship has been published to date on the role that religion might play in influencing the relationship quality of unmarried parents in urban America even though a large minority of unmarried parents attend religious services.

"Religion, Race, and Relationships in Urban America" Research Brief no. 5 from the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values was written by W. Bradford Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia. It is the first published research on the link between religiosity and relationship quality among unmarried couples in fragile families.

It is based on analyses of data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, which is sponsored by Columbia and Princeton Universities.

The brief can be read online or downloaded directly at: http://center.americanvalues.org.