Are Earth Day and Good Friday an unholy alliance?s

Holy Week this year has a surprising twist. The international observance of Earth Day and the Christian church’s celebration of Good Friday converge on April 22.

To many in the church this will come as an unwelcome intrusion. I’ve learned in my years as a pastor not to schedule anything that would compete with the rhythms of Holy Week. I’m still reminded occasionally by the keepers of the church calendar about the year I agreed to do a wedding on the Saturday before Easter. I won’t do that again.

For others, the threat of this coincidence goes much deeper than potential scheduling conflicts. They will see this as a sacred-secular fault line in an ongoing cultural struggle between two opposing ideologies.

When the Episcopal Church recently trumpeted this year’s Earth Day as a welcome addition to Good Friday observances, the news was greeted with suspicion in some quarters. One hyperbolic headline proclaimed: “Episcopal Church Replaces God With Gaia on Good Friday.”

Given the sensitive nature of Good Friday, I think there is good reason to be cautious in making connections. In a popular culture that has a knack for seamlessly combining cultural narratives, it’s important to not carelessly turn Good Friday and Earth Day into some kind of earthy, spiritual, "Inception"-meets-"Toy Story 3" mashup. Instead of mixing metaphors and liturgies, I think the most helpful approach is to simply answer the question this coincidence brings to the surface: Does the death of the Jesus on the cross have anything to do with caring for the Earth?

I think a faithful reading of the Good Friday service of Tenebrae - in which candles are extinguished one by one, congregants leave the church in silence, and the cross is shrouded in a black cloth - demands that the church answer this question with an emphatic, Yes!

I haven't always been so passionate about this, but my work as a pastor and my family’s journey over the last few years has changed that. Four years ago my church started a farmers’ market in the parking lot and more recently helped turn an abandoned industrial lot into a community garden.

As we have paid closer attention to the intersections of faith and environment, some of our most hallowed practices have been transformed. For example, instead of using precious resources to buy small forests of poinsettias and Easter lilies every year for Christmas and Easter services, members of the congregation now join forces to buy thousands of trees to be planted in impoverished communities around the world through an organization called Plant With Purpose. As we seek to follow Jesus in our community and reflect Jesus in our practices, we are discovering that caring for the Earth is not an option, it is essential.

My work at the intersections of faith and environment took a very personal turn in 2008 when our young suburban family launched an experiment in consumption. In an effort to find a more sane and faithful way to live, we committed to a year of consuming only items that were local, used, homegrown or homemade.

Going green is not necessarily how we understood our journey at the beginning of the year, but we quickly realized that our rules landed us in the middle of a vibrant environmental movement. We joined with others in celebrating the year of the locavore, food not lawns, walking school buses, backyard chickens and the virtues of reusing and recycling. As we followed these green practices, we discovered that they have a holy rhythm to them. They connected us in important ways to Jesus - his life, his mission and, yes, his death on the cross. Based on our experience, it’s not so strange to imagine Earth Day and Good Friday as appropriate companions on the calendar.

The typical Good Friday service follows the progression of Jesus’ seven last words, the lights dimming with each successive reading, culminating with total darkness and the reading from John 19:30, “It is finished.” Unlike every other worship service during the year where I encourage people to joyously greet each other after worship, on Good Friday I ask that everyone recess in silence. Before the triumph and victory of Easter Sunday, there is the solemn darkness of Good Friday.

It’s important to recognize that this sacrifice of Jesus reaches far beyond personal suffering and sin. Earth Day’s collaboration with Good Friday helps the church remember that, like his love, Jesus’ sacrifice is for all the Earth.

Along with inviting churches to embrace this coincidence as a holy reminder, I do have a word of invitation to Earth Day organizers. Just as Earth Day serves as a helpful reminder and even corrective to the church this year, Good Friday offers something helpful to the environmental movement as well.

As I understand it, Earth Day was originally conceived of as a “teach-in” on campuses to help people understand the damage that was being done to the Earth. It was less a street festival featuring green businesses and more of an earnest wake-up call declaring that there is a crisis, that we live in a world on the brink, a world in need of saving. This is something that organizers of Good Friday services and Earth Day festivities can certainly agree on.

A death that gave life to five people

Though she died in a road accident last week, 17-year-old Reena will live in the collective memory of five patients who have got a new lease of life because of her donated organs.

Reena, a resident of Jind in Haryana, was seriously injured and was declared brain dead at the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER) here.

Her distraught family consented to donate Reena's liver, both kidneys and two corneas, giving a ray of hope to the five patients.

Her liver was successfully transplanted to a 44-year-old patient from Uttar Pradesh April 15. This was the first liver transplant surgery in PGIMER, one of the leading medical institute of northern India.

PGIMER director KK Talwar said: "Seven to eight departments were involved in this operation. The donor, whose brain was dead, helped five people to live a new life. It is really exemplary."

PGIMER has decided to place a photograph of Reena in its premises - as a tribute.

Delhi-born cancer specialist wins Pulitzer : Indians Abroad: India Today

A Delhi-born cancer specialist - Siddhartha Mukherjee - won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in general non-fiction category to become only the fourth person of Indian origin to get the honour.

The Indian-American physician's acclaimed book on cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, won the prestigious award.

The prize carries a $10,000 award.

Mukherjee's book was also listed in "The 10 Best Books of 2010" byThe New York Times and the "Top 10 Non-fiction Books" by theTime magazine. He is also listed on Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People" list this year.

Mukherjee, 40, who is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University, grew up in the city's Safdarjung Enclave and studied at St Columba's School before training as a cellular biologist in Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. His first book is a runaway success.

In his book, Mukherjee has recounted centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories and deaths, told through the "eyes of his predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out war against cancer".

An award-winning science writer, Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist's precision, a historian's perspective and a biographer's passion.

'India has exam system, not education system'

In the thick of the entrance exam season, a furious dispatch to the Prime Minister from his own scientific adviser has termed such tests as one big menace.

Strongly recommending an immediate halt to the system of sitting for a pile of exams, C N R Rao, who heads the Scientific Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (SACPM), said in a letter sent last week that the American method of holding one national exam before joining university is the way.

Putting it bluntly, Rao told the PM that India is said to "have an examination system but not an education system... When will young people stop taking exams and do something worthwhile?"

Referring to the exam overdrive, Rao briefedManmohan Singh on the various flavours of examinations that dot a student's life: "It is important to relook the entire examination system including the system of final examinations, entrance examinations, qualifying examinations, selection examinations, and so on. Now one hears of a proposal to have a qualifying or accreditation examination for medical graduates and post-graduates."

Students who groan under the pressure of multiple entrance exams will cheer this advice. Citing the example of Joint Entrance Examination conducted by IIT, he said: "IIT entrance exams have the reputation of being difficult and purposeful, but they have also had a negative effect on young minds. Young people suffer so much to succeed in these entrance exams, and in the process lose excitement in education itself."

The lakhs who don't make it across the IIT gates, Rao told the PM, get exhausted and can't perform as well as young people with fresh minds.

Talking about the agony that the Indian higher education sector is in, the SACPM, in a brief document sent to the PM recently — accessed by TOI — noted, "Today there is not a single educational institution in India which is equal to the best institution in the advanced countries".

In view of the growing number of aspirants for higher education, the SACPM has readied a 10-point checklist of key problems and challenges. It has asked the human resources development ministry to set up a taskforce to come up with an action-oriented document within a year.

"We should seriously consider a possible scenario wherein the young India advantage enables India to emerge as the provider of trained manpower for the entire world in the next 20-30 years. This could be a worthwhile national objective," he told the PM.

Rao's checklist for higher education include:

Raising the bar: Provide all required support to 10 educational institutions to enable them to compete with the best in advanced countries

Look ahead: There's a manpower mismatch in many countries with too many professionals in some subjects. Prepare a vision document which foresees the problems 20 years hence

Inclusivity: Increase the number of fully residential schools up to higher secondary level in rural India to nurture rural talent

Magnitude 6.6-quake jolts Japan coast - CNN.com

Fires burned in northeastern Japan Monday evening after a powerful earthquake shook the region, sending a landslide into Iwaki City, authorities said.

A preliminary estimate put the quake's magnitude at 7.1, which was later lowered to 6.6, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Residents in Tokyo also felt the jolts.

A tsunami warning issued by Japan's Meteorological Agency was canceled.

The quake was centered about 164 kilometers (101 miles) northeast of Tokyo, or about 50 kilometers (31 miles) southwest of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, according to the USGS.

Workers at the plant were asked to evacuate.

The Tohoku Electric Power Company said 220,000 households and businesses in Fukushima where without power after Monday's quake.

After World Cup loss, Sangakkara quits as captain

Kumar Sangakkara stepped down today as captain of Sri Lanka's ODI and T20 teams three days after his side's defeat to India in the final of the World Cup.

He has, however, offered to continue to lead the Test side on an interim basis for the upcoming series against England and Australia "if this is considered helpful for the new captain".

"I would like to announce that after careful consideration I have concluded that it is in the best long-term interests of the team that I step down now as national captain so that a new leader can be properly groomed for the 2015 World Cup in Australia," a statement from Sangakkara said.

"This was a decision I made prior to the 2011 World Cup.

“I will be 37 by the next World Cup and I cannot therefore be sure of my place in the team. It is better that Sri Lanka is now led by a player who will be at the peak of his career during that tournament."