In First Lady’s Roots, a Complex Path From Slavery

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October 8, 2009

By RACHEL L. SWARNS and JODI KANTOR

WASHINGTON — In 1850, the elderly master of a South Carolina estate took pen in hand and painstakingly divided up his possessions. Among the spinning wheels, scythes, tablecloths and cattle that he bequeathed to his far-flung heirs was a 6-year-old slave girl valued soon afterward at $475.

In his will, she is described simply as the “negro girl Melvinia.” After his death, she was torn away from the people and places she knew and shipped to Georgia. While she was still a teenager, a white man would father her first-born son under circumstances lost in the passage of time.

In the annals of American slavery, this painful story would be utterly unremarkable, save for one reason: This union, consummated some two years before the Civil War, represents the origins of a family line that would extend from rural Georgia, to Birmingham, Ala., to Chicago and, finally, to the White House.

Melvinia Shields, the enslaved and illiterate young girl, and the unknown white man who impregnated her are the great-great-great-grandparents of Michelle Obama, the first lady.

Viewed by many as a powerful symbol of black advancement, Mrs. Obama grew up with only a vague sense of her ancestry, aides and relatives said. During the presidential campaign, the family learned about one paternal great-great-grandfather, a former slave from South Carolina, but the rest of Mrs. Obama’s roots were a mystery.

Now the more complete map of Mrs. Obama’s ancestors — including the slave mother, white father and their biracial son, Dolphus T. Shields — for the first time fully connects the first African-American first lady to the history of slavery, tracing their five-generation journey from bondage to a front-row seat to the presidency.

The findings — uncovered by Megan Smolenyak, a genealogist, and The New York Times — substantiate what Mrs. Obama has called longstanding family rumors about a white forebear.

While President Obama’s biracial background has drawn considerable attention, his wife’s pedigree, which includes American Indian strands, highlights the complicated history of racial intermingling, sometimes born of violence or coercion, that lingers in the bloodlines of many African-Americans. Mrs. Obama and her family declined to comment for this article, aides said, in part because of the personal nature of the subject.

“She is representative of how we have evolved and who we are,” said Edward Ball, a historian who discovered that he had black relatives, the descendants of his white slave-owning ancestors, when he researched his memoir, “Slaves in the Family.”

“We are not separate tribes of Latinos and whites and blacks in America,” Mr. Ball said. “We’ve all mingled, and we have done so for generations.”

The outlines of Mrs. Obama’s family history unfolded from 19th century probate records, yellowing marriage licenses, fading photographs and the recollections of elderly women who remember the family. Ms. Smolenyak, who has traced the ancestry of many prominent figures, began studying the first lady’s roots in earnest after conducting some preliminary research into Mrs. Obama’s ancestry for an article published in The New York Times earlier this year.

Of the dozens of relatives she identified, Ms. Smolenyak said, it was the slave girl who seemed to call out most clearly.

“Out of all Michelle’s roots, it’s Melvinia who is screaming to be found,” she said.

When her owner, David Patterson, died in 1852, Melvinia soon found herself on a 200-acre farm with new masters, Mr. Patterson’s daughter and son-in law, Christianne and Henry Shields. It was a strange and unfamiliar world.

In South Carolina, she had lived on an estate with 21 slaves. In Georgia, she was one of only three slaves on property that is now part of a neat subdivision in Rex, near Atlanta.

Whether Melvinia labored in the house or in the fields, there was no shortage of work: wheat, corn, sweet potatoes and cotton to plant and harvest, and 3 horses, 5 cows, 17 pigs and 20 sheep to care for, according to an 1860 agricultural survey.

It is difficult to say who might have impregnated Melvinia, who gave birth to Dolphus around 1859, when she was perhaps as young as 15. At the time, Henry Shields was in his late 40s and had four sons ages 19 to 24, but other men may have spent time on the farm.

“No one should be surprised anymore to hear about the number of rapes and the amount of sexual exploitation that took place under slavery; it was an everyday experience, “ said Jason A. Gillmer, a law professor at Texas Wesleyan University, who has researched liaisons between slave owners and slaves. “But we do find that some of these relationships can be very complex.”

In 1870, three of Melvinia’s four children, including Dolphus, were listed on the census as mulatto. One was born four years after emancipation, suggesting that the liaison that produced those children endured after slavery. She gave her children the Shields name, which may have hinted at their paternity or simply been the custom of former slaves taking their master’s surnames.

Even after she was freed, Melvinia stayed put, working as a farm laborer on land adjacent to that of Charles Shields, one of Henry’s sons.

But sometime in her 30s or 40s, census records show, Melvinia broke away and managed to reunite with former slaves from her childhood on the Patterson estate: Mariah and Bolus Easley, who settled with Melvinia in Bartow County, near the Alabama border. Dolphus married one of the Easleys’ daughters, Alice, who is Mrs. Obama’s great-great-grandmother.

A community “that had been ripped apart was somehow pulling itself back together,” Ms. Smolenyak said of the group in Bartow County.

Still, Melvinia appears to have lived with the unresolved legacy of her childhood in slavery until the very end. Her 1938 death certificate, signed by a relative, says “don’t know” in the space for the names of her parents, suggesting that Melvinia, then in her 90s, may never have known herself.

Sometime before 1888, Dolphus and Alice Shields continued the migration, heading to Birmingham, a boomtown with a rumbling railroad, an iron and steel industry and factories that attracted former slaves and their children from across the South.

Dolphus Shields was in his 30s and very light skinned — some say he looked like a white man — a church-going carpenter who could read, write and advance in an industrializing town. By 1900, he owned his own home, census records show. By 1911, he had opened his own carpentry and tool sharpening business.

A co-founder of First Ebenezer Baptist Church and Trinity Baptist Church, which later became active in the civil rights movement, he supervised Sunday schools at both churches, which still exist today, and at Regular Missionary Baptist Church.

“He was the dean of the deacons in Birmingham,” said Helen Heath, 88, who attended church with him. “He was a serious man. He was about business.”

He carried his family into the working-class, moving into a segregated neighborhood of striving black homeowners and renters. In his home, there was no smoking, no cursing, no gum chewing, no lipstick or trousers for ladies and absolutely no blues on the radio, which was reserved for hymns, remembered Bobbie Holt, 73, who was raised by Mr. Shields and his fourth wife, Lucy. She said the family went to church “every night of the week, it seemed like.”

He carried peppermints for neighborhood children, Mrs. Holt said, and told funny stories about his escapades as a boy. But his family struggled.

His first wife, Alice Easley Shields, moved around after they split up, working as a seamstress and a maid, and two of their sons stumbled.

Robert Lee Shields, Mrs. Obama’s great-grandfather, married Annie Lawson in 1906 and worked as a laborer and a railroad porter but disappeared from the public record sometime around his 32nd birthday.

Willie Arthur Shields, an inventor who obtained patents for improving dry cleaning operations, ended up working as a maintenance man, Mrs. Holt said.

As for his ancestry, Dolphus Shields didn’t talk about it.

“We got to the place where we didn’t want anybody to know we knew slaves; people didn’t want to talk about that,” said Mrs. Heath, who said she assumed he had white relatives because his skin color and hair texture “told you he had to be near white.”

At a time when blacks despaired at the intransigence and violence of whites who barred them from voting, from most city jobs, from whites-only restaurants and from owning property in white neighborhoods, Dolphus Shields served as a rare link between the deeply divided communities.

His carpentry shop stood in the white section of town, and he mixed easily and often with whites. “They would come to his shop and sit and talk,” Mrs. Holt said.

Dolphus Shields firmly believed race relations would improve. “It’s going to come together one day,” he often said, Mrs. Holt recalled.

By the time he died in 1950 at age 91, change was on the way. On June 9, 1950, the day that his obituary appeared on the front page of The Birmingham World, the black newspaper also ran a banner headline that read, “U.S. Court Bans Segregation in Diners and Higher Education.” The Supreme Court had outlawed separate but equal accommodations on railway cars and in universities in Texas and Oklahoma.

Up North, his grandson, a painter named Purnell Shields, Mrs. Obama’s grandfather, was positioning his family to seize the widening opportunities in Chicago.

But as his descendants moved forward, they lost touch with the past. Today, Dolphus Shields lies in a neglected black cemetery, where patches of grass grow knee-high and many tombstones have toppled.

Mrs. Holt, a retired nursing assistant, said he came to her in a dream last month. She dug up his photograph, never guessing that she would soon learn that Dolphus Shields was a great-great-grandfather of the first lady.

“Oh, my God,” said Mrs. Holt, gasping at the news. “I always looked up to him, but I would never have imagined something like this. Praise God, we’ve come a long way.”

Jim Sherling contributed reporting from Rex, Ga. Kitty Bennett contributed research.

In Surprise, Nobel Peace Prize to Obama for Diplomacy

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October 10, 2009

By WALTER GIBBS and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

OSLO — The Nobel Committee announced Friday that the annual peace prize was awarded to Barack Obama, just nine months into his presidency, “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”

The award cited in particular Mr. Obama’s effort to reduce the world’s nuclear arsenal. “He has created a new international climate,” the committee said.

The announcement stunned people from Norway to the White House. “There has been no discussion, nothing at all,” said Rahm Emanuel, the president’s chief of staff, in a brief telephone interview.

Mr. Emanuel said that he had not yet spoken directly to the president. A senior administration official said in an e-mail message that the press secretary, Robert Gibbs, called the White House shortly before 6 a.m. and woke the president with the news.

“The president was humbled to be selected by the committee,” the official said, without adding anything further.

A statement from Mr. Obama was expected at 10:30 a.m. in Washington.

Mr. Obama, who made United States history by becoming the first African-American president, made repairing the fractured relations between the United States and the rest of the world a major theme of his campaign for the presidency. Since taking office as president he has pursued a range of policies intended to fulfill that goal. He has vowed to pursue a world without nuclear weapons, as he did in a speech in Prague earlier this year; reached out to the Muslim world, delivering a major speech in Cairo in June; and sought to restart peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.

“Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future,” the committee said in its citation. “His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.”

But while Mr. Obama has generated considerable good will overseas — his foreign counterparts are eager to meet with him, and polls show he is hugely popular around the world — many of his policy efforts have yet to bear fruit, or are only just beginning to do so. North Korea has defied him with missile tests; Iran, however, recently agreed to restart nuclear talks, which Mr. Obama has called “a constructive beginning.”

In that sense, Mr. Obama is unlike past recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize such as former President Jimmy Carter, who won in 2002 for what presenters cited as decades of “untiring efforts” to seek peaceful end to international conflicts. (Mr. Carter failed to win in 1978, as some had expected, after he brokered a historic peace deal between Israel and Egypt.)

Thorbjorn Jagland, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee and a former prime minister of Norway, said the president had already contributed enough to world diplomacy and international understanding to earn the award.

“We are not awarding the prize for what may happen in the future, but for what he has done in the previous year,” Mr. Jagland said. “We would hope this will enhance what he is trying to do.” The prize comes as Mr. Obama faces considerable challenges at home. On the domestic front, he is trying to press Congress to pass major legislation overhauling the nation’s health care system. On the foreign policy front, he is wrestling with declining support in his own party for the war in Afghanistan. The White House is engaged in an internal debate over whether to send more troops there, as Mr. Obama’s commanding general has requested.

For Mr. Obama, the award could, in a strange way, prove a political liability. As he traveled overseas during his campaign for the presidency, he was subjected to criticism from Republicans who argued he was too much the international celebrity. Winning the Nobel at such an early stage in his presidency could further that kind of criticism, especially in Washington’s hyperpartisan political environment.

Even before Mr. Obama appeared in the Rose Garden to discuss the award, he was facing criticism from the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele.

“The real question Americans are asking is, ‘What has President Obama actually accomplished?’ It is unfortunate that the president’s star power has outshined tireless advocates who have made real achievements working towards peace and human rights,” Mr. Steele said in a statement. “One thing is certain — President Obama won’t be receiving any awards from Americans for job creation, fiscal responsibility, or backing up rhetoric with concrete action.”

Mr. Obama also suffered a rejection on the world stage when he traveled to Copenhagen only last Friday to press the United States’ unsuccessful bid to host the Olympics in Chicago. Mr. Emanuel, who heard the news at 5 a.m. when he was heading out for his morning swim, said he joked to his wife, “Oslo beats Copenhagen.”

But rebuffs have been rare for Mr. Obama as he has traveled the world these past nine months — from Africa to Europe, Latin America and the Middle East, with a trip to Asia planned for November.

In April, just hours after North Korea tested a ballistic missile in defiance of international sanctions, he told a huge crowd in Prague that he was committed to “a world without nuclear weapons.”

In June, he traveled to Cairo, fulfilling a campaign pledge to deliver a speech in a major Muslim capital. There, in a speech that was interrupted with shouts of, “We love you!” from the crowd, Mr. Obama said he sought a “new beginning” and a “fresh relationship” based on mutual understanding and respect.

“I am convinced that in order to move forward, we must say openly the things we hold in our hearts, and that too often are said only behind closed doors,” the president said then. “There must be a sustained effort to listen to each other, to learn from each other, to respect one another, to seek common ground.”

Mr. Obama’s foreign policy has been criticized bitterly among neoconservatives like former Vice President Dick Cheney, who have suggested his rhetoric is naïve and his inclination to talk to America’s enemies will leave the United States vulnerable to another terrorist attack.

In its announcement of the prize, the Nobel Committee seemed to directly refute that line of thinking.

“Obama has as president created a new climate in international politics,” the committee wrote. “Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play.”

Interviewed later in the Nobel Committee’s wood-paneled meeting room, surrounded by photographs of past winners, Mr. Jagland brushed aside concerns expressed by some critics that Mr. Obama remains untested.

“The question we have to ask is who has done the most in the previous year to enhance peace in the world,” Mr. Jagland said. “And who has done more than Barack Obama?”

He compared the selection of Mr. Obama with the award in 1971 to the then West German Chancellor Willy Brandt for his “Ostpolitik” policy of reconciliation with communist eastern Europe.

“Brandt hadn’t achieved much when he got the prize, but a process had started that ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall,” said Mr. Jagland. “The same thing is true of the prize to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990, for launching perestroika. One can say that Barack Obama is trying to change the world, just as those two personalities changed Europe.”

“We have to get the world on the right track again,” he said. Without referring specifically to the Bush era, he continued: “Look at the level of confrontation we had just a few years ago. Now we get a man who is not only willing but probably able to open dialogue and strengthen international institutions.”

President Obama is the third leading American Democrat to win the prize this decade, following former Vice President Al Gore in 2007 along with the United Nations climate panel and former President Jimmy Carter in 2002.

The last sitting American president to win the prize was Woodrow Wilson in 1919. Theodore Roosevelt was selected in 1906 while in the White House and Mr. Carter more than 20 years after he left office.

The prize was won last year by the former president of Finland, Martti Ahtisaari for peace efforts in Africa and the Balkans.

The prize is worth the equivalent of $1.4 million and is to be awarded in Oslo on Dec. 10.

The full citation read: “The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.

“Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama’s initiative, the United States is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.”

Walter Gibbs reported from Oslo and Sheryl Gay Stolberg from Washington. Alan Cowell contributed reporting from London, and Richard Berry from Paris.

Today's Reading

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October 9, 2009

Friday of the Twenty-seventh Week in Ordinary Time Lectionary: 465

Reading 1
Responsorial Psalm
Gospel

Reading 1
Jl 1:13-15; 2:1-2

Gird yourselves and weep, O priests!
wail, O ministers of the altar!
Come, spend the night in sackcloth,
O ministers of my God!
The house of your God is deprived
of offering and libation.
Proclaim a fast,
call an assembly;
Gather the elders,
all who dwell in the land,
Into the house of the LORD, your God,
and cry to the LORD!

Alas, the day!
for near is the day of the LORD,
and it comes as ruin from the Almighty.

Blow the trumpet in Zion,
sound the alarm on my holy mountain!
Let all who dwell in the land tremble,
for the day of the LORD is coming;
Yes, it is near, a day of darkness and of gloom,
a day of clouds and somberness!
Like dawn spreading over the mountains,
a people numerous and mighty!
Their like has not been from of old,
nor will it be after them,
even to the years of distant generations.


Responsorial Psalm
Ps 9:2-3, 6 and 16, 8-9

R. (9) The Lord will judge the world with justice.
I will give thanks to you, O LORD, with all my heart;
I will declare all your wondrous deeds.
I will be glad and exult in you;
I will sing praise to your name, Most High.
R. The Lord will judge the world with justice.
You rebuked the nations and destroyed the wicked;
their name you blotted out forever and ever.
The nations are sunk in the pit they have made;
in the snare they set, their foot is caught.
R. The Lord will judge the world with justice.
But the LORD sits enthroned forever;
he has set up his throne for judgment.
He judges the world with justice;
he governs the peoples with equity.
R. The Lord will judge the world with justice.


Gospel
Lk 11:15-26

When Jesus had driven out a demon, some of the crowd said:
“By the power of Beelzebul, the prince of demons,
he drives out demons.”
Others, to test him, asked him for a sign from heaven.
But he knew their thoughts and said to them,
“Every kingdom divided against itself will be laid waste
and house will fall against house.
And if Satan is divided against himself, how will his kingdom stand?
For you say that it is by Beelzebul that I drive out demons.
If I, then, drive out demons by Beelzebul,
by whom do your own people drive them out?
Therefore they will be your judges.
But if it is by the finger of God that I drive out demons,
then the Kingdom of God has come upon you.
When a strong man fully armed guards his palace,
his possessions are safe.
But when one stronger than he attacks and overcomes him,
he takes away the armor on which he relied
and distributes the spoils.
Whoever is not with me is against me,
and whoever does not gather with me scatters.

“When an unclean spirit goes out of someone,
it roams through arid regions searching for rest
but, finding none, it says,
‘I shall return to my home from which I came.’
But upon returning, it finds it swept clean and put in order.
Then it goes and brings back seven other spirits
more wicked than itself who move in and dwell there,
and the last condition of that man is worse than the first.”

German Writer Wins 2009 Nobel Literature Prize

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By Tom Rivers
London
08 October 2009

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To a hushed throng of reporters, Peter Englund, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy made the announcement.

Romanian-born German writer, author Herta Mueller has won the 2009 Nobel Prize in literature (file photo
Romanian-born German writer, author Herta Mueller has won the 2009 Nobel Prize in literature (file photo)
"The Nobel Prize in literature for 2009 is awarded to the German author Herta Mueller, who with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose depicts the landscape of the dispossessed," he said.

A member of Romania's ethnic German minority, Mueller knew persecution under the rule of the Ceausescu regime. Her work, which was censored by the then communist government in Romania was smuggled into Germany where it received rave reviews.

Eventually in 1987, she emigrated to Germany with her husband.

Her writing of the harshness of life in a small, German-speaking Romanian village spoke of corruption and repression and her fight for free speech.

Peter Englund calls Mueller a truly phenomenal writer.

"All Nobel Prize laureates are of course special. I think it is a combination of a very, very distinct special language on one hand and then on the other, she has really a story to tell about growing up in a dictatorship but also growing up as a minority in another country and also growing up sort of a stranger for your own family. It is a very strong; very, very strong story to tell," he said.

The 56-year-old writer is said to be overjoyed with winning the prize.

Some say the award this year also represents a nod to the 20th anniversary of communism's collapse in Europe.

Mueller is the third European in a row to win the prize and the 10th German to take it. She is also the 12th woman to capture the top literature award.

The writer also collects a prize of $1.4 million from the Nobel committee.

Putting America’s Diet on a Diet

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October 11, 2009
The Food Issue

By ALEX WITCHEL

On his first day in Huntington, W. Va., Jamie Oliver spent the afternoon at Hillbilly Hot Dogs, pitching in to cook its signature 15-pound burger. That’s 10 pounds of meat, 5 pounds of custom-made bun, American cheese, tomatoes, onions, pickles, ketchup, mustard and mayo. Then he learned how to perfect the Home Wrecker, the eatery’s famous 15-inch, one-pound hot dog (boil first, then grill in butter). For the Home Wrecker Challenge, the dog gets 11 toppings, including chili sauce, jalapeños, liquid nacho cheese and coleslaw. Finish it in 12 minutes or less and you get a T-shirt.

So much for local color. Earlier that day, Oliver met with a pediatrician, James Bailes, and a pastor, Steve Willis. Bailes told him about an 8-year-old patient who was 80 pounds overweight and had developed Type 2 diabetes. If the child’s diet didn’t change, the doctor said, he wouldn’t live to see 30. Willis told Oliver that he visits patients in local hospitals several days a week and sees the effects of long-term obesity firsthand. Since he can’t write a prescription for their resulting illnesses, he said, all he can do is pray with them.

Last year, an Associated Press article designated the Huntington-Ashland metropolitan area as the unhealthiest in America, based on its analysis of data collected in 2006 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nearly half the adults in these five counties (two in West Virginia, two in Kentucky and one in Ohio) were obese, and the area led the nation in the incidence of heart disease and diabetes. The poverty rate was 19 percent, much higher than the national average. It also had the highest percentage of people 65 and older who had lost their teeth — nearly 50 percent.

All of which makes Huntington the perfect setting for the next Jamie Oliver Challenge. While he understands the allure of Home Wreckers and Big Macs alike, this British celebrity chef has made it his mission in recent years to break people’s dependence on fast food, believing that if they can learn to cook just a handful of dishes, they’ll get hooked on eating healthfully. The joy of a home-cooked meal, rudimentary as it sounds, has been at the core of his career from the start, and as he has matured, it has turned into a platform.

Oliver became famous at 23 for his television series “The Naked Chef,” which was broadcast from 1999 to 2001, first in Britain, then here, on the Food Network. The title referred not to his lack of clothing but to his belief in stripping pretense and mystery from the kitchen — the idea that anyone can cook and everyone should. He was loose and playful, measuring olive oil not in spoonfuls but in “glugs,” making a mess and having a ball. In the years since, that laddish charmer has morphed, somewhat unexpectedly, into a crusading community organizer. “Jamie’s School Dinners,” his award-winning four-part series, exposed the shameful state of school lunches in Britain and made for riveting television — he and the school cooks working feverishly to prepare dishes like tagine of lamb that the students either refused to try or dumped in the trash after one bite. When he eventually succeeded in getting them to abandon their processed poultry and fries and eat his food, the teachers reported a decrease in manic behavior and an increase in concentration. The school nurses noted a reduction in the number of asthma attacks. Those findings, along with “Feed Me Better,” his online campaign and petition drive, were the impetus for the British government to invest more than a billion dollars to overhaul school lunches.

In addition to TV specials like “Jamie’s Fowl Dinners” and “Jamie Saves Our Bacon” (exposing the state of the British poultry and pork industries, respectively), Oliver got personal with his series “Jamie’s Kitchen,” based on the Fifteen Foundation, which he created in 2002. Each year it sponsors 15 (give or take a few) young adults from disadvantaged backgrounds, including those with criminal records or a history of drug abuse, and trains them in the restaurant business. To kick-start the program and to finance Fifteen, the upscale London restaurant that would employ them, he put up his own house as collateral — without telling his wife. In addition to the London flagship, whose customers have included Brad Pitt and Bill Clinton, branches of the restaurant have opened in Cornwall, Amsterdam and Melbourne. So far, the program has graduated 159 students at a cost of $49,500 each. Oliver endowed the foundation with proceeds from his book “Cook With Jamie,” and it now operates as an independent entity.

If he were just a professional do-gooder, Oliver, who is 34, would be a bore. But food has given his life focus and meaning since childhood, and he has honored it ever since. Born and raised in Essex, northeast of London, Oliver, the son of a pub owner, grew up hyperactive and dyslexic. In school, he failed every subject except Art (he got an A) and Geology (a C). By the time he was 6, his tough-love father, Trevor, put him to work in the pub, cleaning up. His father’s work ethic was such that on summer vacations he would aim the garden hose through Jamie’s bedroom window, soaking his bed to get him out of it, at 6:30 a.m. “People die in bed,” he liked to say.

It seems to have worked. By the time he was 13, Jamie was turning out between 100 and 120 meals on a Sunday night alongside the pub’s chef. In a work-study program, he spent six weeks at a high-end restaurant, starting at the appetizers station. When the head chef quit, he took over.

Though his father was proud of him, Oliver says, he is mindful that the pub owner’s motto remains “You can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear.” Having started out as the ear, Oliver has worked hard to prove his father wrong. Cooking saved his life. He wants it save yours too. “Being in the kitchen is the most simple part of life,” he said. “People talk about it like it was some sort of science experiment.”

In last year’s U.K. series, “Jamie’s Ministry of Food,” Oliver expanded his reach past the school system into people’s homes. He chose Rotherham, an industrial town in northern England with a high rate of obesity and related illnesses, where 20 percent of the working-age population was on public assistance. He built a community center where residents could learn to cook inexpensively for their families while instilling the idea that healthful eating is not a luxury. “They thought that cooking a meal and feeding it to your family was for posh people,” he said. Some participants in the show had never even had a kitchen table. They ate takeout food on their floors.

That project has proved a success and the perfect model for Oliver’s mission in Huntington. The community center here will be called Jamie’s Kitchen and will teach both adults and children the basic skills for cooking healthful, economical meals at home. Oliver will also work with local schools on eliminating junk food in vending machines and in cafeterias, replacing reheated processed foods with meals cooked from scratch with fresh ingredients. But there is no guarantee of success. In spite of the resources the British government has allocated for school lunches, Oliver admits that only half the schools are functioning properly; the other half are still experiencing difficulty training cafeteria staff and enforcing new guidelines. And follow-up reports show that while students now understand the benefits of eating healthfully, many still opt out of their school-lunch plans, reverting to fast food instead.

What’s really happening is about more than old habits dying hard or the love of frying. The reason the world is still waiting for the Messiah is that most people don’t actually want one, no matter how many fresh fruits and vegetables he’s carrying. Oliver expects some of the same pushback in Huntington, whether it comes from recalcitrant teenagers, petty bureaucrats or parents who don’t like being told they’ve failed. It remains to be seen whether the contest between being threatened and resentful versus forthright and true can trump the American intoxication with show business: will this much-maligned area let a Member of the British Empire play Pygmalion and win? In this country, ordinary people seem willing to do or say almost anything to be immortalized in the latter-day vaudeville of reality shows. Oliver’s goals here, no matter how authentic, can be thwarted if the balance between camera hunger and social reform goes off-kilter. The series, “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution,” is a co-production of his company and Ryan Seacrest Productions. ABC will broadcast it in six parts in early 2010.

Like Rotherham’s, Huntington’s economy was buoyed for years by the coal mines nearby as well as by manufacturing jobs in the chemical industry, glassworks, steel foundries and locomotive-parts plants. In 1950 its population was near 90,000. Manual labor took care of excess calories, if not hardened arteries. When the coal industry was modernized and the changing economy resulted in the loss of manufacturing jobs, the population dropped to less than 50,000; hospitals became one of the city’s largest employers. Another is Marshall University, home of the “Thundering Herd” football team and the subject of the 2006 film “We Are Marshall.” Its students are aficionados of the delicacies at Hillbilly Hot Dogs (a sign out front reads, “If you hit it on the run, we’ll put it on a bun”), and Oliver doesn’t blame them.

“That was 15 pounds of madness,” he said of the trademark burger, jumping into the car outside the restaurant. “But it tasted good.” He had been shooting all afternoon and was 90 minutes behind schedule, an occurrence his publicist calls “Jamie Time.” He gets so involved in what he’s doing that he tends to lose track. He was due downtown in 30 minutes to hold a town-hall meeting to talk about the show. On the way there, he agreed to run through Kroger, a local supermarket, to see what Huntington residents were buying.

As we drove there, Oliver talked about his first day in town. He likes to say that the C.D.C. statistics on obesity in the Huntington-Ashland metropolitan area are only a few percentage points higher than the national average. In fact, the C.D.C.’s numbers vary from year to year: obesity rates in the last two years hovered near the national average, 34 percent, but the A.P. report that brought Oliver to West Virginia was based on 2006 figures that put the area’s obesity rate at 45 percent. From what I saw in one day, the locals were plenty touchy about their collective waistlines, so Oliver was wise to tread lightly. That is typical of his style. Effortlessly charismatic, he has an easy warmth — happy to shake hands or pat a back, though he takes the business of listening to people quite seriously. When he finds a kindred spirit, a sharp focus, an open mind, he leaps, immediately connecting. He is genuinely polite, which is in itself so rare that it is genuinely winning. Though he is still hyperactive — if he’s standing he’s pacing; if he’s sitting, a leg bounces — his mind seems insatiable.

Oliver is at the head of a multinational corporation that has produced 12 television series and assorted specials seen in 130 countries; he has written 10 cookbooks that have been translated into 29 languages and sold almost 24 million copies in 56 countries. In addition to the Fifteen Foundation and restaurants, he has opened six Jamie’s Italian restaurants in the U.K. in the past two years, high-volume yet high-quality odes to a cuisine he loves; he sells his own brands of cookware, cutlery, tableware and gift foods; he publishes his own magazine; and he continues in his ninth year as spokesman for Sainsbury’s, an upscale supermarket chain in England. Because his company is privately held, it does not release its annual earnings, but he is said to be personally worth at least $65 million.

All told, 2,150 people work for his businesses. He keeps every fact and figure in his head — no reading, no writing, no notes. The format he has worked out for so many of his series — Jamie identifies a problem, Jamie sets out to fix the problem, Jamie encounters evil forces along the way, Jamie triumphs — comes naturally to him because that’s exactly how he has lived his own life so far.

Once inside Kroger we started with produce. “I find it fascinating looking at people’s trolleys,” he said. “The ones here are twice the size they are at home.” He picked up a bag of salad greens. “A lot of these are washed in chlorine, so they lose their nutrition,” he said, tossing it back. “It takes no time to get lettuce and spin it about.” He picked up a bottle of salad dressing. “Four dollars? You can make your own for less than half that price.” He looked at its ingredients. “Water. I’ve never been taught to put water in any dressing.”

Well, how about those packages of cut-up fresh fruit? He shrugged. “I don’t understand why people can’t cut it up themselves. Don’t they own knives?”

Two little girls ran past us, playing tag while an older man trailed them, his cart bearing bananas and M&M’s. “Two things happen when shopping with kids,” Oliver said. “You either give in and buy everything they want, or if you’re a strong parent you make certain choices.”

We headed toward frozen foods. No one recognized him. Six weeks from now he’d be mobbed doing this. “Or punched,” he said. “I’m a respectful person, and I’m going to try to do things in the nice way. But it’s almost as if parents here have stopped saying no. It’s as if the kids rule the roost.” We came upon a table of Krispy Kreme doughnuts. “They’re a treat, there to be loved,” he said. “But start having them every day, job done. It’s harsh to say, but these parents, when they’ve been to the doctor and keep feeding their kids inappropriate food, that is child abuse. Same as a cigarette burn or a bruise.”

Town Hall awaited. Oliver is so practiced at doing these series that he spoke automatically in sound bites, sensing it was the moment to build suspense. “Ultimately, I’m a foreigner,” he said. “I’ve got no place being here, but I’ve got all the right reasons.” He headed for the door. “I just bloody hope I pull it out of the bag.”

THE DAY IN Huntington wasn’t my first meeting with Oliver. He came to New York in August on business and, in a borrowed apartment arranged by his publisher, cooked us some lunch before we sat down to talk. His new cookbook, “Jamie’s Food Revolution: Rediscover How to Cook Simple, Delicious, Affordable Meals,” is based on the “Ministry of Food” series and will be published by Hyperion on Oct. 13. He prepared a dish from it that he often makes for his daughters Poppy, who is 7, and Daisy, who is 6: Mini Shell Pasta With a Creamy Smoked Bacon and Pea Sauce.

A timeout here for self-anointed Health Nazis. Oliver cooks and eats all kinds of meat and feels free to use butter, cream and cheese, in sane amounts. He is not a diet cop; he’s about scratch cooking, which to him means avoiding processed and fast food, learning pride of ownership, encouraging sparks of creativity and finding a reason to gather family and friends in one place. If you can make pancakes or an omelet, a pot of chili or spaghetti sauce and know how to perk up some vegetables, you can spend less and eat a more healthful meal that’s delicious.

Oliver’s hyperactivity finds its perfect expression when he’s cooking. His movements were almost balletic, charged and graceful, even when he stuck his finger straight into the pot of water to feel if it was near boiling. It was. He cut the pancetta with lightning speed. “I swear I could do that at 10 years old,” he said. “Tuck your fingers in, you never get cut.”

He dressed the salad, which he filled with fresh herbs, tossing it with his hands. Then he threw frozen peas into the pan with the pancetta. Two women who work for him moved in and out of the kitchen, talking on cellphones. “The key to life is to surround yourself with lots of women,” Oliver said. “Men would just lie to me. Girls say, ‘Give me half an hour and I’ll find out.’ They’re intelligent, more loyal and they make things happen. Everything I do is about team, really. So 90 percent of my team are women.” The dish was done within minutes. (It was also done within minutes when I made it at home, at a more leisurely pace, the following day.)

We sat at the dining-room table. “The key to life is to know what you’re good at and stay away from what you’re bad at,” he said. Well, the pasta was certainly delicious. As for the bad part, we talked about school. He said he recently ran into his “special needs” teacher, Mrs. Murphy, and actually blushed as he told me, “I gave her a big hug and kiss, and she said she was really proud of me.” Oliver has often recounted the story of being one of five children out of 150 pulled from regular classes each week to learn how to read and write, as the other kids taunted them, singing the phrase “special needs” to the tune of “Let It Be.”

He left school at 16 and graduated from Westminster Catering College. After a brief stint cooking in France, he returned to London to work at Antonio Carluccio’s Neal Street Restaurant, where he met his mentor, Gennaro Contaldo, who taught him to make bread and pasta and to love all things Italian. (Contaldo now supervises bread- and pasta-making at the Jamie’s Italian restaurants.) Then Oliver moved on to the trendy River Café, where a camera crew came to shoot one day and found him to be a natural.

Since 2000, Oliver has been married to his longtime love, Juliette Norton. A former model, she is known to his viewers and fans as “the lovely Jools.” They live in the Primrose Hill section of London and spend weekends at his farm in Essex, near where he grew up. His father’s pub, the Cricketers, is still in business. Oliver says: “I have my two girls waitressing there. Poppy is gentle, sensitive. Daisy is sort of a bit mad, incredibly funny. She eats for England. She’s only 6, and she’ll eat squid, she’ll try anything.”

Poppy and Daisy have an infant sister, Petal. Really.

“That’s Jools,” he said, easily. “My opinions in the name department don’t get much of a looking. We live very segregated sort of lives, really. Jools isn’t into anything workwise that I do. It means that home is home, and when I’m there I don’t talk about work. Like a lot of working mums or dads, I see the girls a bit in the morning, and then I really don’t see them until the weekend, which is the way it’s always been, so I don’t feel bad. Mum does a great job of being a mum.” But Oliver doesn’t just come home from work; he comes home from being an international entertainment conglomerate. That seems hard to leave at the door.

“It’s the battle of life isn’t it, trying to get the right balance,” he said. “The problem with me is, no one truly understands how I tick as a person, even my wife.” That includes his parents, he added. “When I started the Fifteen Foundation and opened that restaurant, I spent all my savings. It was kind of reckless, and the key people around me, the business accountants and my parents, it took them five years to get it. That’s why I try and take them to every graduation to meet the kids. You know my old man’s saying was ‘You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,’ but I’ve spent the last eight years disagreeing with that. I like giving people a bit of extra.”

But his father still doesn’t understand him? Oliver’s leg bounced ferociously. “He’s really proud, but he doesn’t know how I manage to multitask. I don’t know if it’s part of my dyslexia, but I can jump from one place into another, into another. So whether it’s the restaurant or the charity or the direct-sales business or the next book — there’s probably 30 things going on now — I think it scares my dad because he’s always been very good at one thing. But he’s starting to relax. I think he thinks I’m happy, and ultimately you’re only as happy as your most miserable child, aren’t you?”

What is his mother, Sally, like? “She’s hilarious. A hundred-miles-an-hour avalanche of energy. She’s superbright and fairly encyclopedic about stuff, but at the same time she’s a complete liability. She just worries and flusters and runs around the place, saying inappropriate things. She’s fairly similar to me, really. But growing up, she was a brilliant mum and a great friend. Dad was strict, hard core, waking me up with the hose.”

Oliver got his revenge ­— or at least tried to. Before he started cooking in the pub, he and his friends set off a stink bomb there during dinner time, sending 30 people out onto the street without paying their bills. “That was just stupid, really,” Oliver said, chagrined that I mentioned it and seemingly still ashamed. “That was an attack on a family business by a moron child.”

High jinks aside, he said that his parents consistently supported him and his younger sister, Anna-Marie. “I was brought up in a family where they would wish the best for you,” he said. “But doing these projects like ‘School Dinners’ and ‘Ministry of Food,’ it amazed me that around so many of these people there was no positivity. With one woman, if she started doing good stuff for herself, people that were her own flesh and blood got jealous. With Fifteen, one of the biggest problems we have is the students’ families, the lack of positive role models. That’s why I disagree with Dad.” He spoke proudly of his graduates, mentioning one who works in New York at the renowned gastropub the Spotted Pig and another who is about to become the head chef at Jamie’s Italian in Guildford. Five years ago, Oliver said, he was on the South Bank of the Thames in a courtroom getting that young man out of jail.

“Look, I think the brilliant and beautiful thing in life is that anyone can do anything,” he said. “When I used to go to special needs, we got laughed at, but we’re not supposed to all be academic. What is education? A bunch of stuff that people think we should know. Ultimately if you can put a wall up, if you can paint, if you can work with other people and, most important, if you find out what you are good at, that’s the key. Kids can do detailed, technical things, and they can do them well. Have you seen them on skateboards and surfing? It doesn’t have to be a BMX, it can be a pot and a pan and a knife, but we wrap them up in cotton wool and treat them like babies and they’re not.”

It certainly didn’t hurt him to have started early. “No,” he said, “but it’s ironic that the one thing I hated I sort of specialize in now,” referring to the cookbooks. He added, good-naturedly, “When I do writing, it’s more imagination than sentences as we know it.” But he is very visual — remember that A in art — and he works on every aspect of the books’ photography and design. “Almost 24 million copies, by someone who swore he’d never ever do any revolting reading and writing when he left school,” Oliver said with smile of pure delight. “It’s funny how things work out.”

AFTER OUR DASH through Kroger, Oliver arrived at City Hall and disappeared backstage. The auditorium was less than half full, and the front rows were filled with local reporters. Mothers brought young children with an eye toward the camera. One even armed her daughter with an oversize school menu as a visual aid. Another woman seemed to have mistaken scratch cooking for “American Idol” — she raced back and forth, trying to persuade someone, anyone, to ask Oliver to listen to her daughter sing.

Oliver picked up the mike. “Hi, guys,” he began. “Some say this is the most unhealthy town in America. We’re going to spend the next few days getting under the skin of the problem, and we’re asking families, individuals, schools and churches to spread the word. Here, the odds are against you, you live an unhealthy life and die young. That’s what the report said. So, this is not a sparkly, pretty show. It’s about finding local ambassadors for change.”

He asked people to raise their hands if friends or family were affected by obesity and bad health. Almost every hand went up. Oliver nodded. “What do you think the problems are?” Among the answers were: too much processed food in school cafeterias; a need for better prenatal nutrition; a call to stop putting Kool-Aid in toddlers’ sippy cups (earlier, Oliver heard about infants’ bottles filled with Coca-Cola); suggestions that restaurants offer smaller portions and that children’s menus offer alternatives to burgers and fries.

Oliver took it in. “This isn’t a freak show here,” he said. “You’re only a few percent away from the national average. Every child should be taught to cook in school, not just talk about nutrition all day. Good food can be made in 15 minutes. This could be the first generation where the kids teach the parents.” That earned a round of applause.

“I got a billion dollars out of the British government and put it into the school system,” he went on. “But it’s still in transition, it’s not all glossy yet. When parents get angry anything can happen. So I’ll need your help. Hopefully over the next few months, we’ll do some really good things together.”

After he left the lectern, the crew restaged the applause they would use for his entrance. It was thin before, but now it ended with a standing ovation. The townsfolk seemed as quick a study on theatrics as they were on health reform; many angled to be interviewed, to establish themselves as characters.

They were actually so intent on chasing the limelight that few seemed to notice an untended table outside the rear of the auditorium. There, in what seemed the ultimate mixed message, was the 15-pound burger Oliver helped make that afternoon. Sitting near a bowl of candy and a half-eaten plate of sandwiches, it filled an enormous platter. It had been cut into pieces, but hardly any had been taken.

As Oliver spoke to the camera downstairs and audience members jockeyed for position upstairs, the table stood ignored. Until two little boys stormed it, prompting their mother to pull herself free from the media hubbub. They stopped just short and stared at the bounty before them.

“Is it free?” one son asked. She looked around, nervously. “Yes,” she said. He reached past the burger and grabbed a box of Milk Duds. Then she got back in line, to be on TV.

Alex Witchel is a staff writer for the magazine.

Today's Reading

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October 8, 2009

Thursday of the Twenty-seventh Week in Ordinary Time Lectionary: 464

Reading 1
Responsorial Psalm
Gospel

Reading 1
Mal 3:13-20b

You have defied me in word, says the LORD,
yet you ask, “What have we spoken against you?”
You have said, “It is vain to serve God,
and what do we profit by keeping his command,
And going about in penitential dress
in awe of the LORD of hosts?
Rather must we call the proud blessed;
for indeed evildoers prosper,
and even tempt God with impunity.”
Then they who fear the LORD spoke with one another,
and the LORD listened attentively;
And a record book was written before him
of those who fear the LORD and trust in his name.
And they shall be mine, says the LORD of hosts,
my own special possession, on the day I take action.
And I will have compassion on them,
as a man has compassion on his son who serves him.
Then you will again see the distinction
between the just and the wicked;
Between the one who serves God,
and the one who does not serve him.
For lo, the day is coming, blazing like an oven,
when all the proud and all evildoers will be stubble,
And the day that is coming will set them on fire,
leaving them neither root nor branch,
says the LORD of hosts.
But for you who fear my name, there will arise
the sun of justice with its healing rays.


Responsorial Psalm
Ps 1:1-2, 3, 4 and 6

R. (Ps 40:5a) Blessed are they who hope in the Lord.
Blessed the man who follows not
the counsel of the wicked
Nor walks in the way of sinners,
nor sits in the company of the insolent,
But delights in the law of the LORD
and meditates on his law day and night.
R. Blessed are they who hope in the Lord.
He is like a tree
planted near running water,
That yields its fruit in due season,
and whose leaves never fade.
Whatever he does, prospers.
R. Blessed are they who hope in the Lord.
Not so the wicked, not so;
they are like chaff which the wind drives away.
For the LORD watches over the way of the just,
but the way of the wicked vanishes.
R. Blessed are they who hope in the Lord.


Gospel
Lk 11:5-13

Jesus said to his disciples:
“Suppose one of you has a friend
to whom he goes at midnight and says,
‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread,
for a friend of mine has arrived at my house from a journey
and I have nothing to offer him,’
and he says in reply from within,
‘Do not bother me; the door has already been locked
and my children and I are already in bed.
I cannot get up to give you anything.’
I tell you, if he does not get up to give him the loaves
because of their friendship,
he will get up to give him whatever he needs
because of his persistence.

“And I tell you, ask and you will receive;
seek and you will find;
knock and the door will be opened to you.
For everyone who asks, receives;
and the one who seeks, finds;
and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.
What father among you would hand his son a snake
when he asks for a fish?
Or hand him a scorpion when he asks for an egg?
If you then, who are wicked,
know how to give good gifts to your children,
how much more will the Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit
to those who ask him?”

Nobel Awarded for Advances in Harnessing Light

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October 7, 2009

By KENNETH CHANG

The mastery of light through technology was the theme of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics as the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences honored breakthroughs in fiber optics and digital photography.

Half of the $1.4 million prize went to Charles K. Kao for insights in the mid-1960s about how to get light to travel long distances through glass strands, leading to a revolution in fiber optic cables. The other half of the prize was shared by two researchers at Bell Labs, Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith, for inventing the semiconductor sensor known as a charge-coupled device, or CCD for short. CCDs now fill digital cameras by the millions.

In recent years, the physics prize has varied between perplexing, esoteric advances at the edges of physics and more comprehensible technology developments. Last year, the academy honored “broken symmetry,” a key but esoteric concept in the description of elementary particles. This year’s prize was more akin to the awards in 2007, which honored a discovery that led to smaller, higher-capacity hard disks in laptops and MP3 devices, and 2000, which honored developments in integrated circuits.

In announcing the winners Tuesday morning, Gunnar Oquist, the academy’s secretary general, said the scientific work honored by this year’s prize “has built the foundation to our modern information society.”

Dr. Boyle, raised by telephone to address a news conference held by the Nobel committee in Stockholm, sounded stunned. “I have not had my morning cup of coffee yet, so I am feeling a little bit not quite with it all,” he said.

The awards ceremony will be held in Stockholm on Dec. 10.

Fiber optic cables and lasers capable of sending pulses of light down them already existed when Dr. Kao started working on fiber optics. But at that time, the light pulses could travel only about 20 meters through the glass fibers before 99 percent of the light had dissipated. His goal was to extend the 20 meters to a kilometer. At the time, many researchers thought tiny imperfections, like holes or cracks in the fibers, were scattering the light.

In January 1966, Dr. Kao, then working at the Standard Telecommunication Laboratories in England, presented his findings. It was not the manufacturing of the fiber that was at fault, but rather that the ingredient for the fiber — the glass — was not pure enough. A purer glass made of fused quartz would be more transparent, allowing the light to pass more easily. In 197o, researchers at Corning Glass Works were able to produce a kilometer-long ultrapure optical fiber.

According to the academy in its prize announcement, the optical cables in use today, if unraveled, would equal a fiber more than a billion kilometers long.

In September 1969, Dr. Boyle and Dr. Smith, working at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J., sketched out an idea on a blackboard in Dr. Boyle’s office. Their idea, originally intended for electronic memory, takes advantage of the photoelectric effect, which was explained by Albert Einstein and won him the Nobel in 1921. When light hits a piece of silicon, it knocks out electrons. The brighter the light, the more electrons are knocked out.

In a CCD, the knocked-out electrons are gathered in small wells, where they are counted — essentially one pixel of an image. The data from an array of CCDs can then be reconstructed as an image. A 10-megapixel camera contains 10 million CCDs.

“We are the ones, I guess, that started this profusion of little small cameras working all over the world,” Dr. Boyle said.

Besides consumer cameras, CCDs also made possible the cosmic panoramas from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Martian postcards taken by NASA’s rovers.

All three of the winning scientists hold American citizenship. Dr. Kao, 75, is also a British citizen, and Dr. Boyle, 85, is also a Canadian citizen. Dr. Smith is 79.

today's reading

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October 6, 2009

Tuesday of the Twenty-seventh Week in Ordinary Time Lectionary: 462

Reading 1
Responsorial Psalm
Gospel

Reading 1
Jon 3:1-10

The word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time:
“Set out for the great city of Nineveh,
and announce to it the message that I will tell you.”
So Jonah made ready and went to Nineveh,
according to the LORD’s bidding.
Now Nineveh was an enormously large city;
it took three days to go through it.
Jonah began his journey through the city,
and had gone but a single day’s walk announcing,
“Forty days more and Nineveh shall be destroyed,”
when the people of Nineveh believed God;
they proclaimed a fast and all of them, great and small,
put on sackcloth.

When the news reached the king of Nineveh,
he rose from his throne, laid aside his robe,
covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in the ashes.
Then he had this proclaimed throughout Nineveh,
by decree of the king and his nobles:
“Neither man nor beast, neither cattle nor sheep,
shall taste anything;
they shall not eat, nor shall they drink water.
Man and beast shall be covered with sackcloth
and call loudly to God;
every man shall turn from his evil way
and from the violence he has in hand.
Who knows, God may relent and forgive,
and withhold his blazing wrath,
so that we shall not perish.”
When God saw by their actions how they turned from their evil way,
he repented of the evil that he had threatened to do to them;
he did not carry it out.


Responsorial Psalm
Ps 130:1b-2, 3-4ab, 7-8

R. (3) If you, O Lord, mark iniquities, who can stand?
Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD
LORD, hear my voice!
Let your ears be attentive
to my voice in supplication.
R. If you, O Lord, mark iniquities, who can stand?
If you, O LORD, mark iniquities,
LORD, who can stand?
But with you is forgiveness,
that you may be revered.
R. If you, O Lord, mark iniquities, who can stand?
Let Israel wait for the LORD,
For with the LORD is kindness
and with him is plenteous redemption;
And he will redeem Israel
from all their iniquities.
R. If you, O Lord, mark iniquities, who can stand?


Gospel
Lk 10:38-42

Jesus entered a village
where a woman whose name was Martha welcomed him.
She had a sister named Mary
who sat beside the Lord at his feet listening to him speak.
Martha, burdened with much serving, came to him and said,
“Lord, do you not care
that my sister has left me by myself to do the serving?
Tell her to help me.”
The Lord said to her in reply,
“Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things.
There is need of only one thing.
Mary has chosen the better part
and it will not be taken from her.”

Today's Reading

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October 5, 2009

Monday of the Twenty-seventh Week in Ordinary Time Lectionary: 461

Reading 1
Responsorial Psalm
Gospel

Reading 1
Jon 1:1-2:2, 11

This is the word of the LORD that came to Jonah, son of Amittai:

“Set out for the great city of Nineveh, and preach against it;
their wickedness has come up before me.”
But Jonah made ready to flee to Tarshish away from the LORD.
He went down to Joppa, found a ship going to Tarshish,
paid the fare, and went aboard to journey with them to Tarshish,
away from the LORD.

The LORD, however, hurled a violent wind upon the sea,
and in the furious tempest that arose
the ship was on the point of breaking up.
Then the mariners became frightened and each one cried to his god.
To lighten the ship for themselves, they threw its cargo into the sea.
Meanwhile, Jonah had gone down into the hold of the ship,
and lay there fast asleep.
The captain came to him and said, “What are you doing asleep?
Rise up, call upon your God!
Perhaps God will be mindful of us so that we may not perish.”

Then they said to one another, “Come, let us cast lots
to find out on whose account we have met with this misfortune.”
So they cast lots, and thus singled out Jonah.
“Tell us,” they said, “what is your business?
Where do you come from?
What is your country, and to what people do you belong?”
Jonah answered them, “I am a Hebrew,
I worship the LORD, the God of heaven,
who made the sea and the dry land.”

Now the men were seized with great fear and said to him,
“How could you do such a thing!–
They knew that he was fleeing from the LORD,
because he had told them.–
They asked, “What shall we do with you,
that the sea may quiet down for us?”
For the sea was growing more and more turbulent.
Jonah said to them, “Pick me up and throw me into the sea,
that it may quiet down for you;
since I know it is because of me
that this violent storm has come upon you.”

Still the men rowed hard to regain the land, but they could not,
for the sea grew ever more turbulent.
Then they cried to the LORD: “We beseech you, O LORD,
let us not perish for taking this man’s life;
do not charge us with shedding innocent blood,
for you, LORD, have done as you saw fit.”
Then they took Jonah and threw him into the sea,
and the sea’s raging abated.
Struck with great fear of the LORD,
the men offered sacrifice and made vows to him.

But the LORD sent a large fish, that swallowed Jonah;
and Jonah remained in the belly of the fish
three days and three nights.
From the belly of the fish Jonah prayed
to the LORD, his God.
Then the LORD commanded the fish to spew Jonah upon the shore.


Responsorial Psalm
Jonah 2:3, 4, 5, 8

R. You will rescue my life from the pit, O Lord.
Out of my distress I called to the LORD,
and he answered me;
From the midst of the nether world I cried for help,
and you heard my voice.
R. You will rescue my life from the pit, O Lord.
For you cast me into the deep, into the heart of the sea,
and the flood enveloped me;
All your breakers and your billows
passed over me.
R. You will rescue my life from the pit, O Lord.
Then I said, “I am banished from your sight!
yet would I again look upon your holy temple.”
R. You will rescue my life from the pit, O Lord.
When my soul fainted within me,
I remembered the LORD;
My prayer reached you
in your holy temple.
R. You will rescue my life from the pit, O Lord.


Gospel
Lk 10:25-37

There was a scholar of the law who stood up to test Jesus and said,
“Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
Jesus said to him, “What is written in the law?
How do you read it?”
He said in reply,
“You shall love the Lord, your God,
with all your heart,
with all your being,
with all your strength,
and with all your mind,
and your neighbor as yourself.”
He replied to him, “You have answered correctly;
do this and you will live.”

But because he wished to justify himself, he said to Jesus,
“And who is my neighbor?”
Jesus replied,
“A man fell victim to robbers
as he went down from Jerusalem to Jericho.
They stripped and beat him and went off leaving him half-dead.
A priest happened to be going down that road,
but when he saw him, he passed by on the opposite side.
Likewise a Levite came to the place,
and when he saw him, he passed by on the opposite side.
But a Samaritan traveler who came upon him
was moved with compassion at the sight.
He approached the victim,
poured oil and wine over his wounds and bandaged them.
Then he lifted him up on his own animal,
took him to an inn, and cared for him.
The next day he took out two silver coins
and gave them to the innkeeper with the instruction,
‘Take care of him.
If you spend more than what I have given you,
I shall repay you on my way back.’
Which of these three, in your opinion,
was neighbor to the robbers’ victim?”
He answered, “The one who treated him with mercy.”
Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

The boundaries of Brand Obama

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The boundaries of Brand Obama

Mark Mardell | 17:17 UK time, Friday, 2 October 2009

Comments (175)

The president's home city has been knocked out in the first round of the vote to choose the host city for the 2016 Olympic Games, even though he and the First Lady travelled to Copenhagen to push the bid.

A humiliation, a moment of moment or a fact devoid of political meaning? I have no doubt some hostile commentators will argue the former.

The argument had already been doing the rounds that he should concentrate on the big stuff, and not on such trivia.

But that position has already been undermined. He used his European trip to have a meeting in the front of Air Force One with Gen Stanley McChrystal, the top military man in Afghanistan. So not a wasted journey.

It is surely the president's duty to push as hard as possible for an event to be held in his country, when most think it will bring jobs and regeneration. It would have been a dereliction to have sat in the White House, leaving it to his wife.

But it perhaps reveal the limits of charisma, the boundaries of Brand Obama. There is no doubt he is still hugely revered in the rest of the world, even if his support has slipped at home. If he is still a spellbinding superstar, this time the magic touch did not work.

You could argue the president has a history of relying too much on his own personal intervention to solve problems, rather than using it as the final touch on top of a detailed political strategy. That certainly seems to have happened with the healthcare debate.

But perhaps the Olympic judges are not swayed by the last minute arguments, and this reality TV with world leaders is just so much showbiz.

The winning city itself may be more compelling than passionate pleading from a superstar.

US health bill gets Senate boost

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US health bill gets Senate boost

The US Senate Finance Committee has completed its work on a health bill, bringing healthcare reform in America a step closer.

The committee is expected to vote on its bill on Monday.

The bill will not include a government-run insurance option for people without employer-provided coverage, unlike other panels' bills.

But it will mandate all Americans to get health insurance, and offer subsidies for the less well-off.

For decades, health reformers have tried to set up a universal healthcare system in America.

But if the finance committee votes to approve it on Monday, it will be the first time that a healthcare reform bill has been passed by all five of the congressional committees with jurisdiction over healthcare.

President Barack Obama welcomed the completion of the finance committee's work.

"We are now closer than ever before to finally passing reform that will offer security to those who have coverage and affordable insurance to those who don't," he said in a statement.

More hurdles

The bill still needs to negotiate a number of congressional hurdles before it can become law, however.

Once the bill leaves the finance committee, it will be combined with the senate health committee's bill, and go before the full Senate for a vote.

If it passes the Senate, it will be combined with the House of Representatives' version by a conference committee and go back before both houses for final approval.

All of the different versions of the bill are broadly similar in the scope of their reforms.

They would all toughen up regulations on health insurers, mandate all Americans to get insurance, offer subsidies to the less well-off and set up health insurance exchanges for people without employer-sponsored coverage, to help them choose between different options.

Lawmakers are divided, however, over whether people with access to the exchanges should be allowed to choose a new state-run scheme - the so-called "public option".

All three House committees supported the proposal, as did the other senate committee with jurisdiction, the health committee.

But moderate Democrats and Republicans are opposed to the public option, and joined together in the finance committee to block amendments to include it in the bill.

Centrist Democrats are attempting to come up with a compromise proposal, and some form of public option could still be included in the final Senate bill.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/8287739.stm

Announcing Winners of the Half the Sky Contest

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October 2, 2009, 9:08 pm
Announcing Winners of the Half the Sky Contest
By Nicholas Kristof

I’m delighted to announce the winners of the Half the Sky contest. There were more than 700 entries, and sifting through them was a dazzling process — so many wonderful people doing awesome work. And one of the things that struck me was how often the intercultural engagement involved Westerners who were as much beneficiaries of the process as the local people.

The winners each get a signed copy of “Half the Sky,” and compliments also to the runners-up published here. Thanks to all who entered — and please take the time to read these entries. They are truly remarkable, particularly in the extraordinary work they represent. I’m proud to have these entries grace this site, and I hope they will inspire others.

WINNERS

Carol Davis, Nepal Health Project
A teacher uses her salary to fund a street theater troupe and school workshop program in rural Nepal focusing on personal health and hygiene, girl’s education and maternal mortality: “Full of information, witty dialog and slapstick, the traveling play keeps audiences laughing while they learn about washing hands, building latrines away from water sources, hydrating babies with diarrhea and taking children for inoculations before they contract preventable diseases.”

Bill Duryea, Barefoot College
A Brahmin from Delhi has spent almost 40 years tapping the native genius of illiterate villagers from India’s lowest castes to uplift their communities — whether building a campus, using rainwater to stave off drought or soldering solar lighting fixtures to electrify their neighbors’ huts. The project has expanded into eastern Africa as well.


Laura Stachel, WECARE Solar
A California obstetrician has co-founded a volunteer organization of doctors, solar designers and lighting/communication specialists who devise solar-powered solutions for maternal health facilities in Africa, and are now field-testing a system in Nigeria and Rwanda. Without adequate electricity, hospitals in such under-developed areas often lose moms and babies who would have otherwise lived.

HONORABLE MENTION

Esraa Bani, “uncut” daughter of a “cut” mother
A Sudanese woman who underwent painful genital cutting as a four-year-old, and was scarred by it so badly that she could not deliver her children without C-sections, summoned the courage to break a tradition held sacred by her ancestors and refused to cut her own two daughters. Now one of them advocates for the eradication of the practice known to its opponents as female genital mutilation.

Zachary Hindin, Guria India
A tiny grassroots NGO in the red-light district of Varanasi, an ancient city in northern India, works with the children of brothel slaves, helping them to laugh, play, study and meditate their way into forgiveness, compassion and self-respect.

Mary Lou Larkin, Haiti Marycare
A nurse practitioner who’s been volunteering for 10 years in Haiti, where only 24% of women give birth with a trained attendant, has helped slash maternal and infant mortality rates in a local fishing village. The project where she works began handing out “safe birth kits” — with clean string and razors for severing umbilical cords, alcohol pads and hospital gloves, among other items. Over the past seven years, no women or infants have died in the village during childbirth.

Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, My Little Red Book
A 19-year-old has collected stories from women around the world about their first periods — an attempt to break the taboos surrounding menstruation and help girls in developing countries stay in school despite the difficulties caused by their periods. The author has gathered the stories into a book and all the royalties from sales ($85,000 so far) are going to help charitable efforts to advance women’s health, with funds targeted to build private latrines for schools in rural Africa.

Carrie Ngongo, Engender Health
A first-time mom compares her own joyous experience of childbirth to the devastation of women she has worked with in Niger, many of whom have not only lost their babies, but suffered through the debilitating, demeaning ailment called obstetric fistula, when they leak urine and other excreta, which eats away their skin and scares away friends and relatives.

Today's Reading

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October 3, 2009

Saturday of the Twenty-sixth Week in Ordinary Time Lectionary: 460

Reading 1
Responsorial Psalm
Gospel

Reading 1
Bar 4:5-12, 27-29

Fear not, my people!
Remember, Israel,
You were sold to the nations
not for your destruction;
It was because you angered God
that you were handed over to your foes.
For you provoked your Maker
with sacrifices to demons, to no-gods;
You forsook the Eternal God who nourished you,
and you grieved Jerusalem who fostered you.
She indeed saw coming upon you
the anger of God; and she said:

“Hear, you neighbors of Zion!
God has brought great mourning upon me,
For I have seen the captivity
that the Eternal God has brought
upon my sons and daughters.
With joy I fostered them;
but with mourning and lament I let them go.
Let no one gloat over me, a widow,
bereft of many:
For the sins of my children I am left desolate,
because they turned from the law of God.

Fear not, my children; call out to God!
He who brought this upon you will remember you.
As your hearts have been disposed to stray from God,
turn now ten times the more to seek him;
For he who has brought disaster upon you
will, in saving you, bring you back enduring joy.”


Responsorial Psalm
Ps 69:33-35, 36-37

R. (34) The Lord listens to the poor.
“See, you lowly ones, and be glad;
you who seek God, may your hearts revive!
For the LORD hears the poor,
and his own who are in bonds he spurns not.
Let the heavens and the earth praise him,
the seas and whatever moves in them!”
R. The Lord listens to the poor.
For God will save Zion
and rebuild the cities of Judah.
They shall dwell in the land and own it,
and the descendants of his servants shall inherit it,
and those who love his name shall inhabit it.
R. The Lord listens to the poor.


Gospel
Lk 10:17-24

The seventy-two disciples returned rejoicing and said to Jesus,
“Lord, even the demons are subject to us because of your name.”
Jesus said, “I have observed Satan fall like lightning from the sky.
Behold, I have given you the power
‘to tread upon serpents’ and scorpions
and upon the full force of the enemy
and nothing will harm you.
Nevertheless, do not rejoice because the spirits are subject to you,
but rejoice because your names are written in heaven.”

At that very moment he rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said,
“I give you praise, Father, Lord of heaven and earth,
for although you have hidden these things
from the wise and the learned
you have revealed them to the childlike.
Yes, Father, such has been your gracious will.
All things have been handed over to me by my Father.
No one knows who the Son is except the Father,
and who the Father is except the Son
and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him.”

Turning to the disciples in private he said,
“Blessed are the eyes that see what you see.
For I say to you,
many prophets and kings desired to see what you see,
but did not see it,
and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it.”

Leaders Make Final Plea for 2016 Games to Olympics Panel

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October 3, 2009

By JULIET MACUR

COPENHAGEN — Teams from the four candidate cities — Chicago, Madrid, Rio de Janeiro, and Tokyo — delivered their final presentations to the 104-member International Olympic Committee and answered every lingering question about the strengths and weaknesses of their bids to host the 2016 Summer Olympics.

Each city had its nation’s top leaders here in advance of the vote. The voting has begun and the decision is expected at about 6:30 p.m. local time, 12:30 Eastern time. President Obama flew in this morning and was the first head of state to address the I.O.C. members.

A 10-person Chicago bid team, led by the president and the first lady, Michelle Obama, put on a presentation heavy on emotion and visual images without getting too deep into he details of the the bid.

“To host athletes and visitors from every corner of the globe is a high honor and a great responsibility,” Mr. Obama whose Chicago home is a short walk from the prospective Olympic Stadium. “And America is ready and eager to assume that sacred trust.”

In the official question-and-answer session following the Chicago presentation, Syed Shahid Ali, an I.O.C. member from Pakistan, asked the toughest question. He wondered how smooth it would be for foreigners to enter the United States for the Games because doing so can sometimes, he said, be “a rather harrowing experience.”

Mrs. Obama tapped the bid leader Patrick G. Ryan, so Mr. Obama could field that question.

“One of the legacies I want to see is a reminder that America at its best is open to the world,” he said, before adding that the White House and State Department would make sure that all visitors would feel welcome.

Tokyo went next and tried to overcome impressions conveyed by I.O.C. evaluations that its bid was lacking. The bid team emphasized to the committee how environmentally friendly its plans are and the positive impact an Olympics would have on the youth of Japan.

“A lot of I.O.C. members suggested that we needed more passion and emotion,” bid leader Dr. Ichiro Kono said afterward. “We wanted to show that.”

“It would be the best Olympic Games for the preservation of the world,” Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara said, referring to how green Tokyo’s Games would be.

Rio de Janeiro, considered by Olympic insiders a front-runner along with Chicago, followed Tokyo.

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, president of Brazil, gave an impassioned speech to the membership, focusing Rio de Janeiro’s hope to host South America’s first Olympics. He said that of the top 10 economic powers in the world, Brazil is the only one not to host an Olympics.

“For the others it would be just one more Games, for us it would be an unparalleled opportunity,” he said. “It would send a message the Olympic Games belong to all people, all continents and all humanity.

He added, “Give us this chance and you will not regret it, be sure.”

The Rio bid also tried to dispel worries about crime.

“We know that some of you have questions about security,” Rio de Janeiro state Governor Sergio Cabral said, as he addressed the committee. “Changes have been made, happily as a result of sport.”

Cabral pointed out that at the 2007 Pan American Games, which were held in Rio de Janeiro, “saw no incidents large or small.”

Madrid gave its presentation last, as Spain made is fourth consecutive pitch to host an Olympics. Madrid was voted out of the competition for the 2012 Games in the third round after gathering the most votes in the previous round.

Presenters focused on the mantra, “Sport makes us equal. It makes us better,” and emphasized that Madrid enjoys more support among its residents than competing cities. In an opinion poll commissioned by the I.O.C. for the last technical evaluation, the Games had 85 percent support in Madrid and 86 percent nationally.

“Our candidacy is reliable because it is united politically and united with the feelings of the population and because it has shown that it could learn and improve,” Spanish prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero said when addressing the I.O.C. members.

Former I.O.C. president Juan Antonio Samaranch went as far as asking the I.O.C. members for a personal favor when he addressed the crowded room.

“Dear colleagues, I know I’m very near the end of my time, I’m 89 years old,” he said. “I ask you to consider granting my country the honor and also the duty to organize the Games and Paralympic Games in 2016.”

After Madrid finished, the I.O.C. disappeared behind closed doors to vote. The eligible voters cast their votes electronically – and secretly. The members from countries vying for the bid must sit out until their city is eliminated. (The United States has two I.O.C. members.) If no city receives a majority of the votes in the first round, the city with the lowest number of votes is dropped from the ballot. If there is a tie in the final round, I.O.C. President Jacques Rogge steps in to vote or asks the I.O.C. executive board to break the deadlock. The United States does not have a member on that board.

Chicago spent nearly $50 million preparing its bid and is trying to bring the Summer Games to the United States for the first time since the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. The last time a United States city hosted any Olympics was the Salt Lake City Winter Games in 2002.

Smiling and waving as he left the convention center to fly home, Mr. Obama said, “The only thing I’m upset about is that they arranged for me to follow Michelle. That’s always bad.” The United States Olympic Committee chairman, Larry Probst, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley and two athletes — Olympic champion decathlete Bryan Clay and former Paralympian Linda Mastandrea — also spoke during the 45-minute presentation that was designed not to be too flashy.

“Our intent was to demonstrate to them we will be good partners and that we are people they could trust,” Doug Arnot, director of sports and operations for Chicago 2016.

The delegation’s presentation started with a video montage of Chicago, including bikini-wearing volleyball players on Lake Michigan beaches. The song, “Sweet Home Chicago” played in the background. “It made me miss home,” Mr. Obama said.

The last time around, in the competition to host the 2012 Games, London beat Paris by the slim margin of 54-50. New York City’s bid was eliminated in the second round of voting.

Every bid team brought distinguished leaders, including King Juan Carlos for Spain and Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama for Japan.

Dozens of Olympians have flooded the city to lobby for their city’s cause, including the Brazilian soccer legend Pelé.

“In these last few days, it’s all about momentum,” one I.O.C. member, Dick Pound, of Canada, said. “Every city knows that.”

With Mrs. Obama and Oprah Winfrey headlining the delegation, the Chicago team has been reminding I.O.C. members of their Olympic plan, which would put the Games along the shoreline of Lake Michigan and in century-old city parks, with Chicago’s dramatic skyline as the backdrop. The Chicago City Council voted 49-0 to cover any financial shortfalls, which is a first for a U.S. bid.

“Some of what the I.O.C. considers has nothing to do with the strength of the bids themselves,” said Frank Lavin, the former U.S. ambassador to Singapore, who worked on New York City’s failed bid to host the 2012 Games.

“A lot of it is political and that encompasses different levels: international politics, personalities, internal I.O.C. politics,” he said.

Today's Reading

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October 2, 2009

Memorial of the Guardian Angels Lectionary: 650

Reading 1
Responsorial Psalm
Gospel

Reading 1
Bar 1:15-22

During the Babylonian captivity, the exiles prayed:
“Justice is with the Lord, our God;
and we today are flushed with shame,
we men of Judah and citizens of Jerusalem,
that we, with our kings and rulers
and priests and prophets, and with our ancestors,
have sinned in the Lord’s sight and disobeyed him.
We have neither heeded the voice of the Lord, our God,
nor followed the precepts which the Lord set before us.
From the time the Lord led our ancestors out of the land of Egypt
until the present day,
we have been disobedient to the Lord, our God,
and only too ready to disregard his voice.
And the evils and the curse that the Lord enjoined upon Moses, his servant,
at the time he led our ancestors forth from the land of Egypt
to give us the land flowing with milk and honey,
cling to us even today.
For we did not heed the voice of the Lord, our God,
in all the words of the prophets whom he sent us,
but each one of us went off
after the devices of his own wicked heart,
served other gods,
and did evil in the sight of the Lord, our God.”


Responsorial Psalm
Ps 79:1b-2, 3-5, 8, 9

R. (9) For the glory of your name, O Lord, deliver us.
O God, the nations have come into your inheritance;
they have defiled your holy temple,
they have laid Jerusalem in ruins.
They have given the corpses of your servants
as food to the birds of heaven,
the flesh of your faithful ones to the beasts of the earth.
R. For the glory of your name, O Lord, deliver us.
They have poured out their blood like water
round about Jerusalem,
and there is no one to bury them.
We have become the reproach of our neighbors,
the scorn and derision of those around us.
O LORD, how long? Will you be angry forever?
Will your jealousy burn like fire?
R. For the glory of your name, O Lord, deliver us.
Remember not against us the iniquities of the past;
may your compassion quickly come to us,
for we are brought very low.
R. For the glory of your name, O Lord, deliver us.
Help us, O God our savior,
because of the glory of your name;
Deliver us and pardon our sins
for your name’s sake.
R. For the glory of your name, O Lord, deliver us.


Gospel
Mt 18:1-5, 10

The disciples approached Jesus and said,
“Who is the greatest in the Kingdom of heaven?”
He called a child over, placed it in their midst, and said,
“Amen, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children,
you will not enter the Kingdom of heaven.
Whoever humbles himself like this child
is the greatest in the Kingdom of heaven.
And whoever receives one child such as this in my name receives me.

“See that you do not despise one of these little ones,
for I say to you that their angels in heaven
always look upon the face of my heavenly Father.”

Today's Reading

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Nehemiah 8: 1 - 12
1 And all the people gathered as one man into the square before the Water Gate; and they told Ezra the scribe to bring the book of the law of Moses which the LORD had given to Israel.
2 And Ezra the priest brought the law before the assembly, both men and women and all who could hear with understanding, on the first day of the seventh month.
3 And he read from it facing the square before the Water Gate from early morning until midday, in the presence of the men and the women and those who could understand; and the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the law.
4 And Ezra the scribe stood on a wooden pulpit which they had made for the purpose; and beside him stood Mattithi'ah, Shema, Anai'ah, Uri'ah, Hilki'ah, and Ma-asei'ah on his right hand; and Pedai'ah, Mish'a-el, Malchi'jah, Hashum, Hash-bad'danah, Zechari'ah, and Meshul'lam on his left hand.
5 And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people, for he was above all the people; and when he opened it all the people stood.
6 And Ezra blessed the LORD, the great God; and all the people answered, "Amen, Amen," lifting up their hands; and they bowed their heads and worshiped the LORD with their faces to the ground.
7 Also Jesh'ua, Bani, Sherebi'ah, Jamin, Akkub, Shab'bethai, Hodi'ah, Ma-asei'ah, Keli'ta, Azari'ah, Jo'zabad, Hanan, Pelai'ah, the Levites, helped the people to understand the law, while the people remained in their places.
8 And they read from the book, from the law of God, clearly; and they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.
9 And Nehemi'ah, who was the governor, and Ezra the priest and scribe, and the Levites who taught the people said to all the people, "This day is holy to the LORD your God; do not mourn or weep." For all the people wept when they heard the words of the law.
10 Then he said to them, "Go your way, eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions to him for whom nothing is prepared; for this day is holy to our Lord; and do not be grieved, for the joy of the LORD is your strength."
11 So the Levites stilled all the people, saying, "Be quiet, for this day is holy; do not be grieved."
12 And all the people went their way to eat and drink and to send portions and to make great rejoicing, because they had understood the words that were declared to them.

Psalms 19: 8 - 11
8 the precepts of the LORD are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the LORD is pure, enlightening the eyes;
9 the fear of the LORD is clean, enduring for ever; the ordinances of the LORD are true, and righteous altogether.
10 More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb.
11 Moreover by them is thy servant warned; in keeping them there is great reward.


Luke 10: 1 - 12
1 After this the Lord appointed seventy others, and sent them on ahead of him, two by two, into every town and place where he himself was about to come.
2 And he said to them, "The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; pray therefore the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.
3 Go your way; behold, I send you out as lambs in the midst of wolves.
4 Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals; and salute no one on the road.
5 Whatever house you enter, first say, `Peace be to this house!'
6 And if a son of peace is there, your peace shall rest upon him; but if not, it shall return to you.
7 And remain in the same house, eating and drinking what they provide, for the laborer deserves his wages; do not go from house to house.
8 Whenever you enter a town and they receive you, eat what is set before you;
9 heal the sick in it and say to them, `The kingdom of God has come near to you.'
10 But whenever you enter a town and they do not receive you, go into its streets and say,
11 `Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet, we wipe off against you; nevertheless know this, that the kingdom of God has come near.'
12 I tell you, it shall be more tolerable on that day for Sodom than for that town.