TCCI - Town & Country Church Institute

05/21/2023

The farm generates 15,000 to 20,000 pounds of food annually to be donated to those in need.

09/15/2022

ULS Observes the Ecumenical Season of Creation.
Please enjoy this video of Prayer for the Season of Creation held on September 1, and sponsored by Town and Country Church Institute of ULS, St. James Lutheran Church of Gettysburg, Trinity Lutheran Church of Arendtsville, and Camp Nawakwa, Arendtsville, PA. Thanks to Donald Redman, Director of IT Systems and Educational Technology at ULS for producing it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in0sx7PvfH

09/19/2021

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/19/us/politics/telehealth-rural-america.html?referringSource=articleShare

New funding will allow more medical appointments to take place via video in rural communities, where some of the nation’s oldest and sickest patients live.

02/08/2021

West Virginia in the New York Times

With the right federal response, it could become a model of renewal for other places around the country that prosperity has left behind.

02/07/2021

Michael Pollan on Community Supported Agriculture and the value of diversity —even if it may be deemed inefficient, challenges like a pandemic show it is worth it in the long run.

The quest for efficiency meant producers couldn't adapt to our changing needs.

05/19/2020

Helpful reminder from Peter Marty.

Genuine Christian faith is larger than the US Constitution.

05/03/2020

A positive glimpse of congregations in this essay

We may not be able to worship together, but that doesn’t mean we can’t act in concert.

04/04/2020

Rural communities "tend to be older, with more chronic illness," making people more at risk of severe Covid-19.

04/02/2020

Writer says “Show us what is real, no more acting.”

Maybe what pastors need is to be real enough to show the isolation

04/01/2020

This review by Silas House is now five years old, but still a good tour through stereotypes of Appalachia and its people.

Three cheers for "Big Stone Gap," for destroying Hollywood's persistent hillbilly stereotypes

03/30/2020

“Let’s recall singing at camp. Some of us will remember how the counselors or musicians would sing something, new campers and old would repeat what we heard until we owned it, and then just as the counselors had given it to us, we could offer it to others. Funny, silly, tender, or occasionally achingly beautiful, those songs are some we can still sing.”
“Some may recognize oral-transmission song-leading practice from summer camp or perhaps from the civil rights movement” or “South Africa’s ‘Revolution in Four-Part Harmony’…. At the heart of this way of making music together, imitation and repetition echo all our classic spiritual practices.”
- Donald Schell writing in Singing in Community: Paperless Music for Worship (2017)

03/08/2020

“We have a lot of letting go to do, and I don’t want to diminish that. But there’s also a sense that we’re part of something new.” — Sr. Classen

As fewer women enter the convent, what will become of Kentucky’s tradition of socially and environmentally engaged religious women?