This week's recommended reading 1.24.14 edition

• KC Public Schools: This week  CCCUCC's own Jan Parks was on 90.1 KKFI talking about proposed plans for KC schools. Judy Ancel interviewed her on the Heartland Labor Forum.  If you missed it they are going to upload it to the web, so I will share a link whenever get one.
• Ever thought about recycling your body?  Here's an interesting article about "Green Burials" that people have begun to choose as a statement of their faith and care for God's creation.  (By the way, you do know don't you that CCCUCC has a Memorial Garden where your cremated remains can be interred?)   
• Things continue to look bad for United Methodists who support marriage for same-gender couples, but thank God for clergy who are standing up and speaking out for LGBT people.
•  It is a falsehood that only conservative churches grow.  That idea has been around for some time, but it's just not true.  Progressive churches can grow if they choose to do so.  As this great article shows, the theology doesn't matter when it comes to church growth.  Whether conservative or liberal or somewhere in between, any church can grow if it chooses to do so.   
• Each week UCC theologian Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite keeps writing great stuff.  This week her essay title speaks for itself: Proof Jesus was Not a Capitalist: The Richest 1 Percent Own Half the World's Wealth.   
•  Here's a piece with a provocative title: "Stop Celebrating Martin Luther King, Jr."  It's point: we celebrate King but don't pay attention to what he stood for.  He preached about the "triple evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism," but we give lip service to the first and ignore the other two.
• In Shreveport, LA, a city council member was trying to block a proposed ordinance prohibiting discrimination based on sexual or gender identity.  Read this inspiring story of a transgender woman who dared him to cast the first stone.  
• Younger Christians are less supportive of the death penalty, and new polling shows that only 5% of Americans think Jesus would support the death penalty.  I wonder if those 5% understood that Jesus was executed by the state.
• Guess what?  Poverty literally makes a person sick.