Elaine started at Southside Pride in 1996 selling ads, maintaining the religion calendar and writing articles that eventually became a column called Spirit and Conscience. Since 2011 she has been the paper’s managing editor.
BY ELAINE KLAASSEN In “Mennonite values in a warming world,” David C. Garen articulates spiritual guidelines for living on the Earth. (The piece was printed as a “web-exclusive” for themennonite.org.) Garen is a retired hydrologist who spent most of his professional career with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the…
BY ELAINE KLAASSEN The first oil pipelines were installed in 1853, in Canada. Rockefeller took over the oil pipeline industry in the U.S. toward the end of the 1800s on the East Coast and it spread from there until today, thousands of miles of oil pipelines cover the globe. The…
BY ELAINE KLAASSEN Southside Pride has been running the following in our Phillips/Powderhorn edition and on our website for a long time: *All Saints Episcopal Indian Mission 3044 Longfellow Ave. –Sundays 5:30-6:30 p.m. First Nations Kitchen: Healthy, organic dinners in setting of radical hospitality. Serving since November 2010! To learn…
BY ELAINE KLAASSEN One day a member of Minnehaha Communion Lutheran Church (MCLC) said out loud, “I want to feed people pie,” and her thought did not fall on deaf ears. The Peace of Pie festival was born, and will be held in the fruit tree orchard of Adams Triangle…
BY ELAINE KLAASSEN When people come into the U.S., through various entry points at the southern border, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) considers them a danger until proved otherwise. Once an asylum seeker has passed the “credible fear” interview and can show they have a family member or sponsor somewhere…
J.R.R. Tolkien’s masterpiece “The Hobbit” will be playing at the Children’s Theatre Company until April 14. Go and see two hours of excitement in this adaptation written and directed by Greg Banks. Altogether the show is two hours, counting the 20-minute intermission, but I count it all as excitement.…
BY ELAINE KLAASSEN “The Scramble for Africa” is a very long book about Europe’s takeover of the continent of Africa at the end of the 19th century. The story is appalling, mostly because of the confidence of European rulers to just take and control whatever they found there, as though…
Love for the Earth BY ELAINE KLAASSEN Since all the great romantic loves of my life are now either married, dead, or sainted hermits, I decided on Valentine’s Day that my last great love affair will be with the Earth. As my good luck would have it, there was a…
BY ELAINE KLAASSEN A friend’s beaten dog inspired the kindness of Southside Pride’s IT support person. Celia Wirth and her husband, Ron Wirth, are friends with a senior citizen, Gemma Barry, who lives a few blocks from the restaurant/bar where Ron is a brewer, Roma in Mahtomedi (50 beers on…
COMPILED BY ELAINE KLAASSEN According to treehuggers.com, “Icelanders have a beautiful tradition of giving books to each other on Christmas Eve and then spending the night reading. This custom is so deeply ingrained in the culture that it is the reason for the Jolabokaflod, or “Christmas Book Flood,” when the…
BY ELAINE KLAASSEN Sunday night, Dec. 9, I went out into the cold dark night to witness wonderful collaborations—people creating art moments together—at Pillsbury House Theatre, 35th and Chicago. Children in the after-school program there had paired up with professional volunteer performers, playwrights and directors to create the little 10-minute…
BY ELAINE KLAASSEN My friend Alex Chandler, who describes herself as a person with a passion for making the world a better place, is part of the ethical consumer movement. She looks for “companies that are committed to Fair Trade and environmentally-friendly practices, treat their employees well, and do not…
BY ELAINE KLAASSEN Seward Neighborhood has written an intriguing book about its own history. The project has involved a “cast of thousands,” and took seven years to complete. Its 19 chapters start before the arrival, in 1850, of the first non-Natives who built homes and settled, and end in the…
FROM ST. JOAN OF ARC CATHOLIC COMMUNITY After years of silence, the bells of St. Joan of Arc Catholic Community are ready to bring their joyous sound to the neighborhood again. Church bell ringing goes back thousands of years. Historically, church bells announced the time of day, ringing on the…
BY ELAINE KLAASSEN Daily emails to my inbox plead with me to “save the wolves, save the polar bears, save the bees … !” Two environmental films I saw recently at Transition Longfellow warned me of the fragile state of our Earth. I am still shaken. I know the Earth…
