{"id":3818,"date":"2006-12-27T01:30:01","date_gmt":"2006-12-27T01:30:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/12\/rebuilding.html"},"modified":"2006-12-27T01:30:01","modified_gmt":"2006-12-27T01:30:01","slug":"rebuilding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/12\/rebuilding.html","title":{"rendered":"Rebuilding"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Michigan to Sri Lanka:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

Two years ago in January, the Rev. Bennett Constantine returned to visit his native Sri Lanka in sorrow.<\/p>\n

The Dec. 26, 2004, Asian tsunami that left 230,000 dead had devastated the village of Mullaittivu, where the Eaton Rapids priest once lived.<\/p>\n

Only an altar and bell tower remained of St. Peter Catholic Church, where he once was pastor.<\/p>\n

There and then, Constantine made a plan to ask the people of mid-Michigan to help him raise $100,000 to build a new church.<\/p>\n

It worked.<\/p>\n

The new St. Peter church in Mullaittivu is complete, and Constantine plans to attend its dedication Jan. 28.<\/p>\n

"I can’t wait to take pictures and come home and show them to the people here, for them to see what their money has done," said Constantine, pastor of another St. Peter Catholic Church – this one in Eaton Rapids.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Michigan to Sri Lanka: Two years ago in January, the Rev. Bennett Constantine returned to visit his native Sri Lanka in sorrow. The Dec. 26, 2004, Asian tsunami that left 230,000 dead had devastated the village of Mullaittivu, where the Eaton Rapids priest once lived. Only an altar and bell tower remained of St.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nRebuilding - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/12\/rebuilding.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Rebuilding - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"From Michigan to Sri Lanka: Two years ago in January, the Rev. Bennett Constantine returned to visit his native Sri Lanka in sorrow. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3818"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3818\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}