{"id":4503,"date":"2006-02-17T09:35:13","date_gmt":"2006-02-17T09:35:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/02\/respecting-all-life-good.html"},"modified":"2006-02-17T09:35:13","modified_gmt":"2006-02-17T09:35:13","slug":"respecting-all-life-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/02\/respecting-all-life-good.html","title":{"rendered":"Respecting all life = Good"},"content":{"rendered":"

Spending a year and half discerning whether or not to let deer who are destroying your property be hunted = kind of whacked.<\/a><\/p>\n

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All 16 Dayspring Church members took part in the decision as to whether to have a hunt, Hall said, using a Quaker tradition known as the "discernment process." Over a year and a half, they researched, debated, prayed and did plenty of "listening to the spirit" before securing a hunting permit, Hall said.<\/p>\n

But the discernment process did not produce a unanimous decision.<\/p>\n

During the hunt, Andrea Burgard, a church administrator, joined two other employees in silent prayer for the deer. "These particular deer are part of our church community," Burgard said. "So deciding to shoot them is like deciding to shoot some community member."<\/p>\n

On the other side of the property, Frank Markus, the former D.C. police officer, led three hunters. Markus, who has been hunting for nearly 40 years, said he is providing a much-needed service. The church leaders, he said, "want to protect the forest that they have. Well, there’s no other way of doing it."<\/p>\n

When the morning hunt was over, Burgard and the two other employees joined Markus for an informal ceremony to bless the dead deer before they were taken away to become a low-cholesterol meal for the homeless or for people with heart conditions.<\/p>\n

Burgard declined to let a reporter accompany her to the blessing. "I need my privacy," she said.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Spending a year and half discerning whether or not to let deer who are destroying your property be hunted = kind of whacked. All 16 Dayspring Church members took part in the decision as to whether to have a hunt, Hall said, using a Quaker tradition known as the "discernment process." Over a year and…<\/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-4503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nRespecting all life = Good - 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\/02\/respecting-all-life-good.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Respecting all life = Good - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Spending a year and half discerning whether or not to let deer who are destroying your property be hunted = kind of whacked. All 16 Dayspring Church members took part in the decision as to whether to have a hunt, Hall said, using a Quaker tradition known as the "discernment process." 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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\/4503","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=4503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4503\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}