Religion
Every Saturday morning, volunteers from North Oakland’s Lighthouse Mosque come to the Rainbow Recreation center on 59th and East 14th Street in East Oakland to give hot food and groceries to people in need.
A chorus of barks, yips and the odd meow served as background music at Skyline Community Church’s 11th annual Blessing of the Animals on Saturday — the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi. patron saint of animals.
The artists behind the Wonderarium, an eight-foot floating terrarium they hope will find a home on the waters of Lake Merritt, brought their project to the public plaza outside Oakland’s Christ the Light cathedral–where they invited passers-by to dig into dirt and plants to make their own mini-terrariums.
Armenian Americans may be one of the Bay Area’s less-noticed ethnic groups, but this Friday and Saturday at the Armenian Bazaar & Food Festival, their rich cultural legacy will be on full display for anyone interested in learning more.
Hundreds of Ethiopian immigrants and their families from around the Bay Area gathered at the Ethiopian Orthodox Cathedral on Mountain Boulevard Sunday for Meskel, or the finding of the True Cross, one of the most important holidays in the Ethiopian Orthodox calendar and a national holiday in Ethiopia. Wearing snow-white linen, worshippers congregated outside the church for much of the day while others prepared food which filled the air with the aromas of East African spices, turning the church parking lot into a scene out of their home country.
For 22 years, the Museum of Children’s Art (MOCHA) has focused on providing art instruction and community outreach for the children of Oakland. This month, the Old Oakland museum staff and board members found themselves embroiled in what one board member described as “the most contentious issue on the planet.”
At the end of her tenure as an artist in residence at the San Francisco Dump, Sharon Siskin discovered a pile of old, Arabic language textbooks used to teach Muslim children the fundamental lessons of life, such as to love their parents, attend school and share.
About 600 people marched from Allen Temple Baptist Church in East Oakland to City Hall to protest crime and violence in Oakland on Saturday. Soldiers Against Violence Everywhere, a community and church coalition, organized the march and rally as a response to the 75 homicides reported in the city from January to August, 2011.
A half decade after the painter Norman Rockwell turned her portrait into a powerful symbol of American public school desegregation, Ruby Bridges-Hall was back in Oakland last weekend, telling a packed church, “At the end of our time, there is not going to be a white heaven and a black heaven. There is only going to be one place.”