He ventured to Syria to tell the stories of those whose lives have been torn apart by war.
But in doing so, Kenji Goto suffered his own gruesome fate — apparently becoming the latest foreigner to be decapitated by ISIS.
A newly distributed video from ISIS appears to show the beheaded body of the Japanese journalist. It came one week after a video surfaced featuring Goto holding a photo of what appeared to be the corpse of his fellow Japanese captive, Haruna Yukawa.
President Obama’s domestic agenda, which he announced in his State of the Union address this month, has a lot to like: health care, maternity leave, affordable college. But there was one thing he got wrong. As part of his promise to educate American children for an increasingly competitive world, he vowed to “protect a free and open Internet” and “extend its reach to every classroom and every community.”
More technology in the classroom has long been a policy-making panacea. But mounting evidence shows that showering students, especially those from struggling families, with networked devices will not shrink the class divide in education. If anything, it will widen it.
In the early 2000s, the Duke University economists Jacob Vigdor and Helen Ladd tracked the academic progress of nearly one million disadvantaged middle-school students against the dates they were given networked computers. The researchers assessed the students’ math and reading skills annually for five years, and recorded how they spent their time. The news was not good….
Shannon Maureen Conley, a young Colorado woman who tried to join the Islamic State terrorist group, was sentenced to 48 months in prison Friday by a federal judge determined to send a warning to anyone who was similarly inclined.
“This is not a serious offense but an extremely serious offense. I need to send a message,” U.S. District Judge Raymond P. Moore said as he pronounced the sentence the prosecution had requested. The 48 months will be followed by three years of supervised release.
Conley, 19, pleaded guilty in September to one count of conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization and, in exchange for a lighter sentence, had agreed to help authorities identify and prosecute those trying to recruit others into terrorist groups. The maximum sentence she faced was five years in prison and a $250,000 fineRead it all.
At 87, the Rev. C.T. Vivian can still recall the moment, decades after the height of the civil rights movement.
As he stood to conclude a meeting in his Atlanta home, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. joined his activist colleagues in song, his eyes closed, rocking back and forth on his heels.
“There is a balm in Gilead,” they sang, “to make the wounded whole.”
J.J. Watt is one of the NFL’s best defensive linemen, and he’s setting a standard for integrity and excellence on and off the football field.
Watch it all (about 2 1/2 minutes).
Aside from issues of life and death, there is no more urgent task for American intellectuals and writers than to think critically about the salience, even the tyranny, of technology in individual and collective life. All revolutions exaggerate, and the digital revolution is no different. We are still in the middle of the great transformation, but it is not too early to begin to expose the exaggerations, and to sort out the continuities from the discontinuities. The burden of proof falls on the revolutionaries, and their success in the marketplace is not sufficient proof. Presumptions of obsolescence, which are often nothing more than the marketing techniques of corporate behemoths, need to be scrupulously examined. By now we are familiar enough with the magnitude of the changes in all the spheres of our existence to move beyond the futuristic rhapsodies that characterize much of the literature on the subject. We can no longer roll over and celebrate and shop. Every phone in every pocket contains a “picture of ourselves,” and we must ascertain what that picture is and whether we should wish to resist it. Here is a humanist proposition for the age of Google: The processing of information is not the highest aim to which the human spirit can aspire, and neither is competitiveness in a global economy. The character of our society cannot be determined by engineers.
“Our very mastery seems to escape our mastery,” Michel Serres has anxiously remarked. “How can we dominate our domination; how can we master our own mastery?” Every technology is used before it is completely understood.
Read it all from Leon Wieseltier in the New York Times Book Review (emphasis mine).
I noticed as I reviewed the final text for my Dante book how remarkably Orthodox it is. I never would have predicted this from a book about the greatest Catholic poet who ever lived, certainly not when I started writing… this phenomenon manifested itself in three main ways….
1. The role of asceticism in the process of salvation. Purgatorio is all about overcoming the passions, or tendencies toward sin, through the rigorous practice of asceticism. Note well: this is not about paying for your sins; that was done by Christ. It’s about retraining your heart to quit desiring evil and to desire good, which is to say, God. Purgatorio is an allegory for the Christian life in this world, which is a constant struggle with the passions. Reading Purgatorio was startling to me as a former Catholic, now Orthodox. I never heard this teaching as a Catholic, but hear it all the time as an Orthodox.
2. Theosis. Theosis is a Greek term meaning “deification.” It is the ultimate goal of each Christian’s life: to be absorbed into God. Theosis doesn’t begin in heaven, but begins right now ”” that is, the path to theosis, which is a process. You can always refuse the path, but if you’re not going towards heaven, you’re moving towards hell. Time is an escalator on which it is impossible to stand still. I had never heard of salvation explained as theosis until I became Orthodox. Dante’s Paradiso is entirely about theosis, to a degree that I think will shock Orthodox readers who have never read it. It’s not even disguised.
O God, who by thy Holy Spirit didst enable thy servant Antony to withstand the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil: Give us grace, with pure hearts and minds, to follow thee, the only God; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the same Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Two years ago, I wrote No God Zone, an e-book predicting that strident secularism would push religion out of public life in the West. I had under-estimated the dangers to people of faith ”“ the enemies come from two sides, not one. Secularists once sought only a separation between Church and State; today they want to purge all signs of religion from all public space: the staff at Charlie Hebdo said they did not want to hear the bells of Notre Dame mourning their colleagues’ murders. Salman Rushdie weighed in, saying religion, as a “maedieval form of unreason”, is the enemy. Meanwhile, extremists have no truck with the moderates in their own religion ”“ and only vicious hatred for outsiders.
Squashed between these Scylla and Charybdis, the devout cannot survive ”“ unless the state steps in, determined to keep alive our precious religious heritage.
If we in the West want to save the little shop with the sweet-scented challa loaves, the faith school with its uniformed pupils, the pealing of church bells, and yes, the veil, we must act now. We must protect outward signs of religious observance. At present, in Europe, this means posting police and soldiers outside Jewish schools and pursuing the perpetrators of anti-Semitic attacks. Already, many synagogues are surrounded by local volunteers trained by the Community Security Trust who protect the faithful marking the Sabbath.
Awaiting the results of litigation. Please pray for Her Honor Judge Diane S. Goodstein, the Diocese of South Carolina and its legal team, all those involved in the proceedings and for the growth of God’s Kingdom in South Carolina
2 Chronicles 30:5-12 (New International Version)
5 They decided to send a proclamation throughout Israel, from Beersheba to Dan, calling the people to come to Jerusalem and celebrate the Passover to the LORD, the God of Israel. . . . 10 The couriers went from town to town in Ephraim and Manasseh, as far as Zebulun, but the people scorned and ridiculed them. 11 Nevertheless, some men of Asher, Manasseh and Zebulun humbled themselves and went to Jerusalem. 12 Also in Judah the hand of God was on the people to give them unity of mind to carry out what the king and his officials had ordered, following the word of the LORD.
O Lord,
We thank You for the unity of mind of the Diocese of South Carolina to carry out Your holy ordinances. Keep Your hand upon them, we pray. Amen.
Please pray it all and there are more prayers for South Carolina here
A few important questions, following the terrorist atrocities in Paris last week: We are all Charlie now, but are we ready to fight to protect freedom of expression before another cartoonist is killed by Islamist extremists? Are we ready to do what is necessary to stop the killing of another police officer just because she is a police officer, and more Jews just because they are Jews?
In other words, can the inspiring unity that filled the streets of Paris on Sunday in defense of freedom be transformed into the mighty unity that is necessary now to defeat radical Islam before it kills more people and takes away more freedom?
In rapid order, the three attacks in France last week showed more clearly than ever that the international movement of violent Islamist extremism has declared war on Western civilization’s foundational values, which are embraced by so many people throughout the world. The murders of police officers, cartoonists and Jews were attacks against the West’s most central values and aspirations””the rule of law, freedom of expression and freedom of religion. Radical Islam will continue to threaten what we hold dear unless it is fought and eventually defeated.
What is at least relatively new about the “new atheism” is its aggressiveness and its attitude of absolute certainty (in that curiously mirroring conservative Christianity, its main antagonist). Atheists can be described as people who have heard a voice from heaven telling them that heaven does not exist. There have been tormented atheists such as Friedrich Nietzsche, who proclaimed the “death of God” (he understood that this event, if it really took place, would be a cosmic tragedy). More recently Albert Camus in his novel The Plague depicted individuals who, without the comforts of faith, heroically defy suffering and evil. This is a far cry from the flippant contempt for religion that characterized H.L. Mencken (I would see him as a precursor of the post-1960s intelligentsia). He once proposed that the universe is a gigantic ferris wheel, that man is a fly who happened to land on it, and who thinks that the whole contraption was created for his benefit. (The shallowness of Mencken’s view of religion should not detract from his having been one of America’s great satirists.)
Gabby Toro Rosa was a strong student in high school but she was lousy at standardized tests, killing her chances at some colleges. Then she heard that DePaul University here was willing to accept a series of short essays in lieu of test scores.
The questions were designed to elicit responses that would gauge traits such as perseverance, adaptability and discipline. They rely on the premise that certain personality types are more likely to succeed at college than others.
“I am very ambitious, and that’s hard to learn, so when you do have it, it sets you apart from other people,” said Ms. Toro Rosa, who is 20 years old and from San Juan, Puerto Rico. She was accepted and is now a junior at DePaul with a grade-point average of 3.63.
“On the Feast of St Basil of Caesarea and St Gregory Nazianzus, 2 January, in St Nicholas Church, Ankara, Fr Ebrahim was ordained to the priesthood. He serves as an honorary assistant priest in St Nicholas’s Church, which has a growing ministry among refugees from many neighbouring countries such as Iran, Iraq and Syria. Fr Ebrahim was ordained deacon in his native Iran. The Diocese of Iran is part of the Anglican Province of Jerusalem and the Middle East.
The world’s worst ebola outbreak, which has killed more than 8,000 people, is masking a far greater death toll as hospitals across west Africa struggle to cope with the region’s other deadly disease: malaria.
The mosquito-borne infection, which kills up to 584,000 people a year, can easily be defeated with a cocktail of drugs that is widely available in west Africa ”” but patients in the countries worst affected by ebola are now terrified of hospitals because of a widespread belief that medical staff are spreading the disease, according to Fatoumata Nafo-Traoré, head of the UN’s Roll Back Malaria Partnership.
Read it all (subscription required).
My aim this evening is to remind and challenge each of us to remember and to take up the responsibilities of our founding Dream that became Reality””the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ and the promise of the New Jerusalem, our template for how to live and work on this earth.
The Grammy Award-winning band Mumford & Sons has a song that goes:
You are not alone in this.
You are not alone in this.
As brothers we will stand.
I will take your hand.
You are not alone in this.
Indeed. We are far from alone in our endeavors””either horizontally across the geography of the world today or vertically through time and eternity. I hope to give you a richer sense of how very not alone we really are.
“Think Different.” With those two words, Steve Jobs created a vision, not only for his then-faltering company but also for every person who buys an Apple product. People who buy Apple think different. And, different is cool. But, the verb in those two words is where I want to start. THINK. How we think matters. The way you think got you here today. But the way we think also matters eternally. Perhaps more than we know.
We become what we worship. Our vision shapes our concrete future. The Bible is very clear on this. Today we live in a world languishing for lack of genuine prophetic vision, based in reality, a world threatened by false visions. This affects our lives, our nations, and our world. God has given us a heavenly vision, the New Jerusalem. Christians in the past understood that they were citizens of two countries””this world and the New Jerusalem. We need to reclaim and live in that vision””for our own sakes and for the sake of the world.
In 2008, when American novelist David Foster Wallace died a suicide at the age of 46, the New York Times’ obituary described him as “a titanically gifted writer with an equally troubled soul.” In 2005, the author of Infinite Jest had given the commencement address at Kenyon College. Wallace said:
This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education ”¦ . You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship ”¦ . In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
And what we worship makes a difference in who we are and what we do in the world. Proverbs 29:18 says this: “Where there is no prophetic vision the people cast off restraint.”
We live in a time when we are “casting off restraint” and “perishing,” as the King James Version put it, because we have lost touch with the prophetic vision, the vision of the New Jerusalem. Scholars talk about the “de-mystification” of reality in the West. By that they mean that a materialist worldview has captured our imaginations. God and his vision are comforting lies. As the writer of Proverbs knew, matter is not the ultimate reality. So, we seek other ways to meet a real longing. We work and work to buy more and more things. Shopping is legitimate 24/7; any laws to restrict this are considered oppressive. James Davison Hunter explains: “we invest enormous resources and energies to encourage people to engage in “materialistic” consumption and spend nothing comparable on encouraging them to take their civic, public, and political””not to speak of religious””responsibilities seriously.”
And we, as a culture, avoid reality and deaden the longing inside however we can””with work, with sex, with drugs, with alcohol, with distraction….
Read it all from Books and Culture; this was also quoted in the morning sermon by yours truly.
The Rev. Dr. Paul Detterman is the national director of The Fellowship Community, formerly called Presbyterians for Renewal. He is among those who have chosen to stay with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) despite its increasing liberal theological stances.
The Fellowship Community is a biblically orthodox group within PCUSA. Detterman told The Christian Post in a recent interview that he and his organization are staying with the PCUSA because “it is a matter of call and of mission.”
“We are uniquely equipped to reach out to others in and through the PC(USA) because we know the territory well,” said Detterman.
Chesterton’s preference for paradox was never hospitable to platitudes. “Familiarity breeds not contempt, but indifference,” Jackson suggests. Chesterton adds: “But it can breed surprise. Try saying ‘Boots’ ninety times.” He is ready, though, to applaud Jackson if he finds something strikingly true. Under Jackson’s remark, “There is nothing old under the sun,” he is content to write, “Very good.”
Chesterton does not share Jackson’s amorphous idea of belief. “No two men have exactly the same religion,” Jackson writes, “a church, like society, is a compromise.” Chesterton’s reply is: “The same religion has the two men. The sun shines on the evil and the good. But the sun does not compromise.”
Chesterton becomes most exasperated when Jackson expresses the conventionally pessimistic social Darwinism in which his thought had developed. It is not a profanity that he employs when he responds to Jackson’s remark, “The most hopeful sign of the present age is the decline of the birth rate,” by writing underneath: “Christ! What an age!” Read it all.
E.J. DIONNE: Well, the question is whether we can push back ISIS or whether we’re starting out trying to contain them and prevent them from taking more territory. I mean, at least in the initial phase, they were on a real roll taking over large amounts of territory, both in Iraq and in Syria. We seem to have stopped that advance. The question is whether we can push them back. The striking thing is ISIS has no friends in the Middle East. I believe it was The Economist had this great chart where they said, who’s friends and who’s enemies with whom? Every regime, regimes we like, regimes we don’t like, really does not want ISIS to take off in the Middle East. And so I think one of the issues will be, what will our””not only our allies, but what will our adversaries do? It’s odd we are on the same side as the Iranians, for example, in this fight. And we are each doing pieces of the military effort.
ABERNETHY: And can other Muslims in the Middle East prevail over this strange””
KEVIN ECKSTROM: That’s part of the problem with this whole ISIS story. This is as much an interreligious or intra=religious fight as it is a political one. These are Muslims who have no problem killing other Muslims because they’re deemed as heretics or not pure enough or whatever. And so in many ways, yes, this is a challenge for the international community to figure out what to do here and how to contain them. But it’s also a struggle for Islam. For Islam to find a way to say, you know, in whatever capacity it can, that this is not allowable Islamic behavior. What ISIS is doing is not sanctioned by this faith. The problem is that Islam doesn’t have a pope, it doesn’t have a council of imams or something that can issue a declarative ruling like that. So I don’t know what the answer is, but Islam itself needs to come to terms with what ISIS is and what it claims to be.
LAWTON: The other problem that we’re going to be facing this year is what to do with all the victims, the refugees, who have been pouring out of the places both in Syria and in Iraq where ISIS and the ongoing civil war in Syria are just killing their communities.
Host Bob Abernethy leads a conversation with managing editor Kim Lawton, Religion News Service editor-in-chief Kevin Eckstrom, and Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, in our annual review of the top religion and ethics stories of 2014.
God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea; though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble with its tumult.
–Psalm 46:1-3
This is, of course, the season, more than any other season, when we wish one another joy and happiness. I may be thought by some to be a Grinch for mentioning a fact that I think weighs on many of our hearts. We are living at a very dangerous moment due to a confluence of a number of things, intellectual, financial, militarily and theologically. I hope to be prudent enough not to attempt to delve into a deep analysis of these matters in what my editors have told me is to be a brief meditation as we enter into the Christmas season, but to be honest and direct, I thought it was necessary to begin with where we find ourselves this Christmas. And that is to say that we are at a perilous moment in history due to the confluence I alluded to above.
How to get to the heart of the matter? That, as Shakespeare might say, is the rub. Yet, as a Christian who believes that the redemption of the world was effected by the Incarnation of Christ, I can certainly use the lens of the Incarnation to understand the state of the world and the people in it, even when, indeed, especially when things are perilous. That is what it means to affirm that Christology is anthropology, i.e., that in order to discover man and what his end truly is, one must study Christ, the perfect man.
If we want to go to root of the modern dilemma we need to identify the tendency that balkanizes reality, the principle of division. Think of that for a moment: The Scriptures present a vision of the origin of humanity as one of harmony and peace, serenity, and joy. This pervasive harmony permeated the relation of the transcendent God to the material universe which Genesis says was fashioned by his own hand and pronounced good. There was a union between God and the human family which he fashioned in his own image. Likewise, there was an intimate unity between man and woman, who were made stewards of the whole of creation, which likewise enjoyed an abundant and harmonious existence.
Now the man to whom I’m going to introduce you was not a scrooge, he was a kind, decent, mostly good man. Generous to his family, upright in his dealings with other men. But he just didn’t believe all that incarnation stuff which the churches proclaim at Christmas Time. It just didn’t make sense and he was too honest to pretend otherwise. He just couldn’t swallow the Jesus Story, about God coming to Earth as a man. “I’m truly sorry to distress you,” he told his wife, “but I’m not going with you to church this Christmas Eve.” He said he’d feel like a hypocrite. That he’d much rather just stay at home, but that he would wait up for them. And so he stayed and they went to the midnight service.
Shortly after the family drove away in the car, snow began to fall. He went to the window to watch the flurries getting heavier and heavier and then went back to his fireside chair and began to read his newspaper. Minutes later he was startled by a thudding sound. Then another, and then another. Sort of a thump or a thud. At first he thought someone must be throwing snowballs against his living room window. But when he went to the front door to investigate he found a flock of birds huddled miserably in the snow. They’d been caught in the storm and, in a desperate search for shelter, had tried to fly through his large landscape window.
Well, he couldn’t let the poor creatures lie there and freeze, so he remembered the barn where his children stabled their pony. That would provide a warm shelter, if he could direct the birds to it. Quickly he put on a coat, galoshes, tramped through the deepening snow to the barn. He opened the doors wide and turned on a light, but the birds did not come in. He figured food would entice them in. So he hurried back to the house, fetched bread crumbs, sprinkled them on the snow, making a trail to the yellow-lighted wide open doorway of the stable. But to his dismay, the birds ignored the bread crumbs, and continued to flap around helplessly in the snow. He tried catching them. He tried shooing them into the barn by walking around them waving his arms. Instead, they scattered in every direction, except into the warm, lighted barn.
And then, he realized, that they were afraid of him. To them, he reasoned, I am a strange and terrifying creature. If only I could think of some way to let them know that they can trust me. That I am not trying to hurt them, but to help them. But how? Because any move he made tended to frighten them, confuse them. They just would not follow. They would not be led or shooed because they feared him. “If only I could be a bird,” he thought to himself, “and mingle with them and speak their language. Then I could tell them not to be afraid. Then I could show them the way to safety … to the safe warm barn. But I would have to be one of them so they could see, and hear and understand.”
At that moment the church bells began to ring. The sound reached his ears above the sounds of the wind. And he stood there listening to the bells – Adeste Fidelis – listening to the bells pealing the glad tidings of Christmas. And he sank to his knees in the snow.
According to a knowledgeable blog commenter in the past, “This was written by the author, Louis Cassels. According to enotes.com, he was a “correspondent for United Press International. He was a feature writer and author of the popular column “Religion in America” from 1955 to 1974. He was also a recipient of the prestigious Faith and Freedom Award from the Religious Heritage of America.”
Then came, at a predetermined moment, a moment in time
and of time,
A moment not out of time, but in time, in what we call history:
transecting, bisecting the world of time,
a moment in time but not like a moment of time,
A moment in time but time was made through that moment:
for without the meaning there is no time,
and that moment of time gave the meaning.
—T.S. Eliot, Choruses from “The Rock”, VII, as found for example there (page 107).
The pro-life movement has been raising the ugly specter of abortions on babies with disabilities for years and now a new article in the Boston Globe confirms that the tests supposedly showing a baby having a mild or sever disability may be wrong.
Calling unborn babies defective if they are prenatally diagnosed with genetic conditions foreshadows a dangerous path toward eugenics. The problem of a society that is prone to abort babies at a rate of 60, 70 or even 80 percent for those diagnosed with Down Syndrome is bad enough. A disability is certainly no reason to have an abortion.
Read it all from Lifesite news.
Watch and listen to it all! LOLOL.
The double-truth doctrine’s effectiveness depends on what Mirowski dubs “everyday neoliberalism,” an ensemble of attitudes and practices that turns all of life into a never-ending market. In the neoliberal imagination, the human person is an “entrepreneurial self,” a package of vendible talents and qualities: “a product to be sold, a walking advertisement…a jumble of assets to be invested…an offsetting inventory of liabilities to be pruned, outsourced, shorted, hedged against, and minimized.” Promulgating a “catechism of perpetual metamorphosis,” neoliberalism denies the existence of a “true,” invariant self, and celebrates the “eminently flexible” personality always ready and willing to submit to the Market. Averse to solidarity, the neoliberal self erases class from its political lexicon. Inoculated against empathy, it espouses a punitive sado-moralism toward the poor, the weak, and the unsuccessful. (American Idol, The Apprentice, and other “reality shows” are, in Mirowski’s words, “an unabashed theater of cruelty,” reflecting neoliberalism’s unforgiving attitude toward “losers.”)
Loudly proclaiming its autonomy, the neoliberal self is often cheerfully entrapped in “an invisible grid” of state and corporate gradients. Even its conceits of rebellion are fraudulent: because the line between commodities and everyday life is ever more steadily obscured or erased, dissent or resistance is expressed through purchases that reinforce the authority of consumer culture. Through “murketing”””the art of convincing consumers that they’re savvier than the marketers who manipulate them””we reach the highest stage of what Thomas Frank has called the “conquest of cool,” where everyday neoliberalism eviscerates the meaning of apostasy, insurrection, or revolution.
Although Mirowski appears to be a social democrat, his bleak account of neoliberal hegemony suggests that opposition is futile where it isn’t counterfeit. If political discourse has been so thoroughly cleansed of antagonism to the market, and if marketization itself has seeped into every crevice of our lives, then Thatcher’s ominous ukase””“there is no alternative”””becomes true by reason of default. Mirowski’s trenchant critique of the Occupy movement concludes with the judgment that “protest has been murketed.” In his view, populists such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren are naïve””too square to realize the supple and enormous dimensions of neoliberal guile. Mirowski’s harrowing portrayal of everyday neoliberalism implies that, as Slavoj Zi̬zek often says, it is now easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
Read it all from America.
Columbia police and City Hall, sounding themes of transparency and trust, announced plans Thursday for body cameras and more training of all officers as well as the creation of a commission to investigate discrimination or abuse in any city agency.
Mayor Steve Benjamin said the changes come amid national concerns about mistrust of police, particularly among African-Americans in the wake of deaths in Florida, Missouri and New York of black males at the hands of white officers.
Among the other promised improvements for next year is a pilot project to require detectives to make video and audio recordings of interrogations of suspects in violent crime cases starting early in 2015, Chief Skip Holbrook said at a news conference to discuss a series of changes.