…we should recognize that many abused women stay in the shadows because they believe our court system will not adequately protect them from further violence. They fear that reporting such behavior will fuel even worse danger later.

Justice should be clear and decisive enough that women will be freed to come forward, with the full protection of the law.

This means that churches should recognize the responsibility of the state in curbing such injustice. When a woman is abused, the church should notify police authorities, immediately, even as it ministers to the abused woman and, when applicable, her children.

Simply getting her out of the home is not enough; the abuser must also stand accountable in a court of law.

Read it all.

Engineering student Mr McIntosh, 23, and teacher Mr McCormick, 24, will tie the knot to win a The Edge radio station competition and a trip to the 2015 Rugby World Cup in England.

Mr McCormick said from Auckland yesterday opposition to the wedding was understandable but the pair never intended to offend anyone.

“We are not here to insult anyone. We are here to do our own thing and travel our own path.” Mr McIntosh said the wedding was not mocking the institution of marriage.

Read it all.

The California State University (CSU) system has issued a nondiscrimination policy that requires InterVarsity to allow non-Christians to be chapter leaders. InterVarsity has always required chapter leaders to agree to our Doctrinal Basis, a summary of basic, historic Christian beliefs. While InterVarsity invites and welcomes all students as participants, we believe a Christian group should have the right to expect and even require their leaders to be Christian””just as any student group, club or Greek organization should be able to require their leaders to be like-minded.

InterVarsity Christian Fellowship is now developing a new style of campus ministry on CSU campuses where we have been banned from participating in campus life as a recognized student organization. In order to maintain a ministry presence with 23 chapters on 19 CSU campuses, InterVarsity is introducing creative new ways to connect with students and share the gospel message””though doing so as an “unrecognized” student group will prove considerably more costly….

On most of the 616 college campuses across the U.S where InterVarsity has 949 chapters, our student ministry work will continue as it has for more than seven decades. Overall our annual reports from staff indicate that InterVarsity is sharing the gospel message with more students and faculty than at any other time in our 73-year history.

Read it all (emphasis theirs).

But I call upon God; and the LORD will save me. Evening and morning and at noon I utter my complaint and moan, and he will hear my voice. He will deliver my soul in safety from the battle that I wage, for many are arrayed against me.

–Psalm 55:16-18

On Saturday, the morning sees the Archbishop formally opening a ‘Ride and Stride’ fundraising event from St Mary’s Church inside the grounds of Lydiard Park in Swindon, then attending a community funday on the Pinehurst Estate. He will also celebrate the third anniversary of a new LIGHT church in Chippenham before conducting around 20 baptisms in a pool set up in front of Malmesbury Abbey in north Wiltshire.

That event will soon turn into a community party and includes live music, a hog roast, curry buffet and a bar, at which a special beer called ‘Welby’s Wallop’ will be served. The beer is the idea of Malmesbury vicar Neill Archer, and has been brewed by the Royal Wootton Bassett-based Malmesbury Brewery.

The Archbishop might not be there long enough to drink too much of it though ”“ he has to head back towards Bristol for a community event at Stoke Gifford. On Sunday morning, the penultimate event will be a huge Eucharist service in Bristol Cathedral before the final event ”“ a Question Time-style debate on children and young people in Bristol at the Cathedral Choir school.

Read it all.

Blessed is he who considers the poor!
The Lord delivers him in the day of trouble;
the Lord protects him and keeps him alive;
he is called blessed in the land;
thou dost not give him up to the will of his enemies.
The Lord sustains him on his sickbed;
in his illness thou healest all his infirmities.

–Psalm 41:1-3

How can we possibly think that a God of love has created this violent, hatred-filled world? It is one of the hardest questions Christians face.

I did not expect to find an answer to this question when I first came across Andrew Elphinstone’s book Freedom, Suffering and Love. Elphinstone was an aristocratic clergyman trained at Eton and Oxford. Queen Elizabeth was a bridesmaid at his wedding. What could this entitled man have to say to about violence and injustice?

But it turns out that his essay on love and suffering””which combines insights from evolutionary biology, psychology, theology, and spirituality””speaks of the complexities of the human heart with incredible force while remaining almost entirely jargon free. Freedom, Suffering and Love was published posthumously from the author’s notes in 1976 and promptly forgotten.

Why does a world created by the God of love contain so much suffering and unrest? Elphinstone’s answer links the evolutionary process, with all its ruthless violence and competitiveness, to the process of love as it is formed in the human heart. He shows that “the present primacy of pain and unrest in the world is part of the raw material of the ultimate primacy of love.”

Read it all from Bethany Sollereder.

A decade and a half ago I put forward a counterintuitive thesis about the religious origins of the French Revolution. Although the book underscored the importance of a century-long controversy resulting from the Bourbon monarchy’s attempt to suppress the “heresy” of Catholic Augustinians, or Jansenists, it did not argue that Jansenists made the French Revolution. Put briefly, the thesis was rather that the monarchy’s repeated need for papal authority to condemn Jansenism as a heresy eventually put it on the unpatriotic side of France’s Gallican liberties, which had long held the papacy to be subject to general councils and which Jansenists began to use in their own defense. By the mid-18th century””so the thesis went””a religious fight picked by the monarchy desacralized the monarchy in its own terms, sanctified the notion of national sovereignty in indigenous Gallican terms, and caused a schism within the Gallican Church that reappeared in more virulent form during the Revolution. It also produced Europe’s most anti-Christian enlightenment, which of course also inflected the course and character of the Revolution. The point was therefore not to dismiss the role of the French Enlightenment in the Revolution, but to enlighten the longer-term religious and political parameters within which that enlightenment assumed its peculiar character and could make its force felt.

In contrast to such an indirect and structural attempt to factor religion into an account of the “causes” of the French Revolution, a more frontal and totalizing approach might have reduced all causes to religious ones on the grounds that, whether they knew it or not, the revolutionaries were still within the paradigm of the redemption of time originally established by the Judeo-Christian tradition, just as they were acting on the notion of human “rights” originally postulated in medieval canon law and scholastic theology. The notion that human beings have intrinsic worth is not after all a self-evident or empirically verifiable proposition; by the standards of human justice itself, humanity cannot be judge and party in its own cause. If no such attempt was made in that book, it was due not only to the desire not to press the evidence beyond the obvious, but also to be taken seriously by the entire community of professional historians.

In comparison to this argument, the case for the ideas of the French Enlightenment as the chief cause of the Revolution is much easier to make.

Read it all.

The news of the Ebola outbreak continues to be very grim:

CNN: Death toll passes 1,550 as Ebola outbreak accelerates, officials say

The Ebola outbreak “continues to accelerate” in West Africa and has killed 1,552 people so far, the World Health Organization said Thursday. The total number of cases stands at 3,069, with 40% occurring in the past three weeks. “However, most cases are concentrated in only a few localities,” the WHO said. The outbreak, the deadliest ever, has been centered in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, with a handful of cases in Nigeria. The overall fatality rate is 52%, the WHO said, ranging from 42% in Sierra Leone to 66% in Guinea. (emphasis added)

Bloomberg: Ebola Cases May Surpass 20,000, WHO Says in Updated Plan

More than 20,000 people may be infected with the Ebola virus before the outbreak in West Africa is controlled and curbing the epidemic will cost at least $490 million, according to a World Health Organization plan.

O God, who hast given us not the spirit of bondage, but the Spirit of adoption into thy family: Grant us the witness of thy Spirit within our hearts, testifying that we are thy children; and give us that fellowship with the sufferings of Christ which shall end in our being glorified with him; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord.

–Henry Alford

The man who forgets to be grateful has fallen asleep in life–Robert Louis Stevenson; Readers Digest, Aug 2014, p. 152

Alarmed by the world’s worst outbreak of Ebola, West Africa leaders have declared extraordinary measures to fight the disease, including closing schools, authorizing house-to-house searches for infected people and, at least on paper, sometimes vowing to go beyond the standard international controls for halting the virus.

Here in Sierra Leone, the nation with the most cases of the disease, the government has decreed a broad state of emergency ”” telling families to stay at home on Monday for “reflection, education and prayers” ”” and has ordered strict new measures, like bans on many public gatherings and the quarantine edict.

“The very essence of our nation is at stake,” President Ernest Bai Koroma said in a televised speech Monday morning.

But that tough stance is being accompanied by loose enforcement that is deeply worrying to doctors and health care workers trying to stem the rapid spread of the virus.

Read it all.

The historical blindness, moral obtuseness, and self-satisfied pomposity of this op-ed by Timothy Egan is only the most recent in a long line of New York Times pieces meant to incite hatred of religious believers. But it’s the last one I’ll read. I have canceled my subscription and will no longer read anything published in that newspaper, with the exception of columns and blog posts by my friend Ross Douthat.

Read it all and take note to breathe hard if you choose to read the Timothy Egan piece which I debated posted on the blog but decided to leave aside.

Bring us, O Lord, at our last awakening into the house and gate of heaven, to enter into that gate and dwell in that house, where there shall be no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light; no noise nor silence, but one equal music; no fears nor hopes, but one equal possession; no ends nor beginnings, but one equal eternity; in the habitations of Thy glory and dominion world without end.

–The Pastor’s Prayerbook

For those who argue that marijuana is no more dangerous than tobacco and alcohol, [Nora] Volkow has two main answers: We don’t entirely know , and, simultaneously, that is precisely the point .

“Look at the evidence,” Volkow said in an interview on the National Institutes of Health campus, pointing to the harms already inflicted by tobacco and alcohol. “It’s not subtle ”” it’s huge. Legal drugs are the main problem that we have in our country as it relates to morbidity and mortality. By far. Many more people die of tobacco than all of the drugs together. Many more people die of alcohol than all of the illicit drugs together.

“And it’s not because they are more dangerous or addictive. Not at all ”” they are less dangerous. It’s because they are legal. .”‰.”‰. The legalization process generates a much greater exposure of people and hence of negative consequences that will emerge. And that’s why I always say, ”˜Can we as a country afford to have a third legal drug? Can we?’ We know the costs already on health care, we know the costs on accidents, on lost productivity. I let the numbers speak for themselves.”

Read it all, and note the sad lack of comments at the time.

For the past two months, federal authorities have been turning away clergy and nuns who’ve been trying to minister to detained, unaccompanied migrant children from Central America. But that situation is beginning to change.

In mid-July, an Episcopal priest in Arizona and a nun in Texas were among the first to receive invitations to provide pastoral care at detention facilities, where U.S. Customs and Border Protection has been overwhelmed and hard pressed to develop visitation protocol.

According to Bishop Kirk Smith of the Episcopal Diocese of Arizona, children detained in the Tucson area got a pastoral visit in mid-July from the Rev. John Smith, rector of the Church of St. Michael and All Angels in Tucson. Bishop Smith said the rector brought along his guitar.

“They wanted to sing songs with him,” Bishop Smith said. “They wanted to have prayers with him. People asked him for a blessing.”

Read it all.

O Holy Spirit of God, who didst descend upon our Lord Christ at the river Jordan, and upon the disciples at the feast of Pentecost: Have mercy upon us, we beseech thee, and by thy divine fire enlighten our minds and purify our hearts; for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord.

–Saint Nerses of Clajes

When morning came, all the chief priests and the elders of the people took counsel against Jesus to put him to death; and they bound him and led him away and delivered him to Pilate the governor.

When Judas, his betrayer, saw that he was condemned, he repented and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders, saying, “I have sinned in betraying innocent blood.” They said, “What is that to us? See to it yourself.” And throwing down the pieces of silver in the temple, he departed; and he went and hanged himself. But the chief priests, taking the pieces of silver, said, “It is not lawful to put them into the treasury, since they are blood money.” So they took counsel, and bought with them the potter’s field, to bury strangers in. Therefore that field has been called the Field of Blood to this day. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken by the prophet Jeremiah, saying, “And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of him on whom a price had been set by some of the sons of Israel, and they gave them for the potter’s field, as the Lord directed me.”

You may be able to watch it here – Click on ‘Live Coverage’ and left image here or listen here

But I trust in thee, O LORD, I say, “Thou art my God.” My times are in thy hand; deliver me from the hand of my enemies and persecutors! Let thy face shine on thy servant; save me in thy steadfast love!

–Psalm 31:15-16

His advisers might be hoping for a similar understanding of their fallibility. Following an interview published Thursday in which the Archbishop said he wanted to “compete” pay day loan company Wonga out of business by creating credit unions “that are much more professional”, it has emerged that the Church has actually invested in Wonga. The stake is indirectly held by one of its pension funds via a U.S. venture capital fund company called Accel Partners.

The Archbishop said on the BBC’s Radio 4 Today program this morning that he was “embarrassed” and “irritated” to have discovered the holding.

One might forgive the Archbishop for missing the memo on this.

The Church’s pension funds are not only “committed to managing its assets in a way that reflects the Church’s teaching and values” but are also signatories to the UN Principles for Responsible Investment. Its Ethical Investment Advisory Group carries out investment research on behalf of the three national investment bodies of the Church of England, the Church Commissioners for England, the CBF Church of England Funds, and the Church of England Pensions Board.

But keeping track of a fund’s investments might prove trickier than it seems.

Read it all from 2013.

I bless the Lord who gives me counsel;
in the night also my heart instructs me.
I keep the Lord always before me;
because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved.

Therefore my heart is glad, and my soul rejoices;
my body also dwells secure.
For thou dost not give me up to Sheol,
or let thy godly one see the Pit.

Thou dost show me the path of life;
in thy presence there is fulness of joy,
in thy right hand are pleasures for evermore.

–Psalm 16:7-11

O Lord God, we pray thee to keep us from all self-confidence and vainglory, and to bestow upon us thy great grace of humility and self-forgetfulness. To thee may we look, in all that we do, both for the will and for the power; and to thee may we ascribe with a sincere heart all the praise; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

–C. J. Vaughan

Penalty kicks, wow.

Javier Mascherano the man of the match for me. Very carefully and skillfully defended by both sides.

Grant, O God, that we who have been signed with the sign of the Cross in our baptism, may never be ashamed to confess the faith of Christ crucified, but may manfully fight under his banner against sin, the world, and the devil, and continue Christ’s faithful soldiers and servants unto our lives’ end.

–The Book of Common Prayer

So how do I accept what my husband does for a living? Quite easily. He serves his country and does so courageously, next to other respectable men and women. He represents America with the utmost dignity while overseas. The Army is lucky to have him, and so am I. While people sit back and criticize what soldiers do, my husband risks his life over and over again. Let’s be honest: It’s a job that most people don’t want. Many don’t think about it because other people do it.

Other people do it.

Instead of trying to figure out how to accept or justify or understand what my husband does because you don’t believe in war, I’d beg you to know that no one wants war; no one likes war. We’d all love a perfect world, but we do not live in one. Our country is at war; two of them, actually. Soldiers, my husband being one of them, have to deploy. We, as families, have to worry and wait and hope.

I believe that the next time somebody asks me how I accept what my husband does for a living, I will simply tell that person to appreciate my husband’s service and to enjoy his or her freedom while my husband does what his country asks of him.

Read it all from 2009 but still full of meaning today.

It’s Independence Day weekend, which means that it is time for barbecues, illegal fireworks, and gratuitous displays of nationalism. This year, I’m planning to get matching bald eagle tattoos on my biceps. But for me, at least, Independence Day is also an opportunity for reflection on who we are as a nation and where we’re headed. I’ll admit that I’m worried.

Earlier this week, Belgium eliminated the United States from the World Cup. But consider that there is a decent chance that Belgium might not exist by the time the next World Cup rolls around, because of the bitter divide between its Flemish speakers and its French speakers. I say this with a heavy heart. Yes, Belgium. Congratulations on scoring your goals. Now enjoy the dustbin of history as your nation is torn apart by deep-seated ethnopolitical resentment. Meanwhile, the United States, a sprawling and spectacularly diverse continental republic with a heavily armed and famously irascible population more than 28 times that of Belgium, will almost certainly be around come 2018, at which point we will easily trounce the soccer teams of Flanders, Wallonia, and the Grand Duchy of Brussels, or whatever random assortment of states emerges from Belgium’s wreckage.

But Belgium-bashing aside, we Americans should not rest on our laurels. America is big, awesome, and beautiful. We’re also divided in ways we can’t afford to ignore.

Read it all.

Yet again, the choice of a civil partnership will not be extended to opposite-sex couples (Civil partnerships can be converted into marriages, 27 June). During the debate on gay marriage you published a letter from my partner and myself calling for parliament to make this option available. We explained we had felt reluctantly obliged to marry after a long-standing cohabitation because of discriminatory pension rules, subsequently changed. Sadly, opposite-sex civil partnerships became the victim of disgraceful parliamentary manoeuvring

Read it all and note this reply from the Very Rev Richard Giles who says “Civil partnerships should not only be available to opposite-sex couples (Letters, 1 July) but made the mandatory first step for all couples, irrespective of sexual orientation, who wish to commit publicly to a permanent relationship.”

Praise the LORD! O give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; for his steadfast love endures for ever! Who can utter the mighty doings of the LORD, or show forth all his praise? Blessed are they who observe justice, who do righteousness at all times!

–Psalm 106:1-3

Archbishop-elect Foley Beach of the Diocese of the South, whom fellow bishops selected earlier this week, saluted founding Archbishop Robert Duncan of Pittsburgh, whom he will succeed upon completion of the latter’s five-year term at the end of the assembly Saturday.

“Archbishop Duncan’s shoes are very big, and my feet are not that big,” Bishop Beach said. “I’m counting on Jesus to fill the gap.”

He said the denomination, with new congregations and many participants who joined without ever participating in the Episcopal Church, is seeking to move forward beyond the years of conflicts that preceded the ACNA’s founding.

Read it all.