Although it’s not even a formal tropical depression, lots of folks are keeping an eye on a tropical disturbance just off the East Coast of Florida, which models currently have aiming towards Louisiana over the weekend. Things that make one go hmmmmm.
“We are not merely imperfect creatures that need improvement: we are rebels that need lay down their arms”.
–C.S. Lewis, quoted in this morning’s sermon
GENEVA, N.Y. (AP) — A western New York man faces grand larceny charges after being pulled over in a car that he said he stole so he could turn himself in on another charge.
Stacey Jutila knows the halls well. She has walked miles in those halls. She knows Moses, and all the rest of the Bible. Plenty of the Koran too. Jutila, 32, is the night chaplain at Children’s. She is among the few ordained ministers assigned full time to the night watch of a hospital, in Chicago or beyond. Usually, nights are covered by whoever happens to be on call. Maybe a student. Maybe someone who drew the short stick.
Not so at Children’s. Folks there listened to the nurses, the doctors. Listened most of all to parents who cried out for someone to lean on when the place, finally, is quiet. When you can hear the sounds that don’t sound one bit like home.
“Nighttime here, especially in the [intensive care unit], is the hardest time anywhere,” says Carly Haniszewski, 29, of northwest suburban Huntley. Her only child, 2-year-old Teagan, has a brain tumor and, beginning June 1, the day after the toppling toddler fell flat on her face off a couch, and everyone, especially her mother and father, realized something was wrong, very wrong, she spent 71 nights in intensive care, took six trips to the O.R., was twice told she would not live through the night.
“Your family’s all gone,” the mother explains of the curse of the nighttime. “The floor has become quiet. You hear more of a hospital, the machines. You don’t hear a ventilator until it’s nighttime. You can hear every breath of the bag. You know that that noise is giving your child that breath, and without it, she couldn’t stay alive.
The opening chapters of Genesis present a poetic vision of creation as a serene process, with the spirit of God majestically hovering “over the face of the waters” and the various stages unfolding in an orderly fashion, celebrated with the choral blessing: “And God saw that it was good.” But this harmonious pageant is counterpointed by a darker sense embedded in the text that creativity is a risky business and creatures have always the capacity to run amok.
I was reminded all of this not so long ago when I watched a programme on television about artificial intelligence. Advances in neuroscience and computing are leading some to predict that, before the century is out, we will evolve machines with mental capabilities vastly superior to our own. The Australian scientist Hugo de Garis calls them “artilects”, artificial intellects, “almost godlike, massively intelligent machines”.
It’s hard to know where sci-fi fantasy ends and realistic hypothesis begins. For some such a triumph of human ingenuity is to be welcomed. In their benign view we will one day benefit from the services of super-brained robots, playing Jeeves to our Wooster. But others offer a bleaker forecast, envisioning a species of cyber-monsters that will turn on their dimmer-witted inventors – creatures that seek to supplant their creators.
We may never understand what it means to be made in “the image of God”, but we may find out what it means to make gods in our own.
Thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing; thou hast loosed my sackcloth and girded me with gladness, that my soul may praise thee and not be silent. O LORD my God, I will give thanks to thee for ever.
–Psalm 30: 11,12 (RSV)
I have always loved the KJV translation of this verse:
Thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing: thou hast put off my sackcloth, and girded me with gladness; To the end that my glory may sing praise to thee, and not be silent. O LORD my God, I will give thanks unto thee for ever.
In an email communication The Venerable Akintunde A. Popoola, Director of Communications for the Church of Nigeria has stated that Bishop Orama has denied making the statements attributed to him in a September 2, 2007, UPI report. Additionally, the journalist who issued the statement has given a verbal apology for the misrepresentation and has promised to print a retraction.
Update: A Living Church report is here.
Another update: UPI has made a statement also.
(Church of Uganda News)
Remarks by the Rt. Rev. John Guernsey
At his Consecration as a
Bishop in the Church of Uganda
On 2nd September 2007
St. James Cathedral, Mbarara, Uganda
Mukama Asiimwe! Mukama Asiimwe! [Praise the Lord!]
I want to thank the Archbishop and the Bishops of the Church of Uganda for this surprising call. When I first came to Uganda in 1989, little did I know that one day I would become a priest in North Kigezi Diocese ”“ what a blessing that has been! ”“ and then be consecrated a bishop in the Church of Uganda. But God’s thoughts are not our thoughts and His ways are not our ways!
I give thanks and praise to the Lord Jesus Christ who saved me when I was a young boy. I was born to Christian parents, but by the grace of God I came to understand that the faith of my parents was not enough. I needed to turn to Jesus Christ for myself. I put my trust in Him and I was born again, and by His mercy I have walked with Him ever since.
There are now 33 Church of Uganda congregations in the U.S. I want you to know of the profound gratitude which these churches have for the protection offered by the Church of Uganda. We praise God for Archbishop Orombi and the House of Bishops, who have paid a high price as they have stood firm for the Gospel and reached out to love and care for faithful Anglicans in America. And now they have taken this step of providing a bishop there in the U.S. to give oversight to these parishes on behalf of their bishops here in Uganda.
As I begin this ministry, the Lord has impressed upon me three priorities, three hallmarks of the Church of Uganda ministry in the U.S.
The first priority is prayer. Jesus said in John 15, “Apart from me you can do nothing.” Everything we do must flow from an intimacy with Jesus Christ born out of prayer. It is in prayer that we are nourished in relationship with the Savior. It is in prayer that we hear the Shepherd’s voice so that we may follow Him. It is in prayer that we are empowered by the Holy Spirit to do His work. Everything we do must be rooted in prayer.
The second priority is mission. “As the Father has sent me,” Jesus said, “so I send you.” Our churches in America are committed to the truth and authority of the Scriptures, but we can only truly claim to be faithful to the Bible if we are missionary churches. We must proclaim Jesus””both His unconditional love and acceptance, and also His transforming power to set us free and make us new. He heals all our brokenness. He redeems all our sin. That is the Good News we share.
I thank God for the East African Revival, which has brought salvation and transformation to countless thousands not only here in this region, but throughout the world. I pray that the fire and fruit of revival will come to the United States, where so many are lost and are, as the Apostle Paul said, “without hope and without God in the world.” And I especially pray that we will be faithful in reaching young people, equipping and empowering them to do the work of ministry in the next generations.
The third priority is unity, the true unity which is found only in the person of Jesus Christ. We have too often seen in the U.S. a counterfeit unity around human institutions. But it is in Jesus, the only Savior, the only Lord, that we unite as sinners saved by grace.
Archbishop Orombi has made clear that in the U.S. the Church of Uganda seeks to join with all the faithful to build a biblical, united missionary Anglicanism in America. We are deeply thankful for the partnership in the Gospel which we have with the Provinces of the Global South. And I praise God for the courage and humility of Bishop Bob Duncan of Pittsburgh, who boldly leads the orthodox Anglicans in America and who points us to Jesus, whose shed blood makes us one.
The verse which the Lord gave to me many years ago for my life and ministry is 2 Corinthians 4:5: “We preach not ourselves but Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake.” May the ministry of the Church of Uganda in the United States always be a ministry of servanthood, seeking only to glorify Jesus Christ.
All praise and honor be to Jesus, this day and always.
Mukama Asiimwe!
A priest was being honored at his retirement dinner after 25 years in the Parish. A leading local politician and member of the congregation was chosen to make the presentation and give a little speech at the dinner. He was delayed, so the priest decided to say his own few words while they waited.
“I got my first impression of the parish from the first confession I heard here. I thought I had been assigned to a terrible place. The very first person who entered my confessional told me he had stolen a television Set and, when questioned by the police, was able to lie his way out of it. He had stolen money from his parents, embezzled from his employer, had an affair with his boss’s wife, and taken illegal drugs, among other things time doesn’t permit me to mention. I was appalled. But as the days went on, I knew that my people were not all like that and I had, indeed, come to a mighty fine parish — full of good and loving people.”
Just as the priest finished his talk, the politician arrived, full of apologies for being late. He immediately began to make the presentation and gave his talk. ” I’ll never forget the first day our parish priest arrived,” said the politician. “In fact, I had the honor of being the first person to go to him for confession.”
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — A man has been charged with a cheesy snack attack on his dad, police said. The weapon? A bag of Cheetos. Patrick Hamman, 22, of Des Moines, was arrested on a charge of domestic assault after he threw a bag of Cheetos at his father, Michael Hamman, hitting him in the face Sunday night.
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
–Martin Luther King, Jr.
THE Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days, according to a national security expert.
Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes” against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,” he said.
Debat was speaking at a meeting organised by The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal. He told The Sunday Times that the US military had concluded: “Whether you go for pinprick strikes or all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the same.” It was, he added, a “very legitimate strategic calculus”.
President George Bush intensified the rhetoric against Iran last week, accusing Tehran of putting the Middle East “under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust”. He warned that the US and its allies would confront Iran “before it is too late”.
Make me to know thy ways, O LORD; teach me thy paths. Lead me in thy truth, and teach me, for thou art the God of my salvation; for thee I wait all the day long.
–Psalm 25:4,5
Obstacles to achieving our real goal of reducing the size of government and limiting its ability to interfere in our lives must be torn down. Gays shouldn’t expect government to foist acceptance of their lifestyle on others; religious conservatives shouldn’t expect gays to abandon an integral part of their being.
Barry Goldwater once remarked that government cannot pass laws to “make people like each other.” His words still ring true today. Labeling people “homophobes” or “bigots” if they refuse to accept the entire gay agenda creates political fractures that work against individual liberties and serve to keep gay voters in the Democratic Party’s political ghetto.
(Originally La Tourneuse De Pages, therefore in French with subtitles) If you get a chance, try it on DVD– well crafted and acted, we thought–KSH.
It is not hard to see why the Summer of Love has been romanticised in popular culture. It was when the young “seemed to be deserting their scripts”, according to Todd Gitlin’s sweeping history of the 1960s. That summer represented the high point of the decade. The Beatles sang a tune about love that was beamed across the world in an experiment for satellite television. A growing sense of optimism that the world could be changed with the application of a little love hit its peak before it all started to go wrong in 1968. More than two-thirds of respondents to a PBS online poll earlier this year said they would liked to have gone to San Francisco in that carefree summer of 1967.
The decade still reverberates in the American psyche. The reaction to George Bush’s recent comparison of the Iraq conflict to the Vietnam war is just the latest example. Some are quick to point to the similarities between then and now: a Texan in the White House, an unpopular war, an actor in charge of California. But the differences are just as stark.
In 1967, segregationist governors were still in power in the South. Race riots convulsed America, killing dozens in Detroit and Newark. The federal budget deficit, at the high point of big-government liberalism, accounted for a smaller percentage of GDP than the rough estimate of $200 billion for 2007. America’s involvement in Iraq is more unpopular now than the Vietnam war was in 1967. In early August, 57% of Americans said that sending troops to Iraq was a mistake, compared with 41% who thought in July 1967 that it was a mistake to send troops to Vietnam.
Attitudes have certainly changed.
Read it all. I found this article surprisingly unbalanced from the Economist. There is no question there have been changes for the better, but unfortunately there were other changes as well–and these are not mentioned. Sexual freedom led to, alas, sexual promiscuity, and a raft of unwanted pregnancies and the issue of abortion, for example, or the War on Poverty led, alas, to a subculture of dependency with all sorts of sad implications, and one could go on and on. The legacy is much more mixed than the picture painted here–KSH.
Next time you’re whining at the water cooler, remember that you might have wound up as Lenin’s corpse keeper. On the other hand, you could have been born in the 19th century and served as a Supreme Court justice, working just eight weeks a year. Esquire magazine editor and self-described know-it-all A.J. Jacobs talks about the best and worst jobs in history with Scott Simon.
In 1980, the Church of England adopted a modern-language prayer-book, hoping to make services more “relevant”. Alan Bennett gave a memorable quote: “The trouble with these modern services is that they’re so very unsettling. You can understand what you’re saying.”
Obviously, rival Sunday attractions also hastened the process of change, but by the end of the century the Church of England had largely become a “members only” organisation. Go to any parish church and the notices (“See Sue for tickets”, “Tell Pamela if you can help”) indicate that everyone knows everyone and newcomers are not expected. Even cathedrals model themselves on suburban parishes, nurturing their regular congregations. Attend debates at the church’s parliament or general synod and you witness an inward-looking body.
If the church prefers commitment to numbers, that is its prerogative. If, on social issues, it wishes to be out-of-step with public opinion, that is its decision. If, as a result, it appears irrelevant, it must not be surprised if it loses the perks of being part of the establishment.
[TEC’s] goal, according to Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, ”˜is part of [the denomination’s] mission.’ The House of Bishops also defined it last March as part of the ”˜gospel’ that the Episcopal Church is called to preach. Yet that goal and many other examples of jettisoning biblical, traditional Anglican faith have led thousands of orthodox Anglicans to leave the Episcopal Church.
And it is precisely those deviations from orthodox faith and practice that put the Episcopal Church outside of the mainstream of not just the Anglican Communion, but the larger body of Christ. Make no mistake: the Episcopal Church’s actions dangerously compromise the holiness of the church and its members. The Anglican Communion primates clearly recognize that fact. Will the Episcopal Church put the good of the worldwide church ahead of its own desires? Or will it remain insistent, as its Executive Council said in June, that it can only be what it is? The clock is running out.
On the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, anger over the stalled rebuilding was palpable Wednesday throughout the city where the mourning for the dead and feeling of loss doesn’t seem to subside.
Hurricane Katrina made landfall south of New Orleans at 6:10 a.m. Aug. 29, 2005, as a strong Category 3 hurricane that flooded 80 percent of the city and killed more than 1,600 people in Louisiana and Mississippi. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.
New Orleans churches staged memorial services, including one at the historic St. Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square, and ring bells in honor of the victims. People throughout the city will hold their own private ceremonies to remember where they were when Katrina hit, and what they lost.
“We ring the bells today for the 17, 1,800 people who have gone on to a better place,” Mayor Ray Nagin said after large bell tolled a dozen times and a crowd wordlessly sounded handheld bells for more than a minute. “We ring the bells for a city that is in recovery, that is struggling, that is performing miracles on a daily basis.”
A day after thousands of schoolchildren began reciting the revised Texas pledge honoring “one state under God,” an atheist couple asked a federal judge in Dallas that the language be immediately removed.
Legislators inserted the language into the pledge earlier this year to mirror the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance.
U.S. District Judge Ed Kinkeade denied the request late Tuesday by David Wallace Croft and his wife, Shannon, for a preliminary injunction to stop the use of the pledge before any trial. No trial date has been set. An unidentified John and Jane Doe are also parties to the case.
“The U.S. Supreme Court has made it abundantly clear for decades that patriotic tributes to God are allowed under the Constitution,” state solicitor general Ted Cruz argued in court.
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The Texas pledge revised by legislators this year now reads:
“Honor the Texas flag; I pledge allegiance to thee, Texas, one state under God, one and indivisible.”
A leader in the Southern Baptist Convention says religious leaders have a “moral imperative” to urge Congress to allow the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to regulate cigarettes.
Richard Land, head of public policy for the SBC, was among leaders from several religious denominations who gathered at a Nashville church today to urge members of the Tennessee congressional delegation to support such legislation.