Many times, the start of Steelers training camp would signal the end of the Pirates season. Today, we have the start of a Pirates post-season pretty much marking the end of the Steelers for 2013.

For the first time in 45 years, back to when miniskirts were all the rage and pro football in Pittsburgh was not, the Steelers lost for the fourth straight time to open a season.

The previously winless Minnesota Vikings turned the trick this time, on another continent but in an all-too familiar way. The Vikings parlayed big plays against a shaky Steelers defense to pull off their first win, 34-27, turning back a furious Steelers comeback that ended when Ben Roethlisberger was sacked from the Minnesota six on their final play and lost a fumble.

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Read it all; appropriate especially for any leading prayers tomorrow.

Did the masterminds of the Westgate terror escape within an hour of launching the attack? Could the terrorists who remained behind to continue the senseless killing and repulse security forces also slip away unnoticed?

And what is the fate of the hostages thought to have been held in the siege? What about the destruction of the mall, did the military bomb it? And who looted the shops?

These are some of the hard questions that Kenyans are seeking answers to as sources reveal new accounts that have not been formally released by the government, further intensifying the mystery that surrounds the four-day siege.

Read it all.

Dear Diary:

While I was riding the subway home after a delightful dinner with a visiting friend, the young woman seated opposite me noticed my cast and asked how I injured my leg. I replied that it was my foot that was injured and that I had fractured my fifth metatarsal.

She asked if she could say a healing prayer for me. I said if she thought that would help, sure, go ahead. She then asked if I would mind if she touched my foot and said a prayer right now….

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A push to forge community partnerships and attack lawlessness at its roots helped Charleston buck a national trend and post substantial declines in violent crime and property offenses last year, according to FBI statistics released Monday.

Charleston saw a 26 percent drop in violent crime in 2012, despite having one more killing than in the previous year. Driving the decline were noticeably fewer rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults than in 2011, the FBI numbers show.

The total number of property crimes such as burglaries and car thefts in the city also dropped, by 10 percent, during the same time period.

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Saying in a statement that church members reacted with “shock and sadness” to the violence, the church’s dean, the Rev. Gary Hall, said, “we mourn for those who have died, and we continue to grieve the persistence of gun violence in our nation.” He added that the cathedral “will hold the victims, first responders, and the Navy community in prayer, while also making the cathedral’s space and its ministries available today to all who seek consolation and refuge from this loss.”

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At least 13 people are dead and several others were wounded after a gunman opened fire at the Washington Navy Yard on Monday, police said, spreading fear and chaos across the region as authorities sought to contain the panic.

The incident, in which the death toll rose almost hourly, represents the single worst loss of life in the District since an airliner plunged into the Potomac River in 1982, killing 78.

D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier and Mayor Vincent C. Gray announced the mounting number of casualties in a series of news conferences. The suspected shooter, identified by the FBI as Aaron Alexis, 34, living in Fort Worth, is among the 13 dead. Alexis was a military contractor, one official said.

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As a college student I attended a campus Christian fellowship that always, at every meeting, had a book table of literature for purchase. On the table there was a little booklet called Doubters Welcome. I remember my surprise at the title, because as a young believer I thought that Christians frowned on doubters and wanted them to just take that leap and have faith. But I came to realize that the Bible had a more balanced view. While we want doubts to give way to faith (John 20:28; James 1:6), we should be merciful and patient with those who are still in their doubt-troubled period. (Jude 1:22). On that campus the Christian fellowship was very inviting to skeptics and doubters, and there were always a lot of them mixed in with the believers.

I always wanted to be part of a church that had that same spirit. When we began Redeemer Church in Manhattan in 1989, one of the first “core values” was that we wanted to be a place where those who were not believers (or who were not sure what they believed) would find their questions welcomed and addressed, their doubts and difficulties respected, and their struggles and concerns anticipated. We soon became aware of and glad for the presence of many, many doubters and spiritual inquirers in our midst. Over time, many of them discovered the Redeemer community to be an “incubator” where they were able to see the reasonable beauty of the Christian gospel and discover their own faith developing and growing.

However, the only way we were able to have a community filled with questioners was because believers at Redeemer were not afraid to identify themselves publicly as Christians to others that they worked with and lived near.

Read it all (his emphasis).

The 12th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York, Washington and Somerset County by al-Qaida terrorists reminds the United States of the life-changing aspects of what happened that day.

It is useful that Americans are probably more vigilant as a result of the fatal assaults. Unfortunately, repeated words of caution and fear are frequently used by politicians and others to further their own ambitions.

The length of the ensuing Afghanistan War and the Iraq War, with the loss of life and expenditure of resources, is attributable to the 9/11 attacks. It is inconceivable that the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama could have initiated or maintained either conflict if there had been no 9/11 and resulting U.S. insecurity….

Read it all.

Take a look at all the pictures and note there is an autoplay option.

Look at them all.

Listen to it all.

With the anniversary of 9/11 days away, high school and middle school students mostly too young to remember the terrorist attacks gathered on the aircraft carrier Yorktown and met one woman who will never forget.

Melodie Homer is the widow of LeRoy Homer, co-pilot of United Airlines Flight 93, one of four the planes hijacked and crashed by terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001.

“For many of us who experienced that day, the word ”˜closure’ doesn’t really exist,” said Homer, who now lives in North Carolina with her children.

Read it all from this past’s weekend’s local paper.

We forgot. It doesn’t seem possible, but we forgot. I forgot.

I didn’t forget in the strictest meaning of the word, but I forgot some things. I forgot the anger. I forgot the anxiety and the worry. It’s all still there; it’s just not out on my sleeve where I can see it and know it and live it all the time. But it’s there. It’s in every perfect day, when the skies are blue and the clouds are perfect and the warmth is soft and comforting in an autumn kind of way. Some things were okay to forget or let go of. I swore after 9/11 that I would never set foot in another airplane.

I am writing this on a flight from New York to California.

Is it a good thing to forget pain? Is it something we need to keep in our hearts as a reminder, something to keep us awake, alert, and ever vigilant?

No, I don’t want to remember that.
I want to remember the way the skyline looked before, with the Twin Towers intact. I want to remember a time when most people didn’t know who bin Laden was. I want to know that time when the country wasn’t a place of divide, when terrorism and war didn’t separate us into with us/against us.

But I forgot so much. Seven years have come and gone. In those years we moved on, we lived, we put 9/11 aside with all our other memories that we like to keep at bay. Time is the best medication of all. It dulls the pain, eases the hurt, and assuages the guilt. It makes me forget it could happen again. Time brings complacency.

In that small space between three hijacked planes and color-coded terror alerts, between a small field in Pennsylvania and conspiracy theories, there was a brief, lit-up moment when we felt like one. I remember thinking that this tragedy would fix us instead of break us. I want so much to feel again that hope and unity that existed in the days after the attack. There was proof, ever so briefly, that we could come together as a nation to help and comfort each other, when we were all just human beings on common ground instead of left or right, Democrat or Republican.

Never forget, indeed. Never forget that out of the rubble of tragedy arose a moment when we put everything aside to be one whole nation.

Read it all.

The day after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the headline in Paris’ Le Monde newspaper read “We are all Americans”. Liane Hansen speaks with Jean-Marie Colombani, who wrote the article that ran beneath that headline about his reflections on that time.

Read or listen to it all from NPR.

(You may find the names of all 343 firefighters here–KSH).

On Monday this week, the last of the 343 firefighters who died on September 11th was buried. Because no remains of Michael Ragusa, age 29, of Engine Company 279, were found and identified, his family placed in his coffin a very small vial of his blood, donated years ago to a bone-marrow clinic. At the funeral service Michael’s mother Dee read an excerpt from her son’s diary on the occasion of the death of a colleague. “It is always sad and tragic when a fellow firefighter dies,” Michael Ragusa wrote, “especially when he is young and had everything to live for.” Indeed. And what a sobering reminder of how many died and the awful circumstances in which they perished that it took until this week to bury the last one.

So here is to the clergy, the ministers, rabbis, imams and others, who have done all these burials and sought to help all these grieving families. And here is to the families who lost loved ones and had to cope with burials in which sometimes they didn’t even have remains of the one who died. And here, too, is to the remarkable ministry of the Emerald Society Pipes and Drums, who played every single service for all 343 firefighters who lost their lives. The Society chose not to end any service at which they played with an up-tempo march until the last firefighter was buried.

On Monday, in Bergen Beach, Brooklyn, the Society therefore played “Garry Owen” and “Atholl Highlander,” for the first time since 9/11 as the last firefighter killed on that day was laid in the earth. On the two year anniversary here is to New York, wounded and more sober, but ever hopeful and still marching.

–First published on this blog September 11, 2003

Remember that the more specific you can be, the more the rest of us will get from your comments–KSH.

(History Channel) For 102 minutes on September 11, 2001, the world looked on in horror as terrorists flew hijacked passenger planes into New York City’s mighty twin towers, destroying the iconic buildings and killing more than 2,700 people. Watch unfiltered videos from nine New Yorkers who witnessed the day that changed America.

Watch them all.

It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,
The dark threw its patches down upon me also,
The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious,
My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre?
Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil,
I am he who knew what it was to be evil,
I too knitted the old knot of contrariety,
Blabb’d, blush’d, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d,
Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,
Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant,
The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me.
The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting,

Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting,
Was one with the rest, the days and haps of the rest,
Was call’d by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young men as
they saw me approaching or passing,
Felt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the negligent leaning of
their flesh against me as I sat,
Saw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat or public assembly, yet
never told them a word,
Lived the same life with the rest, the same old laughing, gnawing, sleeping,
Play’d the part that still looks back on the actor or actress,
The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like,
Or as small as we like, or both great and small.

–Walt Whitman, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

Dear God:

Thou who has been our help in ages past, thou who dispenses your comfort to all those who mourn. We seek your grace to strengthen us as we commemorate the lives of loved ones who have been lost on this day of anguish for our country and our world.

Wipe away the blinding tears that plummet down our cheeks like gushing streams of an overflowing riverbank. Our heavy hearts still search for the solace of your guidance through the maze of pain and the myriad of complex issues such tragedy releases.

Though hurt, we are compelled to commemorate those who are fallen on this day. Remember those who may not have lost a life but instead they lost a limb, those who gave their health for our wholeness, those who lost their emotional stability to help us regain our national security.
Read it all.

Through the eyes of a child–take a look (she was a student at Sequoyah Elementary School).

(Courtesy of Nathaniel Harmon)

Another historic Euclid Avenue church is facing demolition, now that a marketing effort by the Episcopal Diocese of Ohio appears to have netted a big buyer: the Cleveland Clinic.

The diocese recently applied for a demolition permit for the Church of the Transfiguration, a shuttered Gothic Revival building that occupies 0.83 acres on the northwest side of the Clinic’s main campus. The Cleveland Landmarks Commission, which exerts some control over significant buildings and historic districts in the city, expects to consider the demolition request at its Thursday meeting….

Read it all.

Read it all.

When Hurricane Katrina destroyed Nikki Moon’s Bay Town Inn bed and breakfast resort in Bay St. Louis, she knew she’d return to Old Town some day.

Eight years later, the resort is back with more amenities and a unique space.

“I knew in my heart that I wanted to do it again,” Moon said. “I just had to wait for the timing to be right.”

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In retirement, …[Juanita O’Neal] bought some acreage in the flatlands 60 miles south of Chicago and plunged her hands back into the soil. On a recent Saturday morning, like all the Saturday mornings of the summer, she had driven with a contingent of black farmers to sell their bounty at a market sponsored by one of Chicago’s most formidable black churches, Trinity United Church of Christ.

“I can’t correct the past,” said Ms. O’Neal, 68. “I can’t blame anyone for the past. I have to take the accountability. But if my grandparents are looking down on me, they’re saying, ”˜Good job.’ ”

The collaboration with Ms. O’Neal and a half-dozen other black farmers from an area known as Pembroke Township fulfills two missions for Trinity’s leaders.

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Southern church culture, including Birmingham, celebrates nearly anyone who claims to reach teenagers. We often assume the inherent goodness of any ministry that draws large numbers. And we idolize reaching the next generation to the point that we largely ignore what we are winning them with and what we are winning them to. Despite warning signs, youth pastors continued to take busloads of teenagers to The Basement and Christian radio relentlessly promoted Pitt’s meetings.

All the while The Basement’s theology was largely ignored. Viewing the videos on The Basement’s website reveals an exciting atmosphere that lacks substantial understanding of God as revealed in his Word. Pitt’s sermons might have been “in your face,” but they did not point teens to the Bible and the gospel message revealed in it. Much of the public also ignored the Bible’s teaching about character in leaders because Pitt claimed to have a “calling” from God to lead this ministry. And who could question his results?

But internal calling is only part of what it means to be a gospel minister.

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It’s been over a year since the Archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Francis George, submitted his resignation letter””mandatory when princes of the Catholic Church turn 75””to then- Pope Benedict XVI. In a highly unusual turn of events, Benedict was the one who resigned. That left Cardinal George””whose intellectual vigor is matched by a forceful defense of the church””still on the job.

Some wish he weren’t. In late July, eight Illinois state lawmakers signed an open letter criticizing Cardinal George, among others, for threatening to end the church’s financial support for a rights group. The church had cited the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, because the group came out for the legalization of same-sex marriage in May. The politicians””all Catholic Democrats””said the threat of a funding withdrawal was “not worthy of the church we know, love and respect.” They said Cardinal George and others were using “immigrants and those who seek to help them as pawns in a political battle.”

But the decision had nothing to do with politics. The church doles out money to organizations on the assumption that they will not violate church teachings. If a church-funded environmental group announced its support for abortion, for instance, it could lose funding.

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Scott Pelley: What do you see when you look around the city?

Paul Tudor Jones: I see people in pain, people in need, people at times without hope, looking for something that will give them some compelling future. I see too many people in homeless shelters, on food stamps. I think a lot of us don’t like to focus on it, but it’s a significant part of this country that needs to be addressed….You cannot have significance in this life if it’s all about you. You get your significance, you find your joy in life through service and sacrifice. It’s pure and simple.

Read or watch it all (video highly recommended).

Janet Engel knelt at the Communion rail at Bethlehem Lutheran Church on Sunday, tears welling in her eyes.

At 85, she’d built a lifetime of memories in this sacred space. She was confirmed here. She attended its grade school. Every Christmas, every Easter was celebrated in these pews.

And on Sunday, for the last time, Engel knelt to receive the Holy Eucharist here.

“It’s heartbreaking,” said Engel, who gathered with hundreds of current and former members for final services at Bethlehem, which closed its doors Sunday after 125 years.

Read it all.