Each morning, to summon the spiritual energy to activate the crystals and heal another wave of New Yorkers, he prays to spirits of nature and of his ancestors. On Wednesday morning, he swigged from a gallon jug of gin and spewed a mouthful of it in a sputtering mist over the shrine as an offering.

“They love gin ”” it revives them,” he said, and then he lighted candles, rang bells and chanted prayers in Spanish to the spirits.

“I just told them I’m going to heal in Union Square today, and I asked the spirits to enter this stone so they could come with me,” he said, putting the stone in his pocket. Then the self-described witch doctor grabbed his skateboard and headed to the N train to reach Union Square in time for the lunch crowd.

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Ask Pittsburgh Steelers chairman Dan Rooney why his football team has been training at St. Vincent College since 1966, and he says that the campus has the right facilities, it’s close to Pittsburgh and “for many reasons, it works well.”

Then he adds with a laugh, “And it helps that it’s the Benedictines.”

For the past 48 preseasons, the college and archabbey have welcomed the six-time Super Bowl winners with the spirit of hospitality written in the Rule of St. Benedict.

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Now 64 years old, Hall has white hair, an angular face and thin-rimmed glasses. He looks, well, like a traditional Episcopalian. But he doesn’t talk like one. He is friendly and funny, smart and very, very frank. Boy, is he frank. Don’t be fooled by the white collar he wears. On a scorching summer day, Hall strides into Le Zinc, a French restaurant close to the cathedral and one of his favorite hangouts, in an Oxford blue shirt with white clerical collar and seersucker jacket. He settles down to lunch and a long conversation that culminates in a description of what he calls “bar theology.”

“Part of being a priest,” says Hall, “is being a cultural anthropologist.” Pastors, he thinks, should devote time ”” perhaps once a week ”” to going around to bars and engaging customers in conversations about religion. This is the thinking behind the Arlington Catholic diocese’s regular “Theology on Tap” ”” conversations, often clergy-led, in bars that are among the diocese’s most popular programs.

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Washington police arrested a 58-year-old woman after two chapels in the Washington National Cathedral were defaced with green paint Monday afternoon.

The arrest follows similar vandalism Friday to the Lincoln Memorial and a statue near the Smithsonian Castle on the National Mall. Police are testing paint samples to determine whether the three incidents are connected.

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Well, for one thing, did you know there is a show on television on this subject going into its second season? (I refuse to provide the link [but I bet you knew it was on cable]).

Aldous Huxley, call your office…KSH.

When Greece ran into financial trouble three years ago, the problem soon spread. Many observers were mystified. How could such a little country set off a continental crisis? The Greeks were stereotyped as a nation of tax-dodgers who had been living high on borrowed money for years. The Portuguese, Italians and Spanish insisted that their finances were fundamentally sound. The Germans wondered what it had to do with them at all. But the contagion was powerful, and Europe’s economy has yet to recover.

America seems in a similar state of denial about Detroit filing for bankruptcy…. Many people think Motown is such an exceptional case that it holds few lessons for other places. What was once the country’s fourth-most-populous city grew rich thanks largely to a single industry. General Motors, Ford and Chrysler once made nearly all the cars sold in America; now, thanks to competition from foreign brands built in non-union states, they sell less than half. Detroit’s population has fallen by 60% since 1950. The murder rate is 11 times the national average. The previous mayor is in prison. Shrubs, weeds and raccoons have reclaimed empty neighbourhoods. The debts racked up when Detroit was big and rich are unpayable now that it is smaller and poor.

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“We spent five months at Harper High School in Chicago, where last year alone 29 current and recent students were shot. 29. We went to get a sense of what it means to live in the midst of all this gun violence, how teens and adults navigate a world of funerals and Homecoming dances. We found so many incredible and surprising stories, this show is a two-parter….”

You can find the link to part one here and part two is there. I finally got to this during some recent driving–very hard to listen to, very important to try to ponder–KSH.

[The] Rev. Steven Kelly of St. John’s Episcopal Church told the Free-Press, “The churches can help by giving a purpose and direction that’s grounded in good morals.”

The more people are involved in the life of a church, the more positive the impact.”

The Detroit Free-Press reported that some churches are helping in unique ways.

Christ Church Detroit, for example, is planning to open a daytime homeless shelter. Another church, Fort Street Presbyterian Church, which has been at the same location since 1855 – serves food to 400 needy people every Thursday.

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The bankruptcy of Detroit, confirmed in 16 pages filed at 4:06 p.m. Thursday, marks an epic fall for an iconic American city even as it opens a new chapter whose ending is decidedly uncertain.

No one really knows how the largest municipal bankruptcy in the nation’s history will end and when ”” not Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr, who recommended the step Tuesday, not his lawyers, and not Gov. Rick Snyder, who said he approved the filing “as a last resort to return this great city to financial and civic health for its residents and taxpayers.”

“This decision comes in the wake of 60 years of decline for the city, a period in which reality was often ignored,” the governor wrote in his authorization. “Without this decision, the City’s condition would only worsen. With this decision, we begin to provide a foundation to rebuild and grow Detroit.”

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Once the very symbol of American industrial might, Detroit became the biggest U.S. city to file for bankruptcy Thursday, its finances ravaged and its neighbourhoods hollowed out by a long, slow decline in population and auto manufacturing.

The filing, which had been feared for months, put the city on an uncertain path that could mean laying off municipal employees, selling off assets, raising fees and scaling back basic services such as trash collection and snow plowing, which have already been slashed.

“Only one feasible path offers a way out,” Gov. Rick Snyder said in a letter approving the move.

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This is no ordinary choir.

Formed two years ago as part of Theatre Terrific’s mandate to provide inclusive arts education to adults with physical and mental disabilities, as well as anyone else interested in learning to sing, the choir includes a diverse membership. Four members sit in wheelchairs with various conditions such as muscular dystrophy or adrenoleukodystrophy, also known as locked-in body syndrome. Others have developmental challenges such as autism or Down syndrome, while others still have no diagnosed labels at all.

“It’s a place where anyone from any background and any sort of various challenges that they have, they can come and sing,” explains [James] Coomber, the choir’s musical director and executive director of Theatre Terrific.

Read it all (and I sure loved the video).

Start to finish, this is a brilliant portrait ”” pointillist, you might say, or modern realist. So brilliant that once it lands on a front table at the Politics & Prose Bookstore on upper Connecticut Avenue, Mr. Leibovich will never be able to have lunch in This Town again, not that there is a respectable nonexpense-account lunch to be had in those precincts.

That said, this is a different Washington from the one I departed from a decade ago (Pittsburgh: what a relief!) and surely a different one from the era when, among the Washington royalty, only Alsop (and not Reston, Broder, Kraft, Evans or Novak) required a first name, and only because there were two of them (Stewart and Joseph).

The partisanship is worse, in part because the parties are different, with no liberal wing to the Republicans and hardly a conservative wing to the Democrats. And the rhetoric is mean, in part because it is less elegant.

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Every weekday, the Nehemiah Project partners with Turner Memorial A.M.E. Church to provide free lunches to as many as 250 children and adults in West Columbia. Local businesses donate the food, and volunteers prepare it in a tiny kitchen next to a multipurpose space with folding tables and chairs.

When a volunteer cook didn’t show up on a recent morning, the Rev. Kenneth Taylor, the church’s pastor, stepped in to pick up the slack. A big pot of macaroni and cheese warmed on the stove and black-eyed peas simmered in a slow-cooker while residents from the surrounding community trickled in for what Taylor said was often their only meal of the day.

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In Canadian eyes, Calgary has not exactly been synonymous with cosmopolitanism.

Located some 200 miles north of Montana, the western city has long been condescended to by eastern elites in metropolitan cities like Toronto and Montreal, who cringed at its cowboy heritage, oil corporations, and conservative politics.

But these days, with Toronto’s mayor stumbling through scandal and the now ex-mayor of Montreal facing corruption charges, many in the east look with envy at the wildly popular Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi, a Harvard Kennedy School graduate, the first Muslim mayor of a major North American metropolis, and symbol of a city moving from cow-town stereotypes to something more cosmopolitan….

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Biola President Barry H. Corey decided that a replica “Jesus saves” sign would create “a fitting reminder” that the school’s core values have not changed in the 105 years since the school’s founding. The Bible Institute of Los Angeles eventually shortened its name to Biola and moved from downtown to La Mirada in 1959.

The sign, one-third the scale of the originals, is incorporated into a 38-by-59-foot photographic mural of the original Bible Institute building and displayed on the side of a parking structure in the interior of the university’s 95-acre campus.

“The placement and size needed to abide by our city’s codes and requirements, including height limitations and sightlines that restricted visibility to our campus boundaries,” Corey said.

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The Anglican Church in Zambia has welcomed the news that the country’s tourist capital Livingstone has partnered with the International Labour Organisation (ILO) to fight child trafficking and child labour there.

“Being a border town, Livingstone is a fertile ground for human trafficking,” said Livingstone West parish priest Fr Emmanuel Chikoya. “Just recently 32 children were almost trafficked into a neighbouring country and members of the church were among those that exposed the incident.”

The city of Livingstone is preparing to co-host the United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) General Assembly in August this year. Fr Emmanuel Chikoya has urged his parishioners to be vigilant as some visitors may take advantage of the event as an avenue for human trafficking.

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For 18 years as pastor of Holy Cross ”” and three more as parish administrator ”” he has presided over one of the most varied congregations in the city. In the pews at Mass, he sees actors and stagehands from the nearby Broadway theaters. He sees workers from the post office across 42nd Street. He sees bus drivers and commuters from the Port Authority Bus Terminal. He sees young Wall Street types from the new apartment buildings that tower over the old Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood. And then there are the worshipers of Times Square in the 21st century: the tourists.

Father Colapietro is as distinctive as the congregation. “A Damon Runyon character in robes,” the writer Brian McDonald called him. Lili Fable, 73, a lifelong member of Holy Cross who runs the Poseidon Bakery a few blocks from the church, said he was “a character and an old-fashioned priest, all at the same time.” Newspaper writers called him “the saloon priest” ”” he was a bartender before he became a priest, and for years he was a regular at Elaine’s, the celebrity hangout on the Upper East Side that closed in 2011.

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Despite repeated requests from religious leaders and anti-abortion activists, city officials in Philadelphia plan to cremate and bury the 47 bodies from abortion provider Kermit Gosnell’s case.

In May, Gosnell was convicted on three counts of first-degree murder. He waived his rights to appeal but has 30 days to reconsider his decision.

Once the appeal period is over on Saturday, the city will follow its normal procedures by conducting cremation and burial, city spokesman Mark McDonald said. McDonald did not have information on when it would take place.

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The city of Philadelphia has rejected overtures made by Archbishop Charles Chaput and others to give the babies killed by notorious “House of Horrors” abortionist Kermit Gosnell a fitting burial.

For now, the unclaimed fetal remains of Gosnell’s victims, once stored in the abortionist’s freezer, will have their final resting place at the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office.

At the close of the trial that resulted in Gosnell’s conviction on three charges of first-degree murder, Archbishop Chaput renewed the archdiocese’s request made back in 2011 to gain custody of the bodies of Gosnell’s fetal victims and bury them.

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Oh boy, he’s having a baby.

It’s hard to ignore these images of teenage boys sporting “pregnant” bellies and that’s exactly the intent of Chicago’s new eye-catching teen pregnancy prevention campaign.

Launched last month, it aims to “spark conversations among adolescents and adults on the issue of teen pregnancy and to make the case that teen parenthood is more than just a girl’s responsibility,” according to the Chicago Department of Public Health….

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Beginning this summer, [William “Chip”] Stokes, who will head a diocese that stretches from Elizabeth to Cape May and encompasses two-thirds of the state, will be living in the city of Trenton.
He will be the first diocesan bishop in 40 years to do so.

“There was some hope in the diocese that the next bishop would live in Trenton, and we’re very comfortable with that,” Stokes said.

“I think I was chosen in part because of my commitment to urban ministries. I grew up in New York City. I’ve been blessed to do a lot of work with diverse communities.

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In 2011, for the first time in more than 90 years, America’s largest cities registered higher population growth than their combined suburbs, according to William Frey, a leading demographer. The signs are this will continue. While the cities are gentrifying, many of America’s suburbs are heading downmarket. It is the invisible side of the same coin. Frey writes: “This puts the brakes on a longstanding staple of American life ”“ the pervasive suburbanisation of its population which began with widespread automobile use in the 1920s, to the present day, where more than half the US population lives in suburbs.”

Students of the “new urbanism”, such as Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class, which argues that cities are the best Petri dishes for new ideas and innovation, say their revival is assisted by a generational shift in US culture as well as deeper economic trends. Florida, who now lives in Toronto, just 250 miles north of Detroit (but still a million miles in terms of its vibrancy), grew up in suburban New Jersey in a second-generation Italian-American family. Like so many other immigrants, his parents fled the claustrophobia of Newark for the freedom of the suburbs. “To them the city was a ghetto ”“ it was stifling and crowded and dangerous,” says Florida. “But to my generation, the suburbs represent a kind of poverty of living and it is the cities, rather than the suburbs, where you can breathe freely.”

In despair over City Hall’s standard revival package ”“ often little more than tax breaks for new sports stadiums and Vegas casinos ”“ the new urbanists believe the only worthwhile goal is to attract talent. Good jobs will follow. As Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York, told the FT last year: “Talent attracts capital, not the other way round.”

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During the testosterone-fuelled boom years, Christian faith was about surviving in the City, but since 2008 and the revelation that it was all built on sand, Christians have been saying unequivocally that the gospel is non-negotiable, that working in commerce isn’t about surviving as a Christian but about transforming the way we do business, that Christianity is disruptive of systemic greed and corruption: that, in short, their work serves their faith and not the other way round. They are converting markets, not just people. These are the new Power Christians.

Welby is their spiritual, as well as titular, leader. Born in 1956 into a privileged, if eccentric family, he has managed a tension between descent from a powerful Conservative dynasty (on his mother’s side, he is a scion of the Butler family, which gave us Rab Butler, the deputy prime minister to Harold Macmillan) and skeletons in the family cupboard (it was seen fit to conceal his paternal Jewish-immigrant lineage from him until he became an adult).

This background may have contributed to Welby the Outsider, part of the establishment but also a thorn in its side. It is no surprise that the relentlessly bourgeois HTB couldn’t contain him. Note that he considerably widened not only his social but his theological circle after he left the Knightsbridge church. Via Africa and the Middle East, he arrived as dean of Liverpool Cathedral, where he operated what he and Dr Williams have dubbed a “mixed economy” of traditions. Now add that eclecticism ”“ one might even call it a catholic taste in denominations ”“ to the can-do attitude of the City whizz-kid and you have someone who can tap effortlessly in to the energy of any kind of Christian witness….

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The sprawling compound [of Norton Manor] is a product of Washington’s Gilded Age””a time of lush business profits initially fueled by government outsourcing and war. Some demographers predicted the boom here would ebb as federal spending shrank amid troop withdrawals from the Middle East and efforts to trim the deficit.

Instead, the region has shown surprising resilience, thanks to an economy that has steadily broadened beyond the government. More than a generation of heavy federal spending, it turns out, has provided the seed money for a Washington economy that now operates globally””less tied to the vicissitudes of the capital’s political rhythms.

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Members of a local congregation are finding themselves without a church.

Saint Andrews Episcopal Church in east Charlotte shut its doors this week, catching many people by surprise.

“It’s terribly disappointing, terribly disappointing,” said Tom Brice, a church member.

Tom Brice says he’s shocked and hurt over the news that St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church is shutting down.

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Like it or not, it’s true: more people are living in cities than ever before. This migration cityward doesn’t appear to be waning, either; in fact, it’s projected that within the next 35 years our world will be 70 percent urban. (In 1800, that number was 2 percent. In 1900, it was 14 percent.)

So what bearing should this reality have on today’s church? In Why Cities Matter: To God, the Culture, and the Church (Crossway), Stephen Um and Justin Buzzard seek to address such pressing questions and trends. Their aim, as Um explains in the video below featuring Buzzard and Christ + City author Jon Dennis, isn’t to insinuate that city ministry is superior. It is, however, uniquely strategic.

“This book is not about why cities matter more. We need gospel-preaching, gospel-shaped churches wherever there are people,” Um says. “But more people are moving into cities than ever before. Around the world 5.5 million people per month are moving into cities. That’s another San Francisco every month.”

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“The city,” says Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, “is humanity’s greatest invention.”

Not everybody agrees with Glaeser’s glowing assessment, but judging by recent population trends, most do. Every day 180,000 people move into cities, and in 2011, for the first time in world history, the majority of the world’s population became urban. It’s estimated that in 2050, 86.2 percent of the population of developed countries will reside in cities. As magnets for talent, engines of innovation, and centers of culture, cities have eclipsed the nation-state as the primary sculptors of modern life.

Following tightly on the heels of urbanologists like Edward Glaeser, Richard Florida, and Joel Kotkin, evangelicals have recognized a golden opportunity. Two new books””Stephen T. Um and Justin Buzzard’s Why Cities Matter: To God, the Culture, and the Church (Crossway) and Jon M. Dennis’s Christ and City: Why the Greatest Need of the City Is the Greatest News of All (Crossway)””herald both the unprecedented importance and unmistakable biblical significance of the city. But only Why Cities Matter strikes the right balance between social analysis and ministry focus, encouraging readers not just to live in the city but also to engage its people and culture with the gospel.

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The mystery surrounding the burial of the body of Tamerlan Tsarnaev has come to an end. The Boston Marathon bombing suspect was buried this week at a small Muslim cemetery in Doswell, Va.

According to his completed death certificate, which was released on Friday, Mr. Tsarnaev was buried on Thursday at Al-Barzakh Cemetery, about half an hour north of Richmond. Officials in Massachusetts had said the body was moved to a burial site out of state. But they had refused to disclose where.

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Cemeteries and even some mosques have refused to take his body. His city, Cambridge, has urged family members to bury him elsewhere. Republican U.S. Senate candidate Gabriel Gomez and local talk radio host Dan Rae want him dumped in the ocean, like Osama bin Laden. Clergy have largely kept mum.

“The only signs of people who are showing some sort of moral conscience are those few who stand with a card near the funeral home saying (burial) is a corporal work of mercy,” said James Keenan, a moral theologian at Boston College. “To say, ”˜we won’t bury him’ makes us barbaric. It takes away mercy, the trademark of Christians. ”¦ I’m talking about this because somebody should.”

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BOB ABERNETHY, host:….The president referred to self-radicalizing. What””how does that work, and what can the Muslim community do to prevent it?

HARIS TARIN (Muslim Public Affairs Council): Well, the phenomenon of self-radicalization is where individuals who do not find a place in mainstream Muslim institutions, places like mosques and organizations, they don’t find a place for their fiery rhetoric, for their violent, extremist rhetoric, so they go online, and they listen to sermons, and they listen to individuals like Anwar al-Awlaki or Adam Gadahn or other folks who misinterpret the religion to give it a violent, violent ideology, and they fall prey to these individuals who are basically online predators, and they get influenced by these individuals to address their grievances through violence….

Watch or read it all.