Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta appeared somber and reflective as he stood upon “hallowed ground” at the Flight 93 National Memorial on the eve of the 11th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

“I came here to Shanksville to extend our nation’s gratitude to the heroes of Flight 93 and their families,” Mr. Panetta said. “At the cost of their own lives they made a fateful decision to fight back and in so doing they prevented an attack on the U.S. Capitol. I am especially grateful to them because on that day I was at the U.S. Capitol.”

The 40 passengers and crew members of Flight 93 are credited with thwarting the deadly intentions of four al-Qaeda terrorists who hijacked their plane less than an hour after it left Newark International Airport.

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Last Sept. 11, the images of that day were inescapable. Every time they flashed across the screen ”” flames and black smoke rising and an impossibly blue sky ”” the anguish came crashing back.

For the families of those killed, the 10th anniversary retrospectives and memorials were so cruelly pervasive it almost felt as if they were reliving the attacks, they said, rather than simply remembering them from a decade’s distance.

“It seemed like every time you turned on the TV, the towers were falling,” said Cindy McGinty, whose husband, Michael, was killed at the World Trade Center in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. “All the days of build-up, you just couldn’t get away from it.”

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Is it time for a different kind of Sept. 11?

Victims’ families and others were poised to gather and grieve Tuesday at ground zero, the Pentagon and near Shanksville, Pa., for the first time after the emotional turning point of last year’s 10th anniversary.

And in New York, there was a sense that it was a season of change and moving forward for the ground zero ceremony. It followed a last-minute breakthrough on a financial dispute that had halted progress on the Sept. 11 museum, and the commemoration itself was to be different: For the first time, elected officials won’t speak at an occasion that has allowed them a solemn turn in the spotlight, but also has been lined with questions about separating the Sept. 11 that is about personal loss from the 9/11 that reverberates through public life.

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The US federal government has added about 50 types of cancer to the list of illnesses to be covered by a 9/11 health treatment programme.

The decision entitles 70,000 surviving emergency service workers and other survivors to free care.

The National Institute for Occupational Safety announced the change on the eve of the attacks’ 11th anniversary.

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(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.

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

There are just over 40 of them and each is very fine. Please note that there is an “autoplay” option if you prefer to go that route–KSH.

Haynes said that, despite all the evil that happened during 9/11, one of the positive things that happened as a result of the attacks was the good it brought out in people.

“It was just an outpouring of love from the American people,” he said. “Everybody was just supportive of one another. I’ve never seen anything quite like that before.”

Haynes said he feels privileged having been at the Pentagon during 9/11, being able to serve those in need of spiritual support. He said that although it was a trying and tiring time, his faith helped him meet the demands.

“I believe that God gives you strength. And I believe in the power of prayer. There was a lot of prayer going on,” he said. “A lot of people just wanted to hear some positive words. I felt like that was my duty. I had to do that. I had to be strong for my fellow comrades and employees in the building. I believe that God prepares us for stuff, and I believe that God had me there for a reason.”

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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

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This video is a long download but an important file to take the time to listen to and watch; I make myself do it every year on this day. There are a few pieces I would have wished to do differently in terms of the choices for specific content, but the actual footage and the music is valuable. Be forewarned that the raw images and sounds of the day are emotionally taxing to try to take in, so one has to be in a prepared state before one begins–KSH.

It began when a Christian dry-cleaning business scorched a Muslim man’s shirt.

First came the insults, and then Muslims and Christians were clashing in a square in this farming town rimmed by pyramids. A gasoline bomb whistled off a roof and struck Moaz Hasaballah, leaving him blistered and, days later, dead.

Now radios squawk and patrolmen camp like an army near the doors of a locked church. But deaths like that don’t come in ones ”” not here, anyway ”” and there was talk that another killing wasn’t far off.

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For years, armed militias have been stalking the lush forests in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, committing all sorts of atrocities against villagers. And now one of the most war-ravaged countries in the world has another looming problem: an emerging rebel group.

“A notorious group of human rights violators” is how the U.N. human rights commissioner describes the group, known as the March 23 Movement, or M23.

Reportedly led by a Tutsi warlord wanted by the International Criminal Court, M23 has been accused of rape, murder and child-soldier recruitment.

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In the coming days, the calendar will bring the anniversaries of two signal events. One, of course, is Sept. 11, a Tuesday this year, as it was in 2001, when Al Qaeda terrorists in four hijacked planes killed more than 3,000 Americans. With public memorial services and private tears, those deaths will be recalled and mourned.

The other anniversary is of the visit President George W. Bush made to a Washington mosque just six days after the attack, where he spoke eloquently against the harassment of Arabs and Muslims living in the United States and about the need to respect Islam.

This act of leadership and statesmanship, however, has all but vanished from the national collective memory. It deserves, instead, to be noted and heeded and esteemed.

Read it all and make sure to read the whole speech also.

King Charles II granted the society a royal charter in 1662, and for centuries it hitched a ride on the back of Britain’s imperial ambitions. Explorers, scientific-minded military officers and colonial officials, and merchants ”” not just British ”” collected specimens, mapped unknown lands and recorded observations in every corner of the globe. And they shipped all of this, with accompanying essays, to the Royal Society.

The society no longer occupies that globe-dominating perch. The United States casts a much longer shadow, with billions of dollars spent on research and industrial might; American scientists dominate many disciplines. And other nations, not least China, are gaining.

But the Royal Society’s journals, particularly The Philosophical Transactions and The Proceedings of the Royal Society, remain vibrant. And British scientists often achieve a written elegance and synthesis of argument that sometimes outstrips their American counterparts.

Read it all (from the front page of this week’s Science Times) and check out the Society’s webpage for more.

To my ears, these arguments ring hollow. They sound eerily similar to arguments that business developers and foresters have used to encroach on the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. Most wilderness, they say, has been lost to human activity — so the BWCA must be changed. In our modern times, others say, wilderness is just a vestige of an earlier hunter-gatherer stage — the march of economic progress must go on.

Yet the fight for wilderness preservation continues, at both the legal and personal levels. The law continues to decree that guests in the BWCA honor strict codes of conduct — eschewing trash cans, motorized boating, cabins and electricity to preserve deep, but not obvious, cultural goods. The benefits for various species, biodiversity and the human soul are profound.

Like wilderness, the deep cultural goods of marriage have been the result of meticulous social and legal exclusion. Throughout history, marriage has involved time-honored renunciations — premarital abstinence; gender separation for much of adolescence and early adulthood; parental oversight, and lifelong fidelity, to name a few….

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The National Football League has faced unwanted scrutiny over the past seven months, ranging from lawsuits from former players over head injuries to a scandal exposing one team’s secret reward program for hard hits on opponents. But as the league opens its regular season Wednesday night, a new Washington Post poll suggests that football remains by far the country’s most popular sport and that the game’s inherent violence is as much of an appeal as it is a liability.

Even as many media critics have suggested the threat of injuries may impair the game’s long-term health, 44 percent of fans in the new poll say their interest in pro football is on the rise, while 32 percent report a drop-off. More than one in three of Americans polled said football is their favorite to watch ”” nearly three times as popular as baseball, which finished second in the poll.

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A former Egyptian culture minister has been charged with corruption.

State media said Farouk Hosni, who served for more than two decades under Hosni Mubarak, had failed to explain how he had about $3m (£1.9m) in assets.

Mr Hosni insisted that his wealth had been legally obtained through investments and sales of his paintings.

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To ask today’s regulators to save us from tomorrow’s crisis using yesterday’s toolbox is to ask a border collie to catch a Frisbee by first applying Newton’s law of gravity.

–Andrew Haldane, Executive Director for Financial Stability of the Bank of England, as cited this morning on Bloomberg Television

”¦[Idolatry] has not disappeared; far from it. If there is no need to withdraw the word “God” from idolatrous confusion there is a need to give the word “God” meaning, by denunciation, challenge, and accusation against the veiled, hidden, and secret gods, who besiege and seduce all the more effectively because they do not openly declare themselves as gods.

It is clear that the task facing Christians and the church differs entirely according to whether we think of ourselves as being in a secularised, social, lay, and grown-up world which is ready to hear a demythologised, rationalised, explicated, and humanised gospel – the world and the gospel being in full and spontaneous harmony because both want to be religionless – or whether we think of ourselves as being in a world inhabited by hidden gods, a world haunted by myths and dreams, throbbing with irrational impulses, swaying from mystique to mystique, a world to which the Christian revelation has once again to play the role of liberator and destroyer of the sacred obsessions in order to liberate man and bring him, not to the self his demons are making him want to be, but to the self his Father wills him to be.’

[Yet] at the mention of a struggle of faith against the modern idols, which are the real ones, I immediately hear indignant protests…

–Jacques Ellul, The New Demons (New York: Seabury Press, 1975 E.T. of the 1973 French original), pp. 227-228 (my emphasis)

When writer David Foster Wallace committed suicide in 2008 at the age of 46, U.S. literature lost one of its most influential living writers.

The definitive account of Wallace’s life and what led to his suicide was published in the New Yorker in March of the following year.

Now D.T. Max, who wrote that article, has written a new a biography of Wallace, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story. It’s a deeply researched look into the life and work of a writer who was called the voice of his generation. Max spoke to Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered.

Read (or better listen to) it all.

The more specific you can be the more helpful it will be for the rest of us. We are especially interested in material others might not be aware of that you have found moving or interesting. What specifically brought this to mind is an off handed reference in my most recent sermon to my wife and I particularly liking English and Scottish mysteries. I was then asked about by several parishioners which mysteries and how did we get them–KSH?

You can check here and there. This is what stood out to me:

1802–A French aeronaut dropped eight-thousand feet equipped with a parachute.

1939– The Nazis marched into Czestochowa, Poland, two days after they invaded Poland.

1951–President Truman addressed the nation from the Japanese peace treaty conference in San Francisco in the first live, coast-to-coast television broadcast.

1984–Brian Mulroney’s landslide victory in general elections in Canada.

1985–The first pictures of the wreck of the Titanic are released 73 years after the liner sank with the loss of 1,500 lives.

What stood out to you–KSH?

It’s the year 2020 and newlyweds Tom and Sara are expecting their first child. Along with selecting the latest high-tech stroller, picking out a crib, and decorating the nursery, they download the “NewBorn” application suite to their universal communicator; they’re using what we’ll call a SmartPhone 20.0. Before the due date, they take the phone on a tour of the house, letting the phone’s sensors and machine-learning algorithms create light and sound “fingerprints” for each room.

When they settle Tom Jr. down for his first nap at home, they place the SmartPhone 20.0 in his crib. Understanding that the crib is where the baby sleeps, the SmartPhone activates its sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) application and uses its built-in microphone, accelerometers, and other sensors to monitor little Tommy’s heartbeat and respiration. The “Baby Position” app analyzes the live video stream to ensure that Tommy does not flip over onto his stomach””a position that the medical journals still report contributes to SIDS. Of course, best practices in child rearing seem to change quickly, but Tom and Sara aren’t too worried about that because the NewBorn application suite updates itself with the latest medical findings. To lull Tommy to sleep, the SmartPhone 20.0 plays music, testing out a variety of selections and learning by observation which music is most soothing for this particular infant….

While this scenario is, of course, science fiction, many of the technologies I’m describing are here today in research labs or even in app stores. So the reality of a SmartPhone 20.0, along with its envisioned NewBorn suite, are not far off.

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A slim majority of Americans, 52%, approve of labor unions, unchanged from 2010 and 2011, and up only slightly from the all-time low of 48% in 2009. Americans had been far more approving of unions before 2009 than they have in the last few years….Gallup first asked Americans whether they approved of labor unions in 1936, and 72% did at that time. Labor union approval peaked at 75% in January 1957, and remained above 60% until 1978. Approval held just below 60% through 1991, and generally hovered around the 60% mark through 2008. The drop in approval to 48% occurred in 2009, the first year of Obama’s presidency and after the 2008-2009 financial crisis and recession.

Union approval has always varied by party. Currently, 74% of Democrats, 48% of independents, and 31% of Republicans say they approve of unions.

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This last sad and oddly inspiring book comes with an introduction by his editor at Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter and an afterword by his wife Carol Blue. Christopher Hitchens’s own pieces are shaped like a fugue; the theme is death, his own death, and the voice in each piece changes slightly as death comes closer. He begins simply with the theme: “I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death. But nothing prepared me for the early morning in June when I came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse. The whole cave of my chest and thorax seemed to have been hollowed out and then refilled with slow-drying cement. I could faintly hear myself breathe but could not manage to inflate my lungs.”

Soon, it emerges that he has cancer of the oesophagus, the disease from which his father had died at the age of 79. Hitchens is only 61. It is clear that he will give anything to live. “I had real plans for the next decade ”¦ Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read ”“ if indeed not to write ”“ the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?”

And so the struggle begins; he writes with a calm and searching honesty about the idea that “I don’t have a body, I am a body.”

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The rest of the world, baffled and worried by what it sees as a flirtation with extremism in the world’s most powerful nation, can nevertheless understand why President Obama has such a fight on his hands. For it, too, feels let down by the refusal of the early Obama vision to materialise, and by his failure to revive the sluggish American economy.

The social divide in America is alarming. Part of the disappointment of Mr Obama’s first term has been his inability to overcome divisions. There is no force for harmony in America at present, no shared idea of what the country is about, no unifying national conversation.

The large and powerful Catholic Church, which could have been a peacemaker, has pushed the pursuit of its own agenda so far that it is now another source of disunity. Cardinal Dolan’s willingness to appear at the Republican Convention has partly been rectified by his acceptance of an invitation to the Democratic Party event next week. But his long-standing friendship with Paul Ryan ”“ a disciple of the notorious atheist Ayn Rand ”“ will cause consternation in Catholic circles around the globe.

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One prolific author is R. S. Sugirtharajah, of Sri Lankan origin, who teaches at Birmingham University in England. Although he ranges widely in his interests, he is particularly interested in the possibility of South Asian linkages to the New Testament itself and to early Christianity more broadly. Any attempt to draw such connections has to be made cautiously, given the dismal track record of past efforts, but Sugirtharajah makes a strong case.

He shows how the campaigns of Alexander the Great brought the Hellenistic world into contact with Asian societies. Indian emissaries reached the West, while Central Asian Greeks encountered Buddhism. An early Christian interest in Indian affairs surfaces in apocryphal texts like the Acts of Thomas, and of course India’s truly ancient Christian communities proclaim Thomas as their founding evangelist. For this reason, Sugirtharajah claims the sizable body of Thomas literature as a critical tool for approaching Asian Christianity, even citing the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas as “an interesting starting point for Asian hermeneutics.”

I am usually skeptical about claims for direct Asian influences on the Mediterranean world, but one of Sugirtharajah’s examples intrigues me. In the Epistle of James, the King James translation of verse 3.6 declares that “the tongue . . . defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature.” Different translations offer widely varying versions of the words here translated “course of nature,” but the Greek phrase is trochos tes geneseos, which can be rendered “wheel of birth.”

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A column on the Obama-Romney race by political and social commentator David Brooks in the August 20 New York Times bore the caption “Guide for the Perplexed.” Brooks was trying to give some helpful counsel to undecided voters trying to make up their minds, and either he or the editors of the column thought this would make a good title. If it came from Brooks, I have no doubt that, a man of cultivation, he was aware that it is also the name of a greatly influential, late 12th-century work of Jewish religious philosophy by Maimonides or Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, widely known among Jews by his acronym of “Rambam.” If it came from the editors of the columns page, I’m not so sure.

I say this because, lately, “guides for the perplexed” have been popping up everywhere, like mushrooms after a rain. Recently, the British Daily Telegraph published an article on “Cancer Cure: A Guide for the Perplexed.” August’s Jewish World Review has a contribution called “A Parenting Guide for the Perplexed.” This past June, The New Yorker ran a piece on the euro crisis, titled “The Spanish Bailout: A Guide for the Perplexed.” Last January, American film historian David Bordwell reviewed the movie version of John le Carré’s “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” under the title “Tinker Tailor: A Guide for the Perplexed.” Among books appearing in the past several years, you can find “Christian Bioethics: A Guide for the Perplexed,” “China Energy: A Guide for the Perplexed,” “Egypt and Islamic Sharia: A Guide for the Perplexed” and “A Guide for the Perplexed: Translations of All Non-English Phrases in Patrick O’Brian’s Sea-Tales.”

Read it all.