The return of South Sudan’s Lost Boys for the birth of this new nation was perhaps the perfect symbol of its hope for a new beginning. Many are American citizens who came back to vote in the 2011 referendum that split off this country from Sudan, with which it fought for decades. Others returned to try to provide the next generation of South Sudanese children with a better country than the one they were born into.

Now, many of these Lost Boys, who had already escaped the violence in their homeland but found themselves inexorably drawn back, are trying to survive the crisis that is threatening to tear their new country apart. Lost, found and lost again, Mr. Atem says that many of his comrades are now trapped in a dangerous and shaky South Sudan.

Some have not made it out alive.

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We end this hour with a remembrance of a daring World War II flight that lifted the spirits of the French people and of the humble man who flew it. In 1944, American fighter pilot William Overstreet of the 357th Fighter Group was on a mission in Nazi-occupied territory. Flying his P-51 Mustang, Overstreet was escorting American bombers through France when a dogfight broke out. Overstreet broke away to pursue an enemy German plane.

PASTOR JEFF CLEMMONS: It started at 30,000 feet….This was a half-hour dogfight which would end up going through the streets of Paris and conclude itself through a pursuit through the Eiffel Tower where Bill shot down the German pilot.

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At the end of December 1772, an Anglican priest in the poor parish of Olney worked by candlelight on his New Year’s Day sermon. He would preach on the text of 1 Chronicles 17, verses 16 and 17.

That passage was Davimod’s response to God after Nathan informed him that his descendants would be enthroned forever as kings of Israel. David, the once-poor shepherd boy, the man who had repented of adultery and murder, responded to the news by saying, “Who am I, O Lord God, and what is my family, that you have brought me thus far?”

That pastor was John Newton, and those words struck a deep chord in his heart.

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

45 B.C.–Jan 1, The Julian calendar took effect.

1831–William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879), 24-year-old reformer of Massachusetts, began publishing his newspaper The Liberator, dedicated to the abolition of slavery.

1891–An office was opened on Ellis Island, New York, to cope with the vast flood of immigrants coming into the United States.

1908–The 1st time-ball signifying new year was dropped at Times Square, NYC.

1975–The Watergate verdict was guilty when a jury convicted Richard Nixon’s three top advisers on all counts in the Watergate coverup: former attorney general John Mitchell and White House aides Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman.

1978–Newspaper editor flees South Africa; Newspaper editor Donald Woods arrives in London after fleeing South Africa’s apartheid regime.

2002–Celebrations as euro hits the streets; Twelve of the European Union’s 15 countries wake up to life with a new currency as the euro reaches the streets.

What stands out to you?

”¦ when Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos buys The Washington Post with his own personal money, thereby ensuring that one of the nation’s most important newspapers will be able to continue producing in-depth, hard-hitting journalism, including an estimated 400 stories and columns in August alone about what a genuinely brilliant yet humanitarian genius Jeff Bezos is. Bezos says he does not plan to make any major changes, other than to deliver the paper in cardboard boxes and replace the stories with reader reviews of news events, using a five-star rating system.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, signaling a major change in the federal government’s policy regarding the War on Drugs, tells a meeting of the American Bar Association that he has a family of tiny invisible harmonica-playing giraffes living inside his nose.

In sports, New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez is indicted for murder; if convicted, under the strict new NFL rules aimed at reducing violence, he will have to sit out at least two games.

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Washington went on to express his gratitude for the support of “my countrymen” and the “army in general.” This reference to his soldiers ignited feelings so intense, he had to grip the speech with both hands to keep it steady. He continued: “I consider it an indispensable duty to close this last solemn act of my official life by commending the interests of our dearest country to the protection of Almighty God and those who have the superintendence of them [Congress] to his holy keeping.”

For a long moment, Washington could not say another word. Tears streamed down his cheeks. The words touched a vein of religious faith in his inmost soul, born of battlefield experiences that had convinced him of the existence of a caring God who had protected him and his country again and again during the war. Without this faith he might never have been able to endure the frustrations and rage he had experienced in the previous eight months.
Washington then drew from his coat a parchment copy of his appointment as commander in chief. “Having now finished the work assigned me, I retire from the great theater of action and bidding farewell to this august body under whom I have long acted, I here offer my commission and take leave of all the employments of public life.” Stepping forward, he handed the document to Mifflin.

This was — is — the most important moment in American history.

The man who could have dispersed this feckless Congress and obtained for himself and his soldiers rewards worthy of their courage was renouncing absolute power. By this visible, incontrovertible act, Washington did more to affirm America’s government of the people than a thousand declarations by legislatures and treatises by philosophers.

Thomas Jefferson, author of the greatest of these declarations, witnessed this drama as a delegate from Virginia. Intuitively, he understood its historic dimension. “The moderation. . . . of a single character,” he later wrote, “probably prevented this revolution from being closed, as most others have been, by a subversion of that liberty it was intended to establish.”

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Hymns echoed down the stairwell on a cold December morning. But they were not in English, or in the Norwegian of the Knudsens, Pedersens and other long-dead Scandinavians who are commemorated on the faded stained-glass windows.

Downstairs the descendants of the Norwegians continued to worship as they have done for decades at Our Saviour’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge neighborhood.

But the Arabic prayers and responses heard upstairs were from a newer congregation that shares the building. The Salam Arabic Lutheran Church has become a home for Arab Christians, many of whom fled the Middle East. Some escaped violence in Syria and Iraq. Others say life was made difficult by armed gangs, kidnappers and extortionists, jihadi extremists or Israeli soldiers and settlers.

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A masked armed man blocked the road ahead before five more emerged from hiding and dragged Mamdouh Eskander Farid from his car.

“They tied my hands and gagged me to stop my screams. Then one hit me on the back of my head with the butt of his rifle and I lost consciousness,” said the 58-year-old Christian worker at a health clinic in Minya province, Upper Egypt. When he came to, he did not know where he was, but Mr Farid’s ordeal had just begun. His captors wanted £180,000 ”” an inordinate ransom for a man who supports a family of nine on just £120 a month.

Like many other Christians in Egypt, Mr Farid will be spending the festive season in fear ”” terrified of a spate of kidnappings that poses a new threat to their beleaguered minority, which makes up about 10 per cent of Egypt’s majority Muslim population. Dozens have been abducted and some tortured by armed gangs who have demanded ransoms of between £4,000 and £30,000.

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When we started production on this Op-Doc video, we never imagined the impact one person could have on his homeland, or the extent to which we would witness that impact and legacy.

People from all areas of Ireland and all walks of life would offer to help with our filmmaking in any way they could. “For Seamus,” they’d say, “I’d do anything.”

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Check out all 24 pictures and note the slideshow option.

After a week of intense gunbattles, rebel factions allied with South Sudan’s former vice president were solidifying control of seized territory while humanitarian organizations warned of being overwhelmed with refugees from the fighting.

By Sunday, there were fewer reports of all-out clashes, but tens of thousands of South Sudanese continued to flee either to the relative safety of United Nations’ camps or across the border to Kenya and Uganda. About 42,000 people have taken shelter in the U.N. camps, the organization said, and some 60,000 overall have been displaced.

At least 500 people have been killed in the week of fighting in South Sudan. Though a political power struggle appears to have sparked the violence, it quickly turned into bloody ethnic clashes and has threatened to split the country along ethnic lines.

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“We now have a cultural Christmas and a Christian Christmas,” [Professor of religious studies at Morningside College in Iowa] Mr. Bruce Forbes said.

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U.S. investors are generally wary about stocks as a way for Americans to build wealth, as 37% say the stock market is an “excellent” or “good” way for average Americans to grow their assets, while 46% consider it “only fair,” and 16% call it “poor.” Large class investors — those with $100,000 or more in investable assets — are significantly more upbeat about the market’s value as a wealth generator than those with less than $100,000 of such assets, but still only 50% rate it positively.

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“Every cough and splutter is played out on social media nowadays, from the birth of the future King to the death of a former Prime Minister. Here we round up the tweets that tell the story of 2013….”

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When I heard a federal judge struck down part of Utah’s polygamy law last week, I gave a little squeal of delight.

To be clear, I’m an Episcopal priest, not a polygamist. But I’ve met the family who brought the suit, and these people changed how I think about plural marriage.

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Although the Fed expects to keep reducing the program “in measured steps” next year, the timing and the course isn’t preset. “Continued progress [in the economy] is by no means certain,” Mr. [Ben] Bernanke said. “The steps that we take will be data-dependent.”

If the Fed proceeds at the pace he set out, it would complete the bond-buying program toward the end of 2014 with holdings of nearly $4.5 trillion in bonds, loans and other assets, nearly six times as large as the Fed’s total holdings when the financial crisis started in 2008.

Still, officials””worried that investors would quake at the thought of less Fed support””went to lengths to demonstrate that they would keep interest rates low for years to come, even after the bond-buying program ends.
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Seventy-two percent of Americans say big government is a greater threat to the U.S. in the future than is big business or big labor, a record high in the nearly 50-year history of this question. The prior high for big government was 65% in 1999 and 2000. Big government has always topped big business and big labor, including in the initial asking in 1965, but just 35% named it at that time.

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The United States State Department announced that its ambassador in Juba met on Wednesday with South Sudan’s president Salva Kiir amid fears of an outbreak of civil war in the world’s newest nation.

“Today, Ambassador Page met with President Kiir in Juba to discuss our concern about the continued violence, increasing death toll, and growing humanitarian challenges,” US Deputy State Department Spokesperson Marie Harf told reporters today.

“She raised the arrests of several opposition members and called on the government to ensure their rights are protected in accordance with South Sudan’s constitution and international humanitarian and human rights laws and norms,” she added.

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In one sense, the decision was almost inevitable, given the trajectory of both the culture and the federal courts. On the other hand, the sheer shock of the decision serves as an alarm: marriage is being utterly redefined before our eyes, and in the span of a single generation.

Judge Waddoups ruled that Utah’s law against consensual adult cohabitation among multiple partners violated the Constitution’s free exercise clause, but a main point was that opposition to polygamy did not advance a compelling state interest. In the background to that judgment was the argument asserted by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy to the effect that the only real opposition to any form of consensual sexual arrangement among adults would be religiously based, and thus unconstitutional.

Kennedy made that assertion in his majority opinion in the 2003 case of Lawrence v. Texas that struck down all state laws criminalizing homosexual behavior””and the Lawrence decision looms large over Judge Waddoups’s entire decision.

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Last month marked the 50th anniversary of a bizarre day in history. Three men of significant importance each died on November 22, 1963: President John F. Kennedy, author Aldous Huxley, and author and scholar C.S. Lewis.

On that day, the developed world (appropriately) halted at the news of the assassination of the United States’ 35th president. The front page of The New York Times on Saturday morning, the day after the tragic shooting, read, “Kennedy Is Killed by Sniper as he Rides in Car in Dallas; Johnson Sworn in on Plane,” and virtually every other news service around the world ran similar coverage and developed these stories for days and weeks following.

Huxley’s death, meanwhile, made the front page of The New York Times the day after Kennedy’s coverage began. The English-born writer spent his final hours in Los Angeles, high on LSD. His wife, Laura, administered the psychedelic drug during the writer’s final day battling cancer, honoring his wishes to prepare for death like the characters in his novels Eyeless in Gaza and Island. Huxley’s Brave New World depicts a haunting futuristic world where a sovereign, global government harvests its tightly controlled social order in glass jars; the Times obituary writer declared that Huxley’s well-known book “set a model for writers of his generation.”

The news of Lewis’s death, though, didn’t appear in print until Nov. 25, and it appeared in the normal obituary section of The New York Times weekday paper.

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Christmastime in America’s megachurches is a middle-class utopia. Jesus’ coming rewards the faithful with more than enough, a whole-life prosperity that can be seen as much in the Xbox One under the tree as in the worship at the altar of children’s Christmas pageants. So much the better if your church can assemble a living Christmas tree or a nativity scene that doubles as a petting zoo.

But perhaps this has more to do with what Tewaldi, an Ethiopian refugee member of our evangelical Mennonite church, observed after his first year in Canada: “At this church, I can’t tell the difference between Good Friday and Easter.”

Coming out of the ceremonial richness of his Coptic background, Tewaldi couldn’t feel among us the liturgical lows of the Christian calendar. And so he couldn’t feel the highs either. The flattening effect of North American Protestantism came at a theological price. Without that temporal economy of up and down”” sanctified periods of celebration and discipline, light and darkness, feasting and fasting””it was hard to tell spiritual time at all.

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“Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean,” wrote Algernon Charles Swinburne. “The world has grown grey with thy breath.” Where, I wonder, did the Victorian poet get this picture of a Christ who draws the color out of life? Then it occurs to me: from Christians. He drew the image from observing people like me.

Those who follow Jesus have done a good deal to propagate an image of Christ as the cosmic killjoy, the divine naysayer, who never met a delight he could not dull or a dream he could not puncture. Puritanism, the 20th-century writer H. L. Mencken famously quipped, is “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” Puritans or not, Christians have done their part to vindicate his statement.

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show seven principal virtues.

The case in favour of four of them – the “pagan” or “aristocratic” or “political” virtues of courage, justice, temperance and prudence – was made by Plato, Aristotle and Cicero. In the early thirteenth century, St. Albert the Great summarized Cicero’s claim that every virtuous act has all four: “For the knowledge required argues for prudence; the strength to act resolutely argues for courage; moderation argues for temperance; and correctness argues for justice.” In sophisticated ruminations on the virtues until the eighteenth century, these four persisted – as, for example, in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments….

The other three virtues for a flourishing life, adding up to the principal seven, are faith, hope and love. These three so-called “theological” virtues are not until the nineteenth century regarded as political. Before the Romantics and their nationalism and socialism, they were thought of as achieving the salvation of an individual soul, as achieving the City of God, not a city of humans.

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When you think about Nelson Mandela, you probably think about freedom ”” free people, free country, free speech. What may be overshadowWhen Mr. Mandela was released from prison in 1990, he told his followers in the African National Congress that he believed in the nationalization of South Africa’s main businesses. “The nationalization of the mines, banks and monopoly industries is the policy of the A.N.C., and a change or modification of our views in this regard is inconceivable,” he said at the time.

Two years later, however, Mr. Mandela changed his mind, embracing capitalism, and charted a new economic course for his country.

ed by Mr. Mandela’s extraordinary legacy was his complicated journey to support free markets and a free economy.

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“There is not and never will be a ”˜definitive’ interpretation of the coming of war: each writer can only offer a personal view”, Hastings contends. The three under review describe in ever more detail what it was like, but only consider in the most broad terms what the war was about and why Europe’s people engaged so wholeheartedly in it. After reading them, one despairs of ever being able to break the distorting lens of the Second World War that prevents our understanding the First. Churchill’s legacy in particular, both as Britain’s successful later war leader and as a contentious popular historian of the war in which he did conspicuously less well, remains pernicious.

The war’s course and outcomes were rooted in the events of 1914 ”“ the French victory on the Marne, Serbia’s repulse of Austria’s invasion, Russia’s defeat at Tannenberg, the Royal Navy’s hold on the North Sea and the decision to expand the British army. There is much more to be said, although it remains to be seen what impact extensive historical revisionism on popular motivation and the military conduct of the war, which has been developing for several decades, will have on the history wars. It does not seem to be riding the crest of the first wave, and perhaps it will not be until the centenaries have passed that a more nuanced understanding of the war will be established. Should Great War historians despair? Boredom may set in, and publishers may feel they have done enough by 1918. Until then, the revisionist view will certainly vie for credibility and acceptance with the over-familiar story vividly retold here. Hastings and Mallinson both acknowledge its existence and dabble with it, but there is an obvious reluctance to waver from familiar paths.

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There are the two dozen Church of England Bishops, and the Archbishop of Canterbury himself, who enjoy reserved places denied Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and those of other faiths and none.

Nor can we ignore the 92 hereditary peers, survivors of Tony Blair’s cull, selected from the Dukes and Earls to sustain feudal bloodlines.

The Establishment guards its perks with a ferocity sadly lacking when it comes to austerity and the Bedroom Tax.

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Also overlooked amidst the fallout from Evangelii Gaudium was a statement by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, which defended not only Francis’s remarks in EG, but also their specific context, as as well as the greater role of the Church vis-à-vis economics and morality….

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There will soon be a rooftop swimming pool where the copper-domed bell towers of Mary Help of Christians once rose.

Formerly a hub of the East Village’s Italian-American community, the site of the Roman Catholic church is now slated for a 158-unit rental building, complete with basement gym and rooftop gardens ”” a familiar trajectory for a growing number of houses of worship as church attendance falls and real estate values soar.

In the rubble-strewn lot on Avenue A between 11th and 12th Streets where Mary Help of Christians and its school and rectory long stood, a rusty basketball hoop and strip of blacktop are all that is left. But perhaps unknown to those mourning the church’s passing, much of what was precious inside it ”” and other now-closed Catholic churches ”” sits in a Staten Island warehouse, awaiting a second chance.

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“The state has got to feel a little foolish enforcing these old statutes that are particular to Utah history,” says Kathleen Flake, chair of Mormon studies at the University of Virginia. “We no longer criminalize adultery or fornication. Any college dormitory could run afoul of these laws.”

Americans today recognize “a zone of privacy around sexual activity,” says Flake, who is working on a book about Mormon polygamy. “Why isn’t that granted to people who believe themselves to be married to multiple partners as opposed to those who simply have multiple partners?”

Now it is, at least to one judge.

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