The prayers are jarring because they are so personal and raw, clearly not written to “edify the saints” in a published manuscript. They are, well, just prayers.

Part of the rawness and authenticity of the prayers come with the way O’Connor refuses to sentimentalize her personal relationship with Jesus (thought it’s clear she has one). She is here constantly aware of her own fallenness and of the seeming silence of the God to whom she pours out these little notes.

O’Connor notes that her attention is “fugitive” in prayer. She confesses that hell seems more “feasible” in her mind than heaven because, “I can fancy the tortures of the damned but I cannot imagine the disembodied souls hanging in a crystal for all eternity praising God.”

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The full court document is there. One of the most important sections is this one:

Plaintiffs provide the “careful description” of the asserted fundamental right the required first step of the analysis in the Tenth Circuit, see Seegmiller, 528 F.3d at 769 as follows: “a fundamental liberty interest in choosing to cohabit and maintain romantic and spiritual relationships, even if those relationships are termed ”˜plural marriage’.” (Pls.’ Mem. Supp. Mot. Summ. J. 11 [Dkt. No. 50].) Plaintiffs truncate the Glucksberg analysis by reference to Lawrence , which they argue establishes “a fundamental liberty interest in intimate sexual conduct” (Pls.’s Opp. Def.’s Mot. Summ.J. 19 n.16 [Dkt. No. 72]), thus prohibiting the state “from imposing criminal sanctions for intimate sexual conduct in the home.” (Pls.’ Mem. Supp.Mot. Summ. J. 9 [Dkt. No. 50].)”

Lawrence was the latest iteration in a long series of constitutional decisions amplifying a core principle: the Due Process Clause circumscribes and in some cases virtually forbids state intervention in private relationships and conduct.”
(Pls.’s Opp. Def.’s Mot. Summ. J. 22 [Dkt. No. 72].) (pp.35-36).

You may find a Deseret News story there as well as a New York Times article here. Take the time to sort through it all.

The actor Peter O’Toole who found stardom in David Lean’s masterpiece Lawrence of Arabia, has died aged 81, his family has annouced.

The acclaimed leading man who overcame stomach cancer in the 1970s passed away at the Wellington hospital in London following a long illness.

His daughter Kate O’Toole said: “His family are very appreciative and completely overwhelmed by the outpouring of real love and affection being expressed towards him, and to us, during this unhappy time. Thank you all, from the bottom of our hearts.”

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“This is a big old ship, Bill. She creaks, she rocks, she rolls, and at times she makes you want to throw up. But she gets where she’s going. Always has, always will, until the end of time. With or without you.”

–J.F. Powers’ Wheat that Springeth Green (New York: New York Review Books Classics edition of the 1988 original, 2000), p. 170

Noted blogger and conservative Anglican theologian The Rev. Canon Kendall S. Harmon, who runs the highly-trafficked weblog TitusOneNine, announced today that he is giving up blogging. Dr. Harmon, an Oxford-educated theologian, explained the sudden change as an inevitable move that was long overdue.

“No matter how you look at it, the Anglican blogosphere has been an abject failure,” Harmon said in a telephone interview from his home in Summerville, South Carolina. “What has it done? Has it exposed the spiritual depravity of the Episcopal Church’s leadership? No. Has it been a key source of information for tens of thousands of Anglicans in America, who up to now depended entirely on the mainstream media and diocesan newsletters? Please! Has it brought together orthodox Episcopalians from all over the country, and helped position them for a renewal of Anglicanism in North America? Yeah”¦” he huffed, “Right.”

Some of Harmon’s colleagues were stunned at his announcement. “I just saw him at a Starbucks in Plano a few days ago,” said The Rev. Canon David Roseberry. “He had his laptop open and his cell phone to his ear….

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Do you know which words entered the English language around the same time you entered the world? Use our OED birthday word generator to find out! We’ve scoured the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) to find words with a first known usage for each year from 1900 to 2004. Simply select the relevant decade and click on your birth year to discover a word which entered the English language that year.

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By the mid-1850s, polygamy, which had originally been the largely secret practice of the Mormon elite, had come out of the closet. Polygamists claimed that attacks on “plural marriage” were violations of their right to religious freedom. Later, some would bring lawsuits asking judges to invalidate laws against polygamy as unconstitutional. One of these cases would make it all the way to the Supreme Court. Apologists for polygamy denied that plural marriage was harmful to children, and challenged supporters of the ban on polygamy to prove that the existence of polygamous families in American society harmed their own monogamous marriages. They insisted that they merely wanted the right to be married in their own way and left alone.

But the Republicans stood their ground, refusing to be intimidated by the invective being hurled against them. They knew that polygamy and slavery were morally wrong and socially corrosive. And they were prepared to act on their moral convictions.

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May 11, 1942: Five months into World War II, a young Coast Guardsman from Iowa was shown in a photo feature exhibiting the “typical actions and reactions of the thousands of service men from small towns who, since the war began, have made their maiden journey to the ”˜big city.’”

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Mr. [Mark] Driscoll certainly has a renegade reputation in much of the evangelical world, but his macho vision of Christ has deep roots in America. Jesus as a brave warrior””not a meek preacher””has been a consistent theme in some Christian circles since the late 1800s.

At the end of the Victorian period, Jesus was widely depicted as a sweet, almost feminine, savior, and church leaders began to ask why so many men were absenting themselves from the pews. They found their answer in “the soft, curled, hermaphroditical” Jesus taken to task in Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick.”

As Teddy Roosevelt decried the “over-civilized man,” and Frederic Remington’s popular woodcuts in Harper’s Weekly idealized the soldier in battle and the football player on the gridiron, many Americans craved a manly redeemer. Preachers delivered, in the hope that a rough-hewn Jesus would draw men back to the pews.

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Longtime U2 musician and veteran activist Bono, who spent a lot of time with Nelson Mandela, speaks about his friend.

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

1745 Dec 12, John Jay, first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, was born.

1915 Dec 12, Frank Sinatra, actor and singer, was born in Hoboken New Jersey.

1964 Dec 12, Kenya formally became a republic.

What stood out to you–KSH?

Held’s new book, Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence, requires focused attention; it is an academic work with scores of footnotes. But it is also for the general reader who wants to know what exactly Heschel is trying to say in the sometimes repetitive maze of his beautiful utterances. What does Heschel mean when he insists, over and over again, that “God is in need of man?” What kind of reminder or awakening is Heschel proposing when he tells us, “We do not have to discover the world of faith, we only have to recover it. It is not terra incognita, an unknown land; it is a forgotten land.”

Held explains, patiently and clearly. He places Heschel’s thought against the background of other Jewish texts and thinkers from Maimonides to the Kotzker Rebbe, but also explains him in relationship to the Christian thought of his time: Merton, Underhill, Barth, Brunner, and others. How does a Jewish thinker differ from his Christian contemporaries, with whom he was close? (Heschel delivered a eulogy at the funeral of his friend, the great Christian thinker Reinhold Niebuhr).

Held’s emphasis is not on Heschel’s life but on his thought. How does he use the idea of ”˜hester panim,’ the concealment of God, to show God’s presence?

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Fascinating–take a look.

Rolihlahla Mandela was nine years old when a teacher at the primary Methodist school where he was studying in Qunu, South Africa, gave him an English name – Nelson – in accordance with the custom to give all school children Christian names.

This was common practice in South Africa and in other parts of the continent, where a person could often be given an English name that foreigners would find easier to pronounce.

Rolihlahla is not a common name in South Africa.

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Brian Pellot: Let’s start with some of your general impressions of North Korea. Very few foreign journalists have reported from there in recent years. Why did you go?

John Sweeney: North Korea is the darkest place on earth, both literally and metaphorically. You can actually see how dark the country is from space. It’s almost as if it isn’t even there. It’s also the darkest place I’ve ever been to in terms of information. I used to be a war reporter. I went to CeauÈ™escu’s Romania, Saddam’s Iraq, Gadhafi’s Libya. I’ve been to about a dozen tyrannies. In Iraq and Libya, I’d meet people who would let you know their government is full of shit. That didn’t happen in North Korea. It feels like bad science fiction there. It’s like walking inside the “The Matrix.” It’s really weird and creepy. I wanted to shed some light on this dark state to show how North Korea is using nuclear blackmail against the West. Behind the mask of this, there is an immense human rights tragedy unfolding.
– See more at: http://brianpellot.religionnews.com/2013/12/10/bbcs-john-sweeney-north-koreas-zombie-gods/#sthash.Woi7GkV8.dpuf

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It has become conventional wisdom in recent years that America is in decline, perhaps terminally so.

Josef Joffe, a professor at Stanford and editor of the German weekly magazine Die Zeit, turns this mindset on its head in his new book: The Myth of America’s Decline.”

It’s a cyclical phenomenon,” Joffe says of the predictions of America’s decline. But just as “declinists” were wrong about Russia in the 1950s and Japan in the 1980s, current forecasts about America playing second fiddle to China will also prove wrong, he says.

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The Atlantic has a story out about how the aging of the baby boom will lead to a housing crash. I am skeptical, because research I am doing with Hyojung Lee suggests that old people do not move out of their homes very much, and so as boomers age, they will not be glutting the market with their houses.

But there is another reason to think that the homeownership rate could fall: people are getting married at a decreasingly low rate. Susan Brown at Bowling Green has a study that shows that the marriage rate has dropped by 60 percent since 1970; right now slightly less than half of American households are married couple households. As recently as 1960, 3/4 of American households were married couple households.

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It is worth the time to look at them all.

World War II pilot Henry Heim, now 92, says he can still hear the sounds of the attack on Pearl Harbor vividly.

Looking back on the fateful morning of December 7, 1941, when Japanese bombers pounded the U.S. Pacific fleet, Americans like Heim are marking the anniversary on Saturday with solemn public ceremonies and private moments of reflection.

The surprise Japanese air and naval assault on the Hawaiian island of Oahu claimed 2,390 American lives and drew the United States into World War II.

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Watch it all (Hat tip: RH).

When, after 27 years, Nelson Mandela was finally released from prison, the world marveled at his generous spirit, even temperament, genteel manners, disarming wit, ready smile and lack of bitterness.

Admirable as they were, those saintly virtues don’t begin to explain his political genius. Mandela was also cunning, iron-willed, bull-headed, contemptuous ”” and more embittered than he let on. He needed all of his traits ”” soft and hard ”” to engineer a political miracle: persuading a sitting government to negotiate its own abdication by yielding power to the very people it had ruthlessly oppressed.

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Mr Powell said that Mr Mandela was a guide to him when he became the first black US secretary of state:

What I liked telling people was I was the first secretary of state who happened to be black, and I put that descriptor behind the title. We have to get beyond these labels depending upon your gender or your colour or your background. I’m proud of being black, and I’m proud of being an immigrant of British subjects, but at the same time I want to be seen as an American. And I think Nelson Mandela was able to create that kind of an image within South Africa. We are not black South Africans or white South Africans, we are South Africans who happen to be black or white. We are one family, one nation, one people.

Read it all and watch the whole video clip (approximately 3 1/4 minutes).

Nelson Mandela, the former South African president who died Thursday (Dec. 5), had a deep connection with religious institutions.

Mandela was educated, first at Clarkebury and then at Healdtown, Methodist boarding schools that provided a Christian liberal arts education.

“Both were important influences on his life,” said Presiding Bishop Zipho Siwa of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa. “Indeed, after his time at Clarkebury, the young Mandela said his horizons had been broadened.”

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One memorable grade-school performance my wife and I attended six years ago included songs about dancing penguins and prancing polar bears sung by fifth-graders dressed in white polo shirts and beige pants, interspersed with poetic student readings about snow and ice (prompting visions of isolation, hypothermia and snow blindness). Imagine a GapKids commercial directed by Ingmar Bergman.

Now, these once-festive and joyous musical events have become monochromatic affairs””both visually and artistically””devoid of any seasonal context. At last year’s high-school concert, all of the student performers were dressed in black””formal yes, but also funereal. Moreover, school music directors these days, overburdened by litigation-avoidance strategies, have committed the sin (if that word is still allowed) of not just erasing religion from these concerts but of basically abandoning musicality altogether.

Much of the music is simply bad: mindless melodies and meaningless lyrics, whether saccharine and syncopated or somber and staccato. To ignore the significant body of church music composed to celebrate Christmas””from English carols to Bach cantatas to the full oratorio of Handel ””borders on musical malpractice, even if it is motivated by fear of the ACLU. No matter how technically well-executed, Broadway show tunes and “Glee” versions of pop standards will never inspire hope, goodwill and renewal. Wasn’t that the whole point of these annual musical celebrations?

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On this day of nonstop Mandela coverage, we owe it to ourselves and to him to ask how 27 yrs in prison would impact us.

Both Joseph (Genesis 37-50) and Nelson Mandela emerged from prison stronger and more forgiving because of what God did in them–would we emerge the same way?–KSH.

Very powerful–take the time to look at them all.

Less than five percent of current world languages are in use online, according to a recent study by prominent linguist András Kornai — and the Internet may be helping the other 95 percent to their graves.

Those startling conclusions come from a paper published in the journal PLOSOne in October titled, appropriately, “Digital Language Death.” The study sought to answer a question that’s both inherently fascinating and little-discussed: How many languages exist online? (And, on the flip side, how many don’t?)

For reference, at least 7,776 languages are in use in the greater offline world. To measure how many of those are also in use on the Internet, Kornai designed a program to crawl top-level Web domains and catalog the number of words in each language. He also analyzed Wikipedia pages, a key marker of a language’s digital vibrancy, as well as language options for things like operating systems and spell-checkers.

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Dear Father,””Do not be grieved at the slanderous libel in this week’s Express. Of course, it is all a lie, without an atom of foundation; and while the whole of London is talking of me, and thousands are unable to get near the door, the opinion of a penny-a-liner is of little consequence.

I beseech you not to write: but if you can see Mr. Harvey, or some official, it might do good. A full reply on all points will appear next week.

I only fear for you; I do not like you to be grieved. For myself I WILL REJOICE; the devil is roused, the Church is awakening, and I am now counted worthy to suffer for Christ’s sake… Good ballast, father, good ballast; but, oh! remember what I have said before, and do not check me.

Last night, I could not sleep till morning light, but now my Master has cheered me; and I “hail reproach, and welcome shame.” Love to you all, especially to my dearest mother. I mean to come home April 16th. So amen.

Your affectionate son, C. H. Spurgeon.

Some of the rarest and most fragile religious texts in the Vatican and Bodleian libraries, including ancient bibles and some of the oldest Hebrew manuscript and printed books, are being placed online in a joint project by the two great libraries, which will eventually create an online archive of 1.5m pages.

The website launched on Tuesday with funding from the Polonsky Foundation includes the first results of the four-year project, including the Bodleian’s 1455 Gutenberg Bible, one of only 50 surviving copies of the first major book printed in the west with metal type.

The site will also host a growing collection of scholarly essays, and interviews with the Oxford and Vatican librarians, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, who said the digitisation was of huge international significance.

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