Ask the parishioners of Grace Episcopal Church about disappointment and they will tell you how it was turned on its head. They will tell you about small gestures and generous spirits. They will share a legend in the making, a story to be told generations from now, to grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

They will tell you about the day the Earth cracked, a building closed and the people of the church were forced to find sanctuary elsewhere, how a great disappointment turned into a reward that transcended church walls and breached religious and racial ideologies.

The Rev. Canon J. Michael A. Wright, rector of Grace, took note of the symbolism. “Our walls are in need of repair, and what we’ve discovered is that other walls have come down.”

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The crisis is deepening for some of the 13m East Africans worst-hit by one of the most devastating droughts in 60 years, aid agencies have warned.

World Food Day is being marked nearly three months since the UN declared a famine in parts of the Horn of Africa.

But people in Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, and the newly-formed Republic of South Sudan remain in desperate need of food, water and emergency healthcare.

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As a boy in San Antonio, Paul Flotron helped his family raise miniature schnauzers. He was there for the dogs’ births, and his family showed the dogs at competitions all over Texas. When he was 10, his family moved to St. Louis, where he accumulated “the Flotron Miniature Zoo,” including “dwarf crocodiles, African pancake tortoises, birds, boa constrictors, hermit crabs, fish, and always dogs.”

Today, Mr. Flotron runs Creature Comforts Great and Small, a St. Louis pet-care business, and leads Noah’s Ark, a pet ministry of Grace Church, a large nondenominational Protestant congregation. Noah’s Ark runs a pet-food drive, supports a no-kill rescue, brings pets to visit the sick and infirm, and hosts a grief group for those who have lost a pet.

“We actually have Bible study and discuss passages that are animal related,” Mr. Flotron said. “We make that our foundation.”

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The Vatican is calling particular attention to the dire circumstances of the peoples of the Horn of Africa, in particular Somalia, who have been facing a severe drought and food crisis since July.

The press office published an informative noted on the “Efforts and Commitment of the Catholic Church in the Horn of Africa,” which is issued in conjunction with a press conference held today by the Pontifical Council Cor Unum on the plight of several East African countries.

Presented in a question-and-answer format, the note summarized the situation in countries such as Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia: “A severe drought, conflict and lack of governments have led to massive numbers of people going hungry.

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Watch it all and do not miss the comments about dogs vis a vis girlfriends(!).

Pope Benedict XVI asked the international community to continue aid to the drought- and famine-stricken Horn of Africa and asked individuals to offer prayers and donate money to help save the millions facing death.

“I invited everyone to offer prayers and concrete aid for their many brothers and sisters so harshly tried, and particularly for the children, who die in that region each day because of sickness and a lack of water and food,” the pope said Oct. 5 at the end of his weekly general audience.

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In a bold new measure intended to address unemployment among young professionals, lawmakers from across the political spectrum agreed on legislation Tuesday to subsidize the cryogenic freezing of recent college graduates until the job market recovers.

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The future of Christchurch’s earthquake-wrecked Anglican and Catholic cathedrals is even more uncertain after the decision by the largest insurer of New Zealand churches and heritage buildings to stop offering earthquake cover.

British-owned Ansvar Insurance took a $700m hit in the earthquakes, including losses on both cathedrals and the Christchurch Arts Centre.

Its decision is a new complication for local church authorities.

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Modern investigators of miraculous history have solemnly admitted that a characteristic of the great saints is their power of “levitation.” They might go further; a characteristic of the great saints is their power of levity. Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly. This has been always the instinct of Christendom, and especially the instinct of Christian art. Remember how Fra Angelico represented all his angels, not only as birds, but almost as butterflies. Remember how the most earnest mediaeval art was full of light and fluttering draperies, of quick and capering feet. It was the one thing that the modern Pre-raphaelites could not imitate in the real Pre-raphaelites. Burne-Jones could never recover the deep levity of the Middle Ages. In the old Christian pictures the sky over every figure is like a blue or gold parachute. Every figure seems ready to fly up and float about in the heavens. The tattered cloak of the beggar will bear him up like the rayed plumes of the angels. But the kings in their heavy gold and the proud in their robes of purple will all of their nature sink downwards, for pride cannot rise to levity or levitation. Pride is the downward drag of all things into an easy solemnity. One “settles down” into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay self-forgetfulness. A man “falls” into a brown study; he reaches up at a blue sky. Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one’s self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good ,i>Times leading article than a good joke in Punch. For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.

—Orthodoxy (Rockville: Serenity, 2009), p.103

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The Diocese of Hyderabad has launched an appeal for funds to help its local flood-stricken community, and the ACT Alliance has issued an appeal for Pakistan ”“ hit by severe flooding for the second time in just two years.

Over 5.4 million people have been affected by the floods that have hit Sindh province, southern Punjab and north-eastern Balochistan. Already 248 people have died, and communities that had barely recovered from the devastating floods of last year have seen their homes and livelihoods destroyed a second time.

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As the slow recovery continues in Haiti after last year’s earthquake, there’s a new book out called Haiti after the Earthquake. It’s by the much-admired Paul Farmer, a medical doctor, a professor at the Harvard Medical School, and a cofounder of the humanitarian aid group Partners in Health. For a quarter of a century, Farmer has worked, primarily in Haiti but in other countries, too, to provide good medical care to the poorest of the poor.

Farmer was in Washington this week signing books and talking about what he says are the two big challenges of relief and reconstruction: helping individuals in need, as so many faith-based groups do, and at the same time building up public health, public education, and other systems that help everyone. Farmer spoke as the head of one of the hundreds of aid organizations in Haiti.

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”˜This is not just a “theological formula”. If we left it out, we would have a Word of God that is separated from God; we would make God the prisoner of our thoughts or theologies. We would have a Word with which we could operate, a Word we could “use”, a Word we could judge. But it could not be the Word of God, the Word which operates with us, uses us, and judges us. Our work in the Church, therefore, can only be a service to this one life-giving Word of God. The clearest expression of this truth is the fact that there is no other way to preach than to preach an “expository sermon”, and even this is not a guarantee’.

—Dietrich Ritschl, A Theology of Proclamation (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1960), pp. 67-68

Hari Kondabolu was born in 1982 in the Little India neighborhood of Flushing, Queens, New York. His parents, both medical professionals, settled there when they first emigrated from Andhra Pradesh, India.

Pursuing the American Dream, the Kondabolu family moved to Floral Park, Queens, when Hari was 8 and his younger brother Ashok was 6. Ashok Kondabolu now performs as Dap, the hype man in the hip-hop group Das Racist. Hari and Ashok occasionally team up for The Untitled Kondabolu Brothers Project, an evening of improvised comic cultural commentary. “It was not my parents’ dream to have their sons in the entertainment field,” says Kondabolu, “but they couldn’t be prouder. Our parents provided us that freedom.”

Ravi and Uma Kondabolu raised their sons to be proud of their Indian heritage, so it is not surprising that cultural identity is a prime factor in their respective arts.

Hari (pronounced HUH-ree) complains in his set that Microsoft Word spell check always tries to correct his name to “Hair.”

LOL. Read it all (page 36 ff. of the pdf).

An unsuspecting Oregon couple’s ascendance to YouTube stardom happened by accident….

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Frank Shane, a professional dog therapist and CEO of the K-9 Disaster Relief Foundation, had to improvise when he brought his golden retriever, Nikie, down to Ground Zero. There was no protocol for anything””from the kind of footwear Nikie should wear to how Frank should deal with the unfathomable grief of 9/11. Yet from the moment Frank and his dog stepped onto the site, they both knew they had a job to do. As it turned out, a pair of soft ears and a wagging tail offered one of the best ways to connect to the people on the ground….

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But the euphoria surrounding the plunging arrow sector may be short-lived, as some analysts caution that that investors’ mania for downward arrow stocks may be a bubble, with others warning that downward arrows are increasingly being manufactured in China, where the arrows are mass-produced using far cheaper labor.

For his part, though, Morgan Stanley’s Dorinson sees a silver lining in such gloomy forecasts: “Even if people wind up losing billions of dollars investing in downward arrows, you know what? There’s only one way to show that.”

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A seemingly intoxicated moose has been discovered entangled in an apple tree by a stunned Swede.

Per Johansson, 45, says he heard a roar from his vacationing neighbour’s garden in southwestern Sweden late Tuesday and went to have a look. There, he found a female moose kicking about in the tree. The animal was likely drunk from eating fermented apples.

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As fires are raging across the state, parishes in Diocese of Texas are working to help tame the blazes and care for the homeless. At last report, over 1,000 homes have been destroyed and thousands of families have been evacuated as drought stricken forests and high winds fuel the flames.

One of the worst fires is burning just outside the town of Bastrop, east of Austin. Calvary Episcopal in Bastrop first acted a shelter for some families, but was then evacuated as the fires approached downtown.

“[Recently]…when I spoke to the Rev. Lisa Hines (rector of Calvary), 12 parishioners had lost their homes,” said the Bishop of Texas, the Rt. Rev. Andy Doyle.

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The sanctuary of Grace Episcopal Church, a historic downtown parish, is off limits for at least a few weeks because of damage caused by the Aug. 23 Virginia earthquake and its aftershocks.

An electronic sensor in the west clerestory wall “showed significant movement” over a seven-hour period on Friday. Technically, five different wythes of brick inside the wall were “delaminating,” or separating from one another, according to Craig Bennett of 4SE Structural Engineers, the firm overseeing the church’s ongoing “Saving Grace” building reinforcement program.

Additional electronic sensors recorded slight movement on two occasions since, church officials said.

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Standing in the nave of the Cathedral, Alonso, the head stonemason, watches as crews begin attaching the nets to the 100-foot vaulted ceiling. He jingles the chips in his hand ”” the same hands that 20 years ago helped put the final touches on the gothic-style cathedral.

“It’s heartbreaking to me, because I know what went into building this building. When I look at a piece of stone, I can tell you what that stone went through, from [when] it was designed by the architect, sculpted, carved [and] laid in place by the stonemason,” Alonso says. “This is a handmade building.”

Construction on the Episcopal cathedral began in 1907, after Congress granted a charter, and it took 83 years to finish.

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When Grace Church finished the most recent phase of work on the Saving Grace project, a decision was made to leave more than 20 electronic monitors embedded in the walls to measure and record any movement. Our engineers felt that, barring a seismic event, the building would be stable and safe to occupy until the next phase of work could begin to address the structural issues in the clerestory walls ”“ the walls supported by the columns that run down both sides of the nave. Unfortunately, a seismic event in Virginia on August 23 appears to have affected the building.

On Friday, September 2, one of the electronic monitors showed significant movement. Monitor No. 19 is positioned to measure the thickness of the clerestory wall. Over a period of about 7 hours, the wall became measurably thicker. What this indicates is that the bricks that make up the wall are separating from each other, or “delaminating.” Should that process continue or speed up, it could cause the wall to fail.

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The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington is donating $25,000 to help repair the Washington National Cathedral, which sustained millions of dollars in damage in the earthquake that rocked the East Coast on Aug. 23.
“The National Cathedral holds a special place in the hearts of all of us in Washington,” said Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington.

“So many recognize it as a national house of prayer, and indeed its magnificent Gothic spires are a reminder of our constant need to raise our hearts in prayer to God in the midst of all our daily preoccupations.”

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“Photographs by Charlotte Dumas of privately owned dogs who were mobilized, with their owners, to search for victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. They are now retired.”

Enjoy them all. Some of you know we have three dogs. I have been saving this until today since this week begins the anticipation of the 10th anniversary of 9/11. Like a lot of dog lovers I teared up at these pictures–KSH.

…[This potential] threat came into sharp focus last week, when shaking from the largest earthquake to hit Virginia in 117 years appeared to exceed what the North Anna nuclear power plant northwest of Richmond was built to sustain.

The two North Anna reactors are among 27 in the eastern and central U.S. that a preliminary Nuclear Regulatory Commission review has said may need upgrades. That’s because those plants are more likely to get hit with an earthquake larger than the one their design was based on.

In South Carolina, SCE&G’s V.C. Summer nuclear plant, about 25 miles northwest of Columbia, is among the 27 facilities possibly needing upgrades to better withstand earthquakes, the NRC records show. So are three reactors operated by Duke Energy near Seneca.

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One picture I really liked was this one (maybe because of the red House).

Due to a total loss of power and heavy flooding the area, the Cranford Police Department has been evacuated. Police Chief Eric Mason, who is serving as the emergency management coordinator, was unavaiable to talk to the media regarding the evacuation.

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As the flood waters receded, weary residents across the Northeast began pulling soggy furniture and ruined possessions onto their front lawns as they surveyed the damage wrought by Hurricane Irene.

The mess of destroyed furniture on Paul Postma’s front lawn looked like a yard sale gone wrong. Over the weekend, Postma had watched as more than two feet of rain filled the bottom level of his home in Lincoln Park, N.J. On Wednesday, he was using bleach to wipe down the house’s mud-soaked walls.

“None of this has value,” he said. “At least not anymore.”

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