We ask that you keep the families of those who have lost loved ones, those who have suffered loss of property and all those harmed or who are assisting in the rescue and relief efforts following this historic flood in your prayers.

While we are grateful to God that the majority of our Diocese has come through the recent catastrophic storm unscathed, a few of our parishes and people suffered significant damage that will not be adequately covered by insurance. It is also a reality that additional flooding is expected and the recovery process will continue for some time. That there will be unmet needs is certain.

For those reasons, the Diocesan office is recommending the following possible responses to this disaster…

Read it all.

"This is a different kind of bad" Haley says, telling people in Gtown, Jamestown, Givhans Ferry to get out before the floodwaters #SCFlood

— ABC News 4 (@ABCNews4) October 8, 2015

@wachfox crews work in the morning hours to create a temporary dam in hopes of repairing the Columbia Canal breach pic.twitter.com/YTH6pU8QcQ

— Ryan Burgee (@ryanthephotog) October 8, 2015

This was the scene an hour ago as a SC pastor pushed an unearthed casket out of the flood waters @WCBD pic.twitter.com/qLVe3q4i5l

— Matt Alba (@mattalbaWCBD) October 5, 2015

At least 18 dams have breached or failed in South Carolina since Saturday, the state’s emergency management agency said early Tuesday.

One failure, of the Overcreek dam in Forest Acres, sent a torrent of floodwater raging downstream and forced a mandatory evacuations near Columbia.

Read it all.

Back in Charleston for the night, waters still high,roads still tough to get through.Short vid from Richland flyover pic.twitter.com/EDkRznt7Jk

— Tim Scott (@SenatorTimScott) October 6, 2015

On a few topics, Riley was brief and to the point.

Invest in early childhood education, he urged, and increase the amount of money available for public infrastructure, perhaps through an increase in the state’s gas tax.

It is imperative that communities have well-functioning roads, bridges and public transportation, Riley said. “We have to have thriving, livable metropolitan areas that are creating jobs, and transportation is a very important part of that.”

Riley also mentioned the importance of attracting high-tech jobs, naming a handful of technology companies headquartered in Charleston, including Blackbaud, maker of fund-raising and nonprofit software; BoomTown!, purveyor of real estate software; and Benefitfocus, which specializes in human resources software.

Read it all from The State newspaper in Columbia, SC.

This summer’s racially-motivated shooting deaths of nine black worshippers inside Emanuel AME Church first affected Charleston’s mayor’s race by shutting down the campaigns for weeks as the city dealt with the funerals and widespread grief.

On Friday, it shaped the race in a different way before more than 225 people at Burke High School.

All six mayoral candidates appeared together on stage there to discuss many of the city’s persistent racial disparities and how they would address them, if elected.

If the Mayoral Forum on Race Equity was not organized directly in response to the Emanuel shootings, the crime gave its organizers a renewed sense of urgency.

Read it all from the local paper.

A South Carolina judge says he will release some police documents and other evidence in connection with the Charleston church shooting that claimed the lives of nine African-American worshippers.

Judge J.C. Nicholson said he first wanted to sit down with attorneys for the victims and the news media to review some of the more graphic evidence ”“ including photographs of the crime scene ”“ before deciding specifically what will be released.

During a hearing in Charleston on Wednesday, Nicholson also indicated the 911 calls would be released but that there had been no decision whether the tapes themselves or just simply transcripts would be released.

Read it all.

The high-profile case of Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue a marriage license certificate to a same-sex couple, has raised questions about law, conscience, and religious liberty. Can exercising religious freedom trump obeying the law? Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State and Roger Severino, director of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at the Heritage Foundation, discuss the Kentucky case with host Bob Abernethy.

Read it all.

….it seems to me that Davis has a much stronger claim under state law for a much more limited exemption. Davis’s objection, it appears (see pp. 40, 133, and 139 of her stay application and attachments), is not to issuing same-sex marriage licenses as such. Rather, she objects to issuing such licenses with her name on them, because she believes (rightly or wrongly) that having her name on them is an endorsement of same-sex marriage. Indeed, she says that she would be content with

Modifying the prescribed Kentucky marriage license form to remove the multiple references to Davis’ name, and thus to remove the personal nature of the authorization that Davis must provide on the current form.

Now this would be a cheap accommodation that, it seems to me, a state could quite easily provide. It’s true that state law requires the County Clerk’s name on the marriage license and the marriage certificate. But the point of RFRAs, such as the Kentucky RFRA, is precisely to provide religious objectors with exemptions even from such generally applicable laws, so long as the exemptions don’t necessarily and materially undermine a compelling government interest.

And allowing all marriage licenses and certificates ”” for opposite-sex marriages or same-sex ones ”” to include a deputy clerk’s name, or just the notation “Rowan County Clerk,” wouldn’t jeopardize any compelling government interest. To be sure, it would have to be clear that this modification is legally authorized, and doesn’t make the license and certificate invalid. But a court that grants Davis’s RFRA exemption request could easily issue an order that makes this clear.

Read it all.

…the hardest questions for the Christian conscience come after she had lost her appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. At this point, she has few options. Judge Bunning had his own options, and he opted to send Kim Davis to jail. That, at the very least, is an act of judicial overreach that is more of a political statement than a judicial act.

What are government officials now to do? This story centers on a County Clerk in Kentucky, but the questions will eventually extend to any office holder, anyone wearing the uniform of the United States military, and virtually any government employee. The same pressures will come on anyone teaching on a secular college campus and anyone working for a Fortune 500 corporation.

But the hardest question in this case has to do with the fact that Kim Davis holds a constitutional office that now requires her, according to the federal courts, to do what she believes she cannot do in good conscience. Anyone who sees this case in simplistic terms simply doesn’t understand the issues. Christians of good conscience may answer these questions in different ways. In a fallen world, some questions seem to grow only more vexing.

Read it all (emphasis mine).

A new chemical plant is being built in the small African-American town of Mossville in southwest Louisiana, raising significant concerns about health, safety, and environmental impact. The plant’s owner has offered to pay Mossville residents to move out of their homes and sell their churches. The company says it is being generous, but some longtime residents and religious leaders feel they are being forced out. “The church is the hub of the community, as far as relationships and as far as love and caring for one another,” says LaSalle Clarence Williams Sr., chairman of the deacon board at Mount Zion Baptist Church, Mossville’s oldest house of worship.

Read it all.

Cities across the nation are seeing a startling rise in murders after years of declines, and few places have witnessed a shift as precipitous as this city. With the summer not yet over, 104 people have been killed this year ”” after 86 homicides in all of 2014.

More than 30 other cities have also reported increases in violence from a year ago. In New Orleans, 120 people had been killed by late August, compared with 98 during the same period a year earlier. In Baltimore, homicides had hit 215, up from 138 at the same point in 2014. In Washington, the toll was 105, compared with 73 people a year ago. And in St. Louis, 136 people had been killed this year, a 60 percent rise from the 85 murders the city had by the same time last year.

Read it all.

This is an all too little known tale–take the time to watch it all.

The nation’s capital could be on track to join those U.S. jurisdictions where terminally ill patients can legally seek to end their lives with medication prescribed by physicians.

D.C. lawmakers on Friday held a hearing on the Death With Dignity Act of 2015, which would authorize doctors to prescribe lethal medication to patients who have been given six months or less to live and wish to die on their own terms.

The bill, introduced by ­D.C. Council member Mary M. Cheh (D-Ward 3), is modeled on the assisted-suicide law in Oregon, where more than 850 terminally ill patients have taken their lives in the 18 years since the statute was passed.

Read it all.

Readers of Travel + Leisure ranked Charleston as the No. 1 city to visit in the U.S. and Canada in its 2014 World’s Best Awards announced Wednesday.

Charleston landed the No. 2 slot in the publication’s top 10 list of best cities in the world overall. Kyoto, Japan, took the leading spot by a fraction.

Cities are given numeric scores based on readers’s ratings of sights and landmarks, culture and arts, restaurants and food, people, and value.

“We believe that Charleston encapsulates the authentic travel experience for which Travel + Leisure readers are looking,” said Dan Blumenstock, director of hotel operations of Fennel Holdings and chair of the Charleston Area Convention & Visitors Bureau. “That readers ranked Charleston the best city in the U.S. and Canada is a testament to Charleston’s viability as a world-class destination for travelers.”

Read it all.

I have no doubt whatsoever that this is a terrorist attack. We did hope in the first few minutes after hearing about the events on the Underground that it might simply be a maintenance tragedy. That was not the case. I have been able to stay in touch through the very excellent communications that were established for the eventuality that I might be out of the city at the time of a terrorist attack and they have worked with remarkable effectiveness. I will be in continual contact until I am back in London.

I want to say one thing specifically to the world today. This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty and the powerful. It was not aimed at Presidents or Prime Ministers. It was aimed at ordinary, working-class Londoners, black and white, Muslim and Christian, Hindu and Jew, young and old. It was an indiscriminate attempt to slaughter, irrespective of any considerations for age, for class, for religion, or whatever.

That isn’t an ideology, it isn’t even a perverted faith – it is just an indiscriminate attempt at mass murder and we know what the objective is. They seek to divide Londoners. They seek to turn Londoners against each other. I said yesterday to the International Olympic Committee, that the city of London is the greatest in the world, because everybody lives side by side in harmony. Londoners will not be divided by this cowardly attack. They will stand together in solidarity alongside those who have been injured and those who have been bereaved and that is why I’m proud to be the mayor of that city.

Read it all.

Riley, who is white, can still hear the sobs and the moans as families learned that their loved ones would never be coming home.

He has attended each funeral.

He has assailed the violence as a product of racism and hate.

“The only reason someone could walk into a church and shoot people praying is out of hate,” Riley said hours after the killings, flanked by members of the black community. “It is the most dastardly act that one could possibly imagine.”

His forthright statements reminded many in this stately city of 130,000 why they keep reelecting him.

Read it all.

Read it all.

Today, a new “cloud tax” takes effect in the city of Chicago, targeting online databases and streaming entertainment services. It’s a puzzling tax, cutting against many of the basic assumptions of the web, but the broader implications could be even more unsettling. Cloud services are built to be universal: Netflix works the same anywhere in the US, and except for rights constraints, you could extend that to the entire world. But many taxes are local ”” and as streaming services swallow up more and more of the world’s entertainment, that could be a serious problem.

Read it all.

[ESPN’s Frank Isola said] “Starting with [coach] Pat Riley in the early ’90s, the Knicks held training camp at the College of Charleston in South Carolina for nearly 15 years. It was the team’s home away from home in early October ”” a time when hope is at its peak for every NBA team. The players, coaches and yes, even the curmudgeon beat writers absolutely fell in love with the place. The weather, the food, but mostly the people make Charleston the beautiful city it is today. I was there with my family last August, in fact.

“Now for all the wrong reasons, Charleston has been in the news lately. And yet in its darkest hour, Charleston sent a powerful message to the world when relatives of nine African Americans gunned down at a local church stood in a courtroom and told a hateful white man they forgive him. Thanks, Charleston.

“On Friday, President Obama delivered a moving eulogy for one of the victims, the Reverend Clementa Pinckney. He even sang ”˜Amazing Grace.’ This all took place inside a basketball arena at the College of Charleston ”” more than ever, a symbol of hope.”

Read it all.

Defenders of the Confederate flag say there is nothing inherently controversial or racist about it. It was adopted by the Confederate armies because the official Confederate national flag, the “stars and bars”, looked too much like the Union’s stars and stripes, and Confederate troops were killed by friendly fire in the smoke and confusion of battle. Its design was based on the cross of St Andrew, featuring in the Scottish and United Kingdom flags.

But what the Confederate flag means to most black Americans today, and to millions of their countrymen, is all too plain. The designer of Georgia’s 1956 flag was an explicit segregationist. The state legislature voted for the new flag after Denmark Groover, a state lawmaker, said it was created to “serve notice that we intend to uphold what we stood for, will stand for, and will fight for”.

Such remarks cannot be unsaid, nor unheard. But while “history cannot be unlived,” in the words of Maya Angelou, people can still change. Half a century after pushing Georgia’s new flag, Groover returned to the state legislature to support changing it. Many other white southerners have trod a similar same path, first clutching the Confederate flag in a burst of reactionary racism, then insisting the symbol had nothing to do with slavery or segregation, and finally, as Groover did, admitting the obvious: “It has become the most divisive issue on the political spectrum and needs to be put to rest.”

Read it all (and if necessary another link there).

Charleston police gave church members clearance Saturday to return to their space, several members said. A group then met in the ground-level fellowship room where those killed had gathered to discuss the Gospel of Mark.

Harold Washington said it was an emotional moment.

“They did a good job cleaning it up. There were a few bullet holes around, but … they cut them out so you don’t see the actual holes,” he said.

Many parishioners are eager to return to their church home. But others aren’t, not with death and horror still so fresh. They will fan out into the area’s other houses of worship to seek much-needed support.

Read it all.

At a Friday night vigil organized by Mr. Riley at TD Arena at the College of Charleston, the mayor received a standing ovation. The large and diverse crowd sat quietly, as Mr. Riley spoke at length about Charleston’s role in the slave trade and its long battle to overcome that history.

By Saturday, an aide said Mr. Riley””like many Charleston residents””was exhausted, and couldn’t be reached for interviews. The aide said the mayor would spend Father’s Day with his family and likely wouldn’t be at Sunday’s planned march across the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge, an iconic part of the city’s landscape.

“He’s done a wonderful job,” said Dwayne Greene, a prominent black African-American activist. “He was there the night of the shooting. He made a very compassionate statement, and the city has done everything it can to bring people together.”

Mr. Riley, after decades in the job, will leave office this year after his term ends.

Read it all.

Attendees heard prepared statements from multiple speakers, including state Sen. Marlon Kimpson, D-Charleston; Charleston County Council Chairman Elliott Summey; Charleston Mayor Joe Riley; the Rev. Nelson Rivers III of Charity Missionary Baptist Church; and others.

They sang hymns “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” held hands and swayed to a rendition of “We Shall Overcome.”

Statements made during the vigil reiterated common themes of love, faith and unity.

“We share one thing in common. … Our hearts are broken. We have an anguish like we have never had before,” Riley said.

Read it all from the local paper.

WATCH: Chief Mullen said "this is the worst night of my career." http://t.co/dWxakaPTgA #CharlestonShooting #chsnews pic.twitter.com/ergxY4MPDq

— WCBD (@WCBD) June 18, 2015

A white gunman killed nine people during a prayer meeting at one of Charleston’s oldest and best-known black churches Wednesday night in one of the worst mass shootings in South Carolina history.

Heavily armed law enforcement officers scoured the area into the morning for the man responsible for the carnage inside Emanuel AME Church at 110 Calhoun St. At least one person was said to have survived the rampage.

Police revealed no motive for the 9 p.m. attack, which was reportedly carried out by a young white man. Charleston Police Chief Greg Mullen said, “I do believe this was a hate crime.”

Mayor Joe Riley called the shooting “a most unspeakable and heartbreaking tragedy.”

Read it all.

Update: the best way to try to keep up with this story is to follow the Twitter Hashtag #charlestonshooting

There are 5 separate stories and then the data–you find the link there.

It’s the end of a tough week in Baltimore. Tensions continue in the Freddie Gray case. And now the murder rate has spiked to a 40-year high. One man who understands well what the city is going through is Kurt Schmoke. He’s a native son and was elected as Baltimore’s first black mayor in 1987. He served three terms, grappling with high unemployment, poor schools and violent crime.

Now the president of the University of Baltimore, Schmoke shares his memories of the city and his thoughts about moving it forward with Morning Edition.

Read it all.

Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr., who helped establish the internationally known Spoleto Festival USA in South Carolina nearly four decades ago, took a final bow Friday as he opened his last festival.

It was Riley who helped persuade the late composer Gian Carlo Menotti to establish the performing arts festival in Charleston as a companion to the composer’s Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy.

Riley has opened every festival now for 39 years. Friday’s was his last because Riley, who has served as mayor longer than anyone else in Charleston’s 345-year history, retires at the end of the year. This year’s festival continues through June 7.

“There is nothing like the Spoleto Festival USA in the world, and for everyone who participates, when the festival is over, they are changed,” Riley told the hundreds gathered in front of Charleston City Hal

Read it all.

You can read about it there. Also, please note that this is 10 time mayor Joe Riley’s last one to open: “Mayor Riley helped convince the late composer Gian Carlo Menotti to establish the festival in Charleston almost 40 years ago.”

Some 239 years after South Carolina lawmakers decided to move the capital from Charleston to Columbia, and more than 65 years after the Capital City’s population eclipsed the Holy City’s, the title of the state’s largest city seems certain to switch back soon.

U.S. Census estimates released Wednesday showed Charleston ”” as well as Mount Pleasant and North Charleston ”” among the state’s fastest-growing cities.

Columbia, not so much, and Charleston’s population might have already eclipsed it ”” even with the Sergeant Jasper emptied out.

The 2015 population estimates ”” to be released at this time next year ”” could place Charleston as South Carolina’s largest city for the first time since World War II.

Read it all.

The bronze plaques on Main Street silently tell the toll of the two world wars on this small county: 197 men, listed by name but uncategorized by rank or age or branch of service.

Nonetheless, each is identified as “white” or “colored,” lingering evidence of Greenwood County’s segregated past that Greenwood city officials and leaders of the local American Legion post now want to banish from the city’s memorial to the war dead.

But they cannot, at least for now, without defying the South Carolina Legislature and a law born of a compromise so uneasy that even 15 years after it was reached, people fear that any changes to Greenwood’s tribute would spawn another tortured clash about how this state marks its racial history.

Read it all.