Ah, dialogue. That would be refreshing when it involves Islam.

The truth is, the most virulent “Islamophobia” plaguing America is the fear of offending Muslims. We’ve grown gun-shy about speaking up and granted radical Islam a formidable power over us from which the Bill of Rights restrains Congress: abridging our freedom of speech.

Now, I’m not hanging a radical tag on Zaghari-Mask. While I believe that on this she was a mite thin-skinned, in America she owns the right to speak her mind. And that’s the point.

Yet, since 9-11, we’ve often ceded that right, often exercising free speech about Muslims with chilled restraint. Just look at Hollywood.

Two years ago, CAIR decried a story line about a Muslim sleeper cell on the popular Fox network series 24 because the portrayal might “increase Islamophobic stereotyping and bias.” So Fox issued a disclaimer.

That same year, Fox swaddled in the free-speech blanket when incensed Christians blasted an episode of Family Guy. God, in the episode, lies beside a blond bombshell who produces a condom.

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The whole of the Episcopalian faith is steeped in tradition. Our liturgy is from the Book of Common Prayer written in 1549. The beginnings of the Anglican Catholic faith are from the times of Shakespeare, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I of England. The structure of our service and liturgy has changed little since the 1500s.

When I am at St. John’s I am surrounded by wonderful memories of family and friends from over the years. This church fits me as comfortably as a well-worn pair of slippers or a favorite old sweater.

Perhaps the tangible is often more worshipped than the intangible.

Recently, my friend, Rev. Charles Brown, invited me to a special service at his church. Charles is the pastor of the Second Baptist Church on Wesley Street in Salem. Two dear friends of mine, Sandy Murphy and Margo Desparrois, were to be among those honored at a special Women’s and Men’s Day celebration.

What a wonderful spiritual experience it was to have been there. What a happy, joyful, hand-clapping good time it was. If true religion is to be happy, joyous and filled with praise, love and thanksgiving, then this Episcopalian and his two Catholic friends had finally found religion!

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A flood of false doctrine has lately broken in upon us. Men are beginning to tell us “that God is too merciful to punish souls for ever…that all mankind, however wicked and ungodly…will sooner or later be saved.” We are to embrace what is called “kinder theology,” and treat hell as a pagan fable…This question lies at the very foundation of the whole Gospel. The moral attributes of God, His justice, His holiness, His purity, are all involved in it. The Scripture has spoken plainly and fully on the subject of hell… If words mean anything, there is such a place as hell. If texts are to be interpreted fairly, there are those who will be cast into it…

The same Bible which teaches that God in mercy and compassion sent Christ to die for sinners, does also teach that God hates sin, and must from His very nature punish all who cleave to sin or refuse the salvation He has provided. God knows that I never speak of hell without pain and sorrow. I would gladly offer the salvation of the Gospel to the very chief of sinners. I would willingly say to the vilest and most profligate of mankind on his deathbed, “Repent, and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be save.” But God forbid that I should ever keep back from mortal man that scripture reveals a hell as well as heaven…that men may be lost as well as saved.

–Bishop J.C. Ryle of Liverpool, quoted in this morning’s sermon

ON its way to becoming the nation’s largest mortgage lender, the Countrywide Financial Corporation encouraged its sales force to court customers over the telephone with a seductive pitch that seldom varied. “I want to be sure you are getting the best loan possible,” the sales representatives would say.

But providing “the best loan possible” to customers wasn’t always the bank’s main goal, say some former employees. Instead, potential borrowers were often led to high-cost and sometimes unfavorable loans that resulted in richer commissions for Countrywide’s smooth-talking sales force, outsize fees to company affiliates providing services on the loans, and a roaring stock price that made Countrywide executives among the highest paid in America.

Countrywide’s entire operation, from its computer system to its incentive pay structure and financing arrangements, is intended to wring maximum profits out of the mortgage lending boom no matter what it costs borrowers, according to interviews with former employees and brokers who worked in different units of the company and internal documents they provided. One document, for instance, shows that until last September the computer system in the company’s subprime unit excluded borrowers’ cash reserves, which had the effect of steering them away from lower-cost loans to those that were more expensive to homeowners and more profitable to Countrywide.

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Two men were talking together. The first challenged the other, “If you are so religious, let’s hear you quote the Lord’s Prayer. I bet you $10.00 you can’t.” The second responded, “Now I lay my down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. And If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” The first pulled out his wallet and fished out a ten dollar bill, muttering, “I didn’t think you could do it!”

The liquidity crunch is not yet over: the insolvency crunch has hardly begun.
Repercussions will follow for the man on the street.

Yes, investors are jumping back into the stock markets, hoping this is just another routine shake-out – much like February 2007, or May 2006 – before the rally resumes. The `buy-on-dips’ orthodoxy dies hard.

And yes, speculators have renewed their leveraged bets on the yen and Swiss franc carry trades, borrowing cheap in Tokyo and Zurich to play global assets. The core belief is that nothing has really changed, that the world economy is still in rude good health.

Be very careful….

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The median price of American homes is expected to fall this year for the first time since federal housing agencies began keeping statistics in 1950.

Economists say the decline, which could be foreshadowed in a widely followed government price index to be released this week, will probably be modest ”” from 1 percent to 2 percent ”” but could continue in 2008 and 2009. Rather than being limited to the once-booming Northeast and California, price declines are also occurring in cities like Chicago, Minneapolis and Houston, where the increases of the last decade were modest by comparison.

The reversal is particularly striking because many government officials and housing-industry executives had said that a nationwide decline would never happen, even though prices had fallen in some coastal areas as recently as the early 1990s.

While the housing slump has already rattled financial markets, it has so far had only a modest effect on consumer spending and economic growth. But forecasters now believe that its impact will lead to a slowdown over the next year or two.

“For most people, this is not a disaster,” said Nigel Gault, an economist with Global Insight, a research firm in Waltham, Mass. “But it’s enough to cause them to pull back.”

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Gray-shingled with an inviting porch, this little island’s tiny chapel looks like a summer home, its stained-glass windows the only sign that it is something more.

But look a little closer at the building, built in 1894, and the scars resulting from decades of pelting by the snow, wind and rain that come off Casco Bay can be seen. The roof needs work. A wall is bowing out. The paint is peeling.

Still, in a community with no stores, no discernible center and a population that for the most part exists only in summer, the church, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, has long been a meeting place, the most vibrant location in a tranquil summer retreat. “It’s really the mainstay of the island,” said Karl Winslow, 75, who has summered here for most of his life.

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A Republican gubernatorial candidate accused Louisiana Democrats of reaching “a new low” with TV ads that accuse him of insulting Protestants, and demanded the ad be taken off the air.

Democratic Party officials continued to defend the spot, as did its two leading candidates for governor, despite cries of outrage from Republican officials about the ads aimed at U.S. Rep. Bobby Jindal.

The commercial began running Monday in the Shreveport, Alexandria and Monroe media markets, which are more heavily Protestant than the southern part of the state. It features an unidentified woman narrator proclaiming that Jindal “insulted thousands of Louisiana Protestants” via articles he wrote in the mid-1990s.

“He has referred to Protestant religions as scandalous, depraved, selfish and heretical,” the narrator says. It then directs viewers to a Web site, www.jindalonreligion.com, where links to the articles are found.

Jindal, who converted to Catholicism as a teen after being raised by Hindu parents, said the commercial is defamatory and misleading and denied that he has ever insulted another branch of the Christian faith.

“They’re absolute lies. We’re not talking about an exaggeration,” Jindal said. “They’re completely out of bounds here.”

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FRED DE SAM LAZARO, guest anchor: For much of modern times, it seems, artists have parked their spirituality outside the studio, outside the gallery. Our next story takes us to a retreat in Santa Fe, New Mexico, intended to bring back what one organizer calls “the intimate relationship between art and faith.”

Judy Valente has our report.

JUDY VALENTE: Santa Fé: a city whose spiritual heritage dates back to the Native Americans and Spanish missionaries; a place of stunning natural beauty — home to more than 250 artists’ galleries; a city where the spiritual and artistic come together easily.

Each summer, hundreds of artists from across the country journey here to St. John’s College, in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, for what’s called the Glen Workshop — a weeklong gathering sponsored by the literary journal “Image.”

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The Whites, who’ve been married nearly 18 years, said in interviews that the split is amicable and comes after visits to counselors over several years.

They blame two lives going in different directions.

Randy, however, said he takes “100 percent responsibility” for the breakup.

“I want to apologize for the poor decisions I’ve made in my life, to my congregation and to the body of Christ,” he told The Tampa Tribune. “I think I’ve let a lot of people down.”

Those regrets, he said, include how he has treated some people, lifestyle changes and being seen in public with women other than his wife, even if it was innocent.

He and Paula said the split involves no third party on either side.

Randy will stay at Without Walls as senior pastor while Paula concentrates on her ministry, which includes a TV show broadcast on several national networks including Black Entertainment Television, conferences, and book and video sales.

She’ll remain based in Tampa, with satellite operations in California, New York City and San Antonio.

Church attendance “will take a hit” from the news, Randy predicted. Without Walls reports having 23,000 members.

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While other agenda items were marked as amended, concurred or had check marks besides it, the Dennis Canon was not marked off.

At this stage, the documentary evidence supporting passage of the Dennis Canon, Resolution D-24, came to an end. No records of the House of Bishops, save for those appended to House of Deputies’ Committee Reports have survived, nor have the minutes or the messages to the House of Bishops from the Deputies confirming its action been retained in the archival record.

A final examination of the remaining documents for the Convention in the Archives, however, unearthed the missing 10th day summary in the “print shop” binder””a record of all items sent for duplication. On page 10, the summary reports resolution D-24 as amended was adopted by the Deputies, and message 204 memoralizing this action was sent to the House of Bishops””-however no copy of this message has survived either, and is known only by reference.

Given that the summary of legislation was produced on the same day as the actions it describes took place, it is reasonable to assume that it is a true and correct record of events. While this indirect evidence exists of passage of the Dennis Canon, no direct evidence has survived.

Wicks Stephens, chancellor of the Anglican Communion Network, said the “absence of usually present documentation is troubling and indeed suspicious.”

While acknowledging that the documentary evidence in the Archives could be used to argue the Dennis Canon passed Convention, it also “suggests that it may not have been. In that event one can argue that the court should put the burden of proving its valid establishment on the party asserting its validity ”“ TEC. At that point, how will TEC meet such a burden unless they can find the rest of the record?” he said.

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If progressives want to know why so many orthodox Anglicans feel that they cannot remain in the Episcopal Church, they should look to a large degree at their own words and actions. The attribution of speculated, and damaging, motives to orthodox Anglican leaders; “glee” at seeming progressive victories; insults and statements that the departures are inconsequential — all of these things, and many more, contribute to orthodox Anglicans feeling that they cannot stay in the Episcopal Church.

The view of orthodox Anglican leaders is so negative and one-sided on the progressive end that people are left with a stark choice. Given that all of us, including godly leaders, struggle with sin daily and have our own weaknesses, are orthodox Christian leaders such as (but not limited to) Minns and Duncan to be respected and trusted? Do they have good ends in mind for the church of God, and for the body of Christ? Or are they nefarious leaders who have been plotting the destruction of one segment of the body of Christ for a decade?

This is not the same question as whether to leave the Episcopal Church. Orthodox Anglicans hold different convictions on that matter, and some are still working through that issue. Rather, the question concerns whether we essentially trust orthodox Christian leaders to have the good of the body of Christ in mind, even if we are not going to follow certain ones in either leaving or staying in (as the case may be) the Episcopal Church. To allude to a choice that Harry Potter must make in J.K. Rowling’s latest bestseller, this is a question of choosing what we believe amid competing voices. The times demand this when orthodox Christian leaders are slandered with abandon.

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Forget, for the moment, that Zachary Crippen’s church has been in the news because of a nasty, high-profile divorce from its mother denomination.

And let’s sidestep the fact that there’s a dispute over who owns the towering stone church building and its belongings, including the 80-year-old organ.

This story is about the young man who brought music back into the lives of the congregation of Grace CANA Church, a group that broke away in March from the Episcopal Diocese of Colorado. The timing wasn’t the best. It was right before Easter, a highly attended service that begs for a church organist. But the organist and most of the choir did not join the breakaway.

Enter Crippen, a master of the keyboard with about eight years of piano lessons to his credit. That’s piano, not organ. He had never touched an organ, but he wasn’t deterred. He stepped into the vacuum and up to the organ ”” and it took him 10 minutes to figure out how to open it up.

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For those of you interested in this sort of thing, the local high school football team, ranked 8th nationally by ESPN, is playing Booker T. Washington from Florida, ranked 9th, and the game is televised on ESPN.

There are occasions when families do not talk to each other, and have deep tensions. Yet they remain families, whether they want to be or not. Family members can make pompous statements ”” “I am no longer your sister” ”” yet they obviously are. Likewise, in the Anglican Family, exclusion makes little sense, and the Lambeth Conference can survive as a less formal gathering, whether or not the bishops share communion or agree about anything much.

The Anglican Family worldwide can be seen to flourish in many different ways, even within parts of its extended family, such as the Methodist Church, that have developed a separate ecclesial identity. In turn, the Anglican Family can also be seen to be a part of the extended Catholic Family, whatever recent popes have thought about the validity of Anglican orders or shared communion.

All Anglicans have a common genetic link with the Church of England, but they have expressed their inheritance differently. However much we may regret this, we are now unlikely ever again to be a Communion. Yet perhaps that can free us to be something else.

We need not strive for conformity. We can be free to explore shared convictions with like-minded family members around the world, without denigrating other members who do not share these convictions. The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee has wisely done this for years.

As a post-colonial Church, the Anglican Family would learn to move beyond power and authority ”” no more Lambeth Resolutions or Windsor Process. Instead, we might discover the joys of sharing and learning from different members of the same family. We might even rekindle some of the genuine family affection that I have seen so often in my travels. Be not afraid. We can indeed flourish as the Anglican Family.

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“Sometimes I think these bishop elections are kind of treated with political nice, like we don’t do politics in the church,” Hunstad said. “Sometimes I think we need to create opportunities for people to be honest.”

Several of the posters eventually revealed their identities, including the Rev. Randy Smith, pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church in Crookston, Minn. As “Holy Discontent,” he wrote that the synod was in “tough shape,” that many quality pastors had left or been fired, and thriving congregations weren’t lifted up as models for the rest of the synod.

“People were ready for change, significant change,” Smith said in an interview this week. “The people spoke with the election.”

Steve Trandem, pastor of Calvary Lutheran Church in Bemidji, Minn., also posted on the site. He described himself as a friend of Wangberg, but said he appreciated his work in the parish more than as bishop.

“I think there was a general feeling on the part of many in the synod … that we had a constitutional expert in the synod office and they were looking more for someone who could be a pastor to the pastor,” Trandem said in an interview. “To be fair, there’s a question as to whether that can happen, but many pastors, me included, feel that’s still necessary.”

The synod, essentially a geographical area covering northwest Minnesota, includes 272 congregations with more than 330 ordained ministers and about 109,000 Lutherans.

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The bumper sticker had a big cross on it and read, “Back to basics: Feed the hungry, House the poor, Clothe the naked.”

Those are the basic values of being a Christian, aren’t they?

In looking at the Gospels, Jesus is constantly healing people and eating with people. Very rarely do I find Jesus, as he is healing or feeding people, asking, “Wait, what do you believe?” or “Who do you live with?” He simply feeds or eats with outcasts and heals people – even people who are of a different religious background than his!

This is the litmus test for being a Christian: Following a Jesus who says love is the only commandment and commands us to feed and heal and eat with outcasts. So, I wonder, how are we, as a Christian nation, doing with the basics? Maybe thinking about our nation begins by looking at our own corner of the world.

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For the laying down of the law of once marrying, the very origin of the human race is our authority; witnessing as it emphatically does what God constituted in the beginning for a type to be examined with care by posterity. For when He had moulded man, and had foreseen that a peer was necessary for him, He borrowed from his ribs one, and fashioned for him one woman; whereas, of course, neither the Artificer nor the material would have been insufficient (for the creation of more). There were more ribs in Adam, and hands that knew no weariness in God; but not more wives Or, “but no plurality of wives.” in the eye of God. And accordingly the man of God, Adam, and the woman of God, Eve, discharging mutually (the duties of) one marriage, sanctioned for mankind a type by (the considerations of) the authoritative precedent of their origin and the primal will of God. Finally, “there shall be,” said He, “two in one flesh,” not three nor four. On any other hypothesis, there would no longer be “one flesh,” nor “two (joined) into one flesh.” These will be so, if the conjunction and the growing together in unity take place once for all. If, however, (it take place) a second time, or oftener, immediately (the flesh) ceases to be “one,” and there will not be “two (joined) into one flesh,” but plainly one rib (divided) into more. But when the apostle interprets, “The two shall be (joined) into one flesh” of the Church and Christ, according to the spiritual nuptials of the Church and Christ (for Christ is one, and one is His Church), we are bound to recognise a duplication and additional enforcement for us of the law of unity of marriage, not only in accordance with the foundation of our race, but in accordance with the sacrament of Christ. From one marriage do we derive our origin in each case; carnally in Adam, spiritually in Christ. The two births combine in laying down one prescriptive rule of monogamy. In regard of each of the two, is he degenerate who transgresses the limit of monogamy. Plurality of marriage began with an accursed man. Lamech was the first who, by marrying himself to two women, caused three to be (joined) “into one flesh.”

–Tertullian

As odd is it might seem, the next to last day of 2003 may someday be seen as a fateful moment for the traditional family. That is the when the United States Drug Enforcement Agency busted a pair of methamphetamine dealers in Philadelphia.

In a remarkable example of the corrosive force liberalism exerts on our society, the arrest of these drug dealers led to an opinion issued July 31 by U.S. District Judge Marvin Katz that — if sustained by the Supreme Court — could erase the special status marriage and the traditional family enjoy in American law.

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He stands in an empty church, practicing. Always practicing. Ninety minutes every day, two mallets in each hand.

They fall gently on an old vibraphone he once rolled through the streets of Manhattan in another life. Another time. Back then a long-haired Norm Freeman played Broadway, Carnegie Hall, Madison Square Garden.

Now? He plays for a hundred people here. A hundred there. He leans over the instrument: Soft strains of “Stardust” lift to the vaulted church ceiling.

It’s hard to believe he once played with the thrash-metal band Metallica. Or at the MTV Music Awards. Or on Saturday Night Live.

“Trying to prove myself in the music business ultimately left me feeling empty,” says Freeman, 55, a husband and father of two. “It was from that place that I started a spiritual quest.”

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As Christians, we’ve learned that God is a forgiving God. We’ve learned that God not only exists, but that God’s very nature is love and that there is nothing we could ever do or think which would make God stop loving us, or being willing to forgive us. We call that “the good news,” and it is news that many people desperately want and need to hear.

They need to hear from us, as so many in the gospels heard from Jesus, “Your sins are forgiven.” That’s really the main message Christians have for this world and it’s what we promise to proclaim every time we renew our Baptismal Covenant: “Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?” I will. “Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?” I will. “Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?” I will. That’s our mission ”” the mission of the Church.

I wish I could promise that the Church is a perfect place, that we all just get along, and that you will never find yourself in the middle of a church fight ”“ whether it’s in a parish, a diocese, the national church, or a worldwide Communion. But I can’t promise you that, because the Church is a human, as well as divine, institution and certainly it is made up of very fallible human beings.

What I can promise is that the mission of the Church is the most important thing you can commit your life to, whether as a young person or an older person, whether clergy or lay, no matter where you spend most of your time on a day-by-day basis. Because everywhere you will find people who need to be reconciled to God or to another person, and your job is to help that happen.

It’s the main thing we do as Christians….

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THE nine men who climbed to the summit of the Colorado mountain were combat veterans who had fought in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam.

Several knew the pain of bullets tearing through flesh. Others couldn’t gather memories blown away by an explosion. Some had seen combat so close they killed with their knives.

They were a wary group of strangers, guarded and slow to trust, who had arrived at the Outward Bound Wilderness school in Leadville, Colorado, a few days before, wondering how a one-week course in the wilderness could help them heal. But on the fourth day of their five-day journey in mid-July, after more than three hours of tough climbing up steep, moss-covered scree fields and beyond the tree line, these hard military men, ranging in age from 23 to 52, mourned in silence, 13,000 feet above sea level on the summit of Virginia Peak. Stripped of life’s routines, they stood under an iron-gray early morning sky and finally allowed the tears to fall for friends who would never see this place.

“Look around this countryside: you guys deserve this,” said Bob O’Rourke, a 62-year-old retired marine and one of the instructors for the Outward Bound course. “Don’t forget this moment.” O’Rourke, a Vietnam veteran, choked back tears of his own. The men with him were silent as they looked out across vast granite bowls speckled with old mine entrances among the evergreens. The imposing silhouette of Huron Peak stared back from the southwest.

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Jesus has a very special love for you. [But] as for me–The silence and the emptiness is so great–that I look and do not see,–Listen and do not hear. –MOTHER TERESA TO THE REV. MICHAEL VAN DER PEET, SEPTEMBER 1979

On Dec. 11, 1979, Mother Teresa, the “Saint of the Gutters,” went to Oslo. Dressed in her signature blue-bordered sari and shod in sandals despite below-zero temperatures, the former Agnes Bojaxhiu received that ultimate worldly accolade, the Nobel Peace Prize. In her acceptance lecture, Teresa, whose Missionaries of Charity had grown from a one-woman folly in Calcutta in 1948 into a global beacon of self-abnegating care, delivered the kind of message the world had come to expect from her. “It is not enough for us to say, ‘I love God, but I do not love my neighbor,'” she said, since in dying on the Cross, God had “[made] himself the hungry one–the naked one–the homeless one.” Jesus’ hunger, she said, is what “you and I must find” and alleviate. She condemned abortion and bemoaned youthful drug addiction in the West. Finally, she suggested that the upcoming Christmas holiday should remind the world “that radiating joy is real” because Christ is everywhere–“Christ in our hearts, Christ in the poor we meet, Christ in the smile we give and in the smile that we receive.”

Yet less than three months earlier, in a letter to a spiritual confidant, the Rev. Michael van der Peet, that is only now being made public, she wrote with weary familiarity of a different Christ, an absent one. “Jesus has a very special love for you,” she assured Van der Peet. “[But] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see,–Listen and do not hear–the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak … I want you to pray for me–that I let Him have [a] free hand.”

The two statements, 11 weeks apart, are extravagantly dissonant. The first is typical of the woman the world thought it knew. The second sounds as though it had wandered in from some 1950s existentialist drama. Together they suggest a startling portrait in self-contradiction–that one of the great human icons of the past 100 years, whose remarkable deeds seemed inextricably connected to her closeness to God and who was routinely observed in silent and seemingly peaceful prayer by her associates as well as the television camera, was living out a very different spiritual reality privately, an arid landscape from which the deity had disappeared.

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For more than half a century, Rachel Kane kept the memories at bay.

There were her daughters to think of, twins born in a displaced persons camp in the aftermath of the second World War. Kane didn’t want to burden them with tales of the Holocaust, of a husband shot to death by the Nazis, a baby who starved to death in the forest, an extended family wiped out in a mass execution.

Nazi memories return. She didn’t explain the nightmares that woke her, screaming, in the long string of cramped apartments the family called home after resettling in Detroit and then Los Angeles.

Instead, the university-educated Hebrew teacher who spoke seven languages regaled her daughters with stories about her “beautiful life” before Hitler’s armies stormed Poland, successfully locking the war years away until 1998.

That was when her second husband died. When she began to lose her battle with dementia. When she became convinced that the soldiers were coming for her, as they’d done so many years before.

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Susan Rosenfeld’s marriage wasn’t what you’d call romantic. She was thrown up against a wall, doused with a bucket of cold water in bed, and, toward the end, became her husband’s punching bag. “Since I wear long sleeves, no one really knew,” she says. Looking back, Ms. Rosenfeld regrets keeping the abuse a secret. But “in the Jewish community, you don’t call the police on your husband.”

In her mid-30s, Ms. Rosenfeld hopes to remarry and build a new life for herself. But as an Orthodox Jew, a civil divorce is not sufficient. For Ms. Rosenfeld to be officially released from her vows, her husband has to grant her a Jewish bill of divorce, called a get. The document, which certifies the termination of the marriage–the Aramaic text declares “you are hereby permitted to marry any man”–not only allows women to remarry, but ensures that future children will not be deemed mamzerim (bastards able to marry only other mamzerim).

Two years have passed and Ariel HaCohen, Ms. Rosenfeld’s husband, has refused to grant her the get. This makes Ms. Rosenfeld an aguna–literally, an anchored woman–trapped in a dead marriage.

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From Zenit:

The nurse warned that the greatest problem of the continent isn’t poverty or a lack of infrastructure, but rather “the absence of reference points [”¦] an ideal and a sense of the meaning of life is lacking.”

She contended that this has caused a general insecurity in personal relationships.

Busingye said she combats this phenomenon by responding not only to the material needs of her patients, but trying to make them aware of their worth, which cannot be reduced even if they are sunk in misery.”

To promote change, Busingye encourages not only children, but also their parents, to get an education.

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Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney said this week that as president he would allow individual states to keep abortion legal, two weeks after telling a national television audience that he supports a constitutional amendment to ban the procedure nationwide.

In an interview with a Nevada television station on Tuesday, Romney said Roe. v. Wade should be abolished and vowed to “let states make their own decision in this regard.” On Aug. 6, he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that he supports a human life amendment to the Constitution that would protect the unborn.

“I do support the Republican platform, and I do support that being part of the Republican platform, and I’m pro-life,” Romney said in the ABC interview, broadcast days before his victory among conservative Iowa voters in the Ames straw poll.

The two very different statements reflect the challenge for Romney, who has reinvented himself as a champion of the antiabortion movement in recent years and is seeking to become the conservative alternative to former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani in the battle for the Republican presidential nomination.

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Near a prairie dotted with cattle and green with soy beans, barley, corn and oats, two bearded Hasidic men dressed in black pray outside a slaughterhouse here that is managed by an evangelical Christian.

What brought these men together could easily have kept them apart: religion.

The two Hasidim oversee shehitah, the Jewish ritual slaughtering of meat according to the Book of Leviticus. The meat is then shipped to Wise Organic Pastures, a kosher food company in Brooklyn owned by Issac Wiesenfeld and his family. When Mr. Wiesenfeld sought an organic processor that used humane methods five years ago, he found Scott Lively, who was just beginning Dakota Beef, now one of the largest organic meat processors in the country.

Mr. Lively adheres to a diet he believes Jesus followed. Like Mr. Wiesenfeld, he says the Bible prescribes that he use organic methods to respect the earth, treat his workers decently and treat the cattle that enter his slaughterhouse as humanely as possible.

“We learn everything from the Old Testament,” Mr. Lively said, “from keeping kosher to responsible capitalism.”

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