Enjoy it.

Shockingly, even today, it appears that the British courts can get it right. Their record in dealing with “mercy killings” provides evidence that we do not need the blunt instrument of a new law legalising euthanasia/assisted suicide.

Robert Cook, 60, suffocated his wife of 29 years with a plastic bag after she took an overdose. Vanessa Cook had worsening multiple sclerosis and had written of her wish to die. On Friday her husband received a 12-month suspended sentence, after pleading guilty to manslaughter on the ground of diminished responsibility. The judge called it an exceptional case. Last November Stephen Jobling, 52, was also given a 12-month suspended sentence after a bungled suicide pact with his ailing 72-year-old wife. Both survived taking a drug overdose.

Not all “mercy killings” are seen in the same way. Last May a jury found Frank Lund, 52, guilty of murder for smothering his wife. Patricia Lund, 62, suffered from depression and irritable bowel syndrome, but was not terminally ill. The judge called the case “highly unusual, if not unique” and imposed a tariff of only three years.

Read it all.

S.G. PRESTON IS a Knight of Prayer. Each morning at his Vancouver, Wash., home, he wakes up and prays one of the 50-odd psalms he has committed to memory, sometimes donning a Kelly green monk’s habit. In Durham, N.C., Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove and fellow members of Rutba House gather for common meals as well as morning and evening prayer based on the Benedictine divine office. Zach Roberts, founder of the Dogwood Abbey in Winston-Salem, meets regularly with a Trappist monk to talk about how to contemplate God. Roman Catholic monastic traditions loom large in their daily routines – yet all three men are evangelical Protestants.

The image of the Catholic monk – devoted to a cloistered life of fasting and prayer, his tonsured scalp hidden by a woolen cowl – has long provoked the disdain of Protestants. Their theological forefathers denounced the monastic life: True Christians, the 16th-century Reformers said, lived wholly in the world, spent their time reading the Bible rather than chanting in Latin, and accepted that God saved them by his grace alone, not as reward for prayers, fasting, or good works. Martin Luther called monks and wandering friars “lice placed by the devil on God Almighty’s fur coat.” Of all Protestants, American evangelicals in particular – activist, family-oriented, and far more concerned with evangelism than solitary study or meditative prayer – have historically viewed monks as an alien species, and a vaguely demonic one at that.

Yet some evangelicals are starting to wonder if Luther’s judgment was too hasty. There is now a growing movement to revive evangelicalism by reclaiming parts of Roman Catholic tradition – including monasticism. Some 100 groups that describe themselves as both evangelical and monastic have sprung up in North America, according to Rutba House’s Wilson-Hartgrove. Many have appeared within the past five years. Increasing numbers of evangelical congregations have struck up friendships with Catholic monasteries, sending church members to join the monks for spiritual retreats. St. John’s Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in Minnesota, now makes a point of including interested evangelicals in its summer Monastic Institute.

“I grew up in a tradition that believes Catholics are pagans,” said Roberts, who was raised Southern Baptist and serves as a pastor in a Baptist church. “I never really understood that. Now I’d argue against that wholeheartedly.”

Read it all.

Parishioners Give $106,000 over Planned Amount in December 2007;
One Family’s Matching Gift Brings Total to $212,000

By Joy Hunter

(This article was originally appeared in the February/March 2008 issue of the Jubilate Deo, the Newspaper for the Diocese of South Carolina.)

The folks at St. Paul’s, Summerville, believed they were called to something new. Having lived with the old model of stewardship with its fall campaign, pledges and various versions of an every member canvass, lengthy prayer and discernment led the church to abandon the whole package. Instead, the vestry emerged from a year-long Sabbath reflection with a new vision for stewardship. So, beginning in the fall of 2006, for the 2007 budget, they had no stewardship campaign, no pledge cards, no canvas, no reminder notices, and no Sunday offering plates at their main service.

A Whole New Stewardship Paradigm

“We were in a whole new paradigm,” says Rector, Mike Lumpkin. “The operative word became, ”˜We intend to rely upon the Lord’s provision.’ Our task, as a staff and vestry was to pray intentionally, regularly and to trust God for his provision. Meanwhile, we began a long-term project of introducing parish families to authentic financial wellness using Biblically-based financial principles.”

Unfortunately, at the November 2007 Vestry meeting they faced a growing budget deficit. “Our question was, do we go back to the parish and ask them to help?” asked Lumpkin. “We felt like that would be going back to the old model, and we rejected that idea. Instead we stuck with our original plan: faith and prayer.”

Out of that Vestry meeting came the idea of creating a prayer card which was included in every Sunday bulletin in December. Though it didn’t mention finances directly it did call members to offer themselves to God. In addition, the Vestry asked Senior Warden, Scott Poelker, to speak to the congregation, not about finances, but about faithfulness. He agreed with the vestry not to mention the particular circumstances.

That service was a turning point according to many. “I was really touched,” says parishioner Cathie Diggs. “I think what Scott said made people think. It was all about trusting God, and I believe it made people more willing to trust God with their finances.”

A Matching Gift Offer

The same day Scott Poelker spoke, a family came to Mike Lumpkin and said they believed there was a “spiritual stronghold related to generosity” in the church. To counter the stronghold, they were willing to match dollar-for-dollar any gift given to St. Paul’s over and above what individuals had originally intended. The only additional stipulation was that the gift be given by Advent IV, December 23. That left three Sundays and 15 days before the deadline.

“St. Paul’s Vestry has a Sunday luncheon once a month, and it just so happened that our luncheon fell on that day,” said Lumpkin. “The news was received with great enthusiasm,” he said. “One vestry member immediately said, ”˜I’ll commit an additional $1,000 right now!’”

“I met later with the family to go over details,” says Lumpkin. “They wanted to stress that there would be no cap on the gift. I would have thought it would have been quite reasonable to put a cap on it, but they said, ”˜No. This is the way God told us to do it.’”

The church sent out a parish-wide e-mail letting individuals know about the matching challenge. It was also shared during the Sunday services on December 16.

At the December 17 vestry meeting it was reported that 21 families had responded, the parish had received $9,500 as “over and above” gifts. It was also reported that the year-to-date deficit was $84,000! “That response was a disappointment,” said Lumpkin. “We acknowledged that there was a spiritual stronghold and we agreed as a Vestry to pray harder and more intentionally.”

By Friday, December 21 the situation had not changed significantly. “We wondered, again, if we needed to do more, but often messages sent out by the church are considered guilt trips or manipulation, so we didn’t say anything,” says Lumpkin.

A Turnaround

Though nothing more was said to the parish family, Lumpkin sent an e-mail to the vestry on Friday, December 21 asking the vestry to pray more, crying out to the Lord, for the ”˜Over and Above Challenge,’ as it had come to be named, and for year-end generosity through December 31 as well. On Advent IV, December 23, the date the challenge ended, the parish had made sudden significant progress. By then, they had responses from a total of 97 families and $106,000 had been given in “over-and-above” gifts!

Michael called the family about the amount. They were blessed by the turnaround in generosity, but at the same time acknowledged, “That’s a higher amount than we anticipated,” they said. “This is a real stretch for us, as well. But give us a few days. We’re doing this because we know God has called us to.” On Sunday, December 30 the parish received the additional $106,000 gift from that family as well, bringing the total to $212,000!

First Priority ”“ Giving Back to God

At year’s end, the vestry celebrated a $155,000 surplus after closing the books on 2007! The vestry approved three priorities for the initial uses of the surplus: One, to give ten percent to outreach ministries; two, to retire a secondary mortgage; and three, to use a small portion for the 2008 budget. The surplus $50,000 remained for the vestry to prayerfully discern its use.

In reflecting on the experience, Lumpkin said, “It is St. Paul who speaks of ”˜spiritual strongholds’ in II Corinthians 10. He tells us not to use the weapons of the world, but weapons that have divine power to demolish strongholds. We believe intentional, focused prayer, plus the kind of faith that is ”˜certain of what we do not see,’ (Hebrews 11:1) are two of those weapons. Anytime a Scrooge-like spirit of hoarding, indifference and apathy exists in a community, then you’re dealing with a spiritual stronghold only God and the supernatural power of His Spirit can overthrow. To whatever degree that particular stronghold exists at St. Paul’s, the leverage applied at year-end by means of the Over and Above Challenge significantly undermined its walls!”

What a lot of fun.

Watch it all.

Watch the whole inspiring thing.

The other day, I admitted to a friend that I don’t have health insurance.

“What?!” he gasped. “But you’re married. Isn’t that part of the deal?” He reacted as if I had just told him that I believed in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or a flat tax — something embarrassingly ridiculous. Because that’s what being uninsured is these days — a character flaw. It’s how you can pay taxes, volunteer, donate to public radio and still be considered a drain on society.

As my friend was, you may be wondering, “Seriously, how can you not have health insurance? Don’t you work? Are you illiterate? Do you have no self-worth whatsoever?!” The short answer is, my husband and I are both freelancers so we have no workplace insurance. And the $500-plus monthly premium? You might as well say our health depended on our adding a new wing to our apartment.

Read it all.

I cannot possibly do it justice without simply saying read it all.

NICHOLAS LASH, professor at Cambridge University, has been one of the most influential theologians in the English-speaking world for the past generation. His work has helped spur the renewal of confidence among orthodox theologians working in mainline academic settings” in the United Kingdom and the U.S. He has engaged philosophers as diverse as Marx and Wittgenstein and drawn on theologians across the spectrum, from Aquinas to liberationists. His own broad reach of interests is reflected in his remark that “to think as a Christian is to try to understand the stellar spaces, the arrangements of micro-organisms and DNA molecules, the history of Tibet, the operation of economic markets, toothache, King Lear, the CIA, and grandma’s cooking–or, as Aquinas put it, ‘all things’–in relation to that uttering, utterance and enactment of God which they express and represent. To act as a Christian is to work with, to alter or, if need be, to endure all things in conformity with that understanding.” A Roman Catholic, he likes to point out that the last Roman Catholic who held his chair at Cambridge (back in the 16th century) was beheaded.

You’ve written that “care with language” is the “first casualty of original sin.” Can you give some examples of poor word care?

Examples are easy: all laziness, carelessness, cliche. I have often quoted a remark that I heard Gerald O’Collins, the Australian Jesuit, make 40 years ago: “A theologian is someone who watches their language in the presence of God.” The church becomes an academy of word care to the extent that people learn that even the most academically demanding and technical theology has to be done, at least metaphorically, on one’s knees, with one’s shoes off.

One of your books is titled Believing Three Ways in One God. Doesn’t this approach to understanding the Trinity fall into what Theology 101 classes teach is the heresy of modalism?

If such classes do teach that, then the teachers should be shot…

Read it all.

Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, has sent a public letter to national election pollsters, blasting them for only asking Republicans about their religious practices.

“So far, exit polls, media reports and pundits have largely missed the story because they’re using an outdated script, which leaves the impression that religion and faith matter only to Republicans,” Dean said in a letter on Friday.

Following on earlier complaints by progressive evangelicals, Dean notes that Democratic voters in the Iowa caucuses and Michigan primary weren’t asked about their religion, while Republicans were. In South Carolina, exit pollsters asked Republicans extensively about their faith, while Democrats were only asked how often they attend worship services.

Read it all.

Religions seem ancient, and many are. But they all began somewhere, and a considerable number began in the USA. The most successful new religious movements of the 19th and 20th centuries ”” Mormonism and Scientology ”” were both “made in America.” And according to J. Gordon Melton of the Institute for the Study of American Religion, Americans continue to pump out new religions at a rate of about 40 to 50 per year.

For the past two years, I have asked students in my introductory religion courses at Boston University to get together in groups and invent their own religions. They present their religious creations to their classmates, and then everyone votes (with fake money in a makeshift offering plate) for the new religions they like best. This assignment encourages students to reflect on what separates “winners” and “losers” in America’s freewheeling spiritual marketplace. It also yields intriguing data regarding what sort of religious beliefs and practices young people love and hate.

The new religious concoctions my students stir up might seem to mirror the diversity of American religion itself. Students tantalize one another with a religion (Dessertism) that preaches the stomach as the way to the soul, another (The Congregation of Wisdom) that honors Jeopardy! phenom Ken Jennings as its patron saint, and yet another (Exetazo) dedicated to sorting out the pluses and minuses of all the other religions so you can find a faith tailored to your own unique personality.

What strikes me most about my students’ religions, however, is how similar they are…

Read it all.

UGANDA’S rebel outfit, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), has been angered by a new US proposal urging rebel leader Joseph Kony (pictured) and his other indicted colleagues to surrender to the government of Uganda and give up themselves to the national judicial process, largely to shake off the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The proposal, circulating to negotiators in the South Sudan regional capital Juba, has prompted Kony to accuse US President George Bush’s administration of exerting pressure on the rebels and using underhand methods. The US and EU last week joined the South Sudan mediated talks in Juba as observers.

In a document; Scenario For Peace and Justice in Northern Uganda, Mr Timothy Shortley, senior adviser to US Assistant Secretary for African Affairs, Dr Jendayi Fraser, who has been in Juba as a US observer to the peace talks, says his proposals are meant to expedite the negotiations.

In the paper, the US representative proposes that Joseph Kony and his colleagues who are wanted by the ICC, place themselves in the custody of the Ugandan authorities. This, he says, would ensure they are safe and a peace agreement signed in Juba.

Read it all.

Chicago’s new Episcopal bishop and the church’s national leader sent a clear message Sunday about where they stand on gay clergy, a smoldering issue that threatens to tear apart the denomination.

Wrapping up a five-day tour in honor of Jeffrey Lee, the new Chicago bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori declared that the American church will not stand alone in its support of gay clergy during an international meeting in July in Lambeth, England.

“Many more [bishops] than you might expect are sympathetic,” Jefferts Schori, the presiding Episcopal bishop, told parishioners at St. Nicholas Church in Elk Grove Village. “They are not, however, the loudest voices.”

Later in Chicago, Lee was seated at St. James Cathedral and reminded audience members of their call to ministry by virtue of their baptism, not their liberal or conservative interpretations of Scripture.

“That’s one of the tragedies afflicting the church right now,” he said. “So many of us seem to think that salvation depends on our theological correctness.”

Read it all.

In Our Mutual Friend, the drunk Mr Dolls is regarded as a child by the young girl who cares for him, as if she were his parent. As for him, “it was always on the conscience of the paralytic scarecrow that he had betrayed his sharp parent for threepennyworths of rum, which were all gone, and that her sharpness would infallibly detect his having done it, sooner or later”.

There is a mixture of guilt and incapacity that, in our generation, we attach to a condition called alcoholism. Yet many people think of alcoholism as an illness. If so, it is not an illness like measles, which admits no admixture of guilt, resolution and disappointed reform.

Alcoholism falls within the category of addiction and, within the past generation, addiction seems to be blamed for an increasingly wide range of bad behaviour. Drugs, we suppose, are addictive. Cigarettes are a kind of drug. Patterns of eating seem to be addictive, not just eating chocolate, but comfort eating, over-eating and compulsive dieting.

Read it all.

Forty one percent of registered voters told the latest Pew Research Center survey that they disliked the idea of Mr. Clinton back at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, which could happen if his wife, Senator Hillary Clinton, is elected president. In October, 34 percent of voters disliked the idea.

Read it all.

Holy Cross, Stateburg, “Gets Serious about Ministry,”
Receives $1.5 Million in Anonymous Gift; $250,000 Grant

By Joy Hunter

(This article was originally appeared in the February/March 2008 issue of the Jubilate Deo, the Newspaper for the Diocese of South Carolina.)

Seven-and-a-half years are a long time to be out of your main church building. It’s also a long time to be without a full-time rector, but that was the reality for the parishioners of Holy Cross, Stateburg. Severe termite damage, discovered in 2000, rendered their historic building unusable. That same year their rector left, and the church was assigned an interim rector.

As the “interim” period stretched into years, Bishop Salmon called the vestry to get serious about ministry. He urged them to step out in faith, look for a full-time rector and purchase a rectory. (They had sold their dilapidated rectory a few years prior.)

Funds were available to cover a rector’s salary for two years. During the interim period they had been able to put money away. However they still were hesitant. With the building in severe disrepair, how could they spend funds on anything other than facilities?

Heeding the Bishop’s Call

Yet, in September 2007, they heeded the Bishop’s words and called The Reverend Tommy Allen to be their full-time Rector. When Tommy joined the parish, he and his wife, Kimberly, moved into a newly purchased rectory.

“When I came in September, I knew it was going to be a challenge,” said Allen. “The parish chapel, where we currently meet, is small and cramped. After a couple of nights of tossing and turning in bed, the Lord had to teach me to let it go.”

Bishop Salmon also reminded Allen to focus on pastoring and teaching. “This community is growing,” Allen said. “There are plenty of opportunities for ministry.” In addition to Shaw Air Force base, just two miles away, the Third Army US Headquarters is planning to move between five and eight thousand people to the area in the next two to three years.

Allen found it a stretch, but he focused, as the Bishop suggested, on pastoring and teaching, and he cast a vision for ministry. “I’ve always believed that if you have strong biblical teaching and preaching, traditional liturgy, and a genuine love for those you serve, there is no better recipe,” Allen said.

The week prior to Thanksgiving, Allen received a phone call from someone asking to meet him to discuss a financial donation. They agreed to meet the Wednesday prior to Thanksgiving. Following the phone call, Allen received an engineering report that said their building was in need of “immediate shoring up” or the roof would collapse. “I already knew what it was going to cost to have the building restored,” said Allen. “This would be an additional $30,000 – $50,000.”

Jesus Takes Material Matters Seriously

The vestry was scheduled to meet the next Tuesday and, after praying about it, Tommy felt led to speak about making the incarnation relevant to how church business is conducted. “Jesus Christ came here in the flesh,” said Allen. “He takes material matters seriously. And we need to, too. I told them that it was our obligation to take care of the building. ”˜You can disagree,’ I said, ”˜but it’s important for all of us to be unified and on the same page. We need to shore up the building and make plans to expand our already existing chapel so we can grow and get back in our sanctuary.’”

“When we took a vote, everyone’s hand went up,” said Allen. “You could actually feel the Holy Spirit moving. It was as though a wind blew right through the room.”

“The parishioners of Holy Cross were determined to keep this ministry alive,” said Allen. They were ready for something to happen.”

Something did happen. The very next day Allen was handed a check for $1.5 million. To say the least, it was much more than he expected. “I had thought we might receive $10,000 – $15,000,” said Allen, “something we could use to offset the cost of the new landscaping at the rectory.”

Instead, the gift will enable Holy Cross to repair the damaged trusses, pay off the mortgage on the new rectory, set aside funds for ministry expansion and get them back into their sanctuary. In addition, the church received a $250,000 grant through SC Senator Jim DeMint’s office from America’s Treasures. “That program has to do with valuing and restoring buildings that are part of America’s rich history,” said Allen. The Vestry’s goal is to restore the sanctuary to its original condition.

“The moral of this story is profound,” says Allen. “The church has to decide to step out and engage the culture with the gospel. This was a movement of the Holy Spirit. The donor saw what was going on here, the enthusiasm and excitement and wanted to share in the vision. I could tell things were going to happen. I just didn’t think it would be this soon. We’re baptizing people. We’ve got weddings scheduled. Our youth ministry is starting: God is on the move.”

There is something missing from this otherwise typical bustling cityscape. There are taxis and buses. There are hip bars and pollution. Every other person is talking into a cellphone. But there are no plastic shopping bags, the ubiquitous symbol of urban life.

In 2002, Ireland passed a tax on plastic bags; customers who want them must now pay 33 cents per bag at the register. There was an advertising awareness campaign. And then something happened that was bigger than the sum of these parts.

Within weeks, plastic bag use dropped 94 percent. Within a year, nearly everyone had bought reusable cloth bags, keeping them in offices and in the backs of cars. Plastic bags were not outlawed, but carrying them became socially unacceptable ”” on a par with wearing a fur coat or not cleaning up after one’s dog.

“When my roommate brings one in the flat it annoys the hell out of me,” said Edel Egan, a photographer, carrying groceries last week in a red backpack.

Drowning in a sea of plastic bags, countries from China to Australia, cities from San Francisco to New York have in the past year adopted a flurry of laws and regulations to address the problem, so far with mixed success. The New York City Council, for example, in the face of stiff resistance from business interests, passed a measure requiring only that stores that hand out plastic bags take them back for recycling.

Read it all.

The Anglican archbishop in charge of drawing up the document intended to reunite his warring Church said he believes that schism can still be averted in spite of divisions over the issue of homosexuals.

The Archbishop of the West Indies, the Most Rev Drexel Gomez, said that a new formula had been found that would allow the disciplining of errant churches while respecting the traditional autonomy of the 38 worldwide Anglican provinces. Urging all Anglican bishops to attend the Lambeth Conference this year, he said that it would be a “tremendous tragedy” if the Church fell apart.

A new document to be published this week would form “a basic way of holding each other accountable as a Communion”, he said. But he indicated that the Episcopal Church of the United States was unlikely to face discipline or any form of exclusion from the Anglican Communion as a result of consecrating Gene Robinson, who is openly gay, as Bishop of New Hampshire in 2003.

Read it all.

The Giants were not even supposed to be here, taking an unlikely playoff path through the behemoths of their conference and regarded, once they alighted on Super Bowl XLII, as little more than charming foils for the New England Patriots’ assault on immortality.

But with their defense battering this season’s National Football League’s most valuable player, Tom Brady, and Giants quarterback Eli Manning playing more like Brady than Brady himself, the Giants produced one of the greatest upsets in Super Bowl history Sunday night, beating the previously undefeated Patriots, 17-14.

The Giants had seemingly been enlivened for the postseason by a 3-point loss to the Patriots in their regular-season finale on Dec. 29, a game in which the Giants had nothing on the line but pride and competitive spirit. A little more than a month later, they topped themselves, winning the franchise’s first championship since the 1991 Super Bowl.

Back then, Bill Belichick was the Giants’ defensive coordinator. On Sunday, he was the coach who had led the Patriots to the brink of a historic 19-0 perfect season, had survived a spying scandal that cost him money and his team a first-round draft pick, had weathered whispers in recent days that a previous title might be tainted. But he could only watch as it all collapsed under the weight of the Giants’ ferocious pass rush. For another year, the 1972 Miami Dolphins will stand alone with the only perfect season in N.F.L. history. The Patriots are, in the end, only almost perfect.

“It’s the greatest victory in the history of this franchise, without question,” the Giants co-owner John Mara said, his voice hoarse. “I just want to say to all you Giants fans who have supported us for more than 30 years at Giants Stadium, for all those years in Yankee Stadium and some of you even back to the Polo Grounds, this is for you.”

Read it all.

“I have a great respect for Barack Obama,” noted Huckabee, during a “Tonight Show” visit. “I think he’s a person who is trying to do in many ways what I hope I’m trying to do and that is to say, ‘Let’s quit what I call horizontal politics.’

“Everything in this country is not left, right, liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican. I think the country is looking for somebody who is vertical, who is thinking, ‘Let’s take America up and not down.’ ”

This is how the Southern Baptist pastor tweaked his “vertical” credo on “Meet the Press,” facing journalist Tim Russert: “There has been a huge cultural shift in this country, Tim. And I think that’s why many Americans are seeking leadership that has a positive and optimistic spirit. … I think the American people are hungry for vertical politics, where we have leaders who lift us up rather than those who tear us down.”

The former Arkansas governor has used the word “vertical” so many times that enquiring politicos want to know: What’s “up” with this guy? Some worry that, as critic Josh Marshall put it, Huckabee is sending a “clever dog whistle call out to Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals that his politics are God’s politics.”

This kind of uplifting, vaguely spiritual language may make some people uncomfortable, but there is nothing unusual about it, according to former White House insider Michael Gerson, the evangelical scribe who helped craft the early speeches of President George W. Bush.

“Making use of these kinds of non-sectarian religious references is, itself, the great tradition of American political speechmaking,” said Gerson, who is now a Washington Post opinion columnist. “As a speechwriter, when I hear this kind of language it tells me that someone is trying to describe a politics of idealism and aspiration. It’s a kind of bringing-America-together language and there is certainly nothing new about political leaders trying to do that.”

Read it all.

It was shortly before 1 a.m. on Feb. 3, 1943 — 65 years ago today — and a German submarine had just blown a gaping hole in the converted cruise ship [named the Dorchester], which was packed with more than 900 soldiers, seamen and civilians headed for bases on the icy reaches of Greenland.

The ship would have about 25 minutes before it sank into the frigid North Atlantic.

As stunned soldiers clambered onto the deck, many started to gather around four officers who had grouped themselves together.

The officers — the Rev. George Fox, Rabbi Alexander Goode, the Rev. Clark Poling and the Rev. John Washington — were the ship’s chaplains. They comforted the men, prayed with them, tried to calm them down, and scrounged up spare life jackets for the dozens who had failed to put on their own before the attack.

Then, at some point, witnesses said, one of the chaplains took off his own cork-filled life jacket and gave it to a soldier who didn’t have one. Before long, none of the chaplains was wearing one.

The ship tilted heavily to starboard and then slipped beneath the sea. Of the 904 men on board, only 229 survived

Read it all.

A defensive battle so far, and still anyone’s game.

Most Kenyans have a strong faith. The majority are Christian with a considerable Muslim minority. But, some Kenyans are becoming increasingly upset with church leaders and are criticising them for letting their ethnic allegiances get in the way of promoting peace.

Listen to it all.

Professor JOHN GREEN (Senior Fellow, Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and Director, Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics, University of Akron, Ohio): Well Kim, there’s a couple of interesting patterns here. Senator Clinton and Senator Obama have competed very evenly for the votes of white Protestants, both mainline Protestants and evangelical Protestants. And in the states where Senator Obama has won, such as in Iowa, he tended to do a little bit better in that competition. Whereas the states where Senator Clinton won, she tended to do a little bit better — so a lot of division among white Protestants. Part of the dynamic here, though, is age. Barack Obama seems to have done very well with younger evangelicals, younger mainline Protestants — some of them very observant in religious terms, but also some of them perhaps not as observant. So he’s kind of gotten both ends of the spectrum. Whereas Senator Clinton really appealed much more to older mainline Protestants and evangelicals.

[KIM] LAWTON: And what about the Catholic vote, which is so important in this election?

Prof. GREEN: One of the really interesting things here is that Senator Clinton really has done a lot better in the Catholic vote in all of the early primary states. She’s done very well among white Catholics, a critical constituency for the fall campaign. She’s also done well among Hispanic Catholics. That’s one area where Senator Obama has not been able to compete as effectively thus far.

Read it all.

In a culture awash in celebrity endorsements, it was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized the value of branding the Bible. A few years ago, Canongate issued the “Pocket Canons” — individual books of the Bible reprinted with introductions by various cultural luminaries. As Canongate’s publisher, Jamie Byng, said: “The Bible’s daunting length only added to its inaccessibility.” Still, he fretted about his decision. “However we jazzed the Good Book up, would anyone actually buy such editions?”

They did — in droves. According to Canongate, the Pocket Canons sold more than 900,000 copies. They were followed up, in 2005, by “Revelations: Personal Responses to the Books of the Bible,” a collection of the introductions written for the Pocket Canons. In his own introduction to the collection, Richard Holloway (the maverick former Bishop of Edinburgh) notes that some Christians were appalled by the less-than-orthodox sensibility of the Pocket Canons; a few even found them blasphemous.

But he assures readers that “the best way to get to the layers of meaning in a great text is not to ask propagandists or special pleaders to explain it, but to get writers to bring their own passion and insight to the task.” The Bible, he tells us, is “above all, a work of literature.” Ardent Christians, in other words, might not have as sophisticated an understanding of Scripture as novelists do — given that believers actually embrace the Bible as the inspired word of God.

Read the whole article.

In his new book, Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks (no relative, alas) tells the poignant story of Clive Wearing, an eminent musician and musicologist, who was struck by a devastating brain infection. The result was acute amnesia. Wearing was unable to remember anything for more than a few seconds. As his wife Deborah put it: “It was as if every waking moment was the first waking moment.”

It is a heartbreaking story. Unable to thread experiences together, he was caught in an endless present that had no connection with anything that had gone before. He had no past at all. In a moment of awareness he said about himself: “I haven’t heard anything, seen anything, touched anything, smelt anything. It’s like being dead.”

Two things broke through his isolation. One was his love for his wife. Whenever he saw her he felt intense relief, knowing that he was not alone, that she was there, loving and caring for him. The other was music. He could still sing, play the organ and conduct a choir with all his old skill and verve.

What was it about music, Sacks asks, that enabled him, while playing or conducting, to overcome his amnesia? He suggests that when we “remember” a melody, we recall one note at a time, yet each note relates to the whole. He quotes Victor Zuckerkandl, who wrote: “Hearing a melody is hearing, having heard, and being about to hear, all at once. Every melody declares to us that the past can be there without being remembered, the future without being foreknown.” Music is a form of sensed continuity that can sometimes break through the most overpowering disconnections in our experience of time.

Read it all.

At a New York or Los Angeles cocktail party, few would dare make a pejorative comment about Barack Obama’s race or Hillary Clinton’s sex. Yet it would be easy to get away with deriding Mike Huckabee’s religious faith.

Liberals believe deeply in tolerance and over the last century have led the battles against prejudices of all kinds, but we have a blind spot about Christian evangelicals. They constitute one of the few minorities that, on the American coasts or university campuses, it remains fashionable to mock.

Scorning people for their faith is intrinsically repugnant, and in this case it also betrays a profound misunderstanding of how far evangelicals have moved over the last decade. Today, conservative Christian churches do superb work on poverty, AIDS, sex trafficking, climate change, prison abuses, malaria and genocide in Darfur.

Bleeding-heart liberals could accomplish far more if they reached out to build common cause with bleeding-heart conservatives. And the Democratic presidential candidate (particularly if it’s Mr. Obama, to whom evangelicals have been startlingly receptive) has a real chance this year of winning large numbers of evangelical voters.

Read it all.

t begins to sound a bit naughty — all this talk about the need to “stimulate” the economy, as if we were discussing how to make a porn film. I don’t mean to trivialize our economic difficulties or the need for effective government intervention, but we have to face a disconcerting fact: For years now, that strange stimulus-crazed beast, the economy, has been going its own way, increasingly disconnected from the toils and troubles of ordinary Americans.

The economy, for example, has been expanding, at least until now, and growth is supposed to guarantee general well-being. As long as the gross domestic product grows, World Money Watch’s Web site assures us, “so will business, jobs and personal income.”

But hellooo, we’ve had brisk growth for the past few years, as the president has tirelessly reminded us, only without those promised increases in personal income, at least not for the poor and the middle class. According to a study just released by the Economic Policy Institute, real wages actually fell last year. Growth, some of the economists are conceding in perplexity, has been “decoupled” from widely shared prosperity.

I first began to sense this in the boom years of the late 1990s, when I was working in entry-level jobs for my book “Nickel and Dimed.” While the stock market soared and fortunes were being made in the time it takes to say “IPO,” my $6-to-$8-an-hour co-workers lunched on hot dog buns because that was all they could afford and, in some cases, fretted about whether they could find a safe place to sleep.

Growth is not the only economic indicator that has let us down. In the past five years, America’s briskly rising productivity has been the envy of much of the world. But again, there’s been no corresponding increase in most people’s wages. It’s not supposed to be this way, of course. Economists have long believed that some sort of occult process would intervene and adjust wages upward as people worked harder and more efficiently.

We like to attribute our high productivity to technological advances and better education. But a revealing 2001 study by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. also credited America’s productivity growth to “managerial . . . innovations” and cited Wal-Mart as a model performer, meaning that our productivity also relies on fiendish schemes to extract more work for less pay. Yes, you can generate more output per apparent hour of work by falsifying time records, speeding up assembly lines, doubling workloads and cutting back on breaks. That may look good from the top, but at the middle and the bottom, it can feel a lot like pain.

.

For years, as many as 200 members of Immanuel Bible Church and their friends have gathered in the church’s fellowship hall to watch the Super Bowl on its six-foot screen. The party featured hard hitting on the TV, plenty of food — and prayer.

But this year, Immanuel’s Super Bowl party is no more. After a crackdown by the National Football League on big-screen Super Bowl gatherings by churches, the Springfield church has sacked its event. Instead, church members will host parties in their homes.

Immanuel is among a number of churches in the Washington area and elsewhere that have been forced to use a new playbook to satisfy the NFL, which said that airing games at churches on large-screen TV sets violates the NFL copyright.

Ministers are not happy.

“There is a part of me that says, ‘Gee, doesn’t the NFL have enough money already?'” said Steve Holley, Immanuel’s executive pastor. He pointed out that bars are still allowed to air the game on big-screens TV sets. “It just doesn’t make sense.”

Read it all.