Wando High School senior Ian Lund knew he was risking his life when he tried to help a stranger trapped in an overturned van on U.S. Highway 17.

But he also realized it would be worse to do nothing at all.

The decision came to him in an instant, when he looked through the van’s windshield and saw John D. Green, 54, of Charleston bleeding heavily and in pain from a broken arm.

“The first thing I smell is gasoline,” Lund said. “I’m like, ‘Oh, boy, this is not good.’ ”

Lund’s bravery will be recognized tonight during a Town Council meeting. The town also plans to nominate him for a Carnegie Medal, which recognizes heroism.

“Ian showed tremendous courage and put his life in immediate danger to aid a complete stranger,” Fire Chief Herb Williams said in a letter to council. “Ian recognized the inherent danger of the gasoline igniting while the driver was still trapped inside the vehicle. His efforts were extraordinary.”

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The Diocese of California has overhauled its canons, saying the action will make its operations more transparent and its leaders more accountable.

At a special convention May 10, delegates voted to eliminate the bishop’s complete control over property and created an executive council to replace a more complicated, less transparent administrative structure.

The actions were the culmination of a process set in motion by California Bishop Marc Andrus about 10 months ago. But the actions of the neighboring Diocese of San Joaquin also served as inspiration, and Bishop Andrus contended that opposition to that move might have been greater had the structure of the diocese been more transparent.

“Some have said that people who might have acted to prevent the actions in San Joaquin didn’t do so because they were not kept fully aware of what was happening,” Bishop Andrus said after the convention.

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The drama of Pentecost: mighty wind, flames of fire, the gift of tongues, can distract us from the more profound and lasting effect of the coming of the Holy Spirit: namely, the way this event transformed the apostles’ – and through them, our – relationship with the Word of God, empowering these “uneducated and ordinary men” (Acts 4:13) to unlock the meaning of their ancient texts, the psalms and prophecies so familiar on one level but of which the deeper significance had, until then, remained veiled. Peter must have heard the words of the prophet Joel many times and had no doubt listened to many a rabbi expounding them, but on the day of Pentecost those “young men” who “shall see visions” and “old men” who “shall dream dreams” (Joel 2:28) appeared, not as pencil outlines on the faded page of the past but in full technicolour before him. Here we have the essence of lectio divina, to engage with a text in a living, life-transforming way, through the gift of the Holy Spirit; to perceive the Word in the words. This is what makes lectio more like prayer than study, and why we may have to broaden our vision of this term to include all contact with the Word of God. After all, a phone-call or voice message from a loved one is at least as, if not more, welcome than a text message or letter. No one has taught us this better than the Apostle John:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him and without him not one thing came into being” (John 1:1-3).

Today we tend to think of lectio divina as an almost exclusively individual activity; but it’s important to realise that such personal reading of the Scriptures grew out of, and reinforced, their public proclamation in the liturgy.

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The theme running through my presentations outside the Diocese in recent weeks is “Advocacy.” I have used this word (its root””’voc’””meaning ”˜voice’) to encourage retired professors, graduating college students and other community leaders to “give voice to people and creatures that have no voice, or whose voices are not heard.”

One needn’t be a Christian or a religious person to recognize the moral importance which certain forms of advocacy signify. Sometimes we rightly speak only for ourselves””in giving our opinions or interpretations of something. Advocacy can also be a negative expression of the individualism so characteristic of our culture.
“Every man for himself,” (wherever that motto came from) is poor moral counsel for people of any age, occupation or affiliation.

Read it all (page 2 of the pdf document).

Asserting that “all peoples have a right to be given equal opportunities to flourish,” Pope Benedict XVI on Monday voiced concern for Israel’s dwindling Christian minority, and called for a relaxation of travel restrictions on the country’s Palestinians.

The pope made his remarks on in a meeting with Mordechay Lewy, the new Israeli ambassador to the Holy See.

Benedict also called for a “positive and expeditious resolution” of longstanding tax and legal disputes between Israel and the Vatican.

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President Bush said Monday that when he meets Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah later this week, he’ll bring up the effect that high oil prices are having on the U.S. and global economies.

“Of course I’ll bring it up to him,” Bush said in a CBS News radio interview. However, he added that the capacity of the Saudis to raise production ”” and thus help lower prices ”” is limited.

“When you analyze the capacity for countries to put oil on the market it’s just not like it used to be,” Bush said. “The demand for oil is so high relative to supply these days that there’s just not a lot of excess capacity.”

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An informative piece on a subject too often neglected–I kept thinking of the sister of one of my friend’s who has Lupus.

Eric Schmidt was doing his level best late last week not to gloat. With Microsoft dropping its attempted takeover of Yahoo, the Google chief executive had just seen his arch-rival abandon its most direct attack yet on Google’s growing dominance of online search and advertising.

“I’m happy to be crowned winner,” Mr Schmidt said, before quickly adding: “But as we’ve learned in the election cycle, it goes back and forth.”

The political analogy may have been ill-judged. Like Hillary Clinton after last week’s primary results, Microsoft has never looked more on the defensive. For a company that has always scorned the idea of big mergers in the past, the pursuit of Yahoo was the clearest admission yet that the software company was running out of options as it tried to counter the rise of Google.

“The failure of the Microsoft/Yahoo merger eliminates the biggest short-term threat” to Google’s unrivalled position on the web, says David Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School. For now, its momentum “seems unstoppable”. Michael Cusumano, a management professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, describes Google’s now-unchallenged dominance even more bluntly: “They’re sitting on a goldmine.”

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Even for Americans — who are constitutionally convinced that there will always be a second act, and a third, and a do-over after that, and, if necessary, a little public repentance and forgiveness and a Brand New Start — even for us, the world looks a little terminal right now.

It’s not just the economy: We’ve gone through swoons before. It’s that gas at $4 a gallon means we’re running out, at least of the cheap stuff that built our sprawling society. It’s that when we try to turn corn into gas, it helps send the price of a loaf of bread shooting upward and helps ignite food riots on three continents. It’s that everything is so tied together. It’s that, all of a sudden, those grim Club of Rome types who, way back in the 1970s, went on and on about the “limits to growth” suddenly seem … how best to put it, right.

All of a sudden it isn’t morning in America, it’s dusk on planet Earth.

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News that scientists have for the first time genetically altered a human embryo is drawing fire from some watchdog groups that say it’s a step toward creating “designer babies.”

But an author of the study says the work was focused on stem cells. He notes that the researchers used an abnormal embryo that could never have developed into a baby anyway.

“None of us wants to make designer babies,” said Dr. Zev Rosenwaks, director of the Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center.

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Saying “I divorce thee” three times, as men in Muslim countries have been able to do for centuries when leaving their wives, is not enough if you’re a resident of Maryland, the state’s highest court ruled yesterday.

[Last week] the Court of Appeals rejected a Pakistani man’s argument that his invocation of the Islamic talaq, under which a marriage is dissolved simply by the husband’s say-so, allowed him to part with his wife of more than 20 years and deny her a share of his $2 million estate.

The justices affirmed a lower court’s decision overturning a divorce decree obtained in Pakistan by Irfan Aleem, a World Bank economist who moved from London to Maryland with his wife, Farah Aleem, in 1985.

Both of their children were born in the United States.

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At the heart of this will be the indaba groups. Indaba is a Zulu word describing a meeting for purposeful discussion among equals. Its aim is not to negotiate a formula that will keep everyone happy but to go to the heart of an issue and find what the true challenges are before seeking God’s way forward. It is a method with parallels in many cultures, and it is close to what Benedictine monks and Quaker Meetings seek to achieve as they listen quietly together to God, in a community where all are committed to a fellowship of love and attention to each other and to the word of God.

Each day’s work in this context will go forward with careful facilitation and preparation, to ensure that all voices are heard (and many languages also!). The hope is that over the two weeks we spend together, these groups will build a level of trust that will help us break down the walls we have so often built against each other in the Communion. And in combination with the intensive prayer and fellowship of the smaller Bible study groups, all this will result, by God’s grace, in clearer vision and discernment of what needs to be done.

As I noted when I wrote to you in Advent, this makes it all the more essential that those who come to Lambeth will arrive genuinely willing to engage fully in that growth towards closer unity that the Windsor Report and the Covenant Process envisage. We hope that people will not come so wedded to their own agenda and their local priorities that they cannot listen to those from other cultural backgrounds. As you may have gathered, in circumstances where there has been divisive or controversial action, I have been discussing privately with some bishops the need to be wholeheartedly part of a shared vision and process in our time together.

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A conservative legal-advocacy group is enlisting ministers to use their pulpits to preach about election candidates this September, defying a tax law that bars churches from engaging in politics.

Alliance Defense Fund, a Scottsdale, Ariz., nonprofit, is hoping at least one sermon will prompt the Internal Revenue Service to investigate, sparking a court battle that could get the tax provision declared unconstitutional. Alliance lawyers represent churches in disputes with the IRS over alleged partisan activity.

The action marks the latest attempt by a conservative organization to help clergy harness their congregations to sway elections. The protest is scheduled for Sunday, Sept. 28, a little more than a month before the general election, in a year when religious concerns and preachers have been a regular part of the political debate.

It also comes as the IRS has increased its investigations of churches accused of engaging in politics.

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I say “the canon lawyers have been unanimous” that Canon IV.9 must be so read, because every lawyer’s opinion I have seen on the Web reads it that way, while I have yet to read a single legal opinion, signed or otherwise, either on the Web, or published elsewhere, that defends the Presiding Bishop’s reading of the Canon (with the exception of her own recent letter to the House of Bishops, which was presumably written by, or with the help of, her Chancellor, but which she alone signed). There have been some differing opinions about the requirement in the Canon that a vote to depose be approved “by a majority of the whole number of the Bishops entitled to vote”, but there has not been a single dissenting view expressed , with reasons and logic to back it up, that the Presiding Bishop is justified by the Canon in proceeding as she proposes to do.

Read it carefully and read it all.

The dust is more or less settling around the largest child custody case in Texas history. DNA samples and fingerprints having duly been taken, the 463 children removed by Texas Child Protective Services (CPS) from Warren Jeffs’s Yearning for Zion (YFZ) Ranch, near Eldorado, have been trundled off to foster care throughout the state. A few nursing mothers are in group home situations with their infants. The rest of the mothers, for whom supervised visitation with their children is being arranged by CPS, await custody hearings to be held by early June.

Any charges of sexual abuse that ultimately emerge from the ongoing investigation will, of course, deserve the most vigorous prosecution. Meanwhile, the case raises some thorny questions, both about how we as a society regard religious “others,” and about the role anti-cult stereotypes play in public decision-making. These questions center on the treatment of those mothers and children.

Legal experts are divided on the legitimacy of what Barbara Walther, the presiding judge in the case, off-handedly referred to as the “cattle call” that removed those mothers and children from their home on April 3. The closed federal warrant authorizing the raid relied heavily on phone calls, subsequently alleged to be a hoax, from 16-year-old “Sarah.” Flora Jessop, formerly a member of a Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (FLDS) community in Utah and now an anti-polygamy activist in Phoenix, had told Texas law enforcement that she had received similar calls from a “Sarah.” Arguably, the raid was spurred more by negative stereotypes about FLDS and members’ practice of polygamy than by a thorough investigation of evidence.

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Strong principals typically are seasoned administrators. Moore didn’t have any experience as a principal, but she had a passion for Sanders-Clyde. She grew up in Atlanta and moved here for a College of Charleston minority fellowship to earn her master’s in education.

Moore taught at Sanders-Clyde for four years before moving up to a lead teacher position. She left Sanders-Clyde to work as a master teacher, and for the next few years, she helped low-performing schools across the district improve.

When Sanders-Clyde’s principal retired, Moore applied for the job. Even when she was a teacher at Sanders-Clyde, she knew she wanted to be its principal. It was a small, 200-student school, and she felt connected to the parents and community. She understood what it would take to help its children. It was the only school where she applied for a principal job.

By most every measure, Sanders-Clyde was struggling in 2003 when Moore became its leader.

It was so bad that more than 60 percent of its students weren’t ready for the next grade in English and math. None of its students scored at the highest possible level on the state’s standardized tests.

Its student enrollment dwindled as families abandoned the school. All but a few of Moore’s students lived in nearby government-funded housing.

Despite those challenges, Moore refused to accept that her students couldn’t score as well as the wealthier ones across the Cooper River.

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Adelino Najarro emigrated from Mexico four years ago. Without a job, he said, life was difficult in his country.

Today, to make a living, he works in a restaurant kitchen. And to improve his English, he goes to church.

Twice a week, Iglesia Forest City in northwest Orlando partners with the local school district to offer English-language classes. On one recent evening, Najarro, 29, was among nearly two dozen Spanish speakers who turned out for class. The church also offers a food bank, speakers on the naturalization process and has plans to offer GED classes.

“We the church are the first contact with the United States,” said the Rev. Santiago Panzardi, the church’s senior pastor and president of the Hispanic Christian Church Association of Central Florida. “The first place they knock is the church.”

Now there’s someone else knocking at the church door–the federal government–but they insist they’re not looking to check immigrants’ legal papers. They’re looking to help.

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Julian Huxley once declared that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions. Andre Suares further observed: “Heresy is the lifeblood of religions. It is faith that begets heretics. There are no heresies in dead religions.” They both agreed, however, that last decade’s heresies may become yesterday’s forsaken beliefs, today’s moral majority and tomorrow’s dogma. Is heresy, then, little more than last year’s apostasies and next year’s certitudes? Somehow, given the dire fate of many heretics, there must be more to heresy than being an unfathomable or unfashionable belief.

It may be easier to understand heresy by first defining its character. Certainly there are many things that heresy is not. A pre-adolescent temper tantrum involving the assertion that a toothbrush is useless does not constitute heresy; nor can condemnation of the Beatles be construed as heresy. Heresy, then, must be substantially more than contrariness. The issue must be serious and the heretic response must be earnest; it must stem from one’s soul and it must engender some measure of personal hazard since it is expressed in the face of those, temporarily in the majority, who fervently believe otherwise.

Furthermore, heresy cannot be frivolous. Declaring total allegiance to the New York Yankees in Fenway Park may be suicidal, but not heretical. Nor can the primary purpose of the heresy be solely to provoke an adverse reaction in someone else ”” “getting a rise out of somebody.”

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“He’s the best warden we’ve ever had,” says Jerry Williams, 51, one of hundreds of convicts selling food and handicrafts outside the stadium while an inmate band serenades the visiting public. Williams has served 31 years for murder.

“God always uses a vessel, and God has used Warden Cain,” says Carlwyn Turner, 47, a convicted rapist who is a disc jockey for the only federally licensed radio station in a US prison – the “Incarceration Station”. “Warden Cain has given a lot of guys purpose. That’s what keeps them going,” says Lane Nelson, 53, another convicted killer and “Death Row” correspondent of The Angolite, the prison’s award-winning newspaper.

It is hard to argue with such accolades. Cain, 65, a fervent Christian with a deep Southern drawl and the build of a refrigerator, believes he was sent to Angola to do God’s work, and what he has achieved there in 13 years is little short of a miracle.

He has transformed the most violent maximum security prison in America into its safest. He has turned Angola into a place where families with young children happily consort with convicted killers at the spring and autumn rodeos. He has brought hope where there was only despair.

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For some people, of course, these events raise questions about whether there can be a God, or if there is a God could he is good. For them it is inconceivable that there could be a God who permits suffering. But nowhere in the Bible; and nowhere in the Christian tradition is it suggested that God is a sort of heavenly puppet master; the sort of god who treats us like robots, who is two steps ahead of us sorting out our lives in front of us.

Faith doesn’t promise us that. Think back to the psalm: ”˜When you travel through the valley of the shadow of death I’ll be with you’. Not ”˜if’, ”˜when’ is what the scripture says.

John Polkinghorne, priest, author and former Professor of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge University puts it like this: God does not bring about everything that happens in the world. Because God is a God of love, he allows creatures to be themselves. That sort of valuable, worthwhile, independent creation has a cost. We see that in the terrible cruel choices of humankind. We also see it in the physical history of the world. Exactly the same bio-chemical processes that enable some cells to mutate and produce new forms of life – the very engine that has driven the amazingly fruitful history of life on earth ”“ will also allow other cells to mutate and to become malignant. You just cannot have one without the other. The tragic fact that there is cancer in the world is not because God did not bother ”“ it is a necessity in a world allowed to make itself.

The freedom that enables me to choose to give generously at the moment to Myanmar, the freedom which enables someone to give their love to someone, to go the extra mile to care; is precisely the same freedom which those rulers in Myanmar are using to stop aid coming in. It is part of the way the world is set up. It’s both a wonderful freedom but a terrible responsibility.

The Christian gospel never says that there will not be suffering or evil. And it does not promise us that we will not go through it. And those of you being confirmed today, this isn’t some sort of talisman which will stop you ever experiencing evil. You and I will experience the same suffering that is the common lot of humanity.

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Depression, teens and marijuana are a dangerous mix that can lead to dependency, mental illness or suicidal thoughts, according to a White House report being released Friday.
A teen who has been depressed at some point in the past year is more than twice as likely to have used marijuana as teens who have not reported being depressed ”” 25% compared with 12%, said the report by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

“Marijuana is a more consequential substance of abuse than our culture has treated it in the last 20 years,” said John Walters, director of the office. “This is not just youthful experimentation that they’ll get over as we used to think in the past.”

Smoking marijuana can lead to more serious problems, Walters said in an interview.

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Just a note to let readers know that due to travel of one elf and the combination of work pressures and serious “technical difficulties” of a second, our elfing capacity is seriously limited this week (and in fact has been stretched way too thin for 4 or 5 weeks). It looks like I (elf girl) may be restored to normal high speed internet access within 2 – 3 days and so I hope to be able to resume more normal “elfing” then. In the meantime:

1. We please ask our commenters to be particularly careful of what you write. Perhaps a policy of “self-elfing” could be practiced? 😉
2. If you have story ideas, please send them directly to Kendall (his e-mail is linked on the sidebar under the “About the Blog” section).
3. Please be patient with any requests for administrative / technical help or research assistance. It’s honestly likely that I won’t get to look at those for another 2 days, and there is already a big backlog.

Thanks very much for your patience and understanding.

John Edwards, an influential Democrat and erstwhile candidate for the presidential nomination, cautioned Sunday that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton “has to be really careful that she’s not damaging our prospects” by staying in the contest now that Senator Barack Obama appears to have won it.

With the race rapidly evolving into an expected faceoff between Obama and Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, McCain’s surrogates came out with some of their toughest attacks on Obama on Sunday. Mitt Romney, who lost his fight with McCain for the Republican nomination but now strongly backs him, said Obama was “clearly out of his depth.”

The sides clashed bitterly over Obama’s suggestion that McCain had “lost his bearings” for saying that Hamas, the Palestinian militant group, favored Obama.

While Edwards, of North Carolina, has not endorsed either candidate, he made it clear that he saw little chance that Clinton could manage a come-from-behind victory. “You can no longer make a compelling case for the math,” he said, referring to delegate totals that increasingly favor Obama. “The math is very, very hard for her.”

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We took the Mom in our family, Elizabeth, out to dinner this afternoon and then all five Harmons–our oldest just got home from freshman year of College–went to see Iron Man together. We enjoyed it–KSH.

What makes the governor’s rhetoric and actions even more troubling has been her acceptance of campaign contributions from Wichita’s Dr. George Tiller, perhaps the most notorious late-term abortionist in the nation. In addition to Dr. Tiller’s direct donations to her campaign, the governor has benefited from the Political Action Committees funded by Dr. Tiller to support pro-abortion candidates in Kansas.
In her veto message, the governor took credit for lower abortion rates in Kansas, citing her support for “adoption incentives, extended health services for pregnant women, providing sex education and offering a variety of support services for families.” Indeed, the governor and her administration should be commended for supporting adoption incentives and health services for pregnant women.

However, the governor overreaches by assuming credit for declining abortion rates in Kansas. Actually, lower abortion rates are part of a national trend. Our neighboring state of Missouri has actually had a steeper and longer decline in its abortion rate.

Governor Sebelius’ inclusion of public school sex education programs as a factor in the abortion rate decline is absurd. Actually, valueless sex education programs in public schools have been around for years, coinciding with increased sexual activity among adolescents, as well as increases in teen pregnancy and abortion. On the other hand, the governor does not acknowledge the significant impact of mass media education programs, such as those sponsored by the Vitae Caring Foundation, or the remarkable practical assistance provided by Crisis Pregnancy Centers which are funded through the generosity of pro-life Kansans.

What makes the governor’s actions and advocacy for legalized abortion, throughout her public career, even more painful for me is that she is Catholic.

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Eventually, OPEC will open the taps and oil prices will recede–a bit, for a while. But our dependence on a small group of countries whose interests are often diametrically opposed to ours will continue, and as long as it does, they’ll hold the fate of our economy in their hands.

Time to drill in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge? No. Time to cut us gas-subsidy checks? No. Time to work on a tax and consumption policy that encourages less oil usage and more investment in alternative, renewable energy.

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Barack Obama erased Hillary Rodham Clinton’s once-imposing lead among superdelegates Saturday when he added more endorsements from the group of Democrats who will decide the party’s nomination for president.

Obama added superdelegates from Utah and Ohio, as well as two from the Virgin Islands who had previously backed Clinton. The additions enabled Obama to surpass Clinton’s total for the first time in the campaign. He had picked up nine endorsements Friday.

The milestone is important because Clinton would need to win over the superdelegates by a wide margin to claim the nomination. They are a group that Clinton owned before the first caucus, when she was able to cash in on the popularity of the Clinton brand among the party faithful.

Those party insiders, however, have been steadily streaming to Obama since he started posting wins in early voting states.

“I always felt that if anybody establishes himself as the clear leader, the superdelegates would fall in line,” said Don Fowler, a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

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