In many ways, Surya Das, 58, remains Jeffrey Miller, the Jewish, three-sport high school letterman from Long Island. Miller enrolled at the University of Buffalo in the late 1960s and like many of his friends with college draft exemptions, took part in the demonstrations against the Vietnam War. He got tear-gassed in Washington. He survived the mud-slicked bliss of Woodstock.

The anger and frustration over the war culminated for Miller in the clash between students and the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University in 1970.

Allison Krause, the girlfriend of one of his best high school friends, was one of the four students shot and killed by guardsmen. Violence, he concluded, was not a path to peace. And trading a bachelor’s degree in psychology for a job was not a way to contentment.

“Those were heavy times,” he said. “I was looking for something different. I was always a questioner, following my heart and sniffing around with my nose for a way to find peace, to become peace. I headed east.”

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The quilt was sewn out of joy and pain, memories and loss.

This same quilt will forever memorialize a daughter and unborn grandchild lost in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.

The patchwork of memories of Carrie Ann Lenz’s 26 years reminds her mother, Doris Jones, of happy times she shared with her daughter.

Cut from her daughter’s clothes, which until recently hung unworn but cherished in a guest bedroom, each of the quilt’s 48 squares holds a memory for Jones.

Read it all and the photos are worth the time also.

The whole memorial service is available here.

“Our people have been reading the Bible for years,” said Dave Peterson, senior pastor at Memorial Drive Presbyterian Church. “When we suggested listening to the New Testament many wondered why. But hearing is turning out to be a very different experience from reading. New doors of understanding are opening all over the place.”

“Most of us have been reading the Bible for many, many years,” added Dr. Ed Young, senior pastor of Second Baptist Church. “Listening to God’s Word, however, can add even greater depth and understanding to our times in the Scripture.”

The Rev. Laurens A. Hall, rector at St. John the Divine Episcopal Church, said, “Parishioners are ecstatic about the You’ve Got The Time format, experiencing the Word of God as they had never done before.”

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At St. Cecillia’s Catholic Church in Rochester, Pa., members were stunned when a state food safety inspector told them that they couldn’t sell homemade pies during events anymore ”” because they were breaking the law.

Guest host Linda Wertheimer speaks to Louise Humbert, a St. Cecilia’s parishioner and pie baker, about the decision and the reaction from church members.

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Our special report this week argues that change may finally be under way. It is prompted, in part, by a host of information and communication technologies that should make health care much more portable, precise and personal. The spread of electronic medical records and the emergence of a “smart grid” for medicine (so doctors, and in some cases patients, can see what their peers are doing) should bring more transparency. “Intelligent pills” that come tailored to people’s needs should be cheaper than the one-drug-fits-all variety, especially if the doses do not have to rely on humans remembering when to take them. Personal medical monitors and other devices should make it easier to treat expensive chronic diseases that last for years, such as diabetes and heart defects, on a preventive basis. Your ticker can be monitored at home remotely rather than having to come in for check-ups, and problems can be spotted in advance, thus avoiding costly hospitalisations.

Change is also being prompted by the willingness of doctors and politicians, especially ones in poorer countries, to apply at least some economic tests to medical spending. One example is India (see article), where poor patients mostly have to pay for their own health care: its techniques and business models may yet be copied in the rich world. Another leader is Britain’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), which has championed the use of basic economic appraisals, albeit in an over-centralised way. Mr Obama wants to expand comparative effectiveness studies and health technology assessments. These sound boring but could save billions, which is one reason so many health-care firms moan about them.

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You’d be amazed at how you don’t even know where your money goes. It took us a couple of months to get a firm handle on our expenses. There are some things you only pay a few times a year and you forget them, and then they crop up and you don’t have $40 for the water bill or veterinarian. I distributed flyers around the neighborhood offering babysitting and elder-care services. I can take care of an infant for a few hours as well as any high school girl. I’m tired of waiting for someone else to offer me a job.

It’s hard to invite people for dinner, so we don’t accept many invitations. We went to the art show on the day tickets were discounted, and told friends we’d brown-bag our lunches. One of them said we could go to a cheap restaurant, but I can’t. I’m not sure they really understand how it is. I know I didn’t until it happened to me.

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Larry Summers, chair of the National Economic Council, said there were signs that worst may be over but warned that “it is a long road and it is going to take time” after the damage inflicted on the financial system.

“There are downside contingencies that we’ve got to prepare for, issues in the global economy, in commercial real estate. We can’t know with certainty what’s going to happen next, and there certainly are real risks ahead,” he said at the Americas summit in Trinidad.

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As brand loyalty to everything from detergents to cell phone carriers is dwindling, so too is loyalty to a denomination that may have nurtured and formed successive generations in a particular faith tradition.

“People tend to go churches that meet their needs before they ever look at the name on the sign,” said Bill Leonard, dean of the divinity school at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem.

One reason for this switching is that people choose congregations for many reasons, not all of them spiritual. In many cases, they are practical.

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Yet the idea of non-traditional protesters using bottom-up organizing to foment a national movement in the span of 60 days may have marked a turning point for the tea partiers ”“ especially since the high attendance estimates rivaled the estimated 500,000 or so protesters who converged on New York City and several other major cities to oppose the Iraq War on Feb. 15, 2003.

“I think it’s not dissimilar from what we had in 2003 with the anti-war protests, where a lot of people were uncomfortable with the war, but also uncomfortable with the anti-war position, recognizing there are terrorists out there,” says Jeremi Suri, a history professor who specializes in social movements at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “Here we have a similar thing: There are serious economic issues, and it’s unclear to many people whether the stimulus is going to deal with these.”

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. Asked about the tea parties, President Barack Obama responded that he was not aware of them. As Marie Antoinette said, “Let them drink Lapsang Souchong.” His Imperial Majesty at Barackingham Palace having declined to acknowledge the tea parties, his courtiers at the Globe and elsewhere fell into line. Talk-show host Michael Graham spoke to one attendee at the 2009 Boston Tea Party who remarked of the press embargo: “If Obama had been the king of England, the Globe wouldn’t have covered the American Revolution.”

The American media, having run their own business into the ground, are certainly qualified to run everybody else’s into the same abyss. Which is why they’ve decided that hundreds of thousands of citizens protesting taxes and out-of-control spending and government vaporization of Americans’ wealth and their children’s future is no story. Nothing to see here. As Nancy Pelosi says, it’s AstroTurf ”“ fake grass-roots, not the real thing.

Besides, what are these whiners so uptight about? CNN’s Susan Roesgen interviewed a guy in the crowd and asked why he was here:

“Because,” said the Tea Partier, “I hear a president say that he believed in what Lincoln stood for. Lincoln’s primary thing was he believed that people had the right to liberty, and had the right ”¦”

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I come to the twentieth chapter of John’s gospel once more, in awe as always of its simple but fathomless power. Recent writers have explored the way in which John’s gospel is focussed on the Temple in Jerusalem, and though the Temple is not mentioned in this chapter, John is the kind of writer who hopes that his readers will have picked up where things are going by now, and will make the connections for themselves. So what has he said so far, and how does it play out in this chapter?

Already in the Prologue, which balances chapter 20 in so many ways as the framework for the gospel, John has declared that the Word became flesh and tabernacled in our midst; he pitched his tent, came to dwell among us as in the Temple; and, in case there were any doubt, John says ”˜and we beheld his glory’. The return of God’s glory to dwell in the midst of his people was the great, unrealized hope of the last four hundred years before the time of Jesus; the Jewish people had come back from exile, but God’s glory, the Shekinah, had not returned. The later prophets insisted that God would come back, but nobody ever claimed it had happened. And this was the more to be regretted, because the Old Testament, in a wide variety of ways, had indicated that the Temple, and the presence of the living God within it, was to be the sign and the means of God’s filling not just a building but the whole earth with his glory.

But it is a main theme of the New Testament, often unnoticed, that the return of the Glory to dwell with God’s people was precisely what was going on in the ministry, and supremely in the death and resurrection, of Jesus.

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He is utterly in charge, greeting members of the choir as they arrive, coordinating adjustments to the risers, smiling, joking, scolding, talking with a latecomer on the cell phone, selling tickets, writing something on his clipboard, reviewing the draft of the program to be distributed at the concert, and all the while thinking about several upcoming engagements, the need to stay healthy and in good voice, the many tasks yet to be done.

‘Show me that diva posture!’ he tells one woman. ‘We sent ya that a loooong time ago,’ he says to another, in a Gullah accent. ‘I’m only doing a million things in a day,’ he tells a visitor.

Having thrown into the air an armful of balls, Lee Pringle sits in the first pew at Citadel Square Baptist Church working diligently to keep them there. It is what he does. Then, 10 or 15 minutes after rehearsal was supposed to start, Pringle announces that the rainy weather has held them up long enough; it’s time to start.

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Martin Walker of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, writing in the Wilson Quarterly (“The World’s New Numbers”), notes that Russia’s declining fertility is magnified by “a phenomenon so extreme that it has given rise to an ominous new term — hypermortality.” Because of rampant HIV/AIDS, extreme drug-resistant tuberculosis, alcoholism and the deteriorating health-care system, a U.N. report says “mortality in Russia is three to five times higher for men and twice as high for women” as in other countries at a comparable stage of development. The report, Walker says, “predicts that within little more than a decade the working-age population will be shrinking by up to 1 million people annually.” Be that as it may, “Russia is suffering a demographic decline on a scale that is normally associated with the effects of a major war.”

According to projections by the United Nations Population Division, Russia’s population, which was around 143 million four years ago, might be as high as 136 million or as low as 121 million in 2025, and as low as 115 million in 2030.

Marx envisioned the “withering away” of the state under mature communism. Instead, Eberstadt writes, the world may be witnessing the withering away of Russia, where Marxism was supposed to be the future that works. Russia, he writes, “has pioneered a unique new profile of mass debilitation and foreshortened life previously unknown in all of human history.”

“History,” he concludes, “offers no examples of a society that has demonstrated sustained material advance in the face of long-term population decline.” Demography is not by itself destiny, but it is more real than an arms control “process” that merely expresses the liberal hope of taming the world by wrapping it snugly in parchment.

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How do they grow up so fast. His girlfriend, Francesca, is accompanying him..

St. Francis Episcopal Church is observing Earth Day early this week with a Monday night covered dish dinner and distribution of reusable bags.

Outreach Chairman Harriet Pegram said attendees will receive one of 100 reusable bags donated by Wal-Mart to take to the churches in their community. The church already has distributed bags donated by earlier this year.

Mrs. Pegram said the project is part of the 15-year Millennium Development Project developed by world leaders in 2000 to reduce poverty and boost renewable energy. One of the eight goals developed was to ensure environmental sustainability.

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Mental illness on the stage and screen is often portrayed in extreme ways, and not just for dramatic effect. In Western culture psychic pain has tended to be seen as the territory of the artist, visionary, rebel and genius, from Emily Dickinson to Sylvia Plath and Friedrich Nietzsche to John Forbes Nash Jr. So it should be no surprise that madness is often used to signify creativity, sensitivity or spiritual and intellectual depth.

In “Proof,” for instance, a troubled math prodigy fears she will unravel like her brilliant father, and in “Equus,” recently revived on Broadway, an emotionally flattened psychiatrist envies his young patient’s creative religious passion, however warped. In “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” mental illness is portrayed as the only refuge of the social misfit.

“Depression can appear to embody an aesthetic or moral or even political stance,” the author and psychologist Peter D. Kramer writes in his book “Against Depression.” In our culture, he added, it “is what tuberculosis was 100 years ago: illness that signifies refinement.”

Brian Yorkey, 38, and Tom Kitt, 35, the creators of “next to normal,” were keenly aware of that romantic strain and studiously worked to avoid it. “Someone said to make her a painter,” Mr. Yorkey said of the protagonist, Diana. “I said no. She’s a suburban mother.”

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Today Rwanda is a much different place thanks, in part, to this man””Anglican Bishop John Rucyahana

Bishop JOHN RUCYAHANA (Chairman, Prison Fellowship Rwanda): People are smiling because they have the hope, but the wounds and the healing is a process that we’ll continue to engage deliberately to tell people that they just can’t cover it up. We need to be able to unearth it and deal with it head on.

[LUCKY] SEVERSON: That’s what the bishop has been preaching from the pulpit of his beautiful church in northern Rwanda since the killing stopped: deal with it head on. And it was personal for him. How could it not be after so many members of his extended family were murdered, including his niece?

Bishop RUCYAHANA: I have forgiven those who killed my niece, and they peeled off the flesh off her arms to the wrist, and they left bare bones, and they gang-raped her, and I forgive them because forgiving is not only benefiting the criminal, it benefits me.

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The U.S. Treasury and financial regulators are clashing with each other over how to disclose results from the stress tests of 19 U.S. banks, with some officials concerned at potential damage to weaker institutions.

With a May 4 deadline approaching, there is no set plan for how much information to release, how to categorize the results or who should make the announcements, people familiar with the matter said. While the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and other regulators want few details about the assessments to be publicized, the Treasury is pushing for broader disclosure.

The disarray highlights what threatens to be a lose-lose situation for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner: If all the banks pass, the tests’ credibility will be questioned, and if some banks get failing grades and are forced to accept more government capital and oversight, they may be punished by investors and customers.

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At least 25 per cent of the services and care for people with HIV/AIDS in Africa is provided by the Catholic Church. While the role of a church is different from government, which has to legislate and organise for people of all religions as well as those without, both are required to respect the evidence and good moral values in the programs they deliver.

Catholics are not obliged to protest publicly against every harm minimisation program, even when the church urges her members not to participate. In the same way, governments and non-Catholic aid agencies can and will continue to hand out condoms in HIV/AIDS programs, although the evidence suggests they may on balance be exacerbating the problem.

But all of us who want to help prevent and reduce the spread of HIV/AIDS need to respect the evidence about what helps and what doesn’t. And the evidence is that it’s not condoms which make the crucial difference, but the choices people make about how they use the gift of sexuality.

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The preacher said, “What good does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?” Hearing this, every one of the pilgrims gathered in the room asked, “Is it me, Lord?” In America, in Europe, people are asking, “Is it us?”

Well, yes. It is us.

Carnival is over. Commerce has been overheating markets and climates … the sooty skies of the industrial revolution have changed scale and location, but now melt ice caps and make the seas boil in the time of technological revolution. Capitalism is on trial; globalization is, once again, in the dock. We used to say that all we wanted for the rest of the world was what we had for ourselves. Then we found out that if every living soul on the planet had a fridge and a house and an S.U.V., we would choke on our own exhaust.

Lent is upon us whether we asked for it or not. And with it, we hope, comes a chance at redemption.

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The Israeli military is preparing itself to launch a massive aerial assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities within days of being given the go-ahead by its new government.

Among the steps taken to ready Israeli forces for what would be a risky raid requiring pinpoint aerial strikes are the acquisition of three Airborne Warning and Control (AWAC) aircraft and regional missions to simulate the attack.

Two nationwide civil defence drills will help to prepare the public for the retaliation that Israel could face.

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The Rev. Jeffrey S. Dugan, pastor at St. James Episcopal Church, is recovering today from surgery after suffering a broken thigh bone Wednesday in a fall at Acadia National Park in Maine.

Dugan, who’s been at St. James for nearly two decades, was hiking at the park when he fell, according to a report in the Bangor Daily News. Lois Wack, the church administrator, said that Dugan was at the park with his daughter.

Wack said that Dugan’s wife, Betty, went to Maine to join her daughter and husband, who was heavily sedated.

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JESUS is a way, but not the only way to salvation, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, the Most Rev Katharine Jefferts Schori has told members of the Diocese of Quincy….

“If Billy Graham or Pope Benedict” were asked the questions the presiding bishop were asked, they would respond that “Jesus is the way, the truth and life,” South Carolina theologian Canon Kendall Harmon said. In a time of doctrinal confusion, “good leadership claims its particular identity from the stability of its historical faith,” he argued.

“It’s the leadership of this church giving up the unique claims of Christianity,” Canon Harmon said. “They act like it’s Baskin-Robbins. You just choose a different flavour and everyone gets in the store.”

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The rector of St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church recently removed one of the congregation’s most prominent members from her volunteer position, creating a painful division for church members.

The Rev. Chris Schuller dismissed Marion Fleming, a retired circuit judge and wife of a former rector, Peter Fleming, from a position known as “warden of the acolytes.”

Now the Flemings have decided to move from the Snell Isle church, which she has attended for more than 30 years, and which he pastored for 19. Last Sunday, Peter Fleming’s name was removed from church bulletins, which named him as “rector emeritus.”

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When I was ill, my husband and I were stuck in the house for months.

But I made a complete recovery and was so happy the day he bounded into the kitchen and asked, “Would you like to go out, girl?”

“I’d love to,” I replied immediately.

We had a wonderful meal, culminating with my husband making a confession. “Remember when I suggested going out tonight?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“I was talking to the dog.”

–Anita Saunders in the May, 2009, Reader’s Digest, page 133

In October, a majority of clergy and lay deputies voted to leave The Episcopal Church and join the Anglican Church of the Southern Cone on a temporary basis. The leadership of the Southern Cone diocese has been active in the development the new Anglican Communion province in North America. The Rt. Rev. Robert Duncan, who was deposed from the ordained ministry of The Episcopal Church prior to the diocesan convention last fall, has been designated archbishop of the new province. Bishop Duncan was also re-elected bishop of the Southern Cone diocese shortly after his deposition.

At the heart of the dispute in the latest filings and an April 17 hearing was whether the diocese’s withdrawal from The Episcopal Church violated a stipulation order on real and personal property that the two sides signed in 2005 to settle the lawsuit. After the majority at the annual convention voted to leave last fall, members of the diocese who wanted to remain Episcopalians held a reorganizing convention and petitioned the court to be added as plaintiffs to the Calvary lawsuit.

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A judge has ruled in the Diocese’s favor on several points in its legal dispute with former leaders over the control of diocesan assets.

In a hearing today, April 17, 2009, Judge Joseph James of the Court of Common Pleas of Allegheny County, allowed Diocesan Chancellor Andy Roman’s appearance as the attorney for the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh of the Episcopal Church. The judge also granted a motion by The Episcopal Church to intervene in the case.

Both matters had been challenged in earlier court filing by attorneys representing former Bishop Robert Duncan and others who left the Episcopal Church last October.

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From here:

On April 17, lawyers for the diocese attended a hearing before Judge James in Pittsburgh, together with lawyers for Calvary Church, lawyers representing The Episcopal Church (TEC) diocese, and lawyers representing the leadership of the national Episcopal Church.

All parties, including the lawyers for the leadership of national Episcopal Church, agreed that there will be hearing based on the assumption that the diocese’s withdrawal from The Episcopal Church was valid. At that hearing, the court will address whether the October 2004 stipulation in the Calvary Church lawsuit was violated by a valid withdrawal of the diocese from The Episcopal Church. No date for the hearing has yet been set.

The issue of validity will be addressed at a later date. Lawyers for The Episcopal Church have announced that they will be filing separate litigation on this issue.

Even after six years on the ground, problems are beginning to build as American forces in Iraq move toward withdrawal over the next few years.

The question of who is going to rule after the Americans leave is up in the air and will not be resolved until U.S. forces have gone. Apart from the division of political power, there does not exist, for example, a law to govern oil revenue sharing. In the meantime, the American presence will be used by various Iraqi elements to try to improve their positions in advance of the withdrawal.

Since the resolution of the question will almost certainly be by force, preliminary maneuvering will also almost certainly involve force. At this point there is skirmishing, and the familiar weapons of car bombs and assassinations are appearing with greater frequency.

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