Brown at 79.0, Coakley at 26.4.

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A Mass of Christian Burial was held Tuesday at St. Mary of the Nativity Church in Scituate, where he was a parishioner.

“We mourn the passing of Father Cowhig, who was called to the priesthood during tumultuous times in the history of our nation and world,’’ Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley, archbishop of Boston, said in a statement. “He ministered with love, commitment, and a desire to bring the message of Christ to parishes and communities across the Archdiocese. We pray that God grant him eternal rest.’’

Burial was at New Calvary Cemetery in Mattapan.

A simply lovely obituary–read it all.

Ruth Pierre wept before the congregation of a small Haitian church in Mattapan yesterday, mourning her uncle, who was killed in the earthquake that has left her impoverished homeland in ruins.

But Pierre said she is also grateful for those who survived, for those who have been rescued from the rubble that has paralyzed Haiti.

“My uncle died, but God saved many others,’’ said Pierre, 25, one of a dozen members of Church of the Nazarene who reflected on their families and loved ones during the 11 a.m. weekly service. “Thank you, God. I pray there are more found.’’

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Mark Mardell reports from Chicago on the president’s current standing.

Listen to it all ( 5 3/4 minutes).

Anote of gratitude is due Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge David P. Yaffe for ordering the immediate firing of Matthew Kim after a tortuous seven-year saga. This wasn’t the first time that Yaffe tried to inject common sense into the absurdly difficult and expensive task of ridding classrooms of teachers who don’t belong there. His previous decision to allow the Los Angeles Unified School District to fire Kim, issued in July, was ignored by the panel that has authority over contested teacher dismissals.

The Kim fiasco is a reminder of just how many thousands of dollars and costly lawyers and innumerable court appearances are currently required to fire incompetent or otherwise troublesome teachers. And, adding insult to injury, Kim has been paid his full salary and benefits since 2003 while doing no work for the district.

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The first, from Lorna Ashworth, the proposer of the motion,is here and the second, from the Secretary General is there.

A Church of England bishop has warned that the former Archbishop of Canterbury’s call for new limits on immigration would “play into the hands of racists”.

The Bishop of Ripon and Leeds, the Right Rev John Packer, is the latest Anglican cleric to criticise Lord Carey of Clifton after he said in an article in The Times that he feared the present levels of immigration threatened “the very ethos or the DNA of our nation”.

Lord Carey is a member of the crossparty parliamentary group on balanced migration, which last week urged the political parties to make a commitment to keeping Britain’s population below 70 million.

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For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need some one to teach you again the first principles of God’s word. You need milk, not solid food; for every one who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, for he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their faculties trained by practice to distinguish good from evil.

–Hebrews 5:12-14

Taliban militants unleashed a carefully coordinated, deadly attack on the heart of Afghanistan’s capital and its U.S.-backed government…[yesterday], killing five people and injuring more than 70 in an attack that illustrated the insurgency’s ability to strike at will at virtually any target.

The five-hour assualt, carried out by seven Taliban insurgents wielding AK-47 rifles, grenades, rocket launchers and suicide bomb vests, plunged downtown Kabul on a bustling workday morning into a state of war. Afghans shopping or heading to work screamed as they darted for cover while bursts of gunfire rang out overhead and explosions shook the downtown area.

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The Reverend Ellis Tucker Bowerfind, Rector

St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Alexandria , Virginia

The Reverend James R. Harlan, Rector

Church of the Ascension, Denver , Colorado

The Reverend Jedediah D. Holdorph II, Rector

St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Medford , Oregon

The Reverend John S. Nieman, Rector

Holy Trinity Parish, Clemson , South Carolina

The Reverend Dr. Michael Louis Vono, Rector

St. Paul ’s Within the Walls, Rome , Italy

This week the European Commission begins studying Greece’s latest plan for extracting itself from its financial crisis. But although the deployment of the Brussels machinery has taken the edge off the drama, any sense that the problem is now contained would be an illusion. The possibility that a country within the eurozone will get to the brink of defaulting on its sovereign debt remains real.

The new Greek Government’s plan remains incredible, based on a cut in the budget deficit from nearly 13 per cent to under 3 per cent in three years. That implies that Greece would, in one coherent sweep, push through profound reforms of the public and private sectors that it has not yet been able to tackle.

It remains likely, then, that Greece is headed for a crisis that tests the stability of the eurozone. The burden of Europe’s most difficult decision this year would fall on Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, who would have to decide whether to rescue Greece to forestall a crisis throughout the currency club.

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The uncertainty surrounding the suddenly-too-close-to-call Massachusetts Senate special election, as well as its high stakes, has political handicappers and strategists wondering if maybe they’ve seen this one before – in 1991, when long-shot Democrat Harris Wofford seized on the health care issue to pull off a shocking Pennsylvania special election victory that sent tremors across the political landscape.

It’s hard not to notice the similarities between the 1991 Senate special election and the current Massachusetts Senate contest.

Much like Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts, Wofford, a little-known Democrat who had been appointed to the late Republican Sen. John Heinz’s seat, began the race as a distinct underdog, and few expected he would be able to overcome former Gov. Dick Thornburgh, who left his post as U.S. attorney general to run for the seat.

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Read it all. I see over on Intrade that Brown is up to 70 and Coakley is down to 30. It will be stunning if it holds–KSH.

Google employees may have assisted hackers who launched a cyber-attack from China, prompting the company’s threat to leave the country, it has emerged.

The world’s most popular search engine is believed to be investigating whether one or more of its own workers bases in the Chinese offices helped those attempting to break into the e-mail accounts of human rights activists last month.

Last week, Google said that it may pull out of the country after it was was targeted, along more than 30 other companies, in a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China”. It has now emerged that a number of Chinese journalists may have also seen their e-mail accounts hijacked.

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Like other ministers in churches with Haitian-American congregations across the USA, the Rev. David Eugene took to the pulpit of his north Miami church Sunday and sought to offer solace to his worried, grieving flock.

“I preached from Deuteronomy, chapter 31, verse 8, and the title of my sermon was ‘I will not forsake you,’ ” said Eugene, pastor of Haitian Evangelical Baptist Church. “The second part of the text was Psalms 46, verses 1 and 2 ”” ‘The Lord is my refuge, my help and my strength.’

“It was very emotional. There was some crying,” he said.

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When I listen to Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, I’m always curious as to why many of us overlook the opening statements of his 1963 address. It’s as if we only hear one side of his speech. Why do we quickly repeat the words “I have a dream,” and not the words “America has given the Negro people a bad check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’ But we refuse to believe the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation….”

In 2010, poverty can disguise itself by hiding behind unemployment lines, housing foreclosures and the inability of a young person to afford a college education. When we look around our nation, many businesses are suffering from insufficient funds, as are too many families.

Once again, we wonder if the great vaults of America are still rich with opportunities for everyone.

The “fierce urgency of now” is what King mentioned back in 1963. But how long is “now”?

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In the months ahead, as 30,000 additional heavily armed American soldiers and Marines surge into Afghanistan, a much smaller group of young Americans will ship out to the world’s most populous Muslim country: Indonesia.

Armed with little more than laptops and textbooks, shod not in combat boots but in sandals and sneakers, these 25 volunteers will be the first representatives of the Peace Corps to land in Indonesia since the organization was expelled in 1965. By agreeing to dispatch volunteers to live side-by-side with Indonesians, teaching English to their children and exchanging insights into each other’s cultures, the Obama administration is sending the clearest possible signal to the world’s Muslims: America’s fight is not with you, but with the terrorists at your fringes.

The move also reflects recognition by the administration and Congress that the Peace Corps is a critical component of a new “smart power” policy toward U.S. engagement abroad. Such an approach emphasizes public diplomacy and grassroots-level development assistance over military hard power. Acknowledging the need for this shift, Congress voted last month to raise Peace Corps funding by $60 million ”” the largest increase ever ”” to $400 million.

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We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

Read it carefully and read it all.

Minutes after the Jets cemented the most surprising upset of this N.F.L. season, before travel plans for the American Football Conference championship had been booked, linebacker Bart Scott stood defiant at his locker, mouth running, faster than ever.

Scott loudly listed the slights, the dozens of so-called experts who picked against the Jets, who said they backed into these playoffs, even the Chargers, who Scott said spent the first half reminding the Jets they did not belong.

On the Jets’ joy ride to the game before the Super Bowl, their loquacious linebacker and the rest of his teammates have clung to their underdog status. Even after they topped the Chargers, 17-14, in front of the 69,498 they silenced at Qualcomm Stadium, the Jets sounded the same theme.

“Everybody can say we don’t deserve to be here,” Scott said. “That we snuck in. That we’re a fluke.” Then Scott added, “We haven’t even cracked the seal on how good we can be.”

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Update: Agony in San Diego–“Bolts’ bitter end: Miscues derail hopes of Chargers ”” and fans.” Read it all also.

Football fans everywhere are preparing to settle in for the NFL’s biggest and most electric weekend of the season””a four-game playoff marathon that will swallow up at least 12 hours of broadcast time over two days.

But here’s something even dedicated students of the game may not fully appreciate: There’s very little actual football in a football game.

I had no idea it was this little until I read this article last week–check it out.

Because many misunderstand the origin of King’s theology in the black church, they also misunderstand his relation to black theology. Many assume that black theology and Martin Luther King, Jr. have completely different theological and political perspectives. Persons who hold this viewpoint often explain the difference by saying that King was concerned primarily with love, non-violence, and the reconciliation between blacks and whites. But black theology, in contrast to King, seldom mentions love or reconciliation between blacks and whites and explicitly rejects non-violence with its endorsement of Malcolm X’s contention that blacks should achieve their freedom “by any means necessary.” Some claim that black theology is a separatist and an extremist interpretation of the Christian faith. But King was an integrationist and a moderate who believed that whites can and should be redeemed.

During a decade of writing and teaching Black Theology, the most frequent question that has been addressed to me, publically and privately, by blacks and especially whites, has been: “How do you reconcile the separatist and violent orientation of black theology with Martin Luther King’s emphasis on integration, love, and non-violence?” I have always found it difficult to respond to this question because those who ask it seem unaware of the interrelations between King, black theology, and the black church.

While it is not my primary intention to compare King and black theology, I do hope that an explication of his theology in the context of the black church will show, for those interested in a comparison, that black theology and King are not nearly as far apart as some persons might be inclined to think.

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God of our forebears and our God, who has summoned women and men throughout the ages to be thy witnesses and sometimes martyrs for thee, we bow before thee this day in remembrance and thanksgiving for the life and legacy of thy servant, witness and martyr, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. We thank thee for his time among us, for his words and for his deeds, and for the quality of his living witness which eases the pain of recalling the brevity of his years. We rejoice in his example of obedient faith and the scenes and stations of his life which inform and enrich our own faith journeys. And we beseech thee this day for the strength, steadfastness and courage not only to remember but also to obey.

We remember the footsteps of Dr. King: walking everywhere in Montgomery, Alabama, during the bus boycott; sidestepping snarling dogs, swinging billy clubs, and torrential fire hoses in Birmingham; charting a King’s highway in the desert wastelands of bigotry and hatred from Selma to Montgomery, from Memphis to Jackson, from Chicago to Cicero; walking ever and always where Jesus walked among the lonely and the lost; the downtrodden and the outcast; those denied their dignity and robbed of their rights. Lord, guide and enable us to follow his footsteps that we too may be found in those places of danger, division, discord and sorrow where love is so desperately needed but so painfully absent. Let us hear and feel anew the words of the old freedom song beckoning us to faith commitment in community with our fellow disciples of Jesus Christ, saying, “Walk together children, and don’t get weary.”

We remember the gentle, patient courage of Dr. King, as he made the teachings of Jesus the literal rule for loving: refusing the temptation to render an eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth but rendering instead good for evil; nonviolently offering the other cheek to those who, blinded by hate, taunted and loving those who chose to be his enemies and persecutors; following his Lord in showing the greatest love of all by laying down his life for others. Lord, give us the courage to live by what we say we believe and to accept the teachings of Christ as codes of conduct rather than mere words of inspiration.

We remember the restless and unrelenting commitment of Dr. King, as he refused to barter justice or compromise thy Word; insisting that the demand for justice, freedom and human dignity applies to all thy children in Southeast Asia as well as the South Bronx, and throughout the two-thirds of thy creation where injustice and oppression preserve the privilege of the other third. Lord, save us from the temptation to be satisfied with partial fulfillment and limited expression of thy truth. Help us both to love our neighbors and also to see the whole world as our neighborhood.

O God, fashion and mold our memories into a guiding vision for active discipleship, so that we may not only long and yearn for thy coming kingdom but may also recognize its arrival and presence in the risen Christ Jesus, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, in whose blessed name we pray. Amen.

— The Reverend Dr. Randolph Nugent
General Secretary, Board of Global Ministries, United Methodist Church

In America’s poorest ghettos, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s portrait is one of the most popular subjects of public art. These images, which I have been documenting since 1977, regularly appear on the walls of the liquor stores, auto-repair shops, fast-food restaurants, mom-and-pop stores and public housing projects of Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York and many other cities across the country. The majority are the work of amateur artists. Though Dr. King is usually front and center, he is often accompanied by other inspirational figures: Nelson Mandela, John Paul II, Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, Mother Teresa, Pancho Villa. He is often accompanied by his famous phrase, “I have a dream” ”“ a reminder that in many of the communities where these murals exist, the gulf between hope and reality remains far too wide. — Camilo José Vergara

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Americans err if we believe that it’s only a black responsibility to right the social wrongs of racial inequality. It’s a white responsibility, too ”” and a Christian responsibility. Why Christians? It’s not that other faiths can’t do their part as well, but Christians ”” by sheer number and religious tradition ”” could be our best hope.

History shows that the teachings of Christianity hold an undeniable power to inspire positive social movements and call Americans to conscience, as they did during King’s time. Many Christians will be the first to tell you they should be held to a higher standard ”” because their religion insists on it.

Let’s improve educational and economic opportunities for African-Americans. Let’s acknowledge and root out the racism that mocks the American ideal. Let’s reject the harmful message of the prosperity gospel and reclaim the best of the nation’s black church tradition, with Christians ”” white as well as black ”” leading the charge for the dispossessed.

As the distinguished columnist Roger Cohen recently reminded, it is on the matter of race where one finds the greatest gulf between American behavior and American ideals. Will history find the same gap between Christian behavior and Christian ideals?

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Watch it all.

I find it always is really worth the time–KSH.

Clearly, Americans of 2009 are far more inclined than Americans of 1929 or 1968 to heed the Rev. King’s call that we judge others not “by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

Yet that positive outcome was far from assured during his time. Less than a half century ago, cruel racism and the long-simmering resentments it fueled threatened to tear apart our nation.

Thanks to the Rev. King, though, our nation was forced to take a hard look at itself and make necessary transformations. Ultimately, his call for overdue fairness and cooperative understanding prevailed through peaceful, yet morally overwhelming, persuasion.

But this warning he issued to all people bears repeating: “Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.”

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When Ty’Sheoma Bethea wrote to Congress to plead for help for her crumbling junior high school, she was just “a little girl from Dillon” trying to make a difference. She never dreamed it would earn her an invitation to President Barack Obama’s first State of the Union address.

Ty’Sheoma’s initiative not only earned her national acclaim, it got the ball rolling to finally fix her old school in South Carolina’s so-called “Corridor of Shame.” And it taught the eighth-grader how words can make a difference, just as they had in the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” a rallying cry for the civil rights movement.

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Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we have not a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.

–Hebrews 4:14,15