As I have followed this battle of Brit vs. the Buddha, I have found myself returning to the story of the Buddha himself, who in his youth led an existence eerily reminiscent of the life of Tiger Woods. He was rich and powerful and lived a private life in a grand palace with a beautiful wife and a beloved son. And for a time, he thought he was happy. But after a while, he realized that no amount of money or power or sex could bring him true happiness. So he left his wife and his child and his palace to seek the source of human suffering. This might seem selfish, but his goal was to find a path that could alleviate the suffering of all of humanity. And one day, according to Buddhists, he did just that. While sitting under a Bodhi tree, he saw that suffering is rooted in a combination of ego and ignorance, and he learned how to uproot both through meditation.

Tiger Woods might well have something to learn from Christianity, and soon enough we might well see him engage in what historian Susan Wise Bauer has called “the art of the public grovel,” complete with Jimmy Swaggart’s tears, Bill Clinton’s confession and Ted Haggard’s repentance. But Brit Hume clearly has something to learn from Buddhism, too, not least that there is more than one way to make yourself new.

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AMERICANS, particularly if they are of a certain leftward-leaning, college-educated type, worry about our country’s blunders into other cultures. In some circles, it is easy to make friends with a rousing rant about the McDonald’s near Tiananmen Square, the Nike factory in Malaysia or the latest blowback from our political or military interventions abroad. For all our self-recrimination, however, we may have yet to face one of the most remarkable effects of American-led globalization. We have for many years been busily engaged in a grand project of Americanizing the world’s understanding of mental health and illness. We may indeed be far along in homogenizing the way the world goes mad.

This unnerving possibility springs from recent research by a loose group of anthropologists and cross-cultural psychiatrists. Swimming against the biomedical currents of the time, they have argued that mental illnesses are not discrete entities like the polio virus with their own natural histories. These researchers have amassed an impressive body of evidence suggesting that mental illnesses have never been the same the world over (either in prevalence or in form) but are inevitably sparked and shaped by the ethos of particular times and places. In some Southeast Asian cultures, men have been known to experience what is called amok, an episode of murderous rage followed by amnesia; men in the region also suffer from koro, which is characterized by the debilitating certainty that their genitals are retracting into their bodies. Across the fertile crescent of the Middle East there is zar, a condition related to spirit-possession beliefs that brings forth dissociative episodes of laughing, shouting and singing.

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At a time when too many of Britain’s schools suffer from abysmal standards of management, teaching and discipline, it seems incredible that the Government should devote resources to harassing some of the most successful state schools in the country. The establishments in questions are faith schools, and while Tony Blair was prime minister they were largely left alone (hardly surprisingly, since Mr Blair educated his own children at one of them). But since 2007 the Government has resorted to the sort of political bullying of “elitist” schools associated with the Wilson and Callaghan administrations.

As we report today, in the last six months more than 30 faith schools, most of them Church of England or Roman Catholic, have been investigated by the Office for the Schools Adjudicators, England’s admissions watchdog. The main purpose: to make sure they do not quiz prospective parents about their faith, since this could constitute “selection”. To cite one example: Cardinal Vaughan School in west London, an excellent and diverse Catholic comprehensive, is effectively forbidden from giving preference to children from committed Catholic families because this might produce a “middle-class” bias. Matters have not been helped by politically correct Catholic education advisers and, as a result, the freedom of a faith school to define itself by its ethos has been weakened.

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They’re a large but neglected group of Christians. Some do not have their own denomination. They have no bishops or pastors. Others might be Baptists or Presbyterians or members of a nondenominational fellowship or a mega church. They are sincere evangelical Protestants who are disenchanted with evangelicalism and are searching for a church that is historical, traditional and liturgical.

Usually the first place they stop and shop is the Episcopal Church.

Before long they discover that Episcopalians are too liberal for their liking. Not only does the Episcopal Church ordain women priests and bishops, but it also permits bishops and priests to be “out and proud” homosexual activists.

The evangelical searchers move on. They read. They study. They pray. They explore Eastern Orthodoxy. But that’s not English, and they’re not Greek or Russian, and the culture shock is enormous.

Finally, they turn to the Catholic Church, and that’s a letdown, too. First of all, the same sorts of ethnic problems that turned them away from the Eastern Orthodox turn up among the Catholics. They’re bewildered by Catholic culture. Rosaries, novenas, Fatima, statues and candles, the Infant of Prague ”” all of it seems foreign. Plus a lot of Catholics seem just as liberal as the Episcopalians.

This is where the new Anglican ordinariate ”” established by Pope Benedict XVI last fall ”” may well prove a bridge to Rome not only for Anglo-Catholics but also a wide range of Protestants.

Read the whole article from NCR.

[Maureen] Waller’s wonderfully lively book brings to life the story of English marriage through accounts of mainly upper-class matches made for money or social advancement. Many of the wives Waller writes about were extremely spirited but are left powerless. Husbands could do whatever they wanted with and to their wives, and, until the late 18th century, there were private madhouses “where men could lock up their wives, no questions asked”. For the middle and lower classes, marriage was a way to respectability, guilt-free sex, legitimised children and a means to avoid poverty ”“ an unmarried woman was an unwanted drain on family resources.

While modern marriage offers all parties a lot more liberation, the sheer weight of its historical baggage is almost too much to contemplate, such is its past injustice to women. Our easily dissolved and diverse models of coupledom may avoid these negatives but they raise another question ”“ why do so many stay together? It all comes back, as Gilbert and Figes conclude, to intimacy. Perhaps this is the new buzzword for what promises to be a less inflated, less dreamy decade.

Intimacy is a shared script, the secret pillow talk, and the quotidian routines of bringing up children and holding down jobs. It may start with romantic love but, with luck and hard work, grows to have a firmer foundation than the passing fancies of romance. As Figes says, “Lasting intimacy is good for our health and sense of wellbeing, and investing in that relationship could be the best insurance policy of our lives.” Intimacy may even be another word for maturity in a marriage. We marry because we need and hope to grow old together.

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Most economists agree that the U.S. left its recession sometime last summer. Yet with each passing month, the employment news remains grim. Looks like we’re in a jobless recovery.

The December job numbers released Friday were of little comfort. True, November’s payroll loss was revised upward to show a minuscule gain of 4,000 jobs. But December’s loss of 85,000 was about twice what Wall Street expected, and the unemployment rate remained at 10%.

For key groups, the news is far worse. Teens, for instance, suffer a 27% unemployment rate. If you’re a construction worker, it’s little better ”” one in four workers in that industry are without work.

Overall, those “underemployed” ”” lacking either a job or not working full time when they would like to ”” now stands above 17%. Also last month, emergency filings for jobless benefits surged 43% nationwide ”” a scary statistic if ever there was one.

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Dr Marcus Braybrooke, a respected Anglican clergyman and theologian, has expressed his anxieties: “[All of us] face the same challenges in an increasingly alien society. Original sin and sexual inhibition has been replaced by what most Christians and Muslims would regard as undue permissiveness.” Atheists too and humanists I bet, and all other sorts.

The last decade was a period of economic greed and libertine excess encouraged and reflected by magazines, television, music, high-paid entertainers and childlike resistance to self-control. Modesty was for losers. Some of those losers turned modesty into the ultimate cause, turned themselves into morality warriors and claimed God was on their side.

With things falling apart and ethical compasses broken, you can see why so many are turning to self-discipline and certainties in an age of chaos. Islamic Stalinism is set to grow stronger. A society in a state of perpetual abandon cannot survive that onslaught. We need to sober up and see what we have become. The future is grim; it needs us to be serious.

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Admit the mystery of the people we are not.

If we are convinced we know them, we don’t. If we choose to act upon the emotions aroused by blind knowledge, we make a public reality of internal presumption. Whether we throw brickbats or bouquets, whether the emotion is a fierce infatuation or an abdominal disgust, then””to the extent of our social power””we imprison humans of genuine mystery in the cells of our simplicities.

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More than half of black males between the ages of 16 and 19 are unemployed, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. And that’s only counting those seeking work. Economists say legions of other young black men ”” nobody knows how many ”” have given up looking.

Sitting in an empty classroom at the YouthBuild Charter School in Washington, D.C., Andre Johnson, 18, talks about his fruitless job search.

“I apply for jobs every day,” he says. “And usually I do it online, ’cause I know before when I used to go in the stores, they used to look at me actually different and weird, and they say, ‘Oh we don’t have no applications or nothing,’ and I never believed them.”

Academics believe fewer than 14 in 100 young black men actually have jobs. Washington, D.C., has the worst teen employment rate in the country, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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Watch it all–wonderful stuff.

If I’m truthful, before all this happened I’d actually stopped wrestling with questions of religion. In typical middle-aged fashion, I guess I thought I’d reached all the religious conclusions I was going to, and was comfortable with a faith I called ”˜liberal Christian’ but was disinclined to probe. The accident changed all that, for, faced with Charlie’s miracle, I’ve found myself increasingly compelled to re-think my understanding of what it means to be Christian.

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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 were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

–John 1:1-15

Lord Jesus Christ, who didst humble thyself to take the baptism of sinful men, and wast forthwith declared to be the Son of God: Grant that we who have been baptized into thee may rejoice to be the sons and daughters of God, and servants of all; for thy name’s sake, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit livest and reignest ever one God, world without end.

The number of Malaysian Christian churches hit by firebombs and vandal attacks has reached six following a court decision last week to allow Christians to use the term “Allah” in Malay language publications.

A Molotov cocktail was hurled at the Anglican All Saints Church in Taiping town in Perak state early yesterday, said state police chief Zulkifli Abdullah. He said the building was not damaged, The Australian reports.

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New Year Fireworks 2010 – Sydney from Digital Documents on Vimeo.

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Congratulations on being amongst the 13% of people in Britain going to church this Christmas morning. That’s nearly 8 million people, but according to a news report earlier this month the average British Christmas today goes a bit differently. A survey across 4000 families showed the following average timings for Christmas Day. 8.19 ”“ open presents (it used to be 5.30 in ours); 8.39 ”“ first bite of chocolate; 9.57 ”“ first family row; 11.48 ”“ first alcoholic drink; 3.24 ”“ Christmas dinner (I thought it was just vicars!); 4.58 ”“ first person falls asleep. And so on.

It’s all very family-centred. We do our best to be together on Christmas day, even if there are lots of family tensions around. And the whole advertising of Christmas is predicated on the image of happy families gathered around the dining table or the Christmas tree. But there’s another side to Christmas. 50,000 young people will be ‘homeless’ at Christmas, having left home or been thrown out of home for a whole range of dysfunctionalities. The number of Big Issue sellers in Oxford city centre yesterday told its own story too. The other side of Christmas is homelessness.

But that’s part of the Christmas story too. The well-worn Christmas narrative tells of a God who lets himself be homeless in a fragile world. There are two expressions of that homelessness. The first is the picture we’re all used to of a vulnerable family for whom there’s no room at the inn, and who have to be packed off to the stable round the back. Of course, we don’t know that it was a stable ”“ it’s the Nativity plays that say that, the gospels don’t. It’s most likely that the place was a cave behind a house or an inn. Indeed the Greek word used for inn ‘kataluma’ usually refers to the upper guest room of a family house. It may be that there was no room for Mary because it was a family house (Joseph’s family perhaps) and the room was already full because of other family visitors who’d come for the census. Mary therefore had to go to the warm cave at the back of the house where the animals were kept. So it’s a cave, not a stable, that we see under the Church of the Nativity today.

But whatever the actual place, there was no room in the ‘kataluma’, the ordinary, civilized places. Jesus was homeless.

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In the wake of the failed Christmas Day airplane bombing and the killing a few days later of seven CIA operatives in Afghanistan, Washington is, as it was after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, obsessed with “dots” — and our inability to connect them. “The U.S. government had sufficient information to have uncovered this plot and potentially disrupt the Christmas Day attack, but our intelligence community failed to connect those dots,” the president said Tuesday.

But for all the talk, two key dots have yet to be connected: Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the alleged Northwest Airlines Flight 253 attacker, and Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, the trusted CIA informant turned assassin. Although a 23-year-old Nigerian engineering student and a 36-year-old Jordanian physician would seem to have little in common, they both exemplify a new grand strategy that al-Qaeda has been successfully pursuing for at least a year.

Throughout 2008 and 2009, U.S. officials repeatedly trumpeted al-Qaeda’s demise. In a May 2008 interview with The Washington Post, then-CIA Director Michael Hayden heralded the group’s “near strategic defeat.” And the intensified aerial drone attacks that President Obama authorized against al-Qaeda targets in Pakistan last year were widely celebrated for having killed over half of its remaining senior leadership.

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Supporters of a woman’s right to choose an abortion had reason to feel confident a year ago, with a newly elected Democratic president whose party controlled the House and the Senate.

But not long after President Obama lifted a ban on U.S. funding for international health groups that support abortion, a gunman killed the nation’s most prominent abortion doctor, George Tiller. And by year’s end, congressional majorities voted to limit access to abortion coverage in proposed health-care reform legislation. The fact that an antiabortion Michigan Democrat won the day stunned abortion-rights advocates.

“We think the potential now for even more mischief and more attacks on pro-choice politics is very, very evident,” said Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America. “The other side is really going to attack on every front. They’re just emboldened.”

The new year finds the opposing political forces at loggerheads once more, as both sides prepare for health-care negotiations and events surrounding the 37th anniversary, on Jan. 22, of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion.

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Religions derive their power and popularity in part from the ethical compass they offer. So why do so many faiths help perpetuate something that most of us regard as profoundly unethical: the oppression of women?

It is not that warlords in Congo cite Scripture to justify their mass rapes (although the last warlord I met there called himself a pastor and wore a button reading “rebels for Christ”). It’s not that brides are burned in India as part of a Hindu ritual. And there’s no verse in the Koran that instructs Afghan thugs to throw acid in the faces of girls who dare to go to school.

Yet these kinds of abuses ”” along with more banal injustices, like slapping a girlfriend or paying women less for their work ”” arise out of a social context in which women are, often, second-class citizens. That’s a context that religions have helped shape, and not pushed hard to change.

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The number of suspected sham marriages by illegal immigrants has leapt by more than half in the past year.

Home Office figures for 2009 show a 54% jump, with 529 suspected cases reported by registrars in England and Wales.

The leap comes after the Law Lords overturned a government scheme designed to stop illegal immigrants marrying.

Registrars have told the BBC that marriage rackets are using Eastern European brides to provide other migrants with a toehold in the UK.

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Oregon is one of several states that provides funding for so-called indigent burials. Historically, this money pays for a final service for people with no home or relatives. But in 2009, Gunson says, an unprecedented number of bodies went unclaimed ”” some for a month or more ”” not because family couldn’t be found, but because the economy has left families unable to pay for even the most basic $500 cremation.

“We don’t really want to become a storage place,” she says.

The trend is elusive to track. In Oregon, demand on the indigent burial fund was so high last year, the Legislature had to nearly triple fees on death certificates to keep the fund solvent. Illinois received so many requests for burial help that its fund was temporarily shut down over the summer. And in Michigan, where the economy hemorrhaged 300,000 jobs last year, indigent burials nearly doubled, from 2008’s 603 to more than 1,100.

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The effect of free money is remarkable. A year ago investors were panicking and there was talk of another Depression. Now the MSCI world index of global share prices is more than 70% higher than its low in March 2009. That’s largely thanks to interest rates of 1% or less in America, Japan, Britain and the euro zone, which have persuaded investors to take their money out of cash and to buy risky assets.

For all the panic last year, asset values never quite reached the lows that marked other bear-market bottoms, and now the rally has made several markets look pricey again. In the American housing market, where the crisis started, homes are priced at around fair value on the basis of rental yields, but they are overvalued by almost 30% in Britain and by 50% in Australia, Hong Kong and Spain.

Stockmarkets are still shy of their record peaks in most countries. The American market is around 25% below the level it reached in 2007. But it is still nearly 50% overvalued on the best long-term measure, which adjusts profits to allow for the economic cycle, and is on a par with two of the four great valuation peaks in the 20th century, in 1901 and 1966.

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[BOB] ABERNETHY: So are you saying that you and other Muslim leaders come down more on the side of individual freedom that you do on security?

[SALAM] AL-MARAYATI: No I think we have to have both. If you are going to stigmatize or isolate a population, that feeds into radicalization. Part of the radicalization problem is when a community feels isolated, and when one person””and we’re talking about now the concern over lone wolves or lone recruits, if that person feels desperate, depressed, then he becomes prey for extremist recruiters, and we should do anything and everything to help accelerate integration of Muslims into American society.

ABERNETHY: After the Christmas Day near-disaster in the air near Detroit, and some other recent events, too, do you sense a growing backlash against Muslims in this country?

AL-MARAYATI: There’s a rise of the mob mentality. You read the comments on a number of stories, you get the emails, you get the phone calls, and I feel, unfortunately, that the level of hostility against Islam and Muslims is at an all-time high, and I’m very concerned.

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Would-be arsonists in mostly Muslim Malaysia struck at a convent school and a sixth church on Sunday while church and government leaders called for calm in a row over Christians’ use of the word “Allah” to refer to God.

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