[The Rev. Steven] Anderson’s journey to the Catholic Church had a few stops along with the way, which explains why he was named a priest with a wife and children.

After graduating from high school, Anderson spent a year at Adrian College before transferring to Oral Roberts University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in biblical literature. He later earned a master’s degree in divinity from Oral Roberts, in Tulsa, Okla.

In 1995, he became a priest in the Charismatic Episcopal Church, a denomination that began in 1992.

Anderson converted to Catholicism after reading work from some of the earliest writers of the church.

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An American poet and experienced journalist, the author brings to her book a sharp eye for telling details and a keen sense of place. By her own admission, she also brings personal baggage. As the daughter of Frank Griswold, the former presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, she grew up a preacher’s kid, deeply steeped in Christian traditions and at home with evangelicals and international proselytizers such as Billy Graham’s son Franklin. But she has done her homework on Islam, and as a young woman traveling alone, she appears to have encountered no obstacles in Muslim countries that she couldn’t overcome.

Admirably evenhanded, she recounts the excesses of fundamentalism on both sides. For readers more accustomed to hearing about Islamic inflexibility, she recalls the callous myopia of Christianity. “Dr. Richard Furman, the head of the World Medical Mission, the medical arm of [Franklin] Graham’s organization, told me that in one of the Samaritan’s Purse’s African hospitals, the doctors will draw a plus or minus sign on a patient’s chart to indicate whether he is an evangelical Christian. If not, his operation may be postponed until someone shares the Gospel with him lest he die without an opportunity for salvation.”

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At 33, [Ryan] Wright is young compared to most priests, yet his vision is clearer than many who have been in the clergy for decades.

“I don’t think my age is really a factor,” he said. That is unless you count intense passion as an age-thing.

“As Christians we are called to enter into a relationship with Jesus Christ, but that is only the beginning,” he said. “The fruits of that relationship are a desire to live and share the Gospel with our neighbors and to enjoy fellowship with our community to experience the transformative power of being in a relationship with Christ within this world.”

When asked what he finds most rewarding in his new cure thus far, Wright comes forth immediately with his response, “From the joy of grandkids to the death of a loved one, the whole church community can come together to share and bear hard places as well as celebrate the positive. It is my pleasure to invite God into those places.”

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There has been a fine old ding-dong in the books pages of The Tablet, the Catholic weekly. Sir Michael Dummett, the retired Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford, has accused Professor John Haldane of St Andrews of a style of thought that is “old-fashioned and cramped”.

In a review of Professor Haldane’s book Reasonable Faith (Routledge, £21.99) Sir Michael declares that “a man’s philosophy ought not to be controlled by his religious beliefs”. He then says: “If the results of someone’s philosophising appear to be coming into conflict with what he otherwise firmly believes, he ought to conclude that they cannot be correct, although he is unable at present to see where or how they have gone wrong.”

That sounds very like religious belief controlling a man’s philosophy….

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[Bill] Scott and other interested Christians who met for the meal at the Hendersonville church were participating in “What Would Jesus Eat?” a Food in the Gospels Bible course being held at the church on Wednesday evenings for the next few weeks.

The course, taught by Bible student John Snodgrass, aims to shed light on the importance of planting, harvesting and dining through the parables as well as miracles that Jesus performed.

“Jesus is known to us today because he captured the hearts of first-century Galileans, and the best way to the heart of a first-century Galilean was through his stomach,” Snodgrass told the group as they ate.

Snodgrass and his wife Elizabeth prepared the food for the meal. They attempted to re-create a typical first-century Palestinian peasant’s supper.

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The introductory blurb reads as follows:

Biological and technological evolution “is a spiritual process,” says this leading futurist. “Entities become more godlike, never reaching that ideal but moving in that direction exponentially.” Watch excerpts from our interview with Ray Kurzweil.

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RAY KURZWEIL: This is a design of a robotic red blood cell. We are going to put these technologies inside us, blood-cell-size devices that will augment our immune system, make us a lot healthier, destroy disease and dramatically push back human longevity, go inside our brains and actually enable us to remember things better, solve problems more effectively. We are going to become a hybrid of machine and our biological heritage. In my mind, we are not going to be transcending our humanity. We are going to be transcending our biology.

[LUCKY] SEVERSON: Kurzweil has written several books. One of the most recent, called “The Singularity Is Near,” predicts that by the year 2050 nonbiological artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence, creating a hybrid of man and technology.

KURZWEIL: What I am predicting is that we will have machines””we are going to need a different word because these are not like the machines we are used to. These are going to be machines that will seem as human, as real, as conscious, as any actual human being.

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Without controversy or protests, Muslims kneel in prayer every day at a quiet Pentagon chapel, only steps away from where a hijacked airliner struck the building on September 11, 2001.

The tranquil atmosphere at the Pentagon is a stark contrast to the furor surrounding a planned mosque near Ground Zero in New York, with opponents arguing the proposed Islamic center is an insult to the memory of the 3,000 victims of the 9/11 attacks.

“I’ve been here almost four years and I’ve never heard of any complaints,” US Army spokesman George Wright said of the regular Muslim services.

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When I was in seminary, I wrote a killer essay on baptism. The assignment was to write a detailed parish newsletter column explaining baptism and the process for preparing infants, children and adults for the sacrament. I pulled out all the stops, wrote just what my liturgics professor wanted to read, and, had the essay actually been printed in the newsletter, I would’ve had to officiate at far more funerals than baptisms as a result of boring parishioners to death.

It’s safe to say there’s a difference between theory and practice, between seminary and ministry. I know this because the past few baptisms I’ve celebrated haven’t exactly followed the outline I dazzled my professor with. They’ve been better.

Working as a chaplain for Hospice at Home has reminded me that at life’s end, people think about tying up loose ends, and for some that loose end is baptism. I was working with a family and two of the daughters of a man who was dying said that he, his wife and another daughter hadn’t been baptized and they thought that the three of them should receive the sacrament before their father died. One thing that’s very important in providing spiritual care for the dying and their families is not to push any agenda or bias I (or the family) may have; rather it is to explore what’s meaningful for the patient and assist him or her in finding it. So we talked about baptism for a few minutes, and they decided they wanted to be baptized; and with the patient in bed and his wife and their daughter at his bedside, I asked the other daughters to find the nicest bowl in the kitchen and fill it with water from the tap. Then we gathered in a circle, and I blessed the water and baptized them.

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….researchers at Stanford University found that regular multi-taskers are actually quite bad at it. In a series of tests that required switching attention from one task to another, heavy multi-task had slower response times than those who rarely multi tasked.

What that suggests, the researchers say, is that multi-task are more easily distracted by irrelevant information. The more we multi-task, the less we are able to focus properly on just one thing.

Damon Young thinks where media and communications are concerned, we’re not made for multi-tasking.

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The consequences of doing nothing would be painful. But they would be far less harmful than the consequences of an unconditioned federal bailout, which would mean massive new fiscal commitments at the federal level.

Unfortunately, leaders in Illinois and elsewhere are now talking quietly about the possibility of a federal bailout. Such speculation undermines state and local efforts to reform pension systems or make other hard choices. Why agonize over unpopular budget cuts or tax increases if the feds will ride to the rescue?

Bailing out state pensions would be astronomically expensive. According to a Pew Foundation estimate this year, the total unfunded liabilities of the 50 states’ pension funds amounted to about $1 trillion in 2008. Another recent study, by Josh Rauh of Northwestern and Robert Novy-Marx of the Chicago Booth School of Business, estimated that the unfunded liability was closer to $3 trillion. Adding the liabilities of municipal pension funds makes the total even larger.

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Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in New York, said Wednesday that he would gladly help mediate between the proponents and critics of an Islamic center and mosque planned for a site two blocks from ground zero.

The archbishop said that it was his “major prayer” that a compromise could be reached, and that while he had no strong feelings about the project, he might support finding a new location for the center.

Speaking during an impromptu news conference at Covenant House, a Catholic shelter in Manhattan for homeless youth, Archbishop Dolan invoked the example of Pope John Paul II, who in 1993 ordered Catholic nuns to move from their convent at the former Auschwitz death camp after protests from Jewish leaders.

“He’s the one who said, ”˜Let’s keep the idea, and maybe move the address,’ ” the archbishop said. “It worked there; might work here.”

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Now, Kenyans have voted after having heard what we, the Catholic Church in Kenya, and various people had to tell them. We respect the outcome of the referendum, where the larger numbers of Kenyans have voted to accept this new constitution. However, truth and right are not about numbers. We therefore, as the shepherds placed to give moral guidance to our people, still reiterate the need to address the flawed moral issues in this new Constitution. That voice will never be silenced.

We thank all the Christians and many Kenyans of good will who voted “no” in consideration of the issues raised by the Church. We also acknowledge many who voted “yes” while having serious misgivings on the moral issues contained in the constitution. We understand the many pressures that were at play at this time, and call upon you to revisit and play a crucial role in addressing these issues as we now seek to implement the Constitution and forge a way forward in the general reforms we now have to embark on.

The Church desires an authentic reform process, and will remain at the forefront to support a good Constitution and the legal reform process in this country….

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Although we have written before of our concerns over the substance of the new Articles of Association of the Anglican Consultative Council, until now we have said little about our concerns over the procedures followed by the Anglican Communion Office in managing the development of these Articles. Others voiced complaints and we remained hopeful that the ACO would respond to these complaints with transparency and by providing satisfactory answers. This has not happened.

We are dismayed that the Communion Office is either unable or unwilling to provide even the most basic information to those who have raised serious concerns: what information was provided to the provinces; when was it provided; and what was their response. An amendment of the constitution is a significant action by an organization, especially one subject to legal duties. Maintaining this information is the most basic level of diligence required of an organization’s secretariat. The lack of transparency and public accountability throughout this process is one of the most regrettable episodes of Communion life in recent years.

Our concerns are only heightened by information suggesting that the ACO may not have followed advice given to it on the necessary procedures for adopting the new Articles. In November 2008 Robert Fordham of Australia, then a member of the ACC standing committee and the “convenor” of its “sub-committee on Constitutional Issues,” addressed the Joint Standing Committee on the status of the new constitution and “what steps have to be taken at this stage.” He advised that the revised draft of the Articles needed to be submitted to the provinces for ratification at that time. He noted that after ACC-13 had approved a draft of the new Articles in 2005 the ACC’s legal advisor, Canon John Rees, had held “extensive discussions” with the UK charity commission and had engaged in “considerable work” to produce a new draft for the February 2008 JSC. At that meeting in February 2008, the JSC then amended the draft further before approving it. Mr. Fordham then states:

The next and final step is to circulate the Constitution in this new format to each of the Member Provinces of the Communion to seek their ratification. For the new Constitution to come into effect support will be required from two-thirds of the 39 Provinces.

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Lutherans world-wide are already buzzing about 2017, the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, commonly regarded as the starting point of the Reformation. But no one’s quite sure about the right way to observe the occasion.

Should Lutherans celebrate the profound insights of a brilliant theologian into the gospel? Or should they lament the splintering of the Western church and the physical and spiritual intra-Christian wars that followed? Should Lutherans lord it over Catholics or should they apologize? Will Catholics ignore the anniversary and its significance altogether, or condemn it; or will they find a way to celebrate it too?

On top of all this, many believe, Christians are and remain in the grip of an “ecumenical winter.” Despite the high hopes for church reconciliation and even reunion through most of the 20th century, the past 25 years have seen waning interest in ecumenism on the popular level, and scandal and schism consuming the churches’ attention at the institutional level.

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While some withdrawals point to capital flight by wealthy Greeks, it is clear that households and companies are running down savings to make ends meet. The Athens Chamber of Commerce warned yesterday that its members are in “dire straits”, with a majority facing a liquidity threat.

Simon Ward from Henderson Global Investors said Greek lenders are covering their funding gap through loans from the European Central Bank (ECB), which reached a record €96bn in July. “The question is how much eligible collateral they have left to take to the ECB. It must be nearing the limits,” he said.

“What is worrying is that this is not just Greeks. Portuguese banks borrowed €50bn in July compared to €41.5bn in June. Together with Ireland and Spain they have borrowed €387bn from the ECB,” he said.

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I’ve been ordained for over 30 years now, and during that time it’s been my privilege to be with a number of people as they died. Some were frightened not of annihilation, but of absurdity. Death sealed for them the emptiness of a life not fully lived. Death came too soon, before they could make sense of their life, before they could make one last attempt to give it meaning. They became vulnerable to attacks of despair in which their sense of the value of all that had gone before them drained away. The sting of death was not the loss of life, but the loss of meaning.

I face my mortality in the conviction that death is the gateway to the fulfilment of human life, not its extinction. I believe life is a pilgrimage of which the destination is God. The fears that assail me are more about the process of dying rather than the event itself. It’s not the dying that’s the issue: it’s living until I die. Jesus said that he had come that ”˜we might have life, and have it abundantly.’ Abundant living is both his promise and his gift, and I pray for grace to be open to it.

Sadly, we all know of individuals where in old age disease and chemical changes to the brain have effected irreversible changes in their personality, but I have also seen how a person’s true character can emerge in old age.

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The decision of the Appellate Tri­bunal rejecting lay and diaconal presidency at the eucharist is the latest setback for the diocese of Sydney in its quest to find a means of allowing lay people and deacons to fulfil this function.

Since the 1990s, numerous at­tempts have failed, but this decision is the most serious, because the dio­cese’s current ordination policy is based on the premise that deacons can (in Sydney’s preferred termin­ology) administer the Lord’s Supper.

Under the policy that has been introduced in recent years, ordination as priests (or presbyters, as Sydney calls them) is restricted only to rec­tors of parishes. At least one newly appointed rector has been ordained priest in the same service in which he was inducted into his first parish.

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Justin Wolfers, a Professor of Business and Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania has these as his first two:

1. If it walks like a bank and quacks like a bank, it’s a bank. Bring all banks out of the shadows and into the glare of the regulatory sunlight.
2. Too often financial information is written with two pens. The small font sizes provide enough cover for a lawyer to sign off, but in larger type, they tell a story that is misleading enough to encourage a steady stream of suckers. That doesn’t seem fair. Here’s a different approach. If your firm’s marketing materials lead a random sample of 100 Americans to believe that the mortgage, or credit card, or other financial product is less onerous or risky than it actually is, then your marketing materials are misleading, and your firm is liable for damages.

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Fidelity administers 17,000 plans, which represents 11 million participants. In the second quarter, some 62,000 workers initiated a hardship withdrawal. That’s compared with 45,000 in the same period a year ago.

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Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Here is one:

We have nothing to gain by continuing to wage war in Afghanistan. We are keeping that poor country in turmoil, killing innocent people and spending money that could be used to create jobs. We have had no success in nine years, and we can expect no success in nine more. We are wasting soldiers’ lives. We should bring our troops home now.

Joel Welty

Blanchard, Mich.

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Prudence means practical common sense, taking the trouble to think out what you are doing and what is likely to come of it. Nowadays most people hardly think of Prudence as one of the “virtues.” In fact, because Christ said we could only get into His world by being like children, many Christians have the idea that, provided you are “good,” it does not matter being a fool. But that is a misunderstanding. In the first place, most children show plenty of “prudence” about doing the things they are really interested in, and think them out quite sensibly. In the second place, as St. Paul points out, Christ never meant that we were to remain children in intelligence: on the contrary, He told us to be not only “as harmless as doves,” but also “as wise as serpents.” He wants a child’s heart, but a grown-up’s head. He wants us to be simple, single-minded, affectionate, and teachable, as good children are; but He also wants every bit of intelligence we have to be alert at its job, and in first-class fighting trim. The fact that you are giving money to a charity does not mean that you need not try to find out whether that charity is a fraud or not. The fact that what you are thinking about is God Himself (for example, when you are praying) does not mean that you can be content with the same babyish ideas which you had when you were a five-year-old. It is, of course, quite true that God will not love you any the less, or have less use for you, if you happen to have been born with a very second-rate brain. He has room for people with very little sense, but He wants every one to use what sense they have. The proper motto is not “Be good, sweet maid, and let who can be clever,” but “Be good, sweet maid, and don’t forget that this involves being as clever as you can.” God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than of any other slackers. If you are thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you you are embarking on something which is going to take the whole of you, brains and all. But, fortunately, it works the other way round. Anyone who is honestly trying to be a Christian will soon find his intelligence being sharpened: one of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself. That is why an uneducated believer like Bunyan was able to write a book that has astonished the whole world.

–C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Working harder than ever these days? Get used to it.

The state’s chief economic forecaster John Rainey said Thursday that South Carolinians who have jobs are working harder than ever before and that record high productivity combined with new technological advances will keep unemployment higher for longer.

In other words, if companies can get by getting more out of less — they will.

“I think high unemployment, unfortunately, is here to stay,” Rainey said after analyzing state unemployment data and revenue collections at the Board of Economic Advisors meeting.

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This question pops up everywhere, underlying concerns about “failure to launch” and “boomerang kids.” Two new sitcoms feature grown children moving back in with their parents ”” “$#*! My Dad Says,” starring William Shatner as a divorced curmudgeon whose 20-something son can’t make it on his own as a blogger, and “Big Lake,” in which a financial whiz kid loses his Wall Street job and moves back home to rural Pennsylvania. A cover of The New Yorker last spring picked up on the zeitgeist: a young man hangs up his new Ph.D. in his boyhood bedroom, the cardboard box at his feet signaling his plans to move back home now that he’s officially overqualified for a job. In the doorway stand his parents, their expressions a mix of resignation, worry, annoyance and perplexity: how exactly did this happen?

It’s happening all over, in all sorts of families, not just young people moving back home but also young people taking longer to reach adulthood overall. It’s a development that predates the current economic doldrums, and no one knows yet what the impact will be ”” on the prospects of the young men and women; on the parents on whom so many of them depend; on society, built on the expectation of an orderly progression in which kids finish school, grow up, start careers, make a family and eventually retire to live on pensions supported by the next crop of kids who finish school, grow up, start careers, make a family and on and on. The traditional cycle seems to have gone off course, as young people remain un­tethered to romantic partners or to permanent homes, going back to school for lack of better options, traveling, avoiding commitments, competing ferociously for unpaid internships or temporary (and often grueling) Teach for America jobs, forestalling the beginning of adult life.

The 20s are a black box, and there is a lot of churning in there….

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O God, by whose grace thy servant Bernard of Clairvaux, enkindled with the fire of thy love, became a burning and a shining light in thy Church: Grant that we also may be aflame with the spirit of love and discipline, and may ever walk before thee as children of light; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with thee, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, liveth and reigneth, one God, now and for ever.

Holy, Blessed and Glorious Trinity, I adore thee.
In thy perfect Beauty, I adore thee.
In thy boundless Power, I adore thee.
With the Holy Mother, I adore thee.
With the Holy Angels, I adore thee.
With the Blessed Saints, I adore thee.
In union with every Mass which is offered today, I adore thee.

Praise and Thanksgiving for protection during the past night, I offer to thee.
Praise and Thanksgiving for all thy mercies and blessings, I offer to thee.
My daily work, I offer to thee.
All my thoughts, I offer to thee.
All my words, I offer to thee.
All my deeds, I offer to thee.
My joys and my consolations, I offer to thee.
My sorrows and my troubles, I offer to thee.
My difficulties, my doubts and anxieties, I offer to thee.

–St. Augustine’s Prayer Book

Again there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came among them to present himself before the LORD. And the LORD said to Satan, “Whence have you come?” Satan answered the LORD, “From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it.” And the LORD said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil? He still holds fast his integrity, although you moved me against him, to destroy him without cause.”

–Job 2:1-3

Nathaniel is transferring to Vanderbilt University as a sophomore and Abigail is beginning her senior year at the College of Charleston.

Seven-time Cy Young Award winner Roger Clemens was indicted by a federal grand jury Thursday for allegedly lying to Congress about using steroids and growth hormone. The criminal case writes a new chapter in one of Major League Baseball’s worst scandals, the rampant use of the banned substances.

A six-count indictment alleges that Clemens obstructed a congressional inquiry with 15 different statements that he made under oath in 2008, including denials that he had ever used steroids or human growth hormone. The indictment says that he lied and committed perjury regarding the same matters.

The former pitcher and his former trainer, Brian McNamee, testified under oath at a 2008 hearing before a House committee and contradicted each other about whether Clemens had used performance-enhancing drugs.

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