With the nation on high alert, an Indian court handed down a long-awaited decision on Thursday over control of the country’s most disputed religious site by splitting the land into three portions to be divided among Hindus and Muslims, according to lawyers in the case.

Much of the detail and rationale behind the decision issued late Thursday by a three-judge panel in the state of Uttar Pradesh remained unclear. The court was expected to release the complete ruling only later in the evening. But lawyers in the case, interviewed on Indian news channels, said the panel had unexpectedly ruled by dividing the land in a way that gave something to both Hindus and Muslims after a legal battle that originated six decades ago.

The case focused on a site in the city of Ayodhya, which many Hindus have long claimed as the birthplace of the Hindu deity Ram, but which also was the site of a mosque, known as the Babri Masjid, built in the 16th century by India’s first Mughal ruler. In 1992, Hindu extremists destroyed the Babri Masjid, sparking riots that would claim the lives of about 2,000 people, mostly Muslims.

One of the central questions in the case had been whether a Hindu temple had existed on the site before the construction of the Babri Masjid. Lawyers in the case said the court’s ruling would reserve one-third of the land for construction of a temple to Ram, another third for another Hindu party to the case, while designating the final third for Muslims to build a mosque.

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As Bauman notes, ‘Most of us, most of the time, are in two minds about that novelty of “bond-free living” – of relationships “with no strings attached”. We covet them and fear them at the same time.’ The flipside of freedom from ties rooted in social convention is a lack of guarantees, and a heightened consciouness of the risk involved in relationships. Bauman refers to the old idea that to love someone means giving a hostage to fortune, but what he goes on to describe is very different from Francis Bacon’s famous and essentially pre-modern observation (borrowing in fact from the Latin poet Lucan): ‘He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief’.

What Bauman means is not simply that the object of one’s affections is vulnerable, and therefore a liability, but that in modernity the object of one’s affections is also a subject. Loving a subject means ‘making oneself dependent on another person endowed with a similar freedom to choose and the will to follow that choice – and so a person full of surprises, unpredictable.’ That person’s surprising choices can be painful. In the absence of the guarantees offered by tradition, the whole enterprise of commitment is fundamentally unilateral, and consequently precarious. Traditional marriage, in contrast, meant staying together ‘through thick and thin’ for the sake of convention rooted in practicality, rather than as a fully autonomous decision. Bourgeois marriage is, or was, emblematic of ‘solid modernity’, combining, never quite satisfactorily, traditional function with an ideal of free choice. That tension between practicality and romance is not resolved in ‘liquid modernity’, merely disenchanted.

Where subjectivity is unconstrained by tradition, then, it is instead inhibited by uncertainty. Dea Birkett argued recently in the Guardian: ‘Falling in and out of love is unpredictable. Promising to love someone forever is a promise no honest person would make.’ But this apparent hard-headed realism is really the flipside of sentimentality. Both attitudes abandon responsibility to the Fates, casting love as a mere subjective feeling rather than, as it might be, a rational determination.

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The 2010 Synod met at Melbourne Grammar School, an establishment bastion every bit as solid as its Tudor Gothic bluestone walls. Those inside sensed and responded to the frailty of the Church itself. Archbishop Philip Aspinall of Brisbane, the Primate, made a heartfelt call to the Synod to exercise a generosity of spirit, which may often have been in evidence; but it is at times hard to distinguish such generosity from caution or fear.

The question of Sydney’s relationship with the rest was never far from the surface, but only once or twice did it breach it in threatening ways. There was predictable posturing about the divisions in the wider Anglican Communion, but overall a curious sense of avoiding conflict prevailed: a motion ‘welcoming’ the proposed Anglican Covenant was met with ambivalence at both liberal and conservative ends of the spectrum. Both were satisfied with a motion referring it for further and wider study.

When the ‘Jerusalem Declaration’ from the gathering of conservative Anglicans held there last year came up for consideration, Perth Archbishop Roger Herft, who has been a frank critic of the conservative forces, made the generous response of seeking and gaining an amendment that encouraged study of the document and its context.

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Archbishop elect, Onesphore Rwaje, who is set to succeed Anglican Archbishop Emmanuel Kolini in January, 2011, has vowed to follow in his predecessor’s footsteps by taking a firm stand against homosexuality.

“Anything that is contrary to God’s family set-up is not acceptable; there is nowhere in the Bible where same-sex marriage is encouraged. God created a man and woman to be the basis of a family,” the Archbishop-elect told The New Times, a week after he was elected to succeed Kolini.

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Pope Benedict made some of his clearest condemnations yet of the sexual abuse of children by priests saying the Catholic Church was not vigilant enough about the problem. This visit by the pope accomplished many things. Most of all Pope Benedict easily managed to shed his hard line image in the eyes of many Britons. This visit helped to unify Catholics and humanise a pope who has so often been perceived as cold and aloof and also authoritarian. This was no doubt a very successful visit.

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The House of Representatives by a wide margin passed legislation to penalize China’s foreign-exchange practices, sending a powerful warning to Beijing but risking a response that could harm U.S. companies and consumers.

The measure would allow, but not require, the U.S. to levy tariffs on countries that undervalue their currencies, which makes their goods cheaper relative to American products. A majority of Republicans lined up with Democrats to pass the bill on a 348-79 vote, highlighting lawmakers’ long-simmering frustration with Chinese trade practices as well as their sensitivity to the faltering U.S. economic recovery with an election looming.

The vote marks the strongest trade measure aimed at China to make it through a chamber of Congress after more than a decade of threats by lawmakers. But despite the broad support Wednesday, dim Senate prospects make it unlikely the measure would become law this year.

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Tony Curtis, a classically handsome movie star who earned an Oscar nomination as an escaped convict in Stanley Kramer’s 1958 movie “The Defiant Ones,” but whose public preferred him in comic roles in films like “Some Like It Hot” (1959) and “The Great Race” (1965), died Wednesday of a cardiac arrest in his Las Vegas area home. He was 85.

His death was confirmed by the Clark County coroner, The Associated Press reported.

As a performer, Mr. Curtis drew first and foremost on his startlingly good looks. With his dark, curly hair, worn in a sculptural style later imitated by Elvis Presley, and plucked eyebrows framing pale blue eyes and wide, full lips, Mr. Curtis embodied a new kind of feminized male beauty that came into vogue in the early 1950s. A vigorous heterosexual in his widely publicized (not least by himself) private life, he was often cast in roles that drew on a perceived ambiguity: his full-drag impersonation of a female jazz musician in “Some Like It Hot,” a slave who attracts the interest of a Roman senator (Laurence Olivier) in Stanley Kubrick’s “Spartacus” (1960), a man attracted to a mysterious blond (Debbie Reynolds) who turns out to be the reincarnation of his male best friend in Vincente Minnelli’s “Goodbye Charlie” (1964).

But behind the pretty-boy looks could be found a dramatically potent combination of naked ambition and deep vulnerability….

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Bob Moon: What’s the rush? That’s what investment consultant Chris Whalen was asking today at Institutional Risk Analytics. He says the government seems to be in a hurry to get the word out that it’s aiming to start unloading its $49 billion in AIG shares within the coming year. Whalen warns the market isn’t ready and won’t support it.

Chris Whalen: We’re trying to do a public offering of shares in a company that can’t stand by itself, that has to have government support. That’s not going to work.

Flooding the market with shares, he cautions, is a money-losing proposition. He says it’s the same catch-22 the government faces with General Motors, and has already run up against trying to sell its Citigroup shares. Gauging by AIG’s total market capitalization — the value of all outstanding shares — he argues the idea of taxpayers making all their money back is pie-in-the-sky.

Whalen: The market cap of this company is single digits. They owe us $100 billion, right? So what the market’s telling you is that the company is worth, today, a tenth of what they owe us.

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It started with a Twitter message on Sept. 19: “Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly’s room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.”

That night, the authorities say, the Rutgers University student who sent the message used a camera in his dormitory room to stream the roommate’s intimate encounter live on the Internet.

And three days later, the roommate who had been surreptitiously broadcast ”” Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old freshman and an accomplished violinist ”” jumped from the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River in an apparent suicide.

The Sept. 22 death, details of which the authorities disclosed on Wednesday, was the latest by a young American that followed the online posting of hurtful material. The news came on the same day that Rutgers kicked off a two-year, campuswide project to teach the importance of civility, with special attention to the use and abuse of new technology.

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Despite tragic violence and discouraging developments, there are signs of hope. Majorities of both Israelis and Palestinians still support a two-state solution. Arab states have declared their commitment to peace in the Arab Peace Initiative. There are U.S. diplomatic efforts to restart Israeli-Syrian and Israeli-Lebanese negotiations for peace. Official and informal negotiations have produced the outlines of concrete compromises for resolving the conflict, including the final status issues: borders and security, settlements, refugees and Jerusalem. Jewish, Christian and Muslim religious leaders both here and in the region reject the killing of innocents, support a just peace, and believe sustained negotiations are the only path to peace.

As we said two years ago, there is a real danger that cynicism will replace hope and that people will give up on peace. With the resumption of direct negotiations, clarity is demanded. So let us be clear. As religious leaders, we remain firmly committed to a two-state solution to the conflict as the only viable way forward. We believe that concerted, sustained U.S. leadership for peace is essential. And we know that time is not on the side of peace, that delay is not an option.

The path to peace shuns violence and embraces dialogue. This path demands reciprocal steps that build confidence. This path can lead to a future of two states, Israel and a viable, independent Palestine, living side by side in peace with security and dignity for both peoples, stability in the region, and a comprehensive peace between Israel and all her Arab neighbors.

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Saying that they are people of hope who “refuse … to give in to cynicism or despair,” a group of interfaith leaders delivered a declaration to the White House and State Department Sept. 29 uniting in support of “active, fair, and firm U.S. leadership for Arab-Israeli-Palestinian peace.”

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori was among the 28 Jewish, Christian and Muslim leaders who signed the statement.

Alexander D. Baumgarten, director of government relations for the Episcopal Church, represented Jefferts Schori at the meeting with General James Jones, United States national security adviser, and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

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O Lord, thou God of truth, whose Word is a lantern to our feet and a light upon our path: We give thee thanks for thy servant Jerome, and those who, following in his steps, have labored to render the Holy Scriptures in the language of the people; and we beseech thee that thy Holy Spirit may overshadow us as we read the written Word, and that Christ, the living Word, may transform us according to thy righteous will; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

O gracious and holy Father, give us wisdom to perceive thee, diligence to seek thee, patience to wait for thee, eyes to behold thee, a heart to meditate upon thee, and a life to proclaim thee; through the power of the Spirit of Jesus Christ our Lord.

–Saint Benedict

And Jesus said to them, “I ask you, is it lawful on the sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to destroy it?” And he looked around on them all, and said to him, “Stretch out your hand.” And he did so, and his hand was restored. But they were filled with fury and discussed with one another what they might do to Jesus.

The former Anglican bishop of the Murray was found guilty of disgraceful conduct by a church tribunal in Adelaide yesterday.

The body rebuked him and recommended that he be prohibited from acting as a bishop.

The special tribunal found Ross Davies had failed to deal appropriately with sexual misconduct allegations against an archdeacon, displayed a lack of commitment to the Anglican Church and used threatening and aggressive language towards parishioners.

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Anti-austerity protests erupted across Europe on Wednesday ”” Greek doctors and railway employees walked out, Spanish workers shut down trains and buses, and one man even blocked the Irish Parliament with a cement truck to decry the country’s enormous bank bailouts.

Tens of thousands of demonstrators poured into Brussels, hoping to swell into a 100,000-strong march on European Union institutions later in the day and reinforce the impact of Spain’s first nationwide strike in eight years.

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In his Pentecost letter to the Anglican Communion, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, speaks of us as having ”˜not fully received the Pentecostal gift of mutual understanding for common mission’.

The differences that focus around questions of human sexuality continue to be very real, very difficult.

ACSA must contribute what we can to the painful debate, not least from our own experiences of dealing with vast diversity.

I am therefore glad that ACSA was effectively represented at the Global South 4th Encounter earlier this year, and that 10 Bishops attended the All African Anglican Bishops Conference in Uganda last month.

For us, what has mattered most is:

· being centred on Christ;

· agreeing on the central matters of who Jesus is and the salvation he brings;

· and therefore recognising one another as being united in him, and, in consequence, with each other.

In consequence, as we have found within the Synod of Bishops, when differences arise, none of us feels called to say to another ”˜I no longer consider you a Christian, a brother in Christ, a member of the body of Christ ”“ I am no longer in communion with you.’

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For a highly religious people, Americans have plenty of room to improve their knowledge of religion, according to a new survey that’s stirring debate about the health of faith in America.

The US Religious Knowledge Survey, released Tuesday from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, found atheists and agnostics know more basic facts about the Bible than either Protestants or Catholics. Among the other findings:

”¢ 57 percent of Protestants can name the Bible’s four gospels.

”¢ 55 percent of Catholics know their tradition teaches that sacramental bread and wine become Christ’s body and blood.

Ӣ 15 percent of white evangelicals know Jonathan Edwards participated in the First Great Awakening.

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Free speech stands front and center in the Supreme Court term beginning next week, in a pair of cases testing the First Amendment’s reach in the digital age.

On Oct. 6, the justices will weigh whether the First Amendment protects a Kansas church’s campaign to publicize its beliefs by picketing military funerals with vulgar placards and insulting fallen soldiers’ survivors in online screeds.

The father of a fallen Marine is seeking damages for emotional distress from the church, which believes that God is killing American soldiers to punish the U.S. for its tolerance of homosexuality.

A month later , the court is to consider whether states can bar minors from buying violent videogames, on the theory that these games cause damage to developing minds and this outweighs young people’s constitutional rights.

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Two things are striking about these vows. First, there is no reference to General Convention or any central body. Obedience is pledged to the bishop. Second, the inclusion of a vow of obedience in the rite for the ordination of priests only confirms further the intentional omission of any such vow in the ordination of bishops. Priests make the same declaration of conformity as do bishops, but added to this is a promise of obedience to a hierarchical authority. And that authority is the bishop.

To conclude, it is erroneous to suggest any violation of the ordination vows in the context of the diocese of South Carolina’s proposed resolutions. When these vows are properly understood, it is apparent that bishops have not only the right but the duty to protect the constitutional integrity of TEC and oppose unconstitutional acts by General Convention.

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With Charleston hosting 52 of the nation’s 87 surviving Medal of Honor men this week, a common thread among many in their ranks is that they came from large, working-class families where self- reliance, unit strength and attention to duty were learned at an early age.

“Everything depended on what you were supposed to do,” Williams said Tuesday, speaking of life on the cash-strapped cow farm. “If you didn’t get something done you got in trouble with the rest of the family,” he said, “not only with the mother and the father.”

And just like in the military, there was no questioning of work or orders.

“You did it because it had to be done,” said Williams, who along with Baker agreed that they excelled during critical moments on the battlefield probably because of the values instilled back home.

Read it all from the front page of the local paper.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember what good government looks like: government that disciplines itself but looks to the long term; government that inspires trust; government that promotes social mobility without busting the budget.

That kind of government existed for decades right here in California. Between 1911 and the ’60s, California had a series of governors ”” like Hiram Johnson, Earl Warren, Goodwin Knight and Pat Brown ”” who were pro-market and pro-business, but also progressive reformers.

They rode a great wave of prosperity, and people flocked to the Golden State, but they used the fruits of that prosperity in a disciplined way to lay the groundwork for even more growth. They built an outstanding school and university system. They started a series of gigantic public works projects that today are seen as engineering miracles. These included monumental water projects, harbors and ports, the sprawling highway system and even mental health facilities.

They disdained partisanship. They continually reorganized government to make it more businesslike and cost effective….

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It might be the most ambitious construction project in China since the Great Wall.

The Chinese government is planning to reroute the nation’s water supply, bringing water from the flood plains of the south and the snowcapped mountains of the west to the parched capital of Beijing. First envisioned by Mao Tse-tung in the 1950s and now coming to fruition, the South-North Water Diversion ”” as it is inelegantly known in English ”” has a price tag of more than $62 billion, twice as expensive as the famous Three Gorges Dam. It is expected to take decades to complete.

“This is on a par with the Great Wall, a project essential for the survival of China,” said Wang Shushan, who heads the project in Henan province, where much of the construction is now taking place. “It is a must-do project. We can’t afford to wait.”

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Many children want to read books on digital devices and would read for fun more frequently if they could obtain e-books. But even if they had that access, two-thirds of them would not want to give up their traditional print books.

These are a few of the findings in a study being released on Wednesday by Scholastic, the American publisher of the Harry Potter books and the “Hunger Games” trilogy.

The report set out to explore the attitudes and behaviors of parents and children toward reading books for fun in a digital age. Scholastic surveyed more than 2,000 children ages 6 to 17, and their parents, in the spring.

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The week that Army Spc. Thomas K. Doerflinger was killed in Iraq at age 20, a friend in the neighborhood brought his parents a felt banner with a gold star. Tradition holds that a grieving mother hangs it in her window until the war is over. As it turned out, the war outlasted the banner.

Years passed; the red border faded. Repairmen who came to their door on leafy Collingwood Terrace would innocently inquire, then stammer their condolences. The Doerflingers didn’t feel right displaying a kind of grief that was never going to go away, so after a while they put the banner in the hutch.

Endings can be complicated for families of the fallen.

When President Obama announced the conclusion of combat operations in Iraq this month, Lee Ann Doerflinger didn’t feel any closer to that magical “closure” everyone talks about. In some ways, she felt worse.

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While I admire Harriet Harman’s attitude, we do have to be careful not to think that the only meaningful life is a busy one. Religions across the world have never thought that – with the exception of Protestant Christianity. But Protestant Britain forgot that the God in whose image we are made was not only an industrious creator, he also took time out to enjoy what he had made.

Too often we lose the capacity for enjoyment other than through work. In the gospels Jesus hints at how we may recover it when he says that if we are to enter the Kingdom of God we must become as little children. Perhaps what he has in mind is the capacity of children for self-forgetfulness in play. They do something because it is fun, worthwhile in itself, and not because it has some further justification beyond itself. This is what we lose in busy lives where everything must be useful or done for a purpose. If we are to enjoy older age we need to regain that spirit of play, and rediscover that light-hearted self-forgetfulness we knew as children. Sixty may be a good age to find it again.

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(The cover itself is here).

The lecturer, a short, thickset man with a ruddy face and a big voice, was coming to the end of his talk. Gathering up his notes and books, he tucked his hornrimmed spectacles into the pocket of his tweed jacket and picked up his mortarboard. Still talking””to the accompaniment of occasional appreciative laughs and squeals from his audience””he leaned over to return the watch he had borrowed from a student in the front row. As he ended his final sentence, he stepped off the platform.

The maneuver gained him a head start on the rush of students down the center aisle. Once in the street, he strode rapidly ””his black gown billowing behind his grey flannel trousers””to the nearest pub for a pint of ale.

Clive Staples Lewis was engaged in his full-time and favorite job””the job of being an Oxford don in the Honour School of English Language & Literature, a Fellow and tutor of Magdalen College and the most popular lecturer in the University. To watch him downing his pint at the Eastgate (his favorite pub), or striding, pipe in mouth, across the deer park, a stranger would not be likely to guess that C. S. Lewis is also a best-selling author and one of the most influential spokesmen for Christianity in the English-speaking world.

One of the many things I reread in preparation for the class I am teaching on C.S. Lewis and apologetics mentioned yesterday–wonderful stuff. Read it all–KSH.

US and European officials said Tuesday they have detected a plot to carry out a major, coordinated series of commando-style terror attacks in Britain, France, Germany and possibly the United States.

A senior US official said that while there is a “credible” threat, no specific time or place is known. President Obama has been briefed about the threat, say senior US officials.

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Doug De Vries describes Sunday evening worship as “a lot less formal” than the morning service at Plymouth Heights Christian Reformed Church.

It’s also a lot less crowded.

Plymouth Heights is in step with a larger trend of declining evening attendance in evangelical denominations that long have cherished a heritage of worshiping twice on Sunday. Some evening services are more intimate; others have been cancelled or replaced by an alternative.

“It’s a business question that has been asked,” said De Vries, the church’s minister of music. “People are spending time with their family (on Sunday nights) or using that time to get together in small groups. We were concerned that we were squandering resources to put the evening service together.”

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O everlasting God, who hast ordained and constituted the ministries of angels and men in a wonderful order: Mercifully grant that, as thy holy angels always serve and worship thee in heaven, so by thy appointment they may help and defend us on earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.