The biggest single factor in putting time on the nuclear clock appears to be Stuxnet, the most sophisticated cyberweapon ever deployed.

In interviews over the past three months in the United States and Europe, experts who have picked apart the computer worm describe it as far more complex ”” and ingenious ”” than anything they had imagined when it began circulating around the world, unexplained, in mid-2009.

Many mysteries remain, chief among them, exactly who constructed a computer worm that appears to have several authors on several continents. But the digital trail is littered with intriguing bits of evidence.

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There has been a lot of speculation about whether Jared Lee Loughner, the man arrested for the Arizona shooting, has a severe mental illness. But is mental illness a sufficient explanation for his actions? Recent research has found that mental illness is, in fact, tied to an increased risk of violence””but it is not a simple relationship….

…the vast majority of patients with severe mental illness are not violent during their lifetimes. The largest and longest study of schizophrenia and violence, conducted in Sweden over the course of 30 years, found that only 13% of patients had violent convictions after receiving their diagnoses. For most patients, the risk of becoming a victim of violence is higher than the risk that they will commit violence.

Nor should we make the mistake of assuming that a correlation between mental illness and violence somehow establishes a causal connection between them. It may be that schizophrenia is simply a marker for other factors that increase the risk of violence. Of these factors, one of the strongest is alcohol and drug abuse. Estimates from the U.S. indicate that around half of patients with schizophrenia also have problems with substance abuse. One study in American urban centers found that nearly a third of patients who were discharged from the hospital and also diagnosed with substance abuse were violent within one year.

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The world was, indeed, in ruins, and the Christian church, within itself, was also painfully divided. The Arian heresy, which denied the truth of the Holy Trinity in an effort to conform to the most sophisticated thought of the age was still widely influential. New controversies about the humanity and divinity of Christ were in the making, and the Pelagian and Donatist controversies, which raised extremely difficult questions about the Christian moral life and the efficacy of divine grace, were in full spate in St. Augustine’s own North African church. But although the saintly bishop was capable of trading hot polemical phrases with the best of them, in the Enchiridion he adopted and promoted what St. Paul, at the end of I Cor., 12, calls the ‘still more excellent way’ — the way of the essential Christian virtues of faith and hope and charity. And, inasmuch as these virtues are not just a matter of hearing,’ but also a matter of living, St. Augustine reminded Laurentius that “it will not suffice to place a small manual in one’s hands; rather, it will be necessary to enkindle a great zeal in one’s heart.”

I have begun with this little historical digression, not because I wish to belabour the thought of parallels between the ruin of St. Augustine’s time and the ruin of our own although I do think that there is scope for interesting and instructive comparisons in matters both intellectual and moral, and every current newspaper, perhaps especially every church newspaper seems designed to elicit mental shudders. But what I want to suggest, rather, is the importance, especially in such times of chaos and confusion, of concentrating our attention and focusing our energies positively upon the essential principles of Christian spiritual life, which that great doctor and apologist of the Elizabethan Settlement, Richard Hooker sketches so admirably when he speaks:

…concerning Faith, the principal object whereof is that eternal Verity which hath discovered the treasures of hidden wisdom in Christ; concerning Hope, the highest object whereof is that everlasting Goodness which in Christ doth quicken the dead; concerning Charity, the final object whereof is that incomprehensible Beauty which shineth in the countenance of Christ the Son of the Living God….’

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The Reverend Professor Robert Darwin Crouse died in his sleep at his home in Crousetown, Lunenburg, Friday night. He had been very ill for several years but he played the organ for the Liturgy at St Mary’s Crousetown the Sunday before last.

It is a passing so momentous for so many, including all of us in the Department, that I can say nothing more at present than to express my thanks to God as Professor Crouse’s perpetual student for all He did for us through this great scholar, spiritual father, saintly exemplar, and unsurpassable teacher.

A student of James Doull, with him he refounded the Classics Department, giving it the character which it now has and which has made it so exceptionally successful. No student of his ever ceases to hear him and so
to walk in the presence of the Logos.

Dr Wayne J. Hankey
Carnegie Professor and Chairman
Department of Classics with Religious Studies
Dalhousie University and Kings College

Almighty God, who hast set in thy Church some with gifts to teach and help and administer, in diversity of operation but of the same Spirit: Grant to all such, we beseech thee, grace to wait on the ministry which they have received in the body of Christ with simplicity, diligence, and cheerfulness; that none may think of himself more highly than he ought to think, and none may seek another man’s calling, but rather to be found faithful in his own work; to the glory of thy name in Christ Jesus our Lord.

–H. J. Wotherspoon

“But now hear, O Jacob my servant, Israel whom I have chosen! Thus says the LORD who made you, who formed you from the womb and will help you: Fear not, O Jacob my servant, Jeshu’run whom I have chosen. For I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground; I will pour my Spirit upon your descendants, and my blessing on your offspring.

–Isaiah 44:1-3

In its 100-plus years Westminster Cathedral, the mother church of English Catholicism, will have seen few stranger sights than Saturday’s procession of three Anglican bishops’ wives, in matching beige coats, one with an outsized brown hat, going up on to the high altar to embrace their husbands, all newly ordained as Catholic priests. Catholicism isn’t that keen on women on the altar ”“ to the pain of the demonstrators from the Catholic Women’s Ordination movement protesting outside the cathedral’s doors ”“ and it doesn’t usually countenance priests having wives.

But this was no ordinary ceremony. Almost everyone who spoke during it used the word “historic” to describe the ordination as Catholic priests of John Broadhurst, Andrew Burnham and Keith Newton, all formerly Anglican bishops.

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He was, as a number of you know, the retired part-time Professor of Classics at the University of King’s College and at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, among many other things. His health in recent years has been, alas, steadily declining.

There is a wonderful page where some of his writings are collected here.

I found a picture of him there.

A very strange game–two different halves. An amazing late long pass from Ben Roethlisberger to rookie Antonio Brown (58 yards). I feel very bad for Joe Flacco as his receivers dropped some crucial passes–KSH.

However, this is only one ”“ misleading ”“ side of the story. There are moments ”“ moments of crisis for the hegemonic discourse ”“ when one should take the risk of provoking the disintegration of appearances. Such a moment was described by the young Marx in 1843. In ”˜Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’, he diagnosed the decay of the German ancien regime in the 1830s and 1840s as a farcical”‹ repetition of the tragic fall of the French ancien regime. The French regime was tragic ”˜as long as it believed and had to believe in its own justification’. The German regime ”˜only imagines that it believes in itself and demands that the world imagine the same thing. If it believed in its own essence, would it ”¦ seek refuge in hypocrisy and sophism? The modern ancien regime is rather only the comedian of a world order whose true heroes are dead.’ In such a situation, shame is a weapon: ”˜The actual pressure must be made more pressing by adding to it consciousness of pressure, the shame must be made more shameful by publicising it.’

This is precisely our situation today: we face the shameless cynicism of a global order whose agents only imagine that they believe in their ideas of democracy, human rights and so on. Through actions like the WikiLeaks disclosures, the shame ”“ our shame for tolerating such power over us ”“ is made more shameful by being publicised. When the US intervenes in Iraq to bring secular democracy, and the result is the strengthening of religious fundamentalism and a much stronger Iran, this is not the tragic mistake of a sincere agent, but the case of a cynical trickster being beaten at his own game.

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Aided by at least $43 million in assistance from the government of Massachusetts and an innovative solar energy technology, Evergreen Solar emerged in the last three years as the third-largest maker of solar panels in the United States.

But now the company is closing its main American factory, laying off the 800 workers by the end of March and shifting production to a joint venture with a Chinese company in central China. Evergreen cited the much higher government support available in China.

The factory closing in Devens, Mass., which Evergreen announced earlier this week, has set off political recriminations and finger-pointing in Massachusetts. And it comes just as President Hu Jintao of China is scheduled for a state visit next week to Washington, where the agenda is likely to include tensions between the United States and China over trade and energy policy.

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The Vatican on Saturday welcomed the first group of traditionalist Anglicans who plan to convert to Roman Catholicism through a new structure the Vatican created to facilitate such group conversions.

The Vatican angered many Anglicans, including the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, when it announced the new structure in October 2009, because it appeared to upend decades of interfaith dialogue by implying that the Roman Catholic Church sought to encourage the conversion of Anglicans, especially those uncomfortable with the Church of England’s ordination of women and openly gay priests.

But tensions were somewhat eased with Pope Benedict XVI’s state visit to Britain in September, which was widely seen as a success.

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