The Tunisian uprising changed everything. We have reached a turning point: it is clear now that dictators can be peacefully overthrown! To do so takes courage, a mass movement, determination and hope, faith in God and/or in the future. Crushed by repression, the people have stood up to claim full human dignity. Their irrepressible right to be free.

The Tunisians blazed the trail. In Algeria and Mauritania, then in Yemen and Egypt women, men and young people of all backgrounds have taken to the streets to express their anger and frustration, their intense desire to see their respective regimes fall. Sparks are flashing everywhere; demands being drafted; protests have even occurred in Syria where the government has announced a series of reforms should the people begin to consider mass action.

In Egypt, tensions have been growing over the last two weeks. After thirty years of unshared power – having imposed a state of emergency after the assassination of Anwar al-Sadat in 1981 – Mubarak and his regime now face the people’s defiance of his authoritarianism and bloody repression. The police and paramilitary force have beaten, arrested, tortured and fired on the crowd; hundreds are dead, thousands injured.

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The Anglican Church of Canada is taking steps towards a green revolution it hopes will sweep across 1,700 parishes nationwide.

The Partners in Mission and Eco-justice (PIMEJ) of General Synod will launch a national database this year to provide information on eco-friendly and energy-efficient Canadian Anglican parishes, including how they became green. It is hoped that sharing their stories will help other parishes to do the same.

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Cathédrale St. Trinité, Port-au-Prince, has been a central place of sanctity, sanctuary, and justice since the 1920s. With a seating capacity of about 700, the cathedral was the home of regular worship services, special events, and meetings of national import and refuge for countless Haitians. Just after the earthquake, its grounds were used as a makeshift clinic and temporary residence for hundreds of displaced and wounded Haitians. Located at the corner of Ave. Mgr. Guilloux and Rue Pavée in the center of Port-au-Prince, minutes from some of Haiti’s most important national monuments and historic and governmental buildings, the cathedral invited a widespread Haitian following and regular visits by international travelers.

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A professor at Notre Dame once lamented to me that the parents he encounters don’t worry that their kids will engage in sexual activity during their undergraduate career. Rather, they fret that students will come home engaged to be married. Forty years ago, who could have imagined that parents would want their children to prolong their “wild” years and put off the responsibilities of grown-up life?

–Naomi Schaefer Riley in a review of Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecke’s new book “Premarital Sex in America,” Commentary (February 2011), p.59

The problems with the FCIC’s report, released at the end of January, stem from the Commission’s very inception: it was focused on the wrong topic. The FCIC investigated risky investments, lax regulation, excessive leverage. And it downplayed the more mundane, but vastly more important, collapse of the housing bubble.

The FCIC was set up to investigate a sidebar rather than the real story. Given the definition of its mission, the Commission did a reasonably good job. However, its 662-page report is a distraction from the real reasons why 25 million Americans are unemployed, underemployed, or have given up looking for work altogether. The real story doesn’t require 662 pages; it can easily be summed up in a few paragraphs.

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[The book is called]…called A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor, and I quickly fell under its spell.

At a mere 95 pages, it is a short read, yet nothing about it makes you want to rush. In the mid-1950s, Fermor, an English travel writer who as a young man once walked from Holland to Turkey, became interested in the life of monks. He decided to visit several Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries in France. A Time to Keep Silence is the record of those visits and it accomplishes something that few books do: It replicates in style and rhythm the very experience that it seeks to describe. The writing is spare, exactingly precise, and then occasionally quite beautiful, just as the life of the monks we hear about are pared down, highly concentrated, and every now and then sublime. In short, it’s a book about the contemplative life that delivers the reader into a contemplation of his or her own.

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Gov. Nikki Haley managed to eliminate one of the three agency budget deficits she inherited, in part, by slashing 20 percent out of welfare-to-work checks provided to South Carolina’s neediest families.

Haley announced Monday that her team was able to wipe out a projected $29 million deficit at the Department of Social Services. But as the Republican governor finishes her first month on the job, two of her Cabinet agencies still are predicting that they’ll run out of money before the budget year ends June 30.

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The morning bells of All Saints Church beckon worshipers a little later these days, and Mass is celebrated more frequently.

The schedule shift for the early service has come in response to the government-imposed overnight curfew. The extra services? Coptic Christians in Egypt’s second-largest city say they have a lot of reasons to pray amid the nation’s ongoing turmoil.

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The pioneers who are going forward at this early stage are, for the sake of the goal, taking a brave step into the unknown. I find it entirely understandable the many Anglo-Catholics baulk at the prospect. Those who, despite having pictures of the Pope in their clergy-houses, sacristies or even churches, cannot imagine ever moving into another ”˜part of the Lord’s vineyard’ (as Pusey put it) need to be clear, however, that achieving tolerated status within the Church of England (a.k.a. The Society of St Wilfrid and St Hilda) is not what the Oxford Movement was about….

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…the [Muslim] Brotherhood, like everyone else, is evolving. It would be a serious error to believe that it has not sincerely wrestled with the seductive challenge of democracy, with the fact that the Egyptian faithful like the idea of voting for their leaders.

In 2007, members of the Brotherhood released, withdrew and unofficially re-released a political platform ”” the first ever for the organization ”” in which an outsider can see the Brothers’ philosophical struggle with the idea of parliamentary supremacy and the certainty that faithful Muslims may legislatively transgress Holy Law. The Brothers themselves didn’t know how much free rein to give to their compatriots ”” they, like everyone else, are moving in uncharted waters.
The Brotherhood is trying to come to terms with the idea of hurriya, “freedom.” In the past, for the Muslim devout, hurriya had denoted the freedom of a believer to worship God; for the Arab nationalist, the word was the battle cry against European imperialism. Today, in Egypt and elsewhere, hurriya cannot be understood without reference to free men and women voting. The Brothers are trying to figure out how to integrate two civilizations and thereby revive their own. This evolution isn’t pretty. But it is real.

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Those younger than the Baby Boomer generation may have missed the release of a Productivity Commission aged care report. Pre-Baby Boomers may wrongly have thought it doesn’t impact them.

Anyone who has had to find an aged care home for a loved one will tell you the system is a maze. It’s hard to access, and hard to find a way through. It’s not able to give everyone what they want.

The reason younger people should worry is that if they have family members, chances are they’ll take a crash course in aged care navigation if, without warning, a family member needs care urgently….

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Competition, innovation and entrepreneurialism, all qualities normally associated with business, may explain why the United States is more religious than Canada, and determine the future of organized religions in our country, says a leading sociologist.

“In the United States there is a lively marketplace and competition because Americans are not worried about saying they have absolute truths,” said Reginald Bibby, a University of Lethbridge professor who specializes in religious trends and is the author of the soon-to-be released Beyond The Gods and Back.

“It’s really non-Canadian to think we’re going to claim truth over another group. So religious groups in Canada just don’t compete intensely with each other, and what they do instead is service their own customers.”

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On Monday, the Southern Sudan Referendum Commission announced in Khartoum that 98.83% of the voters had backed independence.

“Those who voted for unity were 44,888, that is, 1.17%. Those who voted for separation were 3,792,518, that is, 98.83%,” commission head Mohamed Ibrahim Khalil said.

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The Archbishop of York: The noble Lord, Lord Myners, normally speaks with great sense and clarity on matters of money, but the question is not that banking is not an honourable profession. People who work in the banks are people of good will and good respect, and they do a very good job. The first question is about bonuses. People in this country find the bonus culture indefensible. The second question is about the gambling casinos around banking. Will they get rid of those gambling casinos? Many people say they do not like them. The question that the noble Lord asked the Minister about Lehman Brothers and deposit accounts in Germany illustrated the point. Some people say that that is not the honourable business of banking. Anybody who is having a go at banking is saying not that banking is not an honourable profession or that bankers are not very able people doing a good job but that these bonuses and the gambling casinos taint the entire profession of banking.

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On Feb. 27, St. Paul’s Bloor Street, diocese of Toronto, will celebrate Black heritage in the Anglican Church of Canada with a unique annual service. This year””which the United Nations has declared International Year for People of African Descent””marks the 15th anniversary of the special Anglican service, planned by the diocese’s Black Anglicans Coordinating Committee and held every February during Black History Month. Each year, hundreds of Anglicans, many of them Blacks, come to give thanks to God for the rich heritage of Blacks in Canada and for the many gifts they share. Always in the presence of a Toronto-area bishop, this inspiring service of prayer and praise to God includes story-telling, drumming, dancing and preaching.

As a baptized member of the Christian church and as a Black Anglican priest in the diocese of Toronto, I view this milestone occasion as an opportunity for theological reflection. I invite all my sisters and brothers to join me in conversation.

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Few realize that after the Islamic Revolution, from the late 1970s through the 1980s, Iran’s Anglicans were the most severely persecuted Christians. Iranian Anglicans worshiped in Farsi, which angered Islamists wanting to portray Christianity as a Western, imperialist religion. More important, many Anglicans were converts from Islam.

The first post-revolution martyr was an Anglican priest, the Rev. Arastoo Sayyah. Islamists cut the throat of this Muslim convert in his office in Shiraz, southwest Iran, on Feb. 19, 1979, and confiscated the property of the church he led.

In October of the same year, the Rt. Rev. Hassan Dehqani-Tafti, also a Muslim convert, and his wife, Margaret, survived an assassination attempt in their bedroom. Dehqani-Tafti was the first Persian Anglican bishop.

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Lord, because being compassed with infirmities we oftentimes sin and ask for pardon: Help us to forgive as we would be forgiven; neither mentioning old offences committed against us, nor dwelling upon them in thought, nor being influenced by them in heart; but loving our brother freely, as thou freely lovest us; for Christ’s sake.

–Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that dwelt first in your grandmother Lo’is and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, dwells in you. Hence I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands; for God did not give us a spirit of timidity but a spirit of power and love and self-control.

–2 Timothy 1:5-7

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Dear Ones: I can’t adequately describe the struggle Anne and I have been involved in over the past week. We have been torn between a feeling of helplessness that urges us to leave, and a sense that our weakness opens the door to God’s power, and that promise calls us to stay. We have come to the conclusion that the Lord has not released us from a ministry in Egypt yet….

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Controversies over bioethical standards at U.S. Catholic hospitals show the need for greater Catholic education for health care workers, Vatican officials said [last] Thursday (Feb. 3).

Church leaders said a new set of biomedical guidelines will be published later this year, as well as a separate document on AIDS prevention after last year’s controversial remarks by Pope Benedict XVI on the morality of condom use.

The announcement, at a press conference to publicize educational initiatives of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Health Care Workers, did not include a publication date for the AIDS document.

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Members of Diocese of Umuahia (Anglican Communion) have embarked on a weeklong prayer to seek for God’s intervention in the state as the 2011 general elections approach.

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You can find them here.

More African than Arab, Southern Sudan might not provide much assistance to minorities in the Middle East. But its existence teaches the lesson that commitment from the United States actually works. In the 1980s and 1990s, a broad political coalition forced the Bush and Clinton administrations to treat Sudan as a rogue state for its oppression of minorities. The 2011 independence of Southern Sudan is a fruit of that effort ”” proof that, though it might take decades, international pressure can succeed.

Unfortunately, in the years since, America foreign policy has been little concerned with religious persecution. George W. Bush, for example, refused to insist on a non-Islamic constitution for Iraq. And Barack Obama has systematically watered down U.S. diplomacy: Where we once demanded “freedom of religion,” a public liberty, we now speak only of “freedom of worship,” a lesser and private right.

This American abdication has produced only more oppression ”” and it’s accelerating at a horrifying rate. Nearly every day since Christmas, Christians have been murderously attacked for the simple fact of being Christians….

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Why do otherwise good kids seem to make bad decisions when they are with their friends? New research on risk taking and the teenage brain offers some answers.

In studies at Temple University, psychologists used functional magnetic resonance imaging scans on 40 teenagers and adults to determine if there are differences in brain activity when adolescents are alone versus with their friends. The findings suggest that teenage peer pressure has a distinct effect on brain signals involving risk and reward, helping to explain why young people are more likely to misbehave and take risks when their friends are watching.

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The Canadian Primate, Archbishop Hiltz, reported afterwards that the Primates at the meeting had “endeavoured to consider, as much as we could, their perspective on the issue before us”. They were successful on at least one point: the Global South absentees had wished to signal by their absence the insignificance of the Primates’ Meeting, as long as it proved unable or unwilling to enforce earlier disciplinary measures against the Episcopal Church in the United States concerning gay bishops and same-sex unions. The Primates who were present in Dublin showed remarkable compliance, redefining the Primates’ Meeting as an essentially toothless body.

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The Anglican Communion needs to get beyond its difficulties over sexuality issues and to focus, as the Primates did at the Emmaus Centre, on much wider issues, not least the mission of the Church. While also addressing the unity of the Communion, which touches not least the proposed Anglican Covenant, the discussions at this Primates’ Meeting were indeed wide-ranging.

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You can find the audio link here. The interview starts about one minute into the programme and focuses in particular on the Muslim Brotherhood (it last about five minutes).

The smallest city with a professional sports franchise still is celebrating and the excitement no doubt will continue for days and into the next season.

Fans will have a chance to cheer for the team today when the Packers return home by motorcade from Austin Straubel International Airport to Lambeau Field via Packerland Drive and Lombardi Avenue. The team announced last week that police would secure Packerland, Lombardi and Hazelwood Lane along the return route where fans can watch as the team passes by. No other public appearances had been scheduled for today.

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Update: Rob Rogers has a fun picture.

Our film critics are not on Pixar’s payroll. Nor are they getting any under-the-table perks from the animation studio. There’s a much less sinister reason that a Pixar movie””in this case, Toy Story 3””tops our Most Redeeming Films list for the third consecutive year: We think their movies rock.

It’s not just the astonishingly good animation. It’s the phenomenal storytelling, the depth of character development, the keen insight into the human condition””even from the perspective of plastic playthings. One of our critics confesses that he cried at the end of TS3 all three times he watched it””and will likely do so the next three times. That’s what Pixar films do to us.

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