Europe may be starting to burrow its way under Africa, geologists suggest.
The continents are converging; and for many millions of years, the northern edge of the African tectonic plate has descended under Europe.
But this process has stalled; and at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) meeting last week, scientists said we may be seeing Europe taking a turn.
On April 12, 1861, the first shots of the Civil War rang out in South Carolina.
Confederate forces, firing on the Union garrison at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, helped launch a four-year war that would kill more than 620,000 soldiers.
It’s been nearly 150 years since the war began. But even now, the city of Charleston is still figuring out how to talk about the war and commemorate the anniversary.
… it has been quite a long time coming. Oaktree started in 1993, as Church of England project to explore a new way of being a church. It has been meeting in a café at Twyford School for the last 5 years. “At last” says the Church’s minister Mark Aldridge, “Oaktree now has the base it needs to pursue the projects closest to its heart.”
Those include projects addressing some of Acton’s core social needs, like the Oaktree-based branch of CAP (Christians Against Poverty), a free debt-advice service which can negotiate with creditors, work out realistic budgets and sets itself the ambitious target to get even those in deep debt trouble out of debt within five years.
Read it all. Indeed. To this I would only add John Stott’s memorable “sermonettes produce Christianettes” (if in fact it originated with him)–KSH.
France’s new ban on Islamic face veils was met with a burst of defiance Monday, as several women appeared veiled in front of Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral and two were detained for taking part in an unauthorized protest.
France on Monday became the world’s first country to ban the veils anywhere in public, from outdoor marketplaces to the sidewalks and boutiques of the Champs-Elysées.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy set the wheels in motion for the ban nearly two years ago, saying the veils imprison women and contradict this secular nation’s values of dignity and equality. The ban enjoyed wide public support when it was approved by parliament last year.
Nearly half the charities and voluntary groups in Yorkshire are expecting to reduce staff numbers over the coming weeks as funding cuts bite, a new study suggests.
Almost 50 per cent of the “third sector” organisations which responded to a survey by Involve Yorkshire and Humber ”“ an umbrella group representing charities across the region ”“ said they were planning to reduce their workforce over the next three months to help to cut their costs.
The study represents yet another blow to David Cameron’s Big Society project, with critics having warned for months that cuts to local authority budgets would have a fatal knock-on effect for many charities which rely on councils for much of their fnding.
Wales is running out of space to bury its dead and needs a co-ordinated policy to tackle the issue seriously.
That’s one of the stark facts the Church in Wales is highlighting in a series of briefing notes about its work to candidates standing for the Welsh Assembly election.
It estimates that two-thirds of the Church’s 1,000 burial grounds will be full in 10 years’ time and calls for a Government Commission to look into provision across Wales.
The delegation was well received by the Nigerian High Commission in London. There was a brief meeting and an interactive section. The group also visited the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth Palace. Our message:
The need to allow Nigerians to worship “the Nigeria way” in abandoned Church buildings or allow them a scheduled time in parish Churches where they could express themselves unreservedly in worship, to save us from the unceasing and intense bleeding of our young executive Anglicans moving over to the New Generation Churches due to what they describe as “cold” worship style. Our request was viewed positively by the Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of All England. We also visited the Lord Bishop of London and the Bishop of Southwark. Other places visited include Manchester and Birmingham. In summary the Archbishop requested us to put our proposal into writing. He assured us that it is a practical proposal. We addressed a group of Nigerians of different age brackets in London, Manchester and Birmingham and had a special session with representatives of Nigerian Clergy in the UK. Our visit was said to be timely. But a few had their reservations.
Another issue which has emerged in this visit is the status, sponsorship and future of the Nigerian Chaplaincy in the UK. At the moment they are enjoying the last part of the generosity of the CMS, and the grace and benevolence of St. Marylebone. These are issues requiring urgent attention.
Almighty and everlasting God, we thank thee for thy servant George Augustus Selwyn, whom thou didst call to preach the Gospel to the peoples of New Zealand and Melanesia, and to lay a firm foundation for the growth of thy Church in many nations. Raise up, we beseech thee, in this and every land evangelists and heralds of thy kingdom, that thy Church may proclaim the unsearchable riches of our Savior Jesus Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
Thanks be to thee, O Lord Jesus Christ, for all the benefits which thou hast given us, for all the pains and insults which thou hast borne for us. O most merciful Redeemer, Friend and Brother, may we know thee more clearly, love thee more dearly, and follow thee more nearly, now and for evermore.
–Saint Richard of Chichester
Blessed be the LORD, for he has wondrously shown his steadfast love to me when I was beset as in a besieged city. I had said in my alarm, “I am driven far from thy sight.” But thou didst hear my supplications, when I cried to thee for help. Love the LORD, all you his saints! The LORD preserves the faithful, but abundantly requites him who acts haughtily. Be strong, and let your heart take courage, all you who wait for the LORD!
–Psalm 31:21-24
Four birdies in a row to close it. Wow.
Leaders have been told to stop politicising the Ocampo Six trials and warned against public utterances likely to rekindle violence in the country.
Anglican Church Archbishop Eliud Wabukala on Sunday told a congregation at the All Saints Cathedral that inflammatory statements could lead to anarchy as Education minister Sam Ongeri warned against hate speech.
“The Ocampo Six and ICC trials should not be politicised. This is a foundation for chaos in the General Election,” Dr Wabukala warned.
Following the sever-and-stay order issued April 5 by the 141st district court, leaders of the Diocese and Corporation of the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth will file a Notice of Appeal with the trial court early in the week of April 11. We will dispute the court’s ruling that all our property is held in trust for TEC; on the contrary, the property is held for the benefit of the local congregation, as our Constitution and Canons plainly state.
Our attorneys anticipate making the appeal directly to the Texas State Supreme Court. It is within the Court’s discretion to take the case directly, or to require that we go first to the intermediate Court of Appeals. Since all parties agree that the case will come inevitably before the high court, we hope to save both the time and expense of an intermediate appeal as we seek resolution to the litigation brought against us, which has been so distracting from our mission for the past two years.
As an additional result of the April 5 order, all discovery in the case is now on hold. The plaintiffs’ proposed property inspections will not be carried out. Nor will the judge’s Feb. 8 order to surrender our property be enforced during this period: Our congregations will not be evicted from their churches for the duration of this process, if ever.
We give thanks for the opportunity to appeal our case, and we continue to pray for our attorneys as we move on to this very important phase of the litigation.
“All Egyptians now think they are Che Guevara, Castro or something,” says Essam el-Erian, a senior leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, bursting into laughter. “This is democracy.”
Amid this political ferment, the Brotherhood is an exception: a well-funded, organized and established force. Founded in 1928, it’s also the grandaddy of the Mideast’s political Islamist movements. The Brotherhood was banned from politics 57 years ago and focused on business, charity and social ventures. But the secretive fraternity always aspired to power.
Now free elections due later this year offer the Brotherhood their best opportunity. The group says it believes in “Islamic democracy,” but what does that really mean? I spent a week with members of the Muslim Brotherhood, and it turns out the answers are far from monolithic, though often far from reassuring.
It is not clear what makes Nick Clegg cry. His office declined to elaborate on his aside in his New Statesman interview with Jemima Khan. The eight pieces he chose for Desert Island Discs recently offered a typical politician’s balanced ticket to imply the widest electoral appeal. Presumably the Chopin Waltz in A Minor, which his wife played when she was pregnant with their first son, is a more obvious candidate than his selections from Prince, Radiohead and David Bowie. But there is always the chance that Johnny Cash’s grim hominy homily “Sunday Morning Coming Down” could tweak the tear ducts in a self-pitying way.
Does it matter? Plato would say so. Music for the father of philosophy is not a neutral amusement but a vehicle for nobility, dignity, temperance, chastity. It has a moral character, and its style can influence those who embrace it. Scruton is interesting on this too. In a culture where pop stars are first among celebrities, idolised by the young and courted by politicians, something of their message will rub off on the laws passed by the politicians who admire them. “If the message is sensual, self-centred, and materialistic… then we should not expect to find that our laws address us from any higher realm,” he says.
Put aside the cruise brochures and let the garden retain that natural look for a few more years. Demography and declining investment returns are conspiring to keep you at your desk far longer than you ever expected.
This painful truth is no longer news in the rich world, and many governments have started to deal with the ageing problem. They have announced increases in the official retirement age that attempt to hold down the costs of state pensions while encouraging workers to stay in their jobs or get on their bikes and look for new ones.
Unfortunately, the boldest plans look inadequate. Older people are going to have to stay economically active longer than governments currently envisage; and that is going to require not just governments, but also employers and workers, to behave differently.
BOB ABERNETHY, host: For Eastern Orthodox Christians this is Great Lent, the 40-day period of strict fasting leading up to Easter. The Orthodox are supposed to observe fasts of one kind or another nearly all year; no meat on some days, no dairy or oil on others. Their calendars serve as reminders. The discipline of fasting is supposed to help focus the mind on God and bring the person fasting closer to God. Catherine Mandell of Clearfield, Pennsylvania talked with us about her family’s fasts.
CATHERINE MANDELL: The church generally gives us a calendar to help us track those days that we are to fast and which days we’re allowed not to fast. We have several others fasting periods during the year. If you take all those days together you are fasting for more than half the year….
The governments of the Netherlands, Great Britain, and other European countries have refused asylum to many Iraqis, including thousands of individual Christians. But this year, evangelical leaders and human rights groups are pushing to resettle Christian refugees in groups to help them maintain their church identity.
The stream of Christian refugees from Iraq and surrounding countries has increased in recent years, though exact numbers do not exist because refugees are not counted by religious affiliation, said Grégor Puppinck, director of the European Center for Law and Justice, the European arm of the American Center for Law and Justice.
Chinese police detained dozens of members of an underground Protestant church yesterday after the congregation tried to pray in a public plaza in the north of the capital.
The police corralled scores of parishioners into buses and blocked church leaders from leaving their homes. Among those detained was a photographer from The New York Times, who was later released.
Last week the church, Shouwang, was evicted from the space it had been renting after the government pressured the landlord not to renew the lease. The congregation, one of the largest so-called house churches in China, has been seeking legal recognition from the authorities since 2006 without success.
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Watch it all–this one made me cry.
On most days, Brother Al Mascia pedals his bicycle cart through downtown Detroit handing out much-needed food to homeless people.
Mascia, 56, is lean and lithe, and handles the cart with ease.
The idea of the cart came from the Franciscan friar’s memories of growing up surrounded by street vendors in New York. The food cart fits over the bicycle’s front end.
The cart, purchased from California with the aid of a benefactor, was outfitted with foldable countertops, insulation and a battery for lighting. It holds Thermos bottles of coffee and hot chocolate. Some days, Mascia dispenses muffins and cookies. On really good days, he has hot, homemade breakfast sandwiches donated by churches.
Not that the “new translation”, as it was known, was popular when it came hot off the printing press. The early responses were unenthusiastic, if not furious. One leading Hebrew scholar wrote: “Tell his Majesty that I had rather be rent in pieces by wilde horses, than any such translation, by my consent, bee urged upon our poore churches.” Like all innovations, it took time to cross the English-speaking world, to influence preachers, poets and politicians and to bed into the national psyche. Melvyn Bragg’s The Book of Books is subtitled The Radical Impact of the King James Bible 1611-2011 and attempts to chart these widespread effects. Bragg’s skill is in translating lofty subjects into a language that we all understand. As such, his endeavour could be compared with that of the 17th-century translators, whose job it was to produce an acceptable vernacular Bible that could be read by every literate English speaker.
As Bragg explains, the enterprise was originally prompted by James I’s need to throw a bone to the Puritan faction, who at the time of his accession were threatening to become a political problem. Rather than accept their proposed liturgical reforms, he seized upon a relatively minor demand for a new version of the Bible, strategically declaring: “I wish some special pains were taken for an uniform translation, which should be done by the best learned men in both Universities … ”
Muslim leaders in Kenya are calling for government action on Christian schools which have banned students from wearing the hijab, the head covering traditionally worn by Muslim girls and women – writes Frederick Nzwili.
Church leaders have defended the ban, saying head teachers have the right to determine dress code in the schools, according to a denomination’s religious traditions, discipline and philosophies.
“The problem has been with us for some time. In our private schools, we do not encourage or allow hijab. We insist the children have to be children just like the others. These are our laid-down procedures,” Roman Archbishop Boniface Lele of Mombasa told ENInews on 6 April 2011, six days after the Muslim leaders issued the demand in the coastal city.
More than 1,000 Muslims, including teenagers and children as young as seven, have been identified as being “at risk” of becoming Islamist terrorists in Britain, police have revealed.
The youngsters include a boy who told classmates he wanted “to go to Iraq and kill Americans” and another child who wrote in an exercise book: “I want to be a suicide bomber.” A 15-year-old white boy who converted to Islam said he was prepared to die for his religion.
The 1,000 cases were all referred for monitoring under a special “deradicalisation programme” called the “channel project”, set up by police, schools and social workers. Their numbers have increased dramatically in recent months, with 500 reported in the past year.
Almighty and most merciful God, who hast given thy Son to die for our sins and to obtain eternal redemption for us through his own blood: Let the merit of his spotless sacrifice, we beseech thee, purge our consciences from dead works to serve thee, the living God, that we may receive the promise of eternal inheritance in Christ Jesus our Lord; to whom with thee and the Holy Ghost be honour and glory, world without end.
–The German Reformed Church
Thus says the LORD of hosts: “Do not listen to the words of the prophets who prophesy to you, filling you with vain hopes; they speak visions of their own minds, not from the mouth of the LORD. They say continually to those who despise the word of the LORD, ‘It shall be well with you’; and to every one who stubbornly follows his own heart, they say, ‘No evil shall come upon you.'”
–Jeremiah 23:16-17
At the tender age of just 21, Rory McIlroy stands on the brink of golfing immortality after another nerveless display at the US Masters in Augusta. At 12 under par, McIlroy will take a four shot lead into the final round later today.
Even with Tiger Woods unable to mount the charge he was looking for and defending champion Phil Mickelson remaining in the pack, McIlroy found it tough going for much of the third round.
But then, as the sun went down, the Holywood wonder kid regained control of the season’s opening major in thrilling fashion. After finding the green and two-putting the 13th and 15th, the two par fives on the back nine, McIlroy gave his biggest fist-pump of the week when he rolled in a 25-footer at the 17th.
Sandwiched between vast coal pits and the roar of highway traffic, the atmosphere at the historic St Clement’s Anglican Church is surprisingly tranquil.
Old trees shade headstones that tell the story of the rise and fall of the once thriving hamlet of Camberwell, north of Singleton on the New England Highway, and many in the Upper Hunter community have strong ties to the grand Georgian-style church.
But its days are numbered, with the Anglican Diocese of Newcastle planning to demolish what is one of the oldest churches in NSW, despite a sustained fight by locals for the past two years.
As uprisings challenge the old order in the Middle East and North Africa, one organisation which for many years claimed it was at the vanguard of toppling authoritarian regimes has so far played almost no part. So is al-Qaeda still relevant? Do the uprisings represent a threat or an opportunity to its role?
In the short term, al-Qaeda has proved slow to respond and is struggling to make any impact, its ideology of violence undermined, experts believe.
But out of the current chaos and instability in the region, they warn, it could still be able to find new opportunities.