Check out what he wore yesterday at opening day–my goodness.

A group of religious non-believers at Fort Bragg is pushing for the U.S. military to make sure they get the same treatment as religious groups.

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Polygamy””or more specifically polygyny, the marriage of one man to more than one woman””has been widespread in human history. And it is becoming increasingly common, particularly in Muslim enclaves””including in Paris, London and New York.

A 2006 report by the National Consultative Commission on Human Rights reported that approximately 180,000 people were living in polygamous households in France. For decades, France allowed entrance to polygamous immigrants from about 50 countries where the practice was legal. When the French government banned polygamy in 1993, it tried to support the decohabitation of such couples if a wife wanted to move into her own apartment with her children.

In Britain, where immigration laws have banned the practice for longer, there appear to be about a thousand valid polygamous marriages, mostly among immigrants who married elsewhere, such as in Pakistan. Such families are allowed to collect social security benefits for each wife, although the government has apparently not counted how many are doing so.

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Educated 20- and 30-somethings are flocking to live downtown in the USA’s largest cities ”” even urban centers that are losing population.

In more than two-thirds of the nation’s 51 largest cities, the young, college-educated population in the past decade grew twice as fast within 3 miles of the urban center as in the rest of the metropolitan area ”” up an average 26% compared with 13% in other parts.

Even in Detroit, where the population shrank by 25% since 2000, downtown added 2,000 young and educated residents during that time, up 59% , according to analysis of Census data by Impresa Inc., an economic consulting firm.

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A funeral is a solemn rite of passage, and since the days of ancient civilization, the eulogy has been a speech of good words for the dead.

That’s changing, say funeral directors, clergy and theologians. Even amid tragedy, today’s eulogy increasingly includes anecdotes that point to the deceased’s foibles and quirks, offering a nuanced character sketch. “More often, people are saying, ‘Let’s be realistic about this person,” says Hari P. Close, a funeral director who worked with the McNeely family.

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Check out the names and the profile information.

Unless Christians acted now to defend the church and the true Gospel, liberal forces that preached a false Gospel would prevail within 10 years, the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney and General Secretary of the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (FCA) said in Port Elizabeth yesterday.

Speaking at a meeting of the FCA in St Saviour’s Anglican Church… [this week], Jensen said that the turmoil in the worldwide Anglican Communion which was triggered by the approval of gay marriages and ordination of gay bishops in North America, highlighted an issue that was much broader than homosexuality: it went to the authority of Scripture and the heart of the Gospel. He said the issue was not just a threat to Anglicans but to the church at large.

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Two senior priests of the Diocese of Fort Worth have left the breakaway Anglo-Catholic diocese for the Anglican Ordinariate.

On March 8, Bishop Jack Iker announced that his number two man, Canon Charles Hough, and Fr. Louis Tobola had resigned their posts effective March 31.

The bishop noted Canon Hough had served as Canon to the Ordinary for the past 17 years, and he and Fr. Tobola had each served for over 30 years in the diocese. “Though they have not yet resigned from the ordained ministry, they are expected to do so at the time the Ordinariate is established for former Anglicans who wish to come into full communion with the Roman Catholic Church,” Bishop Iker said.

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Self-supporting ministers (SSMs) feel “ignored, overlooked, and under-used” in their ministry, new research unveiled in the Church Times this week suggests.

A survey of about 900 SSMs across the UK, undertaken by the Revd Dr Teresa Morgan, a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, who is an SSM in the parish of Littlemore, paints a picture of stagnation after ordination for SSMs, who make up 27 per cent of clergy in England.

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Almighty God, who hast restored our human nature to heavenly glory through the perfect obedience of our Savior Jesus Christ: Keep alive in thy Church, we beseech thee, a passion for justice and truth; that we, like thy servant Federick Denison Maurice, may work and pray for the triumph of the kingdom of thy Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

Enable us, O heavenly Father, to walk with thee this day and every day in sure and simple trust; ever remembering that our little things are all big to thy love, and our big things are all small to thy power; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.

–Romans 6:1-4

”˜It’s the pearl of great price,’ says Jonathan Ruffer. Like the merchant in the Gospel, he is selling all that he hath. With the proceeds, he is buying the 12 Zurbaran paintings of Jacob and his Brothers at Auckland Castle, the palace of the Bishop of Durham. And when he has bought them from the Church of England, he will give them back, keeping them in the castle, thus bestowing them upon the people of the north-east in perpetuity. The price is £15 million. He believes in the Big Society and is taking a big punt on it.

Ruffer, who is 59, is a very successful private client fund manager. He is famous for having foreseen the credit crunch, largely by careful study of past crises. ”˜I know more about the history of economics than anyone I know,’ he boasts, though, on the subject of his benefaction he is so unboastful as to be almost abject. The credit crunch was the moment when people suddenly stopped trusting their bank deposits. The next big crunch, which he sees as ”˜certain’, and which could happen in Britain first, is that trust in the value of the currency will collapse, leading to hyperinflation: ”˜It is an airless valley from which there is no escape.’

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At least 40 Libyan civilians have been killed as a consequence of airstrikes carried out by the United States and other Western powers, the leading church official in Libya said.

“The so-called humanitarian raids have caused dozens of victims among civilians in some areas of Tripoli,” the Libyan capital, Bishop Giovanni Innocenzo Martinelli, the apostolic vicar of Tripoli, told the Vatican’s missionary news agency Fides March 31.

“I gathered testimony from trustworthy people. In particular, in the neighborhood of Buslim, the bombardments caused the collapse of a civilian residence building, resulting in the deaths of 40 people,” Bishop Martinelli said.

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It really couldn’t be clearer. “The Congress shall have power ”¦ to declare war.” Yet these are probably the most egregiously ignored words in the Constitution. You would think that Republicans, especially, with their showy fondness for “originalism” and “plain meaning” in interpreting the Constitution, would have no problem interpreting the meaning of these words: If a president wants to go to war, he must get the approval of Congress.

Presidents of both parties traditionally ignore the congressional war power when they feel like it. Or they wait until the troops are poised for battle ”” putting Congress in an impossible position ”” before asking permission.

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When Ronnie writes of prisoners who “have given up,” who “are waiting to die” or who “just want to die,” he knows well of whom he is speaking. With equal confidence, the inmate of Riverbend Maximum Security Institution writes, “The good news is that Jesus doesn’t give up on any of these people. Nor should we.”

Ronnie’s brief reflection on John 17, including his personal journey of more than 40 years to discover “Jesus is love; Jesus is real,” is part of the 2011 Lenten Devotional published by Christ United Methodist Church in Franklin, Tenn. Fifteen current and former inmates of the maximum-security prison wrote more than half of the entries in the booklet. The rest came from church staff members and other sources.

Karen Vander Molen, a church member active in prison ministry, and the Rev. Mark Price, minister of spiritual formation, coordinated the project. It began as Price was considering who might write the Lenten devotional.

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