The Rev. Patrick Conroy was sworn in Wednesday (May 25) as House chaplain, making him the first Jesuit to hold the position, and the first candidate forced to navigate around the Catholic Church’s abuse scandal.
“It’s clear this loyal servant of the faithful is uniquely suited to serve as chaplain of the people’s House,” Speaker John Boehner said, noting that the chaplain “is the anchor of the House.”
Selimah Marie Harmon was born in Oxford, England, in 1993–how could she be done with secondary school already? Where does the time go?–KSH.
For one picture of her [singing] you can go here and look at photo #1 (she is in the middle, closest to the front).
You may also find the schedule here and, if interested, you may read about the school there.
The Charleston County School District’s proposed budget for next school year won’t raise taxes or furlough teachers, but it does include cuts that will affect employees.
With the exception of teachers, every district employee will be furloughed next year, and no employee will receive a cost-of-living increase or salary hike for additional years of experience.
The school board approved on Thursday the first reading of its proposed $332.1 million operating budget, which is about $2.6 million more than this year. That budget covers classroom expenses, and the board voted 7-2 for it.
In a complex transaction designed to strengthen nonpartisan religion reporting, the newly nonprofit Religion News Service received a grant of almost $3.5 million from the Lilly Endowment and was acquired by the Religion NewsÂwriters Association, effective June 1.
As newspaper circulation numbers fell and online journalism struggled for profits, “religion reporting became a lower priority,” said RNA president Steve Maynard. When the for-profit Advance Publications sought a buyer for RNS in the fall of 2009, the Washington-based news service looked for help from the professional journalists’ organization beyond the RNA’s existing role of providing contracted assistance to RNS’s business operations.
Every year during the 40 days of Lent, millions of Catholics honor Jesus’s crucifixion by foregoing meat in their Friday meals. But starting this September, if the bishops of England and Wales have their way, Catholics there will abstain from meat every Friday, year-round. This change marks the revival of a practice that the church abandoned a half-century ago””and it’s the latest of several in recent years.
Catholic tradition calls for acts of penance every Friday, the day of Jesus’s death, but observance of that tradition has changed dramatically since the modernizing reforms that followed the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). Bishops in most countries eliminated abstinence from meat or limited it to Lent alone, and each Catholic became free to choose his own form of Friday penance: skipping television, perhaps, or taking the stairs instead of the elevator. This effectively meant the disappearance of Friday penance altogether. In my 11 years of Catholic schooling, I don’t recall hearing it mentioned once.
That’s why the announcement by the bishops of England and Wales is so significant….
Sovereign and holy God, who didst bring John Calvin from a study of legal systems to understand the godliness of thy divine laws as revealed in Scripture: Fill us with a like zeal to teach and preach thy Word, that the whole world may come to know thy Son Jesus Christ, the true Word and Wisdom; who with thee and the Holy Spirit livest and reignest, ever one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.
O God our Father, whose blessed Son, being falsely accused, answered nothing; being reviled, reviled not again: Give us faith, when men accuse us falsely, to go quietly on our way, committing ourselves to thee, who judgest righteously, after the pattern of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.
–Romans 15:13
…Here is something most people don’t know about Barcelona: Unlike every other famous soccer team in the world that thrives on possession and ball control, they do something unique during matches. They run as if their bikini briefs are on fire.
According to Stats Inc., which tracks the distance each player travels in a match, Barcelona’s players have covered 627,366 meters of turf during their six Champions League knockout-round matches, or about 390 miles. Its opponents, meanwhile, have run 611,120 meters or 380 miles, about 3% less, which is significant considering they are all chasing the same ball…
On its face, this makes absolutely no sense….[so how could it be true?]
The answer to the riddle is that for all the superlatives lobbed at Barcelona for its artistry with the ball, its central weapon, and perhaps its defining strength, is what happens when the other team does get its cleats on the ball….
The answer to the riddle is that for all the superlatives lobbed at Barcelona for its artistry with the ball, its central weapon, and perhaps its defining strength, is what happens when the other team does get its cleats on the ball….
(ENS) As Sudan’s wanted President Omar al-Bashir said that he would not remove his Khartoum troops from the disputed oil-producing Abyei region, church and world leaders are insisting that advocacy for the war-torn south and for a lasting peace must continue.
“It seems only a little while ago that we were ratcheting up our advocacy with our government and other friends of the international community to ensure a safe and timely referendum,” said Richard Parkins, executive director of the American Friends of the Episcopal Church of Sudan (AFRECS), referring to the historic January plebiscite when southerners voted almost unanimously to secede from the Islamic north….
An Anglican delegation present at the 2010 World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh will meet again next week in Toronto to prepare a book about their experience. The nine Anglican delegates participated in what has been called a milestone in the global ecumenical movement.
Bishop Mark MacDonald, national indigenous bishop for the Canadian Anglican church, attended the conference. In an earlier interview with Episcopal News Service, he characterized the gathering of 300 people from 60 countries as one of “building the relationships that will carry the worldwide church to a new level.”
Jesus disarms and makes a spectacle of the power of money in the parable of the unjust steward (Luke 16:1-15). A steward accused of embezzlement is told to settle the accounts one last time. He uses the opportunity to “forgive” his master’s debtors and ingratiate himself with them, so he can seek help after his threatened dismissal. The Pharisees, who were lovers of money, ridiculed Jesus. He replied that what people prize can be an abomination in the sight of God.
Let the litigious bureaucracy have the money it wants. We keep the Gospel and proclaim it, in season and out of season. The money the Episcopal Church raises from coerced offerings, from Pyrrhic legal victories or from those who believe its new gospel will do no more to save it on its appointed day of judgment than the wealth of Herod’s temple protected it from Roman soldiers in A.D. 70. In the end, money is of no account, mere dust on the scales.
“Our calculations suggest that nearly all the rise in nominal personal spending in April was due to higher prices,” Paul Ashworth of Capital Economics wrote in a report, “with consumption barely rising in real terms.” No wonder: Unemployment is still high, home prices are falling and federal stimulus like the payroll-tax cut will soon fade. And households are still using income to pay down unsustainably high levels of debt.
“The household balance sheet is still a bit of a mess,” Mr. Ashworth says.
….suppose the law is implemented just as it’s written. In that case, according to the Medicare Trustees, Medicare’s long-term unfunded liability fell by $53 trillion on the day ObamaCare was signed.
But at what cost to the elderly? Consider people reaching the age of 65 this year. Under the new law, the average amount spent on these enrollees over the remainder of their lives will fall by about $36,000 at today’s prices. That sum of money is equivalent to about three years of benefits. For 55-year-olds, the spending decrease is about $62,000””or the equivalent of six years of benefits. For 45-year-olds, the loss is more than $105,000, or nine years of benefits.
In terms of the sheer dollars involved, the law’s reduction in future Medicare payments is the equivalent of raising the eligibility age for Medicare to age 68 for today’s 65-year-olds, to age 71 for 55-year-olds and to age 74 for 45-year-olds. But rather than keep the system as is and raise the age of eligibility, the reform law instead tries to achieve equivalent savings by paying less to the providers of care.
What does this mean in terms of access to health care? No one knows for sure, but it almost certainly means that seniors will have difficulty finding doctors who will see them and hospitals who will admit them. Once admitted, they will enjoy fewer amenities such as private rooms and probably a lower quality of care as well.
Read it all (also on the Op-ed page of this morning’s Wall Street Journal).
What is terrifying in this story is the ease with which people’s words can now be taken down and used in evidence against them. It is technologically possible, and indeed easy, for everyone to conduct the whole of his social life as if it were a series of interviews under caution. All that is necessary is to slip one of the latest mobile phones into one’s top pocket and entrapment can commence.
Of course, there are occasions when entrapment might be justified. If, for example, I thought and had good reason to believe that a group of people were plotting to commit a terrorist atrocity, I should have no hesitation in entrapping them in the way in which Pilkington was entrapped. But it is a poor principle to allow one’s general conduct to be guided or ruled by the most extreme circumstances possible. One is still unlikely in everyday life to come across a terrorist group, for example; there is therefore no reason or excuse to record what, say, the woman behind the post office counter says to one in selling a stamp.
What this man did was dangerous, at least if it is taken as model to be followed or is in any way rewarded, because it so powerfully undermines the trust that is essential to civilised (and sincere and truthful) social and professional intercourse.
The quiet little park in Cupertino, Calif., is a world away from the mountains of Afghanistan where a Chinook helicopter was shot down in 2005, killing all aboard ”” including Navy SEAL James Suh.
Most Sundays, including this Memorial Day weekend, visitors to this place of manicured lawns and graceful red maple trees will find James’ father, Solomon, 72, sitting on a bench.
He will be reading a Bible and gazing now and then at bronze sculptures of his son and another Navy SEAL that are the centerpiece of a veterans memorial. James, who died at age 28, is depicted in full battle gear crouching beside a close friend, Matthew Axelson, a Cupertino native who also died in the mountains that day.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visited Pakistan on Friday in what officials described as an effort to measure Pakistan’s commitment to fighting Islamic extremism after the killing of Osama bin Laden badly strained relations with the United States. It did not appear to go well.
The atmosphere of her initial meetings ”” visibly frosty ”” underscored the tensions between the two countries, which have threatened to lurch into open confrontation since Navy Seals found and killed Bin Laden on May 2 in a military garrison town only 35 miles from here. Mrs. Clinton, the highest ranking American official to visit Pakistan, was joined by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, who arrived separately as part of a carefully orchestrated diplomatic encounter.
What has helped make her all the things she is? It’s the two things she’s not: a wife and mother. A lot of ambitious women will say they had to make a choice: They could be a CEO or get married and have kids but most assuredly not both. With Oprah it seemed a whole other matter entirely. She’s like the religious leader who forswears marriage and children to better serve her flock. Perhaps she made a sage choice. Unlike many wives, she tended to get the last word. Unlike many mothers, she had countless followers always willing to take her suggestions””be your best self, find your own power””as commandments.
Oprah’s final show made it difficult to avoid ecclesiastical comparisons. “Amazing Grace,” she told her rapturous audience, “is the song of my life.” “This was what I was called to do,” she said at another point. She also referenced the hand of God and the presence of God, offering prayers of gratitude “for the privilege of doing the show,” talking about her “yellow-brick-road of blessings,” and signing off for the last time with hands raised in benediction and a fervent “God be the Glory.” Even the heavenly host might find this host a tough act to follow.
Read it all from the Op-ed page of today’s Wall Street Journal.
Church of England Schools must have a “critical mass” of Christian students and teachers to maintain their distinctive ethos, the Bishop of Exeter has told his diocese. Diluting the Christian element of church schools would no longer leave them Christian and would rob them of their unique character.
In a letter released to coincide with the start of term for Devon’s 131 Church of England schools, Bishop Michael Langrish said the church had “always been committed to the education of all children.”
However, the “work of all our Church Schools is grounded in a Christian understanding of the nature of human beings and their relationship both with other people and with God. This understanding finds expression in teaching, in pastoral care, in worship and in the total school ethos” the bishop said in his April 28 letter.
A checklist has been drawn up that makes it virtually impossible for an openly gay person to become a bishop in the Church of England.
At the same time as the Church of Scotland was opening the door to gay ministers, the C of E’s House of Bishops met in secret to discuss, among other things, legal advice on how to continue to exclude homosexuals from the episcopate in the wake of the Equality Act 2010.
A press spokesman confirmed that the Bishops discussed “issues concerned with episcopal appointÂments this week, and commissioned further work”. It is understood that the bishops were unable to agree.
God our ruler and guide, we honor thee for Queen Bertha and King Ethelbert of Kent who, gently persuaded by the truth of thy Gospel, encouraged others by their godly example to follow freely the path of discipleship; and we pray that we, like them, may show the goodness of thy Word not only by our words but in our lives; through Jesus Christ, who with thee and the Holy Spirit livest and reignest, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to his abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for all who believe in Him; to whom with thee, O Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, be ascribed all honour and glory, dominion and power, now and for evermore.
Praise the LORD! O give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; for his steadfast love endures for ever! Who can utter the mighty doings of the LORD, or show forth all his praise?
–Psalm 106:1-2
Episcopalians in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles held silent prayer vigils in protest of Israeli treatment of Palestinians on May 24, the day Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress about the peace process.
They sought to send a message about the Israeli government’s policies towards Palestinians in general and specifically the refusal to grant Anglican Bishop Suheil Dawani a permit to reside in Jerusalem. As bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem, Dawani, a Palestinian Christian, oversees congregations and institutions in Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the Palestinian Territories.
Businesses, nonprofits and informal groups of friends in southwest Missouri are joining together to offer what help they can to victims of the Joplin tornado.
The generosity pouring into Habitat for Humanity in Springfield has, on a couple of occasions, choked up Eric Allen, director of the ReStore.
He estimated 30-40 people came with donations on Tuesday. Some were low-income families who have received homes through Habitat. Others were tradespeople who regularly make donations to the organization or shoppers who appreciate bargains at the ReStore.
Trinity Episcopal Cathedral announced Wednesday that it will close The Cathedral School at the conclusion of the school year.
Preschool programs serving children ages six weeks to 4 years will remain open.
The 54-year-old Episcopal school serves students in pre-K through fifth grade and had become something of a Little Rock institution. Its enrollment started to decline after the opening of an elementary school at Episcopal Collegiate School in 2009, but had grown by 34 percent in the last three years, according to school officials.
The first ever international consultation for Anglican Communion theological college Principals and Deans, gathering together representatives from 27 countries, has been held in Canterbury. We celebrate and affirm the vital significance of theological education for the life and health of the Church and the whole people of God. We believe that good theological education has transforming power, and can promote a global understanding of Anglican identity. Our consultation has contributed to the unity of the Anglican Communion, as well as enabling various models of ecumenical engagement to be explored. We identified through our meeting a shared commitment to fostering active and discerning Christian discipleship which embraces holistic mission and enables the building up of the Kingdom of God.
Due to declining enrollment and a lack of funding, the preschool at Trinity Episcopal Church in Pottsville will close June 3.
“I think it’s a shame because there aren’t many programs in the area that offer a spiritual component to a sound educational background,” said Tiffany L. Reedy, Pottsville, whose daughter, Samarra, 5, is a preschool student there. Reedy is also principal of D.H.H. Lengel Middle School, Pottsville.
“The school’s been operating in the red for the last three years,” said the Rev. James Rinehart, a member of Trinity Center for Children’s board of directors. “We had some money invested, but we’ve gone through our investments … Last year, we didn’t even hold our summer program because of lack of registration.”
Marriage is losing ground to a grinding economic slowdown that has prompted more couples to live together without tying the knot.
The share of couples who are not married has risen in many places but is highest in areas that offer many people grim prospects for a better financial future: old industrial cities and the Mississippi Delta.
Unmarried couples made up 12% of U.S. couples in 2010, a 25% increase in 10 years, according to Census data out today.