Concern is growing for prominent moderate Muslims in Russia’s Dagestan region after an imam was shot dead days after the killing of an academic.
Unidentified gunmen shot Ashurlav Kurbanov near his mosque in the northern village of Mikheyevka, investigators said.
Maksud Sadikov, rector of an Islamic college in the regional capital Makhachkala, was killed last week.
Bishop of Christchurch Victoria Matthews says Christchurch Cathedral has sustained significant new damage, with the famous rose window and most of the western wall lost.
She says it is now more likely that the cathedral won’t be restored to its original state, but built in a new modern form. However she says the cathedral will be at the heart of the city, wherever that is.
Read it all and I also recommend the accompanying audio link.
An unexpectedly huge $3 million budget shortfall for the Columbia area’s bus system is likely to cut the number of routes in half and cost as many as 40 jobs in the company that operates the buses, transit officials disclosed Wednesday.
The figures were released at a specially called meeting of the Central Midlands Regional Transit Authority board attended by fewer than the required seven-member quorum. The board took no action but asked chairwoman Joyce Dickerson to make an appeal to Columbia City Council to offset $618,000 of the red ink.
That still would leave a $2.5 million shortage for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1.
…the contagion into core banks may be being underestimated by investors. Moody’s on Tuesday said it could downgrade France’s BNP Paribas, Société Générale and Crédit Agricole due to their holdings of Greek debt, and the ratings firm is looking at whether other banks could face similar risks.
Disturbingly, the worries have now reached non-financial companies, which have been virtually bulletproof this year. Investment-grade bond issuance has come to a near-standstill. The yield premium on Portugal Telecom’s February 2016 euro bond over German Bunds has widened a stunning 2.3 percentage points in the last two weeks, data from Société Générale show. Italian and Spanish credits are under pressure too. The credit market now starts by pricing government risk and then works back to price debt from financials and companies, one investor says: Greece is a destabilizing influence at the center of the market’s deliberations.
(ENS) During their opening remarks, both Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori and House of Deputies President Bonnie Anderson spoke about the calls for changes in the structure and governance of the church.
Jefferts Schori said she encounters many people who are “eager or at least willing to entertain those conversations.”
She said she sees “a really significant rise in readiness for mission and connections to the need and concerns of people beyond our immediate congregations,” adding that she sees that readiness “as a sign of enormous health ”¦ [and] renewed investment in the core work of the church.”
“People are not focused inward by large; they are focused outward which is where the church is supposed to be,” she said.
Anderson suggested that the church will not “find our way forward by debating questions whose answers are important primarily to people who live and breathe church governance — as lovely as we all are!” Instead, she said, “we need to devote our energy to enabling the church to realize the possibility of real change — courageous, life-giving and life-altering change — for Episcopalians, for seekers, and for the lost and hurting and hungry in our midst.”
Despite all the recent news about possible cancer risks from cellphones, coffee, styrene and formaldehyde in building materials, most of us probably face little if any danger from these things with ordinary use, health experts say. Inactivity and obesity may pose a greater cancer risk than chemicals for some people.
“We are being bombarded” with messages about the dangers posed by common things in our lives, yet most exposures “are not at a level that are going to cause cancer,” said Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, the American Cancer Society’s deputy chief medical officer.
When it comes to health care, Pittsburghers take it for granted that they will have access to the hospitals of their choice.
But in the battle between the region’s largest insurer, Highmark, and its largest health care provider, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, it appears that access could come at a price.
UPMC said Highmark members will have to pay out-of-network provider rates to most UPMC physicians when the insurer’s contract with UPMC expires June 30, 2012.
When Kasey Sands and her family returned home last month a few days after a tornado flattened much of Joplin, Mo., a dozen strangers were removing trees toppled in their yard.
“I asked them who they were, and they said they were veterans,” says Sands, 27. “They said they like to help with peace and not just with war.”
They were Team Rubicon, a non-profit group of veterans formed after the 2010 Haiti earthquake to help in the immediate aftermaths of disasters. They also raced in after tornadoes struck Alabama in April and following earlier crises in Chile, Burma, Pakistan and Sudan. More than 500 people have volunteered; 25 were in Joplin for a week.
For a guy who is only 35 and lives in a walk-up apartment, Eboo Patel has already racked up some impressive accomplishments.
A Rhodes scholar with a doctorate in the sociology of religion from Oxford University, he has four honorary degrees. His autobiography is required freshman reading on 11 college campuses. He runs a nonprofit organization ”” the Interfaith Youth Core ”” with 31 employees and a budget of $4 million. And he was tapped by the White House as a key architect of an initiative announced in April by President Obama.
Mr. Patel got there by identifying a sticky problem in American civic life and proposing a concrete solution. The problem? Increased religious diversity is causing increasing religious conflict. And too often, religious extremists are driving events
….when a U.N. political declaration on AIDS/HIV was accepted unanimously Friday, the Vatican delegation had points of contention.
To fight this infection — 30 years after it first appeared and 30 million deaths later — Jane Adolphe, associate professor of law at Ave Maria School of Law, spoke on behalf of Archbishop Francis Chullikatt and proposed a starting point: “the recognition that the human person can and should change irresponsible and dangerous behavior, rather than simply accept such behavior as if it were inevitable and unchangeable.”
The Holy See’s permanent observer at the United Nations was a voice that reminded that AIDS is about more than statistics, or ideologically tinged plans to fight it.
You probably missed the recent special issue of China Newsweek, so let me bring you up to date. Who do you think was on the cover ”” named the “most influential foreign figure” of the year in China? Barack Obama? No. Bill Gates? No. Warren Buffett? No. O.K., I’ll give you a hint: He’s a rock star in Asia, and people in China, Japan and South Korea scalp tickets to hear him. Give up?
It was Michael J. Sandel, the Harvard University political philosopher.
This news will not come as a surprise to Harvard students, some 15,000 of whom have taken Sandel’s legendary “Justice” class….
(It also will not come as a surprise to close readers of this blog, since we featured this amazing resource last September–KSH).
Ridgewood High School in New Jersey introduced a homework-free winter break in December. Schools in Tampa, Fla., and Bleckley County, Ga., have instituted “no homework nights” throughout the year. The two-year-old Brooklyn School of Inquiry, a program for gifted and talented elementary students, has made homework optional: it is neither graded nor counted toward progress reports.
“I think people confuse homework with rigor,” said Donna Taylor, the Brooklyn School’s principal, who views homework for children under 11 as primarily benefiting parents by helping them feel connected to the classroom.
The homework revolution has also spread north to Toronto, which in 2008 banned homework for kindergartners and for older children on school holidays, and to the Philippines, where the education department issued a memorandum in September calling on teachers to refrain from giving weekend assignments “for pupils to enjoy their childhood.”
While on his religious tour, Bishop [Michael] Kyomya recently called upon believers to support church leaders to live a better life. “It is so challenging that Anglican Church leaders have lived a miserable life and considered the poorest people who beg and move on foot throughout their lifetime,” he said at St James Church.
He said priests and religious leaders need to be empowered by Christians because they are messengers of God and giving them is worth giving to God. “For how long shall we be a laughing stock yet they give us blessings all the time?” the bishop said in a circular issued to all parishes.
Salvation: We can never make up for our sin by self-improvement or good works. To save us from our sinful nature, Christ suffered and died on the cross in our place. Only by trusting in Jesus Christ can anyone be saved from sin’s penalty. Romans 6:23; Ephesians 2:8,9; John 14:6, 1:12; Titus 3:5; Galatians 3:26; Romans 5:1
Eternity: People are immortal and will exist eternally either separated from God or with God through salvation. To be eternally in union with Him is eternal life. Heaven and Hell are real places of eternal existence. John 3:16; John 14:17; Romans 6:23; Romans 8:17-18;Revelation 20:15; 1 Cor. 2:7-9
O Holy Ghost, giver of light and life, impart to us thoughts higher than our own thoughts, and prayers better than our own prayers, and powers beyond our own powers, that we may spend and be spent in the ways of love and goodness, after the perfect image of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
“Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs which God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know–this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. But God raised him up, having loosed the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it….”
–Acts 2:22-24
Holy Trinity Anglican Church, [where the Rev. Neil Struthers serves]… is 141 years old…[and] had been condemned after February’s quake;… it completely collapsed on Monday “with this tremendous noise”.
His vicarage next door will almost certainly have to be demolished because the land it is on has been left unstable by the most recent quakes.
Although he admits “I don’t know where we go from here,” Mr Struthers is confident the church will be rebuilt soon.
Melbourne Auxiliary Bishop Peter Elliott, who addressed a Festival introducing the Ordinariate in Melbourne on 11 June, told The Record that there is momentum leading to the establishment of an Anglican Ordinariate in Australia with recent events in England and, closer to home, the Torres Strait.
“We have been advised that the Ordinariate will take shape here next year,” Bishop Elliott told an Anglican Ordinariate Festival in Melbourne on 11 June.
“I know that many, including myself, had hoped it would be sooner, but it seems best to take the necessary and somewhat complex steps slowly and surely, inspired and encouraged as we are by recent events in England and the interesting prospects for growth that that are already being revealed.”
The Anglican Alliance is co-ordinating with Anglican agencies to provide support for the Episcopal Church in Sudan during the current humanitarian crisis.
More than 53,000 people have been driven from their homes, numerous villages have been bombed, and government troops have used indiscriminate violence against civilians, in the run-up to the secession of south Sudan.