Here’s a feel-good story.

“Two seriously injured bald eagles, found two months apart and more than a mile away from each other near the Iroquois National Wildlife Refuge,” in Western New York State, “were rescued and reunited in a wildlife rehabilitation facility in Medina last week,” the Buffalo News reports.

And on…[Monday’s] All Things Considered, raptor rehabilitator Wendi Pencille tells host Michele Norris the remarkable story of what it was like when the two lovebirds were reunited.

Read or listen to it all (and you have to love the picture).

…America’s dominance of innovation and technology is being challenged by other countries.

Figures from Battelle show that China’s spending on research and development is second only to the US because its unprecedented investment in education has created a highly skilled workforce.

The company warns that America’s under-investment in Stem subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) will spark an innovation crisis for the nation in the years to come.

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[The] Rev. Nicholas Holtam has smoothed over many conflicts in his long career as an Anglican vicar. Before he leaves his central London parish this month [to become the Bishop of Salisbury], he wants to bring peace to one more group of warring factions: the Pearly Kings and Queens.

The “Pearlies” are no street gang. They are groups of mainly aged “Cockney” Londoners who sew mother-of-pearl buttons on their clothes in lavish designs and sing sentimental pub songs. Begun in the 1870s by an orphan London street sweeper, the Pearlies are mostly known for raising money for charity.

But all is not well in their world. Their ever-dwindling ranks have splintered into three factions. Years ago, a feud over finances caused several Pearly “families” to split off from the Original Pearly Kings and Queens Association to form a new group, the London Pearly Kings and Queens Society.

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The leading opponent to the introduction of ethics classes in NSW schools, the Anglican Church, has reversed its position and says they should be retained, while the Catholic Church now argues they should not be removed as they have ”little impact” on the teaching of scripture.

The reversals come amid a stand-off over the classes between the O’Farrell government and the Christian Democratic Party MP, Fred Nile, who has threatened to block key legislation in the upper house if it does not consider removing them from schools.

The comments will be welcomed by the government, which yesterday rejected Mr Nile’s proposal that the classes be moved from being in competition with special religious education (SRE), or scripture, lessons.

Read it all.

Moody’s Investors Service warned Tuesday that it probably will lower the credit rating on five states ”” including South Carolina ”” if it downgrades the U.S. government’s credit rating.

The credit rating agency said it has placed on review for possible downgrade the triple-A bond ratings of South Carolina, Maryland, New Mexico, Tennessee and Virginia.

A triple-A rating is the highest for debt and tells investors an institutional borrower presents a minimal credit risk.

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Three years ago, the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the US investment bank, triggered a domino effect that had calamitous consequences for the world. No one knew how many institutions had lent money to Lehman, or how many might be pulled down with the bank. Fear spiralled through the financial markets and central banks worked overtime to prop dominoes up. The result was a painful recession.

This time, some of the dominoes are nations. Greek debt is about three times the size of that of Lehman Brothers. Around half of it is held by foreign investors, who will be hit if Greece defaults. Add in Spain and Italy, which represent about 28 per cent of eurozone GDP, and the numbers get scary. Add in a leadership vacuum, and investors start asking why they should keep lending to countries such as Italy that are troubled but still solvent…

That Europe has reached its Lehman moment is substantially the fault of its myopic and reckless power elite.

Read it all (requires subscription).

Katerina Sokou, 37, a Greek financial journalist at Kathimerini, a daily newspaper, told me this story: A group of German members of the Bavarian Parliament came to Athens shortly after the economic crisis erupted here and met with some Greek politicians, academics, journalists and lawyers at a taverna to evaluate the Greek economy. Sokou said her impression was that the Germans were trying to figure out whether they should be lending money to Greece for a bailout. It was like one nation interviewing another for a loan. “They were not here as tourists; we were giving data on how many hours we work,” recalled Sokou. “It really felt like we had to persuade them about our values.”

Sokou’s observation reminded me of a point made to me by Dov Seidman, the author of the book “How” and the C.E.O. of LRN, which helps companies build ethical business cultures. The globalization of markets and people has intensified to a new degree in the last five years, with the emergence of social networking, Skype, derivatives, fast wireless connectivity, cheap smartphones and cloud computing. “When the world is bound together this tightly,” argued Seidman, “everyone’s values and behavior matter more than ever, because they impact so many more people than ever. …We’ve gone from connected to interconnected to ethically interdependent.”

As it becomes harder to shield yourself from the other guy’s irresponsible behavior, added Seidman, both he and you had better behave more responsibly ”” or you both will suffer the consequences, whether you did anything wrong or not. This is doubly true when two different countries share the same currency but not the same government….

Read it all.

“Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion. And the scepticism of our time does not really destroy the beliefs, rather it creates them; gives them their limits and their plain and defiant shape. We who are Liberals once held Liberalism lightly as a truism. Now it has been disputed, and we hold it fiercely as a faith. We who believe in patriotism once thought patriotism to be reasonable, and thought little more about it. Now we know it to be unreasonable, and know it to be right. We who are Christians never knew the great philosophic common sense which inheres in that mystery until the anti-Christian writers pointed it out to us. The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed.”

–G. K. Chesterton, Heretics

“This study shows that conventional wisdom ”” to eat everything in moderation, eat fewer calories and avoid fatty foods ”” isn’t the best approach,” Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health and lead author of the study, said in an interview. “What you eat makes quite a difference. Just counting calories won’t matter much unless you look at the kinds of calories you’re eating.”

Dr. Frank B. Hu, a nutrition expert at the Harvard School of Public Health and a co-author of the new analysis, said: “In the past, too much emphasis has been put on single factors in the diet. But looking for a magic bullet hasn’t solved the problem of obesity.”

Also untrue, Dr. Mozaffarian said, is the food industry’s claim that there’s no such thing as a bad food.

Read it all.

It is Monday morning (or Tuesday, if your pastor takes Monday off), and your pastor is wondering where to begin. There are sermons to write, committee meetings to plan, visits to make, and things left over from last week’s list that he was never able to get to. He may already feel overwhelmed, and the week has not yet even begun.

Where should he begin? What should he be doing? Most Orthodox Presbyterian churches do not have a written job description for their pastor. We expect them to know what to do. But with the lack of a clear job description comes the problem of our expectations””unwritten, but as firm as if written in stone””of what our pastor ought to do. Pastors face the same problem: what should their priorities be?

In this article, I want to suggest that the pastor’s job description can best be defined by aligning it with the job description of Christ as our mediator. The Shorter Catechism reminds us that Christ, as our mediator, executes the offices of prophet, priest, and king (SC 23). Since pastors are Christ’s representatives, serving as undershepherds of their flock, it is helpful to think of their calling in terms of the same three categories. I have found that I cannot be a faithful pastor if I am not actively involved in all three areas.

Interesting reflections from another tradition–read it all.

1. It is vitally important that evangelicals committed to the biblical and traditional sexual ethic set out in Lambeth I.10 engage constructively with these two new initiatives. Some, weary of apparently unending dialogue and listening, fearful of the possible outcome and concerned to put their energy into more important issues, may be tempted to keep their distance or engage in a defensive manner. Such approaches, however, risk the wider church not recognising the strength”“ both in numbers and in argument ”“ of the evangelical positon.

2. These two reviews provide an opportunity for evangelicals to

a. re-explore the historic Christian vision for sex and marriage

b. regain intellectual and spiritual confidence in the biblical rootedness, theological coherence and significance and psycho-social validity of traditional Christian teaching compared to a revisionist position

c. enter constructive theological dialogue with those seeking to revise Christian teaching in order both to correct and be corrected by those with whom we disagree.

Read it all.

O thou who hast taught us that we are most truly free when we lose our wills in thine: Help us to attain to this liberty by continual surrender unto thee; that walking in the way which thou hast prepared for us, we may find our life in doing thy will; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

–Gelasian Sacramentary

The apostles and the elders were gathered together to consider this matter. And after there had been much debate, Peter rose and said to them, “Brethren, you know that in the early days God made choice among you, that by my mouth the Gentiles should hear the word of the gospel and believe. And God who knows the heart bore witness to them, giving them the Holy Spirit just as he did to us; and he made no distinction between us and them, but cleansed their hearts by faith. Now therefore why do you make trial of God by putting a yoke upon the neck of the disciples which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear? But we believe that we shall be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will.”

–Acts 15:6-11

Now this is a media reported statement not a theological essay or paper, so I am not going to declare this to be evidence of heresy. But, on the face of it, here is an Anglican bishop making a christological statement which, putting it diplomatically, falls below the Nicene and Chalcedonian par.

The least we could expect of Anglican bishops around the world is that, different and diverse though they may wish to be on human sexuality, whether Hooker meant this or that re Scripture, reason and tradition, and what robes should be worn on which occasion, they all subscribe to the common ecumenical creeds.

Read it all.

The US has said it will send aid to famine-hit areas of Somalia controlled by the Islamist group al-Shabab.

But US aid officials say assurances must be given that the insurgents will not interfere with its distribution.

The US considers al-Shabab a terrorist group and last year stopped aid to the large area of Somalia it controls.

Read it all.

Read it all and there is much more there.

I’m the only one I know that sleeps floating. It’s delicious. You don’t know where you are, and after a while, because your limbs aren’t touching anything, you lose sense that you even have them.

–Story Musgrave, veteran of six space shuttle flights, in Time Magazine, July 18, 2011, edition, page 64

A group of Hindus can sue an Edison restaurant for money to travel to India, where they say they must purify their souls after eating meat, a state appellate court panel ruled Monday (July 18).

The decision reinstates a lawsuit filed against Moghul Express, the restaurant that admitted it accidentally served meat-filled pastries to 16 Hindus whose religion forbids them from eating nonvegetarian food.

The diners said the mix-up has harmed them spiritually and monetarily, and that to cleanse themselves of their sin””even though it was committed unknowingly””they must participate in a purification ritual in the Ganges River.

Read it all.

When students and professors return to budget-slashing colleges this fall, they might notice things missing, such as limitless piles of food on their plates, land-line phones and trash pickup.

At Penn State University, “all you can eat” meals have been slimmed down to “all you care to eat,” and two fewer dining halls offer them, spokeswoman Annemarie Mountz says. The marketing change is to encourage gastronomic restraint.

It may be hard to swallow, but budget-cutting is the new normal at the nation’s 6,700-plus post-secondary schools.

Read it all.

The segment description is as follows:

A joint conference of Catholic and Anglican experts on the Middle East, taking place at Lambeth Palace in London, has been hearing first hand accounts of the struggles of the Christian community in the Holy Land today. The two day meeting, organised by the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols aims to raise greater awareness of the difficulties facing the minority Christians in Israel and the Palestinian territories and find practical ways of supporting the Churches there. At the opening of the meeting on Monday, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem Fouad Twal and his Anglican counterpart Bishop Suheil Dawani joined some young Palestinian Christians in speaking of the human face of the continuing conflict and occupation. Philippa Hitchen spoke to Patriarch Twal to find out what he hopes this conference can achieve

Listen to it all (about 6 1/2 minutes).

Religious history has been made with the first ordination of a former Anglican clergyman in Scotland into the Catholic priesthood.

Father Len Black, 61 and a grandfather of two, was ordained into the priesthood this weekend, at a ceremony at St Mary’s Church in Greenock performed by Bishop Philip Tartaglia of Paisley.

Father Black was an Episcopal minister for 30 years before converting to Catholicism. Until recently he was the minister at St Michael and All Angels in Inverness and was also the regional dean of Forward in Faith, the leading group of traditionalist Anglicans.

Read it all.

For a man who wrote a seminal book on the shadowy nature of public relations entitled The Death of Spin, there is something rather ironic about the fact that George Pitcher ”“ the Archbishop of Canterbury’s public affairs secretary ”“ has been dismissed for what appears to have been a spin too far.

Mr Pitcher, a former industrial correspondent turned Anglican priest who styles himself as the vicar of Fleet Street, is to leave his post as Rowan Williams’ chief spin doctor after just nine months in the job.

The official reason given by Lambeth Palace is the termination of what was only ever a year-long contract. But sources within the Church of England and Westminster say Mr Pitcher’s departure was the endgame of a political fallout that began with Archbishop Williams’ damning critique of the Government’s cuts and ended with an offhand joke about canapés

Read it all.

Marriage is very difficult. It’s like a 5000-piece jigsaw puzzle, all sky.

–Cathy Ladman, as cited in Reader’s Digest, August 2011 edition, page 173

Though we retain the potential and many of the assets necessary to operate as a global power, a number of the enablers that we depend upon to project and sustain that influence are being eroded away, if not deleted outright. At the heart of the problem is the fact that the UK does not possess a proper national strategy, and has not done so since at least 1989.

National strategy is what enables a country to have real direction and strength. National strategy seeks to further the national interest through the effective coordination of all instruments of power, be they economic, political, cultural, military or diplomatic. It is guided by a clear understanding of what the country stands for, what sort of power it wants to be in the world, and what it understands about the geopolitical environment in which it operates….

The government will claim it has a national strategy, the National Security Strategy (NSS) released in October 2010, but that does not constitute a real national strategy, and nor can it.

Read it all.

The following speeches are a selection of those made on the second day of the Conference on Christians in the Holy Land, and include an audio recording of the Archbishops’ comments at the concluding press conference.

Read and listen to it all.

“This is the happiest day of my life!” So says Maci Bookout, according to a recent cover of OK! magazine, where the 19-year-old Teen Mom star and rumored bride-to-be flashes a beauty-queen smile. Sharing cover space with Bookout ”” and sporting a bikini, plus a baby on each hip ”” is Leah Messer, 19, whose dream wedding was featured in last spring’s season finale of Teen Mom 2. (One month later, she filed for divorce.) Elsewhere in the celebrity mediasphere, one might find Teen Mom’s Farrah Abraham, 20, staging a photo op for paparazzi on a Florida beach, or Abraham’s castmate Amber Portwood, 21, posing for photographers outside her latest court hearing; she was recently sentenced to probation after pleading guilty to felony domestic battery against the father of her child.

A spin-off of MTV’s popular reality series 16 and Pregnant, Teen Mom recently entered its third season. With more than 3 million viewers each week, it’s the network’s top-rated show after Jersey Shore, and its subjects provide endless fodder for the tabloids.

Ugh–read it all.

The following speeches are a selection of those made on the first day of the Conference on Christians in the Holy Land, hosted by Archbishop Rowan Williams and Archbishop Vincent Nichols.

Read and listen to it all.

Underemployment, a measure that combines the percentage of unemployed with the percentage working part time but wanting full-time work, is at 18.3% in mid-July — precisely the same as at the end of June and in mid-July 2010.

Read it all.