Marriage is a fundamental tenet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But church leaders now face a matrimony problem within their flock: Young single Mormons are delaying marriage.

Becky Maher, 29, attends the American River Young Singles Adult Branch in Sacramento. She is active in the congregation and has held leadership positions in the church. But getting married has so far eluded her. “I would like to be married as soon as possible,” she said.

Ben Forsyth, 28, is also a member of the singles congregation. Sunday, he led the congregation in the benediction. But he’s not ready for marriage. “I don’t think I’ve put it off, I just haven’t found the right person,” he said.

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Enemy-initiated attacks in Afghanistan have decreased by 25% as Afghan and coalition forces have degraded insurgent leadership and hammered their morale, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East said Tuesday.

The latest figures come during the deadliest month ever for Americans in the 10-year war. Sixty-six U.S. servicemembers have been killed this month, a toll that includes the deaths of 30 troops in an Aug. 6 helicopter crash. The previous high was 65 troops killed in July 2010.

Commanders cautioned that violence levels alone are not an effective way to measure progress or failure.

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A Glasgow-based company has installed its first commercial “alkaline hydrolysis” unit at a Florida funeral home.

The unit by Resomation Ltd is billed as a green alternative to cremation and works by dissolving the body in heated alkaline water.

The facility has been installed at the Anderson-McQueen funeral home in St Petersburg, and will be used for the first time in the coming weeks. It is hoped other units will follow in the US, Canada and Europe.

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Over the last few weeks of prayer, fasting and reflection it must have been very difficult to watch the growing unrest and rioting in many of the major cities in the United Kingdom. The tragic deaths of Haroon Jahan, Shahzad Ali and Abdul Muzavir in Birmingham occurred at the darkest moment of those days. Their families and friends suffered horrific bereavement and shock, but somehow in the midst of this chaos, they brought about a change. On the day after their murder, Tariq Jahan, the father of one of the boys who died, showed immense dignity in calling for restraint in his local community. His call for peace and unity was one of the decisive moments during those days and was a gift in Ramadan that gave hope to many not just in Birmingham but all over the United Kingdom and beyond….

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The Diocese of New York, which includes the Lower Hudson Valley, is generally quite liberal and very open to gays and lesbians at all levels. But there has been some tension over whether gay couples can be married by priests.

[Bishop Mark] Sisk supported the passage of civil gay marriage by the state Legislature and has been very supportive of gays in church life. But he does not believe that church law has empowered priests to perform marriages for same-sex couples.

In a statement this past June, he said that clergy can offer a blessing for a gay couple that has entered into a civil marriage.

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While violating provisions of the Torah or the Sermon on the Mount does not by itself constitute grounds for driving someone from office (even in the hive-mind of 24-hour cable news), reactions to the Weiner scandal tended to borrow their moralism from these sources. Voices from inside politics and out, and across the political spectrum, were quickly raised in indignation. Even [Congressman Anthony] Weiner’s defenders tended to criticize his actions while insisting that they were private, legal and ultimately a distraction from serious public issues.

One prominent pundit went considerably further in defending Weiner: “Weiner does not have a problem. He has a computer. The whole world has Weiner’s problem: same old horniness, brand new box.” This incredulous voice of moral realism belongs to Dan Savage….Preachers, teachers and counselors who aren’t listening to Dan Savage should be””he is one of the more interesting church substitutes in American culture. He started in the 1990s answering questions on rarely discussed sexual practices, but he has since come to address a much wider range of concerns (including the moral and political implications of online affairs, whether by politicians or private citizens). When it comes to answering the ethical dilemmas and disappointments that persist even among those with knowing and disenchanted attitudes toward the how-tos of intimate life, Savage’s authority has no peer.

Read it all and please note the content may not be appropriate for some blog readers–KSH.

In September 2001, Sam Harris was an unknown doctoral student who didn’t believe in God.

But after the World Trade Center crumbled on 9/11, he put his studies aside to write a book that became an instant best-seller — and changed the way atheists, and perhaps Muslims, are perceived in this country.

Published in 2004, Harris’s “The End of Faith” launched the so-called “New Atheist” movement, a make-no-apologies ideology that maintains that religion is not just flawed, but evil, and must be rejected.

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DeVon Franklin was on track to become a mover and shaker in Hollywood when he hit what he calls “development hell.” For a time, his upwardly mobile career path was stalling, if not dying altogether. His employer, MGM, was about to be sold, and Franklin, then a junior exec, thought he’d lose his job.

When Sony Pictures bought MGM in 2004, Franklin survived the sale and continued his climb. He’s now vice president of production for Columbia Pictures (a division of Sony), where he has overseen such projects as The Pursuit of Happyness, The Karate Kid, and this summer’s Jumping the Broom. Franklin, 33 and single, chronicles his story in Produced by Faith: Enjoy Real Success Without Losing Your True Self (Howard Books, 2011). His book encourages fellow Christians to use “faith as a professional asset,” with chapters on “Writing the Script,” “God’s Green Light,” and, yes, “Development Hell.”

Actor Will Smith, one of Franklin’s oldest friends in Hollywood, says Franklin “lives his life the same way he makes his movies: with commitment, humility, and a work ethic that demands respect.”

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According to the Vatican official on ecumenism, the Church and the World Lutheran Federation are preparing a Joint Declaration on the Reformation, in view of the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses.

Cardinal Kurt Koch, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, announced this in an interview with the German Catholic agency KNA.

In this context, Vatican Radio reported Monday that Benedict XVI wants his Sept. 22-25 trip to Germany to have an ecumenical focus.

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Continued involvement of the ECB could be stymied by two factors. The first is its own distaste for the job. “The fact that markets are dysfunctional is, in our opinion, the responsibility of governments,” ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet said in Brussels on Monday. “They are issuing their own securities. They have the responsibility for the credibility of their own securities.”

There are also question hanging over the Italian austerity plan that the ECB wanted as the price of its support. On Monday, a proposed tax increase on high earners was ditched and some cuts to local-authority funding were scaled back.

“If Italy can’t deliver austerity, it is going to run into some hard questions from the ECB this year,” Mr. Penn said.

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Everliving God, who didst call thy servants Aidan and Cuthbert to proclaim the Gospel in northern England and endued them with loving hearts and gentle spirits: Grant us grace to live as they did, in simplicity, humility and love for the poor; through Jesus Christ, who came among us as one who serves, and who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

O God in whom all fullness dwelleth, who givest without measure to them that ask; Give us faith to ask, and faith to receive, all that thy bounty giveth; that being filled with all thy fullness we may as thy faithful stewards impart thy gifts to all thy children; for Jesus Christ’s sake.

And as soon as it was morning the chief priests, with the elders and scribes, and the whole council held a consultation; and they bound Jesus and led him away and delivered him to Pilate. And Pilate asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” And he answered him, “You have said so.” And the chief priests accused him of many things. And Pilate again asked him, “Have you no answer to make? See how many charges they bring against you.” But Jesus made no further answer, so that Pilate wondered.

–Mark 15:1-5

Operation Hope built a nonprofit powerhouse over the last decade, spinning a stockpile of donations from Wall Street firms into 27 financial education centers across the country.

But the charitable organization’s donor base has retrenched in the wake of the financial crisis. Citigroup’s foundation last year cut its giving 60 percent, to $115,000. The ING Foundation delayed paying its $300,000 commitment to Operation Hope. And the CIT Group, a lender that was once one of the organization’s biggest benefactors, stopped giving altogether.

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A charity that aims to advance Christianity with Anglican principles has announced a prize of £1,000 ($1,600) for the best 5000-word answer to “Why I am an Anglican and believe I shall remain so.”

St. Boniface Trust has been concerned that yet more divisions are being created within both the Anglican and the Roman Catholic churches. Its response is to run the competition, which is open to lay people and clergy of all ages and in any province of the Anglican Communion.

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Members of the IALC present at the meeting told The Church of England Newspaper the US delegation led by Prof. Ruth Meyers of the Church Divinity School of the Pacific and Bishop Thomas Ely of Vermont offered a theological rationale for same-sex blessings and offered a sample of one rite, with two female members of the US delegation serving as the spouses. After the ceremony the American team solicited comments from the gathered IALC, but asked for the return of the service leaflet as the rite remained a work in process and was not ready for publication.

While some members of the IALC, including its new chairman, Canadian-member the Rev. Dr. Eileen Scully, were generally supportive of the US view, the majority were not. One participant told CEN the objections fell in two general groups: those who believed the concept of same-sex blessings was un-Biblical, and those who were perturbed by the “aggressive” push by the US team to seize control of a study process on rites for traditional marriage to include their own agenda.

The Bishop of Bolivia, the Rt. Rev. Frank Lyons explained the “theme of blessings for same sex partners was not in the purview of the IALC which is preparing a forthcoming study based upon marriage between a man and a woman.”

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The segment description is as follows:

What does New Evangelisation actually mean? How does the Church ”“ universally and locally ”“ envision its concrete application? Is there any ”˜master plan’? And what did they really talk about at the Ratzinger Summer School? These are some of the questions that Emer McCarthy put to Fr. Vincent Twomey SVD., Professor emeritus of Moral Theology at Maynooth seminary in Ireland, and one of the founding members of the Ratzinger Schuelerkreis.

Recently convened for their annual meeting in Castel Gandolfo (Aug. 25-28), the group of 40 former theology and philosophy students of then Professor Joseph Ratzinger were given the task of discussing this sometimes ”˜nebulous’ term. Added to their ranks were academics who have chosen to study the thought and writings of Joseph Ratzinger ”“ a suggestion first put forward by Fr. Twomey himself – creating a veritable ”˜think-tank’, with some surprising results.

In the first part of this two part interview, Fr. Twomey speaks of how the concept of New Evangelisation is a thread that runs throughout the teaching and writing of Pope Benedict XVI, then Professor Ratzinger. He brings us back to their first meeting over 40 years ago, when as a young Irish missionary priest, he sought out the ”˜promising and brilliant theologian’ in his ”˜simple’ Bavarian home to ask to study under him. Fr. Twomey takes us on a journey from the Münster and Tübingen years, through the establishment of Ratzinger’s first ”˜Doctoral colloquium’, to the Regensburg years and finally, Rome. He speaks about why the New Evangelisation calls for ”˜God’s humility’ and why ”“ contrary to popular belief ”“ secularisation is not wholly negative.

Listen to it all (almost 27 1/2 14 minutes).

If it sometimes seems as if Washington exists in a totally different economic universe from the rest of us, rest assured: it does. According to Gallup, the District of Columbia is the most economically optimistic part of the country.Every day, the polling organization surveys Americans of all income levels about whether they think current economic conditions are good, and whether the economy is getting better. The results of these two questions make up Gallup’s Economic Confidence Index.

The latest index report shows that the District of Columbia is far more confident in the economy than any state, by a long shot. In every state, most residents think the economy is getting worse; in the nation’s capital, fully 60 percent think the economy is getting better.

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Our atheist modern age understands the contrast between life and death as absolute. We search for some palliatives, but they are ineffective. “My life continues in the lives of my children,” we say, but for an individual this is an empty phrase.

We doggedly fight to prolong life, only to find that we cannot win this battle – and are left unable to produce authentic rituals to accompany the end of our existence.

Because our societies have no sense of limits, they strive to eliminate death from our consciousness. More and more often, death takes place in a hidden hospital room. Death is suppressed socially, but the effect is that individuals’ fear of death grows ever greater. Most people nowadays face death never having witnessed the death of someone else!

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Sensitive Government information about Afghanistan was accidentally revealed by Cabinet minister Andrew Mitchell today when he left Downing Street with the documents on show.

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The parish self-description from their website is:

We are an inclusive, welcoming community with a historic and ongoing commitment to outreach, traditional worship and music shaped by our Anglo-Catholic heritage, and a growing number of children.

.In a recent newsletter rector Elizabeth Randall says:

With the Bishop’s permission and by resolution of the vestry, St. Andrew’s is now a parish where the blessing of same-gender relationships may take place. Blessings are available to active members of the parish, and will use the liturgy provided by the diocese. Couples who are interested in seeking a blessing should contact the rector. Many thanks to the vestry task force who guided our discernment process, and to all those who told their stories and offered their views during this time. This is an important milestone in the life of our community, and I am grateful to share this moment with you.

In absolute numbers, the total public debt as of Aug. 11 was $9.924 trillion, and the intra-government debt was $4.666 trillion, for a total of $14.587 trillion. That’s well over 300 million times the country’s median household income….

The GDP of the United States was $15.003 trillion at the end of the first quarter in 2011. That makes the public debt equal to 66.1% of GDP and the intra-governmental debt 31.1%. Total debt is now 97.2% of GDP and climbing rapidly.

And it’s the climbing rapidly part that is worrisome, not the debt’s current size relative to GDP. Indeed, the debt has been substantially higher by that measure in earlier times. In 1946, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, it was 129.98% of GDP. But while the debt had increased enormously during the war (it had been 50% of a much smaller GDP in 1940), it did not increase substantially over the next 15 years….

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Despite two centuries of being told the opposite, in fact, the Church can’t help itself. Secular modernism still likes to pretend that the world runs itself, and that ”˜religion’ has to do with private spirituality and ­otherworldly hope. The Church ”” not least those who want to create a ”˜pure’ type of Christianity, and look either to Rome or to a ”˜biblical’ sect to provide it ”” has often colluded with this secularist shrinking of the task. But the genuinely biblical vision, rooted in the four gospels, is of God already being king of the world, through the victory of Jesus. ”˜All authority in heaven and on earth,’ said Jesus, ”˜has been given to me.’ And on earth. The Church exists to demonstrate what that means.

It exists, in other words, to do and be for the world what Jesus had been for his contemporaries: to bring healing and hope, to rescue people trapped in their own folly and sin, to straighten out the distorted pictures of reality that every age manages to produce, and to enable people to live by, and in, God’s true reality. It exists not to rescue people from the world but to rescue them for the world: to see lives transformed by the gospel so that people can discover a new depth and resonance of what it means to be human, precisely by looking beyond themselves to God, to the beauties and glories of his creation, and to their neighbours, particularly those in need. The Church does this through liturgy and laughter; through music and drug-rehabilitation programmes; through prayer and protest marches; through preaching and campaigning; through soaking itself in the Bible and immersing itself in the needs of the world. When God wants to change the world, he doesn’t send in the tanks (as many, including many critics, think he should). He sends in the meek; and by the time the world realises what’s going on, the meek have set up clinics and schools, taught people to read and to sing, and given them a hope, meaning and purpose….

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The Chinese have long understood that America’s sea control in the western Pacific has been the military foundation of its strategic primacy in Asia, and that the US Navy’s carriers are the key. They have therefore focused the formidable expansion of their naval and air forces over the past 20 years on trying to deprive the US of sea control by developing their capacity to sink American carriers. In this they appear to have been strikingly successful, to the point that US military leaders now acknowledge that their sea control in the western Pacific is slipping away.

But for China, depriving America of sea control is not the same as acquiring it themselves. Its naval strategy has focused on the much more limited aim that strategists call ”sea denial”: the ability to attack an adversary’s ships without being able to stop them attacking yours. These days, sea denial can be achieved without putting ships to sea, because land-based aircraft, long-range missiles and submarines can sink ships much more cost-effectively than other ships can. This is what China has done.

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Clashes broke out between Christians and Muslims in tense central Nigeria on Monday, with witnesses reporting a number of deaths as well as vehicles and at least two shops set ablaze.

The head of a search-and-rescue team for the Muslim community in the city of Jos, where the clashes occurred, reported nine dead and 106 people wounded, but there was no official confirmation.

Information commissioner for Plateau state Yiljap Abraham said “there are casualties, but the police will give that later.”

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….Catholic moral theologians at the moment have much more to say about the importance of staving off death than the importance of learning how to welcome it, and this needs to be corrected. If it is not, we will lose Therese’s sense that death can be a matter for rejoicing.

Catholics need to begin to think and teach again, in public, about the ars moriendi, the art of dying.

One way in which this might be done is for the church to educate its wealthy – in American terms, that means anyone with medical insurance and a household income over $100,000 annually – that it might be good for them to die sooner than they do and with less care than they have come to think their right.

There is no reason why the church ought to accept the guidelines of the American Medical Association about such things….

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There is no rising alienation or anger among American Muslims, despite a feeling that they are being targeted by anti-terrorism government programs, a comprehensive new poll found Tuesday.

The vast majority of Muslim-Americans surveyed by the Pew Research Center – 79 percent of respondents – rated their communities as “excellent” or “good” places to live.

Indeed, Muslim-Americans are more likely than two years ago to say that they are satisfied with the current direction of the country – 56 percent are satisfied, compared to 38 percent in 2007, according to the poll – one of the largest ever done on Muslim attitudes in the U.S.

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Internet entrepreneur Nicholas Merrill was working in his Manhattan office when an FBI agent in a trench coat arrived with an envelope.

It was fall 2004, and federal investigators were using new legal authority they had acquired after Sept. 11, 2001. Merrill ran a small Internet service provider with clients including IKEA, Mitsubishi and freelance journalists.

The agent handed Merrill a document called a National Security Letter, which demanded that he turn over detailed records on one of his customers. The letter wasn’t signed by a judge or prosecutor. It instructed him to tell no one….

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[My 79-year-old mother] found more care amid the cauliflowers and cash registers of John Lewis than in the NHS hospital she was admitted to six months ago. Her calls for water and a commode were ignored; so, too, were her attempts at conversation. Worse still, at one point she found herself lying naked on the bed while the two nurses who were sponging her giggled and spoke in Tagalog.

At least she was spared the nurses who wear red tabards emblazoned with the warning “Do Not Disturb”. But thousands of patients in Kent, Derby and Middlesex are not so lucky. Their nurses are donning the “buzz off” tabards during drug rounds. The aim, according to the NHS Trusts that have introduced the uniform, is to prevent those pesky patients from interrupting nurse during her important tasks. She should not have to stop her form-filling and box-ticking to quench some old biddy’s thirst, for goodness’ sake.

This leaves the patient and their worried relatives wondering, whatever next?

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Loving God, who didst call Charles Chapman Grafton to be a bishop in thy Church, endowing him with a burning zeal for souls: Grant that, following his example, we may ever live for the extension of thy kingdom, that thy glory may be the chief end of our lives, thy will the law of our conduct, thy love the motive of our actions, and Christ’s life the model and mold of our own; through the same Jesus Christ, who livest and reignest with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, throughout all ages. Amen.