…statistics indicate most people were not so drastically reshaped and motivated by the Sept. 11 experience. A Pew Research poll in December 2001 found that those who said they prayed or worshiped more in the aftermath of the attacks were people who already were the most religious.

Indeed, the number of people who are “unchurched” — who have not attended a service or event other than a wedding or funeral in the last six months — increased from 24% in 1991 to 37% in 2011, according to two decades of studies by George Barna, founder of the Christian research firm The Barna Group. What never wavers: Nearly all Americans, about 95%, consistently say they believe in God or a higher power.

And that moves to the forefront during a crisis, says David Kinnaman, president of The Barna Group and author of a new book, You Lost Me.

Read it all.

Genna Saucedo supervises cashiers at a Wal-Mart in Pico Rivera, California, but her wages aren’t enough to feed herself and her 12-year-old son.

Saucedo, who earns $9.70 an hour for about 26 hours a week and lives with her mother, is one of the many Americans who survive because of government handouts in what has rapidly become a food stamp nation.

Altogether, there are now almost 46 million people in the United States on food stamps, roughly 15 percent of the population. That’s an increase of 74 percent since 2007, just before the financial crisis and a deep recession led to mass job losses.

Read it all.

I have spoken to this many times in public. Those with the capacity to hire American workers”•small businesses as well as large, publicly traded or private”•are immobilized. Not because they lack entrepreneurial zeal or do not wish to grow; not because they can’t access cheap and available credit. Rather, they simply cannot budget or manage for the uncertainty of fiscal and regulatory policy. In an environment where they are already uncertain of potential growth in demand for their goods and services and have yet to see a significant pickup in top-line revenue, there is palpable angst surrounding the cost of doing business. According to my business contacts, the opera buffa of the debt ceiling negotiations compounded this uncertainty, leaving business decisionmakers frozen in their tracks….

…put yourself in the shoes of a business operator. On the revenue side, you have yet to see a robust recovery in demand; growing your top-line revenue is vexing. You have been driving profits or just maintaining your margins through cost reduction and achieving maximum operating efficiency. You have money in your pocket or a banker increasingly willing to give you credit if and when you decide to expand. But you have no idea where the government will be cutting back on spending, what measures will be taken on the taxation front and how all this will affect your cost structure or customer base. Your most likely reaction is to cross your arms, plant your feet and say: “Show me. I am not going to hire new workers or build a new plant until I have been shown what will come out of this agreement.” Moreover, you might now say to yourself, “I understand from the Federal Reserve that I don’t have to worry about the cost of borrowing for another two years. Given that I don’t know how I am going to be hit by whatever new initiatives the Congress will come up with, but I do know that credit will remain cheap through the next election, what incentive do I have to invest and expand now? Why shouldn’t I wait until the sky is clear?”

Read it all.

It’s not yet 10am and the 64-year-old bishop has already presided over Holy Communion at St Paul’s, hosted an overnight visit from the new bishop of Durham and held a breakfast meeting to discuss diocesan links with Nigeria. He is now on his way to address the pupils of a Church of England secondary school in a deprived part of north London, then it’s a dash to King’s College London to appraise the dean in a meeting with the principal, then back home to counsel a US priest distressed by tensions within the Anglican communion. The previous evening he was up late addressing the General Synod, the legislative body of the Church of England.

“You can’t survive unless you believe in early hours,” he says. “As soon as the morning office starts at 7.30am you are available to people.” He never attends the morning office in the cathedral, however, because the new order of service is used and Chartres, an implacable traditionalist, prefers the Book of Common Prayer. Instead, he rises at 6am and says morning prayer by himself in a back room in the deanery before it fills up with the staff who occupy most of the building.

Read it all.

Catholic and Anglican Bishops weighed in on economic and security matters at the weekend, as both groups criticised the approach of President Goodluck Jonathan to the menace posed by Boko Haram in the North, and expressed concern over Islamic banking.

Over 20 Bishops of the Anglican Communion who congregated at St. Peter’s Anglican Church, Ogharefe Delta State at the First Synod of the Anglican Diocese of Sapele condemned the introduction of Islamic banking. They urged Abuja to review the conditions for the approval of non-interest banking and make all possible amendments that would ensure the interest of every religious group in Nigeria is protected….

Read it all.

“These are all whopping numbers,” said Robert Litan, a former Justice Department official who in the 1990s served on a commission probing the causes of the savings and loan crisis. “You’re talking about the aristocracy of American finance going down the tubes without the federal money.”

It wasn’t just American finance. Almost half of the Fed’s top 30 borrowers, measured by peak balances, were European firms. They included Edinburgh-based Royal Bank of Scotland Plc, which took $84.5 billion, the most of any non-U.S. lender, and Zurich-based UBS AG (UBSN), which got $77.2 billion. Germany’s Hypo Real Estate Holding AG borrowed $28.7 billion, an average of $21 million for each of its 1,366 employees.

Read it all.

Standing under a funnel here–you know the feeling; KSH.

Check it out–ugh.

(The figures are from May, the most recent available).

No fair clicking until you make your answer.

We discussed this in yesterday’s Adult Sunday school–KSH.

Listen to it all if you so desire.

Like many South Carolinians facing surging medical costs, [Ken] Riddle wants to know why premiums keep rising. Here, annual premiums for private health insurance have risen about 85 percent for individuals and 75 percent for families in the past decade, federal data show.

South Carolina regulators can take at least some of the blame. Many factors contribute to soaring health care costs, but lax state regulation — an area increasingly scrutinized as national health care reform takes effect — has contributed to the problem, critics said.

Read it all.

Born in Detroit, Mich., on Jan. 10, 1928, [Philip] Levine received degrees from Wayne State University and the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and in 1957 was awarded the Jones Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford. As a student, he worked a number of industrial jobs at Detroit’s auto-manufacturing plants, including Detroit Transmission””a branch of Cadillac””and the Chevrolet Gear and Axle factory. Levine has said about writing poems in his mid-20s during his factory days: “I believed even then that if I could transform my experience into poetry, I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own. I thought, too, that if I could write about it I could come to understand it; I believed that if I could understand my life””or at least the part my work played in it””I could embrace it with some degree of joy, an element conspicuously missing from my life.”

–from the announcement that the Librarian of Congress has appointed Philip Levine Poet Laureate (my emphasis)

1. Love Words 2. Tell the Truth 3. Don’t Tell Lies 4.Read Well 5. Stay in Conversation 6. Share Stories 7. Love the Long Sentence 8. Practice Poetry 9. Attend to Translation 10. Play 11. Pray and 12. Cherish Silence.

You may see more about the book there.

Used by yours truly in yesterday’s sermon–KSH.

Libya’s endgame appears to be at hand, bringing to a climax an uprising against Muammar Qaddafi that just weeks ago appeared to be stalled by inexperience, disunity, and a lack of resources.

For months, Libya has been stalemated as rebels have surged forward, only to be pushed back by Qaddafi loyalists. But aided by NATO airstrikes and better organization, rebels have been steadily building momentum….

Read it all.

Make us tender and compassionate towards those who are an overtaken by temptation, considering ourselves, how we have fallen in times past and may fall yet again. Make us watchful and sober-minded, looking ever unto thee for grace to stand upright, and to persevere unto the end; through thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord.

Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water, that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. The wicked are not so, but are like chaff which the wind drives away. Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous; for the LORD knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.

–Psalm 1

Holy Spirit “Abundantly Present” during Worship in a Converted Garage

Tom Kay can sum up the first Spanish-language Faith Alive weekend in five words: “The Lord was with us!”

Kay, a Faith Alive team leader based east of Dallas, Texas, says the June 10-12 event at Iglesia San Miguel, a burgeoning Anglican mission in the Diocese of Fort Worth, was the best he ever has attended, despite the fact that he does not speak Spanish.

From Kay’s first meeting with San Miguel’s vicar, Fr. Sergio Diaz, “the Spirit of the Lord was abundantly present … and intensified through the planning process.

Read it all.

This “unexpected miracle” was not a one time event that made it into the Bible. Desperate mothers, and fathers, have been calling out to the Lord, and He has done the “unexpected miracle” over and over again.

One of my favorite “unexpected miracle” stories comes out of World War II. The mother was the wife of a Free Methodist pastor. She did her best to raise her children in the church to know and follow Christ. But when he was in high school, Jacob, her son, turned his back on the church walked away from God. He joined the newly formed Army Air Corp and became a bombardier on the B-25 Liberator.

In April 1942, Lt Col Jimmy Doolittle gathered the crews of sixteen B-25’s to go on a top secret mission. The B-25 had never flown off an aircraft carrier before. Giant cranes loaded the bombers on to the USS Hornet and the famous Doolittle Raiders were on there way. The mission was so secret that the crews could not tell their families where they were going, which, of course, caused great concern for the families.

Read it all or if you prefer audio you may find the audio link here.

This July was no better than the last for South Carolina job-seekers, and the unemployment rate is rising again.

Across the state and in the greater Charleston area, joblessness is back up to about where it was last summer. South Carolina is now tied with Michigan for third-highest unemployment rate in the nation, behind housing meltdown epicenters Nevada and California.

“It doesn’t give you a lot of hope,” said West Ashley resident Mary Catherine James, 51, who has been job-hunting since April. “It’s very stressful.”

Read it all.

A shadowy Islamist insurgency that has haunted northern Nigeria ”” surviving repeated, bloody efforts to eliminate it ”” appears to be branching out and collaborating with Al Qaeda’s affiliates, alarming Western officials and analysts who had previously viewed the militants here as a largely isolated, if deadly, menace.

Just two years ago, the Islamist group stalking police officers in this bustling city seemed on the verge of extinction. In a heavy-handed assault, Nigerian soldiers shelled its headquarters and killed its leader, leaving a grisly tableau of charred ruins, hundreds dead and outmatched members of the group, known as Boko Haram, struggling to fight back, sometimes with little more than bows and arrows.

Now, insurgents strike at the Nigerian military, the police and opponents of Islamic law in near-daily assaults and bombings, using improvised explosive devices that can be detonated remotely and bear the hallmarks of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Western officials and analysts say. Beyond the immediate devastation, the fear is that extremists bent on jihad are spreading their reach across the continent and planting roots in a major, Western-allied state that had not been seen as a hotbed of global terrorism.

Read it all.

Q. Was the application process difficult?

A. We had to sign so many documents that my hand hurt after I was done. I had to pledge not to open a zoo, swimming pool or aquarium. It struck me as strange. Yes, it’s the bank’s duty to do due diligence, but this was just a silly restriction.

Q. But there was a happy ending, right?

A. Yes, after being turned down by 15 banks, it was a personal relationship that introduced us to a regional bank in New Jersey that gave us a $200,000 loan.

Read it all.

Where does all the time go?

Greeted by hundreds of thousands of euphoric young Catholics gathered in the city to celebrate World Youth Day the Pontiff chose to highlight the difficulties facing young people in his first address of the four-day visit.

“Many young people look worriedly to the future, as they search for work, or because they have lost their job or because the one they have is precarious or uncertain,” he said in a speech delivered in Spanish.

He arrived in recession-hit Spain ”“ where unemployment is 20 per cent rising to above 40 per cent in the under 25s ”“ with a thinly veiled attack on financial institutions.

Read it all.

It is not just the feral youth of Tottenham who have forgotten they have duties as well as rights. So have the feral rich of Chelsea and Kensington. A few years ago, my wife and I went to a dinner party in a large house in west London. A security guard prowled along the street outside, and there was much talk of the “north-south divide”, which I took literally for a while until I realised that my hosts were facetiously referring to the difference between those who lived north and south of Kensington High Street.

Most of the people in this very expensive street were every bit as deracinated and cut off from the rest of Britain as the young, unemployed men and women who have caused such terrible damage over the last few days. For them, the repellent Financial Times magazine How to Spend It is a bible. I’d guess that few of them bother to pay British tax if they can avoid it, and that fewer still feel the sense of obligation to society that only a few decades ago came naturally to the wealthy and better off.

Yet we celebrate people who live empty lives like this….

Read it all.

All good brands need a mission statement or a manifesto. Warren’s breakthrough to a mass audience came in 2002 with The Purpose Driven Life. His book describes itself as a “40-day spiritual journey for Christian living in the 21st century”. Though he rejects descriptions of it as a “self-help book” for the religious, it is reminiscent of the genre, with its folksy prose and short chapters. It reassures those with busy lives that they can converse with God “while shopping, driving or working” and that everyday tasks can be devoted to God including “taking out the trash”.

Warren says: “There’s not a new idea in [it] that hasn’t been said in 2,000 years of history. It’s been said all before. If I had a 15-word sentence, how could I say it in nine? How can I say it in five?”

Warren’s revolutionary tactic was to bypass bookshops and market the book directly to evangelical America, through its churches. It became a classic word-of-mouth success: it has sold more than 30m copies in the US, been translated into more than 50 languages and generated sequels.

Read it all.

Though the event went largely unremarked upon at the time, a report published Monday by the Kaiser Family Foundation has found that the apocalypse, or end of the world, occurred three years ago….

Heh–read it all.

Specifics help, it can be from any sphere, and we are looking for three or less.

Earlier this summer, the chief rabbi for Great Britain warned about a new intolerance being imposed in the name of tolerance.

“I share a real concern that the attempt to impose the current prevailing template of equality and discrimination on religious organizations is an erosion of religious liberty,” Lord Sacks told a House of Commons committee in June. “We are beginning to move back to where we came in in the 17th century””a whole lot of people on the Mayflower leaving to find religious freedom elsewhere.”

Though not as pronounced on this side of the Atlantic, we can see the same trend that so worries Lord Sacks. Here too the imposition comes in the guise of nondiscrimination laws and codes. Here too the result is the same: Faith organizations are told whom they must employ and what they must assent to, or face being shoved off the public square.

Read it all.

It’s a question that can cause tension and tears in a circle of home-school moms in a Bible Belt church fellowship hall.

It’s a question that can have the same jarring impact in a circle of feminist mothers in a Manhattan coffee shop.

Here it is: Will you buy your daughter a Barbie doll? Other questions follow in the wake of this one, linked to clothes, self-esteem, cellphones, makeup, reality TV shows and the entire commercialized princess culture.

Read it all.

A mosque dispute in this Atlanta suburb is shining a spotlight on an antidiscrimination law increasingly pitting the Department of Justice against zoning officials across the country.

Lilburn’s city council plans to vote Tuesday whether to allow construction of a 20,000-square-foot Muslim worship center between a large Baptist church and a Hindu temple on a busy thoroughfare also lined with gas stations and strip malls.

The city council rejected zoning applications in 2009 and again last year for the center amid stiff opposition from some residents, who say the large mosque would bring too much traffic and noise and encroach on the neighborhood behind it.

Read it all.