Matthew Garrett makes a living from the tip of his paintbrush.

The 34-year-old paints nearly every day, re-creating scenes from the Bible and heavenly images of the risen Jesus, Christian saints and angels on wood and canvas. He carries forward the ancient tradition of Orthodox Christian iconography in a modest West Boise, Idaho, house that he shares with his wife, Lisa, and her cat, Cecelia.

Garrett has been commissioned by individuals and churches all over the country over the past 17 years, finding jobs through old-fashioned word-of-mouth and through his website. His work is in several churches, among them, St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Boise.

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The National Association of Evangelicals on Tuesday (Nov. 8) called for greater precautions with nuclear weapons and a renewed effort toward disarmament.

“The rules have changed in the past 25 years,” NAE President Leith Anderson said. “Nuclear weapons don’t serve as a deterrent to the dangers of our post-Cold War era, which include rogue nations and terrorist groups.”

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The U.S. citizenship ceremony is an iconic rite of passage for immigrants.

Would-be Americans gather to pledge allegiance to the Stars and Stripes. There are cheers and often tears, patriotic speeches, sometimes music, and plenty of flag waving.

Now, a small but growing band of Americans in Canada is doing it in reverse ”“ gathering en masse to begin the process of becoming un-American.

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Italy’s financial crisis deepened on Wednesday despite a pledge by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to resign once Parliament passes austerity measures demanded by the European Union.

The move failed to convince investors, propelling Italy’s borrowing costs through a key financial and psychological barrier of 7 percent, close to levels that have required other euro zone countries to seek bailouts.

Mr. Berlusconi, cornered by world markets and humiliated by a parliamentary setback, appeared to have become the most prominent victim of the broader European debt crisis. But his decision did not remove wide uncertainty about Italy’s ability to tackle the crisis, and some analysts said the prospect of a protracted period of political wrangling could exert further pressure for a quicker exit from the impasse.

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In the past 10 years some 100,000 British people have converted to Islam, of whom some three-quarters are women, according to the latest statistics. This is a significant increase on the 60,000 Britons in the previous decade, according to researchers based at Swansea University.

While the number of UK converts accelerates, many of the British women who adopt Islam say they have a daily struggle to assimilate their new beliefs within a wider culture that both implicitly and explicitly positions them as outsiders, regardless of their Western upbringing.

More than three-quarters told researchers they had experienced high levels of confusion after conversion, due to the conflicting ways Islam was presented to them.

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Obama, at any rate, felt that they would have little value. Instead, he confronted the Germans in Cannes with a suggestion so radical that it alarmed both Merkel and Schäuble. To save the common currency, Obama proposed that the Europeans follow the example of the American Federal Reserve, which buys up almost unlimited amounts of US treasury bonds when necessary.

The Germans pointed out feebly that the ECB operates within a completely different tradition than the Fed, and that it also pursues a different mission. But it is becoming increasingly clear to Merkel and her finance minister that, in the end, only the ECB will be able to save the euro if the crisis continues to escalate. It is the only European fiscal policy institution capable of taking action, and it also comes equipped with unlimited firepower. It can never run out of money, because it can simply print new money when needed.

This is an approach Germany’s representatives in the ECB council have strongly resisted….But how long can the Germans resist the pressure from other members?

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Mr [Ken] Costa, the chairman of the St Paul’s Initiative, established by the Church to open up a debate on ethical capitalism, said the clergy’s response to the ongoing protests outside St Paul’s Cathedral must not turn into a “reheated Faith in the City”.

In his first public comments since his appointment, Mr Costa insisted that a flourishing banking sector was “essential to any successful economy” and that financial incentives are “both valid and effective”.

He also said that stiffer regulation of financial services was not necessarily the solution to the global economic crisis, saying, “you cannot regulate into existence a culture of honesty, integrity, truthfulness and responsibility”.

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Last week Mark Steyn wrote, “America is seizing up before our eyes,” and that is a spot-on image. She is like a brilliantly conceived machine that, poorly maintained for more years than any of us cares to admit, has gone too long untuned; the oil of her invention has thinned out and broken down and now bit-by-bit, gear-by-gear””economically, socially, spiritually””she is making an ungodly noise and grinding to a halt.

And yet people want optimism. They crave it, especially when a president is telling one half of the country that it is “time to eat your peas” while simultaneously encouraging another half to take to the streets and demand more dessert. “Where is our Ronald Reagan,” is a phrase that rises with alarming frequency, in some comboxes, and it always unsettles me to see it, because it seems so determinedly obtuse; if we can just find someone exactly like the president from thirty years ago, we will be alright. If only someone will smile and tell us it is morning in America, again, and the city has not slid down the hill!

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The Pentagon’s use of retired generals and admirals as paid advisers has virtually ceased, plummeting from 355 “senior mentors” in 2010 to four today, according to a report released by the Defense Department’s inspector general.

Requirements to disclose their business ties, a cap on pay of $179,700 per year and limits on working for private firms were the reasons the generals and admirals gave for quitting the program, the report said.

Retired officers from several services told investigators they quit because they did not want to disclose their finances publicly. Others pointed to the pay of $86.10 per hour, with a maximum of $179,900, as too low.

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An interesting retrospective so to speak–read it all.

When the novelist Murong Xuecun showed up at a ceremony here late last year to collect his first literary prize, he clutched a sheet of paper with some of the most incendiary words he had ever written.

It was a meditation on the malaise brought on by censorship. “Chinese writing exhibits symptoms of a mental disorder,” he planned to say. “This is castrated writing. I am a proactive eunuch, I castrate myself even before the surgeon raises his scalpel.”

The ceremony’s organizers forbade him to deliver the speech. On stage, Mr. Murong made a zipping motion across his mouth and left without a word. He then did with the speech what he had done with three of his best-selling novels, all of which had gone through a harsh censorship process: He posted the unexpurgated text on the Internet. Fans flocked to it.

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Like many middle-class American baby boomers, Linda Carmona-Sanchez is anxious about slipping into poverty and says whatever dreams she once had about retirement in her “golden years” have turned into nightmares.

“We don’t value people here in this country, and we value you less if you’re not healthy and strong,” Carmona-Sanchez, 55, said.

“To me it would almost be a welcome blessing to know that I would die rather than to be old and have to live in poverty,” she said.

Her anxiety is widespread….

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“A religious campus can be a lonely place for someone who doesn’t subscribe to faith,” said King, now 23 and a graduate student in biology. “We want to reach out to these people.”

The [University of] Dayton students are not alone. The Secular Student Alliance, a national organization of nontheistic students with 320 campus chapters, reports at least two other religious universities””Notre Dame and Baylor””have rejected clubs for atheist, agnostic, humanist and other nontheistic students. Students at Duquesne, a Catholic school, say they have little hope of approval on their first application this year.

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Grant us, O Lord, so to enter on the service of our Christian warfare, that, putting on the whole armour of God, we may endure hardness and fight against the spiritual powers of darkness, and be more than conquerors through him that loved us, Jesus Christ our Lord.

–Leonine Sacramentary

I do not turn aside from thy ordinances,
for thou hast taught me.
How sweet are thy words to my taste,
sweeter than honey to my mouth!
Through thy precepts I get understanding;
therefore I hate every false way.
Thy word is a lamp to my feet
and a light to my path.

–Psalm 119:102-105

United Nations weapons inspectors have amassed a trove of new evidence that they say makes a “credible” case that “Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear device,” and that the project may still be under way.

The long-awaited report, released by the International Atomic Energy Agency on Tuesday, represents the strongest judgment the agency has issued in its decade-long struggle to pierce the secrecy surrounding the Iranian program. The findings, drawn from evidence of far greater scope and depth than the agency has previously made public, have already rekindled a debate among the Western allies and Israel about whether increased diplomatic pressure, sanctions, sabotage or military action could stop Iran’s program.

Knowing that their findings would be compared with the flawed Iraq intelligence that preceded the 2003 invasion ”” and has complicated American moves on Iran ”” the inspectors devoted a section of the report to “credibility of information.” The information was from a range of independent sources, they said; some was backed up by interviews with foreigners who had helped Iran.

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You have to love the picture–read it all.

Read it all. Charleston Mayor Joe Riley is running to serve for his tenth term. You can take it to the bank that he will win–KSH.

Update: You may find nine election day photos here.

A major child sex abuse cover-up case ”“ that does not involve the Catholic Church.

When the case unfolding at Penn State blew up last week, I have to admit the first people I thought I would hear from those in the Catholic Church who believe their faith gets unfairly tarred on this subject. As so many high-level cases around the world have unfolded in the past decade, these Catholics often ask, rightly: What is the rate of sex abuse in other institutions?

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Mr. Sandusky, a former defensive coordinator under Mr. Paterno, has been charged with sexually abusing eight boys across a 15-year period, and Mr. Paterno has been widely criticized for failing to involve the police when he learned of the allegation of the assault of the young boy in 2002.

Additionally, two top university officials ”” Gary Schultz, the senior vice president for finance and business, and Tim Curley, the athletic director ”” were charged with perjury and failure to report to authorities what they knew of the allegations, as required by state law.

Since Mr. Sandusky’s arrest Saturday, officials at Penn State ”” notably its president, Graham B. Spanier, and Mr. Paterno ”” have come under withering criticism for a failure to act adequately after learning, at different points over the years, that Mr. Sandusky might have been abusing children. Newspapers have called for their resignations; prosecutors have suggested their inaction led to more children being harmed by Mr. Sandusky; and students and faculty at the university have expressed a mix of disgust and confusion, and a hope that much of what prosecutors have charged is not true.

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Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s embattled prime minister, signalled on Tuesday night that he would resign after parliament passes a new financial stability law that will implement fresh austerity measures demanded by the European Union.

Giorgio Napolitano, head of state, said Mr Berlusconi had expressed his recognition of the “urgent need” to respond quickly to the expectations of Europe through the approval of the stability law, which would be amended in light of the most recent recommendations of the European Commission.

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