The Steelers were eliminated from playoff contention today when Cincinnati beat them 13-10 on Josh Brown’s 43-yard field goal with four seconds left.
Cincinnati clinched a playoff berth with the victory.
The field goal was made possible when safety Reggie Nelson intercepted Ben Roethlisberger’s pass and returned it 10 yards to the Steelers’ 46 with 14 seconds left in the game.

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In assessing the greatness of Lionel Messi, Arsene Wenger, usually the world’s most insightful soccer manager, once said a trite thing: “When you look at the numbers, you have to kneel down and say they are fantastic.”

Wenger was referencing the 2010-11 season, in which Messi scored 53 goals in all competitions.

On Saturday, in his last game before the Christmas break, Messi scored his 91st goal of 2012. So Messi not only crushed the 40-year-old calendar-year scoring record held by German Gerd Muller (85), he reversed over it a few times.

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BOB ABERNETHY, host: Welcome. I’m Bob Abernethy and this is our annual look back at the top religion and ethics news of the year. Religion & Ethics managing editor Kim Lawton is here, and so are Kevin Eckstrom, editor-in-chief of Religion News Service, and E.J. Dionne, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, professor at Georgetown University, and columnist for The Washington Post. Welcome to you all. Kim has put together a short video reminder of what happened in 2012.

KIM LAWTON: A wave of mass shootings renewed age-old theological discussions about evil, suffering and tragedy. Especially after the massacre at the Connecticut elementary school, many religious leaders repeated calls for stricter gun control measures. Some called it a pro-life issue. One of the mass shootings took place in a house of worship. In August, six people were killed when a gunman opened fire at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin.

Once again, religion played an important role in the presidential election. For the first time ever, there were no white Protestants on either ticket. Although there wasn’t a lot of God-talk from President Obama or Mitt Romney, grassroots religious groups were active on both sides. Evangelical voters were divided during the primary season, but in the end they rallied around Romney, despite some concerns about voting for a Mormon candidate. Still, their support didn’t put him over the top. Obama narrowly won the Catholic vote, thanks to a strong showing among Latino Catholics.

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Christmas is the season when even people of only vestigial religious faith are to be found in church. The carol services, much-loved tunes, beautiful church buildings and the feeling of rebirth and happiness bring comfort to millions. The Church of England continues, less obtrusively, throughout the year to carry that message of hope to those in most need of it, as detailed today in Cole Moreton’s extensive report. For one reason or another, 85 per cent of the population visit a church at least once a year and, although the latest Census reveals a decline in belief, nearly two thirds of people in England and Wales still describe themselves as Christian.

The Church is an institution that is often taken for granted; but if it disappeared it would be sadly missed, not least by those who benefit from the £50 million Anglicans donate yearly to charity, and from the Church’s night shelters, food banks and other good works. Every month, Anglicans contribute 22.3 million hours to voluntary work, and other denominations are similarly generous. Yet it is also true that Christians are under unprecedented assault, even in Britain. The ugly phenomenon of “Christianophobia”, analysed in a report we carry today from the think tank Civitas, shows the lethal persecution faced by Christians around the world. In the UK, a low-level hostility to Christianity exists, in which believers find their faith sidelined by a secular state.

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The idea of Protestant civil religion sounds strange in a country that prides itself on secularism and religious tolerance. However, America’s religious free market has never been entirely free. The founding fathers prized freedom of conscience, but they did not intend to purge society of Protestant influence (they had deep suspicions of Catholicism). Most believed that churches helped to restrain the excesses of mob democracy. Since then, theology has shaped American laws regarding marriage, public oaths and the bounds of free speech. For most of our history, the loudest defenders of the separation of church and state were not rogue atheists, but Protestants worried about Catholics seeking financing for parochial schools or scheming their way into public office to take orders only from mitered masters in Rome.

Activists on both the left and the right tend to forget this irony of the First Amendment: it has been as much a weapon of religious oppression as a safeguard for liberty. In the 19th and early 20th century, when public school teachers read from a Protestant translation of the Bible in class, many Americans saw benign reinforcement of American values. If Catholic parents complained, officials told them that their Roman dogma was their own private concern. The underlying logic here was not religious neutrality.

The Protestant bias of the American public sphere has mellowed over time, but it still depends on “Christian secularism,” said Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, a political scientist at Northwestern University.

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Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups in a 32-question survey of religious knowledge in 2011 by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. On average, Americans got 16 of the 32 questions correct. Atheists and agnostics got an average of 20.9 correct answers. Jews (20.5) and Mormons (20.3). Protestants got 16 correct answers on average, while Catholics got 14.7 questions right.

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He sat between two men of God. They have been in his position. Faced with a tougher job, under close scrutiny of a bigger congregation, the new Archbishop of the Church of Uganda, Stanley Ntagali, looked relaxed and only shifted occasionally in his seat during his enthroned on Sunday, Dec. 16. The 57-year old sat between his mentor, retired Archbishop Livingstone Mpalanyi Nkoyoyo, and his predecessor, immediate-past Archbishop Henry Luke Orombi. After signing a few documents as the new archbishop, he said something that left Orombi in quiet laughter and smiles.

Over 30,000 people flocked St. Paul Cathedral, Namirembe to witness the enthronement. President Yoweri Museveni, Prime Minister Amama Mbabazi, ambassadors, chief justice, Catholic Cardinal Cyprian Kizito Lwanga, Pastor Joseph Serwadda, head of the Pentecostal Churches, the Metropolitan YonaLwanga, and a representative of the Mufti of Uganda attended.

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In Fort Stewart, Ga., soldiers from the Third Infantry Division are honored with wreaths laid by their graves. NBC’s Matt Taibbi reports.

A ery important reminder–watch it all.

The Marine Corps’ top officer is meeting with all the service’s generals to talk ethics in the wake of recent scandals that have taken a toll on the reputation of the nation’s military leaders.

Gen. James Amos, the commandant, told USA TODAY he doesn’t believe standards among the Marine Corps’ top officers are slipping, but said the recent publicity has presented an opportunity to discuss standards and the public perceptions recent scandals have generated.

In the first such meeting, held near the Pentagon, Amos cautioned against a complacency that could lead to ethical lapses. “You reach a point where you become insensitive,” Amos said. “It’s not so much a sense of entitlement I think as much as you just forget.”

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…if we put aside the necessity of the Virgin Birth, can we not see the congruity of it? In other words, does the Virgin Birth not fit into a kind of biblical logic once you accept the Bible’s overall Trinitarian framework?

Since God was in the business of re-starting creation in the sending of his Son, might we not expect him to create “out of nothing” the second time, just as he did the first? Karl Barth, the greatest theologian of the 20th Century, thought so. Just as the Spirit brooded over creation the first time, so again in the birth of Jesus the Spirit “brooded” over the virgin Mary. Also, just as creation was totally initiated by God the first time, so creation (the second time, in Jesus) gets to be totally initiated by God. The Virgin Birth tells us that Jesus was not born “of the will of man”, but wholly of the Father’s initiative. God chose to by-pass the normal male role in the work of redemption, in part, so the logic goes, to signal his own headship. “Man as a creating, controlling, self-assertive, self-glorifying being was set aside in favor of a woman who listened, received, and served.” (From, A Step Further, by the author)

We honor the Virgin Birth, of course, because Scripture teaches it. But we can also see the logic behind it. God’s sovereign action is a challenge to the human psychological need to contribute to our own salvation, to be co-creators with God. Mary is a witness against the drive, push, and self-assertion that men especially (though not exclusively) associate with a healthy self-image and by which men often mask their own impotence.

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We don’t need to abandon wholesale the tinsel and bells and mistletoe like Frank, but we do need to be particularly vigilant to keep ourselves, and those we love, from being occupied with everything that has become Christmas, save Jesus.

For the Christian, the best answer to the Christmas mess isn’t Festivus ”” entertaining as the idea of “playful consumer resistance” made for a beloved sitcom. Our best response is clarity and explicitness about the true miracle of Christmas, that God himself, in the person of Jesus, took a true human body and a reasonable human soul (as the ancient creed puts it) that, fully God and fully man, he might bring us humans from our mess to himself.

In the midst of layer after layer of holiday common graces that quickly become distraction after distraction of the celebration’s true essence, it is a beautiful thing, when for a memorable, unhurried moment, everything stops and Linus reads from chapter two of the Gospel of Luke.

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What has caused the rust? The easy answer: the church lost the gospel. Waves of pragmatism, liberalism, and “Anglo-Catholicism” (a blend of Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism) have swept through the church, leaving wreckage in their wake.

But the actual cause is slightly more subtle. Anglicans still talk about the gospel, a lot. And mission. And even about being evangelical—the new archbishop self-identifies as an evangelical, though he certainly wouldn’t recognize the definition of the term Don Carson and Tim Keller give in TGC’s Gospel-Centered Ministry booklet.

The denomination never lost the words. But it lost the biblical content. In order to keep unity among people who differ over essentials, Anglicanism has increasingly emptied key concepts of their content. So you can sit in a room with 10 Anglican ministers and talk for half an hour about “the gospel” without ever defining the term and always knowing there are probably ten (or eleven!) different views.

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Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood claimed Sunday that the Islamist-backed constitution has passed with a 64 percent “yes” vote, the day after the final voting in a two-round referendum that deeply divided the country.

The constitution’s critics however may contest the outcome. A spokesman for the main opposition group which has been campaigning for a “no” vote said there were “a lot” of irregularities in the voting.

The Brotherhood’s unofficial results come a day before the election commission is expected to announce the final official tally for voting organized over two weeks. The group has accurately tallied the outcome of past elections.

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A device made of materials like those used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing could have been a former student’s “dry run” to see how authorities would respond to a bomb threat at Trident Technical College, Sheriff Al Cannon said Friday.

Local investigators and federal terrorism experts wouldn’t say whether the device could have exploded and caused damage near the North Charleston campus’ Student Center, which was mostly abandoned Monday for the holiday break.

The device contained ammonium nitrate, the same, readily available fertilizer that Timothy McVeigh used in his attack on the Oklahoma City federal building that killed 168 people.

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Does Advent in your parish serve as a season of anticipation for the second coming of Christ? It is to focus on preparing us for both comings, the first in Bethlehem and the second in glory, but Christmas preparation has gained huge precedence in the last century.

It wasn’t always thus. Advent was once a time for hearing about the last four things, death, judgment, heaven and hell. A word about heaven is apt here.

The Scriptures teach that we were made by the God of heaven, in Jesus Christ heaven begins now on earth, and we are ultimately destined for the fullness of that heaven. And what is heaven? A place of rejoicing in and seeing God’s glory reflected in creation, a place of family reunion, of ultimate worship, of the final homecoming, and of the joyful face to face encounter with God himself who loves us more than we could ever imagine.

Why focus on our ultimate destiny? Because one of the most profound ways in which to think of the church is as a little glimpse of heaven on earth. So who are we called to be? A place where people are stewards over and delighters in God’s creation, a place of rich fellowship, where the stranger is welcomed and given refuge, a place of deep worship, where God is encountered in his full glory, a place of real homecoming, where people are safe to love and be loved and to develop their gifts for ministry in a context where they are free to
fail, and, finally, a place where God’s face is truly seen. Wow.

There is a vision for every church in the twenty-first century. I pray that God might grant us the grace to embrace this vision and to move forward into it together as the new millennium begins.

–The Rev. Canon Dr. Kendall S. Harmon (From 2002)

Almighty Father, whose blessed Son at his coming amongst us brought redemption unto his people, and peace to men of goodwill: Grant that, when he shall come again in glory to judge the world and to make all things new, we may be found ready to receive him, and enter into his joy; through the same our Lord Jesus Christ.

A Psalm of David. The earth is the LORD’s and the fulness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein; for he has founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the rivers. Who shall ascend the hill of the LORD? And who shall stand in his holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to what is false, and does not swear deceitfully. He will receive blessing from the LORD, and vindication from the God of his salvation. Such is the generation of those who seek him, who seek the face of the God of Jacob. [Selah] Lift up your heads, O gates! and be lifted up, O ancient doors! that the King of glory may come in. Who is the King of glory? The LORD, strong and mighty, the LORD, mighty in battle! Lift up your heads, O gates! and be lifted up, O ancient doors! that the King of glory may come in. Who is this King of glory? The LORD of hosts, he is the King of glory! [Selah]

–Psalm 24

Gear up the handkerchiefs and watch it all.

Recently [in Nigeria] a new line of inhumanity was crossed. In October, armed attackers, presumed to be members of Boko Haram, an Islamist terrorist group with links to al Qaeda, invaded the Tudun Wada Wuro Patuje area, entering the off-campus housing of the Federal Polytechnic State University.

The attackers called students out of their rooms and asked for their names. Those with Christian names were shot dead or killed with knives. Students with traditionally Muslim names were told to quote Islamic scripture. The selektion completed, at least 26 bodies were left in lines outside the buildings.

The attack was a pogrom, the victims of which were African Christians, not European Jews. To be sure, it lacked the scale and scope of Hitler’s total war against the entire Jewish people. The Boko Haram seem content to burn churches and to maim and murder those””including other Muslims, but especially Christians, by the scores””who would stop the spread of their version of Shariah law in Nigeria alone.

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Chinese leaders issued an order last year quietly directing universities to root out foreigners suspected of plotting against the Communist Party by converting students to Christianity.

The 16-page notice ”” obtained this month by a U.S.-based Christian group ”” uses language from the cold war era to depict a conspiracy by “overseas hostile forces” to infiltrate Chinese campuses under the guise of academic exchanges while their real intent is to use religion in “westernizing and dividing China.”

The document suggests that despite small signs of religious tolerance in recent decades,China’s ruling officials retain strong suspicion of religion as a tool of the West and a threat to the party’s authoritarian rule. And with the country’s top leadership in transition and looking to consolidate power, Chinese religious leaders worry that the stance is unlikely to change in the near future.

Read it all and note there is a link to the 16 page document itself for those interested.

The oldest church in Norristown, St. John’s Episcopal Church, installed the Rev. Scott Albergate as just the 20th rector in the history of the church on the eve of its bicentennial.

Albergate, who was first a bankruptcy lawyer before being called to his current role in the church, comes to St. John’s after previously serving parishes in New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and, most recently, New Orleans, where he was called to serve in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, serving first in the Diocesan Offices of the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana before being called to the parish of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church.

“We found him in our search,” explained Carmen Branco, who was the head of the search committee for the church and actually went down to New Orleans to interview Albergate. “He seemed to fit with what we were looking for more so than any of the other candidates and we look forward to a long tenure.”

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“What the Presiding Bishop is trying to do is to organize a new diocese of the Episcopal Church in this area,” …[ Bishop Mark Lawrence] said. “We in the Diocese of South Carolina have nothing to do with that undertaking. The name “The [Episcopal] Diocese of South Carolina” is the registered property and identity of the Diocese.”

Bishop Lawrence explained that the continued use of the Dioceses’ corporate name and identity by TEC is causing confusion among the members of the Diocese and the wider South Carolina public. “This misuse of our name and identity by TEC is a violation of South Carolina law and can subject it to liability for treble damages and attorneys’ fees, he explained. “I call upon TEC to cease and desist from the continued misuse of our name and identity.“

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Ellen Wright Clayton, a specialist in law and genetics at Vanderbilt University, says there aren’t many possibilities. “The only thing they can be looking for here is to see whether the killer had certain genetic variants that may predispose to mental illness or to violence,” she says.

Scientists have spent decades studying these genetic variants. But can a person’s genes reveal why they commit mass murder?

“Absolutely not,” Clayton says. “Genetic variants do not explain criminal behavior.”

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…there is one thing often said by defenders of the American gun laws that ought to make us think about wider questions. ”˜It’s not guns that kill, it’s people.’ Well, yes, in a sense. But it makes a difference to people what weapons are at hand for them to use ”“ and, even more, what happens to people in a climate where fear is rampant and the default response to frightening or unsettling situations or personal tensions is violence and the threat of violence. If all you have is a hammer, it’s sometimes said, everything looks like a nail. If all you have is a gun, everything looks like a target.

People use guns. But in a sense guns use people, too. When we have the technology for violence easily to hand, our choices are skewed and we are more vulnerable to being manipulated into violent action.

Perhaps that’s why, in a passage often heard in church around this time of year, the Bible imagines a world where swords are beaten into ploughshares.

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I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

Brian Rants never thought his contribution to the world would be a $15 lamp. But for schoolchildren in Swaziland and earthquake survivors in Haiti, these solar lamps have made all the difference. Rants’s Denver-based company””Nokero, short for “no kerosene”””have allowed African students to read at night and increased safety for Haitian families living in tent cities. As vice president of marketing, Rants’s job is to get these lamps into the hands of millions of families in the developing world.

Since its founding in 2010, Nokero has sold over half a million solar lights and chargers in 120 countries, but Rants believes their work has just begun. With over a billion people worldwide still using kerosene as their primary fuel source, the need is vast. In a comprehensive study on the industry, The Economist lauded solar lights as the next big innovation for the world’s poor, noting that solar lighting is “falling in price, improving in quality and benefiting from new business models that make it more accessible and affordable to those at the bottom of the pyramid. And its spread is sustainable because it is being driven by market forces, not charity.”

Nokero’s lamps replace the need for kerosene lighting and eliminate the sweeping problems that accompany its use.

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What do you find most discouraging in trying to follow those models and goals?
I get discouraged when I see people who think that the way of the future in the Church is to abandon the past. I find it enormously discouraging to encounter the idea that progress somehow means perpetual revolution. I think that our programs here have shown me that people are yearning ”” deeply yearning ”” to touch something authentic. They don’t want one more place that “markets” to them.

And what makes you hopeful?
What makes me hopeful is the number of young people bringing so much energy into the church. When you come to Compline at Christ Church and see 150 young adults sitting there praying, engaged in adoration, you can’t help but be hopeful about the future of the Church.

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Spiritually, we must prepare ourselves for the journey, stripping away the trivial and comfortable habits that all of us develop in our practice of faith, and renewing our commitment to follow the Word Incarnate. And then we must work this out in action ”“ in our own willingness to be alongside the displaced, to work devotedly with all who defend the rights and dignities of those without land or livelihood, and to speak for them and serve them in whatever way we can. Our churches should not be places where we retreat into the relief and safety of being with people who are just like ourselves. They should be places where we meet the ”˜divine exile’ who invites us to follow him in bringing hope to the displaced and disinherited ”“ where we learn something of his own liberty to be at the service of all in need and pain.

May God lead us out beyond the gates of our comfort to be with Jesus; and may he keep us always awake to see the realities of disorder and suffering around us.

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The interests of God and Mammon were reconciled in a seasonal spirit this week to accommodate the diary commitments of the parliamentary banking commission’s most intriguing member ”“ the future archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby.

It is understood that Andrew Tyrie, chairman of the commission looking at the future shape of the City, delayed his report for a day to allow the current bishop of Durham to attend a carol service.

Such is Bishop Welby’s importance to the work of the commission that Mr Tyrie was said to have been insistent that he be there for the finalising of the report into the culture and behaviour of the banks.

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It’s not hard to be a Christian while everything is going well ”” while grace flows all around, while providence sprinkles miracles along the path, while joy abounds and times are good. It’s easy to praise the Lord and feel his presence, to do his work, when you stand in the bright sunlight. But eventually the night cometh, the darkness and the shadows, when faith is more difficult and no man can work.

The quarterback Tim Tebow was always something of a young mystic ”” he was David, dancing in the joy of his youth before the Ark of the Lord ”” and amid all the hoopla of the overtime victories and sudden triumphs to which he led the Denver Broncos last season, he found himself professional football’s most vocal and visible Christian: praising the Lord, feeling his presence, and spreading his message.

Always well-mannered ”” “the politest interview in NFL history,” Sports Illustrated’s Peter King called him ”” he expressed nothing but confidence in his teammates and his coaches, nothing but a manifest belief in the hoariest of cliches about hard work and sportsmanship and inspiration, nothing but alleluias for the Lord who had so blessed him.

Then came a darker time for him….

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Benedict the theologian is versing us in the sole maxim history acknowledges: the only way to understand history is to question it. In this light, he helpfully resets the Christmas stories, back into their larger, resurrection frame: if this man rose from the dead, if death and sin have truly been conquered in his life, then we must know the origins of that life. We need to hear and to ponder. He asks:

[H]ow did Matthew and Luke come to know the story that they recount? What are their sources? As Joachim Gnilka rightly says, it is a evidently a matter of family traditions. Luke indicates from time to time that Mary, the Mother of Jesus, is herself one of his sources, especially when he says in 2:31 that “his mother kept all these things in her heart” (cf. Also 2:19). Only she could report the event of the annunciation, for which there were no human witnesses.

Naturally modern “critical” exegesis will tend to dismiss such connections as naive. But why should there not have been a tradition of this kind, preserved in the most intimate circle and theologically elaborated at the same time? Why should Luke have invented the statement about Mary keeping the words and events in her heart, if there were no concrete grounds for saying so? Why should he have spoken of her “pondering” over the words (Lk 2:19; cf. 1:29) if nothing was known of this? (16)

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