Through some basic analysis of census data, we can see what adopting the 180 percent [of the Federal poverty] line as the definition of poverty in North Carolina would have meant over the last nine years.

In every year since 2003, the number of North Carolinians under a 180 percent line hovers around 35 percent of the population, while the number of people falling below current poverty standards averages about 15 percent.

That is, the current poverty definitions show that approximately one in six people in North Carolina are in poverty. Using the more accurate 180 percent line would increase that proportion to one in three.

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Let us return again to the theme of witnessing. In the second reading the Apostle John writes: “It is the Spirit who bears witness” (1 John 5:6). He is referring to the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, who bears witness to Jesus, testifying that he is the Christ, the Son of God. This is also seen in the scene of the baptism in the Jordan River: the Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus like a dove, revealing that he is the Only Begotten Son of the Eternal Father (cf. Mark 1:10). John underscores this aspect as well in his Gospel when Jesus says to his disciples: “When the Paraclete comes, whom I will send from the Father, the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness to me; and you too will bear witness to me, because you have been with me from the beginning” (John 15:26-27). This is a great comfort to us in educating others in the faith because we know that we are not alone and that our witness is supported by the Holy Spirit.

It is very important for you parents and also for you godfathers and godmothers to believe strongly in the presence and the action of the Holy Spirit, to call upon him and welcome him in you through prayer and the sacraments. He is the one in fact who enlightens the mind, who makes the heart of the educator burn so that he or she knows how to transmit the knowledge of the love of Christ. Prayer is the first condition for educating, because in praying we create the disposition in ourselves of letting God have the initiative, of entrusting our children to him, who knows them before we do and better than us, and knows perfectly what their true good is.

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Commander [Layne] McDowell banked and aligned his jet’s nose with the canyon’s northeastern end. Then he followed his wingmen’s lead. He dived, pulled level at 5,000 feet and accelerated down the canyon’s axis at 620 miles per hour, broadcasting his proximity with an extended engine roar.

In the lexicon of close air support, his maneuver was a “show of presence” ”” a mid-altitude, nonlethal display intended to reassure ground troops and signal to the Taliban that the soldiers were not alone. It reflected a sharp shift in the application of American air power, de-emphasizing overpowering violence in favor of sorties that often end without munitions being dropped.

The use of air power has changed markedly during the long Afghan conflict, reflecting the political costs and sensitivities of civilian casualties caused by errant or indiscriminate strikes and the increasing use of aerial drones, which can watch over potential targets for extended periods with no risk to pilots or more expensive aircraft.

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(Please note the content of this post is unlikely to be suited to some blog readers–KSH).

Gemma Barker, from Middlesex, wore boy’s clothes and gave herself three false identities so she could have sexual encounters with her 15- and 16-year-old friends, the Daily Mail reported.
Prosecutor Ruby Selva told Guildford Crown Court Barker set up Facebook profiles for her different personas and had individual dress styles for them.
She completely fooled her friends and their families by posing as Aaron Lampard, Connor McCormack and Luke Jones, the court heard.

Read it all and you can you can find the Daily Mail article there.

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

Some commentators have been quick to hail the ruling. It’s “the greatest Supreme Court religious liberty decision in decades,” opined the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which acted as co-counsel to Hosanna-Tabor.

On the other side, David Gibson, a columnist for Commonweal, observed in a post on the magazine’s blog that while the ruling “is clearly the right one,” celebration seems premature. Under the headline “High court: Religions are free to be jerks,” Gibson cautioned about how churches might exercise their protected right.

“How can churches be held to account?” he wrote. “This is a real difficulty, given that religious institutions behave just as badly as secular groups, and often worse. And that truly does hurt the witness of religious communities.”

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We almost hope this was a political call because, on the substance, there should be no question. Without the pipeline, Canada would still export its bitumen ”” with long-term trends in the global market, it’s far too valuable to keep in the ground ”” but it would go to China. And, as a State Department report found, U.S. refineries would still import low-quality crude ”” just from the Middle East. Stopping the pipeline, then, wouldn’t do anything to reduce global warming, but it would almost certainly require more oil to be transported across oceans in tankers.

Environmentalists and Nebraska politicians say that the route TransCanada proposed might threaten the state’s ecologically sensitive Sand Hills region. But TransCanada has been willing to tweak the route, in consultation with Nebraska officials, even though a government analysis last year concluded that the original one would have “limited adverse environmental impacts.” Surely the Obama administration didn’t have to declare the whole project contrary to the national interest ”” that’s the standard State was supposed to apply ”” and force the company to start all over again.

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Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Watch it all, very heartwarming.

Equal marriage is a social experiment of yet unknown proportions. No wonder we are confused. Most of our social scripts””from romance novels, fairy tales, movies, the advice that we gleaned from our parents and grandparents””are based on older forms of marriage that placed little value on emotional intimacy, sexual compatibility, shared (as opposed to specialized) skills and interests, or equal decision making.

Consider that it was only in the late 18th century that society began to approve of love as a primary consideration in the choice of a spouse. Only in the early 20th century did mutual sexual satisfaction become an accepted goal of marriage….

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Roswell, Georgia–The waiting list for subsidized housing here, just 40 families long a year ago, is up to 500. The number of children eligible for free or reduced lunch is up 50%. A little more than a year ago, the Methodist church began seminars for marriages strained by job losses.

Roswell is a pre-Civil War cotton mill town that grew into a wealthy bedroom community of Atlanta as the metro area prospered. More than half the city’s 88,000 residents have four-year college degrees. But Roswell sits in a region with an unusually severe case of long-term unemployment: About 40% of the unemployed in the Atlanta metro area in 2010, the most recent local data available, were out of work for a year or more versus the national average of 29%.

One of them is Marcy Bronner, 57 years old. When she lost her job at Pennzoil back in 2000, it took her seven months to find a new one at Quintiles, a bio- and pharmaceutical-services company….

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From Philadelphia to Newark, N.J., New York to Boston, Cleveland to Chicago to Detroit and beyond, the church of the immigrants is going the same route as the old industrial America of our forebears. The huge plants — churches, schools and parish halls — markers of another era, like the hulking steel mills and manufacturing plants of old, can no longer be sustained. There aren’t enough Catholics left in those places, not enough priests and nuns and certainly not enough money to maintain the church as it once was.

According to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University in Washington, the church in the United States has lost 1,359 parishes during the past 10 years, or 7.1 percent of the national total, and most of those have been in the Northeast and the Upper Midwest.

“I’m developing a theory that one of our major challenges today is that American Catholic leadership is being strangled by trying to maintain the behemoth of the institutional Catholicism that we inherited from the 1940s and ’50s,” New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan told NCR’s John Allen in the recently released book-length interview A People of Hope.

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The homily at Friday’s service could not have been more appropriate. Mark Greene, now executive director of the London Institute of Contemporary Christianity (LICC) that John Stott founded, summed up Stott’s unwavering commitment to Biblical teaching on the calling, convictions and lifestyle of all those who would claim Christ as their saviour.

“He yearned not only for the conversion of medics, lawyers and factory workers, he yearned for the transformation of medicine, law and manufacturing,” said Greene. Stott’s emphasis was on whole-life disciple-making, on the supreme transformative power of the gospel in the individual and through the Christian individual into the workplace. He longed for lay Christians to be biblically envisioned and equipped for that mission in their daily lives.

“What would Stott’s emphasis on whole-life disciple-making say to us today in areas such as the moral and directional crisis in our economy ? “ Greene asked the assembled congregation, an audible silence falling across the great church, as he referred to both to the bankers of the city and the Occupy protesters in their tents still spread across the churchyard outside.

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Almighty God, whose only-begotten Son hath led captivity captive and given gifts to thy people: Multiply among us faithful pastors, who, like thy holy bishop Wulfstan, will give courage to those who are oppressed and held in bondage; and bring us all, we pray, into the true freedom of thy kingdom; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Lord of the Church, who hast given to thy servants a diversity of gifts, that they may share them with their brethren: Grant us the generous heart to give, the humble heart to receive; that we, with all that love thee, may know the fullness of thy grace; that thy love may be perfected in us; to the glory of thy Name.

Now the whole earth had one language and few words. And as men migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the sons of men had built. And the LORD said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Ba’bel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth; and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.

–Genesis 11:1-9

Regent College is pleased to announce that Bruce Hindmarsh, the James M. Houston Professor of Spiritual Theology at Regent College, has been appointed as the incoming President of the American Society of Church History.

The appointment began on January 1, 2012, and finishes on December 31, 2014, and includes one year as President-Elect and another year as Past-President. Dr. Hindmarsh’s responsibilities include planning the program for the 2013 annual meeting in New Orleans, chairing the council and executive committee, providing the presidential address to the society in 2014, and chairing the nominating committee in his final year.

“This is a great honour for Bruce and for Regent, not least because Bruce is the first non-American to be awarded the post widely seen as the highest academic honour for the discipline in North America,” says Paul Williams, Academic Dean of Regent College.

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Father Clarke, formerly on staff at Holy Communion, Charleston, began a new ministry yesterday at Holy Cross, Stateburg.

You can find the audio link here (about 22 minutes).

If the Ordinariate in the United States is a Vatican effort to poach disgruntled Anglicans, Sunday-golfing ex-Anglicans or never-were Anglicans, its newly appointed leader has not received that memo.

In fact, says the Rev. Jeffrey N. Steenson, Anglican does not appear in the new body’s formal name, the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, because members will make no pretense of remaining Anglicans. And anyone who wants to enter the Ordinariate because of anger toward Anglicanism rather than a desire for deeper communion with the Roman Catholic Church probably ought to wait.

Steenson, who was bishop of the Episcopal Church’s Diocese of the Rio Grande from 2004 to 2007, will be invested as the first Ordinary of the Ordinariate during a Mass at the Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, Houston, Feb. 12.

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“Be fruitful and multiply”. There is one man in England who has taken this old biblical call too seriously. His name is Ian Hellyer and together with his wife Margaret is raising not one but nine children. He is also more than well acquainted with the Holy Scriptures, being a Roman Catholic pastor. Yes, that is right, he is both a father and a priest, and yet there is no excommunication on the horizon for him. The story appeared a few days ago in English daily newspaper The Guardian. Beware though, the Fr. Ian affair is no theological trick. The 45 year father of nine was an Anglican priest until last year and following a spiritual journey and a course of study, he decided to convert to Catholicism.

Fr. Ian belongs to the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walshingam in England and Wales. Ordinariates were established two years ago by the Holy See: they are essentially new organisations and canonical structures that allow Anglican “defectors” who wish to join the Catholic Church, to keep some of their liturgical traditions. Above all, however, the Ordinariate grants former pastors special “permission” that authorises them to stay married. According to information obtained by the Vatican Insider from the Ordinariate and the English Episcopal Conference, there are currently 57 former Anglican pastors who have joined the Catholic Church. Forty two of these are married and Hellyer is one of them.

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Check it out.

Christian humanitarian agencies are delivering relief aid to thousands of people displaced in inter-tribal conflict in South Sudan, the world’s newest nation.

The assistance is targeting nearly 60,000 people in Jonglei State where a cycle of violence between two pastoralist communities is continuing. The Lou-Nuer and the Murle have a history of raiding each other’s cattle, women and children, but Christian leaders want the communities to give up arms.

“I urge the government to disarm the two communities (whose members posses illegal arms), simultaneously. The action should also be extended to other armed communities in the state,” Anglican Bishop Alapayo Manyang Kuctiel of Rumbek told ENInews in a telephone interview from South Sudan on 16 January.

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What’s dragging down U.S. economic vigor?

According to Harvard Business School graduates, political gridlock, faltering schools, and a convoluted tax code are making American companies less competitive in the global marketplace.

A new survey of the business school’s alumni found that nearly three-quarters of respondents expect the U.S. to be less competitive over the next three years. They said the U.S. is losing ground to emerging economies, where low wages, increasingly skilled workers, growing markets and proximity to customers frequently trump traditional American strengths such as sophisticated infrastructure, a reliable legal system and effective macroeconomic policy.

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A hearing… in a lawsuit aimed at stopping the Sussex County Council from reciting the Lord’s Prayer before each meeting delved into the theological meaning and history of the prayer’s title and whether it is explicitly a Christian prayer.

Four county residents want U.S. District Court Judge Leonard P. Stark to rule that council’s recitation of the Lord’s Prayer violates the establishment cause of the First Amendment, which prohibits government from favoring one religion over others. They have asked the judge to rule the practice unconstitutional and order the council to cease reciting any sectarian prayers.

“It affiliates the county government with one single faith ”” Christianity ”” and sends a message to the county residents that their county government favors one religion,” said Alex Luchenitser, an attorney for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a Washington, D.C., watchdog group that has taken on the case for the plaintiffs.

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Crime is down in this city on the desert fringe of Los Angeles County, and Mayor R. Rex Parris is sure he knows one reason: It’s the chirping….

The chirps subconsciously discourage criminality, Mr. Parris says: “Everybody is now in a better mood, a better place.”

Those chirps aren’t from here. The mayor bought them in recordings from England, and for the past 10 months he has had his city play them over 70 speakers along a half mile of Lancaster Boulevard, blended with mellow synthesizer tones, five hours a day.

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A key suspect in the Christmas Day bombing which killed at least 38 people in Nigeria has escaped from custody, police have admitted.

Kabiru Sokoto – believed to be a member of the Islamist sect Boko Haram – was arrested on Saturday in the capital Abuja after police trailed him.

But the very next day he escaped as police attempted to search his house outside the capital.

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The founder of Wikipedia is leading calls for search engines and social media sites including Google, Facebook and Twitter to take themselves offline for an entire day in protest against a controversial bill winding its way through the US Senate that could have profound implications for the internet.

Jimmy Wales has called for a “public uprising” against the Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa), which critics say will have a “chilling effect on innovation” by forcing websites to keep a much closer tab on what is posted by users on their pages….

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2011 was a good year for film, and particularly for depictions of faith in film ”” but not in the Hollywood mainstream on either count.

This year, in one Hollywood film after another, religion was strikingly absent in tragic or crisis-filled times. George Clooney was widowed in The Descendants; Matt Damon widowed in both Contagion and We Bought a Zoo; Nicole Kidman bereaved of a child in Rabbit Hole (which had a limited opening in December 2010); all suffered bereavement with scarcely any acknowledgment of religion (except, in Kidman’s case, to reject it). Contagion, in particular, depicted all sorts of social consequences of a global pandemic except the role of faith in times of crisis. The black Baptist church in The Help was a rare exception.

Outside the Hollywood mainstream, it was another story. The French drama Of Gods and Men (easily my favorite film of the year) and the English documentary No Greater Love offered remarkable depictions of monastery life. Passion plays featured in two art films: Polish artist Lech Majewski’s The Mill & the Cross and Milanese architect Michelangelo Frammartino’s Le Quattro Volte (The Four Times).

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A shale-driven glut of natural gas has cut electricity prices for the U.S. power industry by 50 percent and reduced investment in costlier sources of energy.

With abundant new supplies of gas making it the cheapest option for new power generation, the largest U.S. wind-energy producer, NextEra Energy Inc. (NEE), has shelved plans for new U.S. wind projects next year and Exelon Corp. (EXC) called off plans to expand two nuclear plants. Michigan utility CMS Energy Corp. (CMS) canceled a $2 billion coal plant after deciding it wasn’t financially viable in a time of “low natural-gas prices linked to expanded shale-gas supplies,” according to a company statement.

Mirroring the gas market, wholesale electricity prices have dropped more than 50 percent on average since 2008, and about 10 percent during the fourth quarter of 2011, according to a Jan. 11 research report by Aneesh Prabhu, a New York-based credit analyst with Standard & Poor’s Financial Services LLC.

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[Rowan] Williams said he has been discussing with the UK government on how to support those living in fear because of the sect’s activities.

In a letter to the Archbishop and Primate of the Anglican Communion in Nigeria, Most Rev. Nicholas Okoh, which was read by his representative, the Bishop of Durham Rt. Revd Justin Welby, in Abuja, Williams said: “I write to assure you of my continuing prayers for you and for the work and ministry of the Anglican Church in Nigeria as unrest continues in many parts of Nigeria, both as a consequence of the national strikes and the continuing campaign by Boko Haram.

“The Rt Revd Justin Welby, newly enthroned as Bishop of Durham, comes to you, my brother in Christ, as my trusted emissary, and brings assurances of my prayers and concern for you and for your people. In addition to his time in Abuja he hopes to travel to Jos and to Kano. I have asked Bishop Welby to deliver my greetings to you in person when he meets with you as part of our continuing dialogue and mutual support.

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