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!
–Psalm 24:7-10
Given church concerns about religious freedom, Cardinal Dolan wrote, “the President invited us to ”˜work out the wrinkles.’ We have accepted that invitation. Unfortunately, this seems to be stalled: the White House Press Secretary, for instance, informed the nation that the mandates are a fait accompli (and, embarrassingly for him, commented that we bishops have always opposed Health Care anyway, a charge that is scurrilous and insulting, not to mention flat out wrong.”)
Cardinal Dolan also said that “The White House already notified Congress that the dreaded mandates are now published in the Federal Registry ”˜without change.’ He added that “The Secretary of HHS is widely quoted as saying, ”˜Religious insurance companies don’t really design the plans they sell based on their own religious tenets.’ That doesn’t bode well for their getting a truly acceptable ‘accommodation.'”
Read it all and note the link to the full letter.
Although the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints promised in 1995 to stop including Holocaust victims in its ritual, the church admitted last week that Anne Frank had been “baptized” in a Mormon church in the Dominican Republic. On Wednesday, The Boston Globe reported that Daniel Pearl, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal who was kidnapped and killed by terrorists in Pakistan in early 2002, was baptized last June in Twin Falls, Idaho; Mr. Pearl was Jewish.
Also on Wednesday, the church released a letter reiterating its policy that “without exception, church members must not submit for proxy temple ordinances any names from unauthorized groups, such as celebrities and Jewish Holocaust victims.”
In proxy baptism, a living Mormon immerses himself or herself in a baptismal font on behalf of a dead person. A church spokesman, Michael Otterson, said Friday that the ritual was done in the spirit of love, and that people’s souls were free not to become Mormons.
European leaders are braced for the eurozone’s first ever sovereign default this week as Greece’s efforts to secure a €206bn (£172bn) “voluntary” bond swap looks increasingly unlikely.
Authorities in Athens are ready to enforce the controversial collective action clauses, or CACs, to impose the restructuring deal on all bondholders as the number of voluntary agreements look set to fall short of the required amount.
Credit rating agencies have warned they will declare Athens to be in default if the CACs are triggered which would be a dramatic culmination to a three-year rollercoaster ride for Athens, the eurozone and global markets.
Here in this small farmland community [of Marysville, Indiana, a single water tower emblazoned with the town’s name ”” the most commanding structure in the town ”” appeared to be the only thing not battered by the storms that cut a swath through southeastern Indiana.
Of the two dozen or so houses that once stood here, only a handful remained upright. Some were reduced to debris ”” piles of wood and possessions. Others were virtually erased.
On Saturday, the drone of chainsaws and diesel trucks filled the afternoon air, replacing the whistling of the tornado and the clamor of warning sirens that preceded it just the day before.
Fear and a lack of choice may carry the election for Mr Putin, but they cannot disguise the growing discontent across different classes, ages and regions. For those who have done less well than Ms Guseva over the past 12 years but still remember Soviet times, the 1990s are becoming less relevant. Polls show that the fastest decline in Mr Putin’s support is among poorer people over 55 years of age; they feel Mr Putin has not honoured his promises, and are tired of waiting. The conspicuous display of riches by corrupt bureaucrats heightens their sense of injustice. The number of people who no longer trust Mr Putin has risen to 40%, and people tell pollsters that the country is stagnating. “The regime is losing its legitimacy in the eyes of the population,” says Lev Gudkov of the Levada Centre, a social-research outfit. Mr Putin’s victory will only make things worse.
Some officials found the current case particularly troubling because it followed more than 10 years at war in the Muslim world, in which outrage over even the rumor of American defacement of Korans has caused previous crises in Afghanistan and Iraq. Several of the officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss details of the investigations.
An American military official familiar with the joint investigation somberly described the burning as a “tragedy,” but rejected any suggestion that it was intentional. He said that the joint commission of three senior Afghan security officials and an American military officer was convinced that the military personnel involved in making the decision to get rid of the Korans and those who carried out the order did not set out to defile the Muslim holy book.
“There was no maliciousness, there was no deliberateness, there was not an intentional disrespect of Islam,” he said.
No way do you get an excerpt–you have to guess your list of 12 first. Then go and read it all.
Nearly 750 Cuban activists have signed a letter to Pope Benedict XVI warning that his planned visit to Cuba will “send a message to the oppressors that they can continue” to abuse Catholic opponents, dissidents reported Thursday.
“We would be very happy to receive you in our country, if the message of faith, love and hope that you could bring us also would serve to halt the repression against those who want to go to church,” the letter said.
Read it all and follow the links for additional information.
The last decade or so has seen a great resurgence of radical skepticism not only about God – the “new atheism” ”“ but also about Man. It is skepticism updated with reductionist attempts to explain human existence and experience, thought and feeling, in terms of matter alone. The mainstream view trumpeted in the “intelligent” media is that the moral sense, love, and reason are really just survival mechanisms developed in the course of human evolution. The mind is just the tool of a social primate developed in order to give it a competitive edge in procreation. As the effort of ‘the selfish gene’ to replicate itself, the mind can have no inherent claim on our loyalty. And God is just another construct, one which we would do well to discard. (The self-contradictory nature of such radical skepticism is rarely noticed. If reason is just a construct of the selfish gene, then the claim that reason is just a construct is itself a construct.)
The new atheists proclaim their gospel with the fervour of believers: God is dead, man is free, free from the destructive illusions of religion and morality, of reason and virtue. But then a someone dies, suddenly and cruelly, like the young man known to many in ..[this] parish [in [Eastern Georgia] who was killed in a freakish accident last weekend. And his death casts a pall of grief over his family, his friends, their families, his school, and many others. Yet if he was no more than an arrangement of molecules, a selfish gene struggling to replicate itself, there can be no reason for grief, or for the love that grieves, since these are (we are told) essentially selfish survival mechanisms left over from some earlier stage in hominid evolution. Friendship is just another illusion. But of course we do grieve, even the atheists. And in so grieving, they grieve better than they know (or think they know).
The grieving atheist cannot provide any reason why he grieves, or why he (rightly) respects the grief of others. For to grieve the death of such a young man is implicitly to affirm the reality of the soul. Man is embodied, to be sure; but what is embodied is a soul, capable of memory, reason, and love. To grieve the loss of anyone then is to lament the departure of a unique being, whose mind and heart have touched our lives in spontaneously beautiful and inimitable ways. To grieve is to travel even beyond the lost life of a loved one to the origin and source of the love we have known, and there to register our gratitude. To grieve, therefore, is to affirm that there is a higher source of value than ‘the selfish gene’ – there is a God, who is absolute truth and goodness, the very possibility of knowledge and love.
To love, to grieve, is to affirm the dignity of man; and to affirm the dignity is to acknowledge gratefully a special instance of God’s creative and lifegiving power expressed in one whose unique nature is gone. When we can no longer grieve, it is not God who dies, but we ourselves.
As C. S. Lewis says somewhere, God “whispers to us in our pleasures and shouts to us in our pains”. In our griefs God shouts, ”˜the Lord thunders out of heaven’, and his thunder dissolves the attempt to live as if he does not exist. We easily forget him; but he does not forget us, nor does he forsake us; and he permits these pains and griefs to fall upon us that we may turn to him again, and know him truly, not as our enemy but as our friend: as the one who “bears our griefs and carries our sorrows”. Our first need “in all our troubles” is (as the Litany teaches us) “to put our whole trust and confidence in him”. He confronts our grief and bears it, that he might transform sadness to joy, despair to hope, and death to new life. He does this in our souls and minds – a space from which the selfish gene is banished by necessity, and the soul that dies to itself inherits eternal life.
God shouts in our pains; and we awaken from dreams to the fact that he has travelled this way before. “Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows” (Isaiah 53:4) up to and into his Cross. The young man who died, the friend of so many, once ”“ wonderfully! – said, “If we really believe in God, there is nothing to be afraid of.” The friend who takes our grief and carries our sorrows confirms his testimony: “God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. And he ”¦ said, Behold I make all things new” (Revelation 21:4, 5).
——The Rev. Gavin Dunbar is rector of Saint John’s, Savannah, Georgia
The funeral cortege for well”“known comedian Frank Carson, following the Requiem Mass in St Patrick’s Church, Donegall Street on the morning of Saturday 3rd March 2012, will pause at the steps of St Anne’s Cathedral. The Dean of Belfast, the Very Revd John Mann, will say:
”˜We are thankful for Frank’s humour, for the happiness he spread, for embracing this Cathedral in his concern and for, at all times, expressing those great qualities of hope and love, through word and action, that transcend division and bring people together in common endeavour….
[Frank] Carson had left school at 14 with no qualifications and became an apprentice electrician, but at 16 switched to being a plasterer. In his spare time he worked on his spiel as a stand-up comic, a talent that earned him regular appearances on Northern Ireland television. When he was 25 he sold some scripts to the regional BBC station, and became a professional entertainer, touring with the Australian magician known as The Great Levante.
Encouraged to try his luck on the northern club scene on the mainland, Carson was spotted by the television producer Barney Colehan and signed up for his first network exposure on the music-hall tribute show The Good Old Days. Meanwhile on ITV, Carson – having thrice won Opportunity Knocks – was also booked to appear on The Comedians by the producer Johnny Hamp.
This was the show that transformed Carson from an obscure club comedian into a comedy star.
Lord God, who didst inspire thy servants John and Charles Wesley with burning zeal for the sanctification of souls, and didst endow them with eloquence in speech and song: Kindle in thy Church, we beseech thee, such fervor, that those whose faith has cooled may be warmed, and those who have not known thy Christ may turn to him and be saved; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
O God, who by thy Son dost marvellously work out the salvation of mankind: Grant, we beseech thee, that, following the example of our blessed Lord, and observing such a fast as thou dost choose, we may both be subjected to thee with all our hearts, and united to each other in holy charity; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord.
–Gelasian Sacramentary
This is how one should regard us, as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God. Moreover it is required of stewards that they be found trustworthy. But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court. I do not even judge myself. I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me.
–1 Corinthians 4:1-4
A number of Dr [John] Sentamu’s followÂers on Twitter, including some clergy, expressed dismay at his endorsement of The Sun on Sunday. On Monday, the Bishop of Bradford, the Rt Revd Nick Baines, wrote: “All my instincts lead me to take a different view from that of the Archbishop of York on this one.”
Bishop Baines said that he did not question Dr Sentamu’s motive “for writing the article and engaging with the paper in this way”, but said: “I could not endorse the paper myself.” He went on to criticise strongly how News International, which owns The Sun, had handled the investigation into phone-hacking.
The Bishop of Swansea & Brecon, the Rt Revd John Davies, speaking on BBC1’s Big Questions on Sunday morning, said that he was “not impressed” by Dr Sentamu’s article….
Meet the Rev. Fred Luter Jr., pastor of New Orleans’s 4,500-member Franklin Avenue Baptist Church””and the man who this spring will likely become the first black president of the Southern Baptist Convention. He announced last month that he was putting himself in the running, and the convention’s movers and shakers seem almost unanimous in their support.
The SBC was born in 1845 after Baptists from the Northern states refused to appoint slaveholders to missionary posts, and the Southern states decided to break off. Like many Protestant denominations in America that split over the issue of slavery, the Baptists remained separate long after the Civil War. Though the leadership of the SBC supported an end to segregation even before Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the denomination’s churches in many cases remained hotbeds of racial animus.
It wasn’t until 1995 that the SBC issued a resolution on racial reconciliation….
The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association of Charlotte has laid off about 10 percent of its workers, which it says is part of a strategic move to emphasize its online ministry and other priorities.
The agency said fewer than 50 employees lost their jobs. Fewer than 20 of the layoffs involved Charlotte operations, an agency spokesman said.
More and more young Catholics (and Americans in general) are delaying marriage than ever before. Some 43 percent of Americans are unmarried, and 61 percent of those have never walked down the aisle.
That has spawned a host of challenges for parish ministries, but also for singles themselves ”” there’s not much wisdom to turn to for guidance.
That may be changing, with books like “The Catholic Girl’s Survival Guide for the Single Years…”
In a first for the UK, a professional qualification in Theology and Communication is in development by the University of Chester, in partnership with the Church of England.
Launching in the autumn of 2013, this postgraduate qualification will be aimed at Church communication professionals, clergy and others, including those working for religious charities, NGOs and faith-based schools.
There is no way I can do justice to how I truly feel about losing our cat of eighteen years and a bunch of months and going on nineteen years. When we moved back to Summerville, South Carolina, in 1993 from Oxford, England, we got her from the SPCA.
She was there through it all–three places to live, the children going from 4, 2 and not yet 1 to where they are now, my living through three rectors in three years in one parish (and living to talk about it), Elizabeth going back to graduate school at MUSC, her graduation, all three secondary school graduations, and all the current twists, turns and travails of the Episcopal Church, the Anglican Communion, and the diocese of South Carolina.
So many things changed, but except for our faith and our family, she was the only constant, friendly, joyful, content, present, glad to be alive and part of it all. The world is a sadder place because she is gone, but we are all the better from having been given God’s gift of Sprightly–KSH.
In an article published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva argue that newborn babies do not have a “moral right to life” because they are not “actual persons” but rather “potential persons”.
“The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual….”
Nick Pollard, co-founder of The Damaris Trust, criticised the claim.
On Wednesday the Anglican Bishop of Christchurch Victoria Matthews said the proposal, mooted by owners of buildings in the Square, could help make the earthquake-damaged area “welcoming and engaging” again.
“People [are] saying, ‘What would happen if this became a place of creativity and not a ruin?’ ”
However, residents and city councillors did not warm to the idea yesterday.
The Church of England has issued a rare national apology for child abuse by some of its clergy.
The “unreserved” apology came on the day a damning report was finally published, months after its completion last year, detailing how a convicted paedophile persuaded the Church he was suitable to be ordained as a priest.
Roy Cotton went on to be approved as a Scout leader on the Church’s recommendation and to hold several jobs as a clergyman in the Chichester diocese where he abused at least 12 boys.
Read it all (requires subscription). Also, please note that you can read the full report mentioned here.
New York churches gained a victory in the courts yesterday (Feb. 29) as the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a district judge’s injunction against the city’s enforcement of a ban to keep churches from meeting for worship in public schools.
The Second Circuit, though, instructed U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska to act quickly on the case, encouraging her to issue a final decision by mid-June so the matter can be resolved before the next school year.
A local priest, the Rev. Scott Quinn, has been added to the slate of candidates for bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh.
Father Quinn is rector of the Church of the Nativity in Crafton. The election will be held on April 21.
Their marriage had all the appearances of an arrangement made in heaven. He was the son of the second Episcopal Bishop of Connecticut, graduate of Yale, wealthy, an ordained and scholarly minister. She was a beautiful and spirited oldest daughter of Elisha Hart, a prominent Saybrook merchant.
And, on a warm summer day in July 1810, the Rev. Samuel F. Jarvis (1786-1851) married Miss Sarah McCurdy Hart (1787-1863) at St. Michael’s Church in Bloomingdale, New York, his first parish.
But, as sometimes happens, this was a mismatch that was made far from heaven.
Rising prices took a toll on Americans’ incomes as the year began, halting a four-month streak of gains and renewing concerns about the consumer’s resilience amid higher gas prices.
That’s according to a report Tuesday that found real median annual household income in the U.S. declined by 1.3% in January from December, to $50,020 from $50,673.
The tick downward follows monthly increases in income from September through the end of 2011, according to the analysis of Census Bureau data conducted by Sentier Research, an Annapolis, Md., firm run by two former Census officials.
Almighty God, whose servant Chad, for the peace of the Church, relinquished cheerfully the honors that had been thrust upon him, only to be rewarded with equal responsibility: Keep us, we pray thee, from thinking of ourselves more highly than we ought to think, and ready at all times to give place to others, (in honor preferring one another,) that the cause of Christ may be advanced; in the name of him who washed his disciples’ feet, even the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.