McGrath’s strong emphasis is on sensitive, artful, and personalized discourse, built on careful listening for the deeper layers of concern in the hearts of those whose spirits are grieved by the brokenness of humanity. It’s a strategy we might describe as “pastoral apologetics.”

This is fine so far as it goes, but what about settings that preclude the pastoral approach? After all, many contemporary apologetic encounters take place within radio call-in shows and university debates, where the interlocutor may be a confident attacker rather than a wounded soul, and the time for spiritual probing is quite limited.
Fortunately, McGrath provides the reader with some handy, off-the-rack rejoinders. To the claim, for instance, that “we can’t be sure about anything,” one might reply: “Are you sure about that?” Still, he wants to equip readers for something beyond clashes of logic. His ambition is to communicate not only the truth, but also the “attractiveness and joy of the Christian gospel to our culture.” We should be like prisms breaking up the light of the gospel into the colors of the rainbow.

Arguably, the most common theme in the entire book is his construal of apologetics as “removing [or overcoming] barriers [or obstacles] to faith….”

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Near the Syrian city of Aleppo, the Church of St. Simeon the Stylite commemorates the 5th-century ascetic who became an ancient sensation by living atop a tall pedestal for decades to demonstrate his faith. Krak des Chevaliers, an awe-inspiring castle near Homs, was a fortress for the order of the Knights Hospitaller in their quest to defend a crusader kingdom. Seydnaya, a towering monastery in a town of the same name, was probably built in the time of Justinian.

A nun there spoke about Syria’s current crisis from within a candlelit alcove this week, surrounded by thousand-year-old votive icons donated by Russian Orthodox churchgoers and silver pendants in the shape of body parts that supplicants have sought to heal””feet, heads, legs, arms, even a pair of lungs and a kidney.

“It’s not a small thing we are facing,” she said, speaking as much about the country as her faith. “We just want the killing to stop.”

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This NIE report on Iran was supposed to have been submitted to Obama a few weeks ago, but it was revised to include new and alarming intelligence information about military components of Iran’s nuclear program. Haaretz has learned that the report’s conclusions are quite similar to those drawn by Israel’s intelligence community.

The NIE report contends that Iran has made surprising, notable progress in the research and development of key components of its military nuclear program.

The NIE reports are the most important assessments compiled by the U.S. intelligence community and are submitted to the president and other top governmental officials. This NIE report was compiled by an inter-departmental team headed by director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Its contents articulate the views of American intelligence agencies.

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In character and location, the city of Hefei in China’s Anhui province and the privileged seaside resort of Beidaihe on China’s eastern coast could not be more different. But today they will be intimately connected, as the trial opens of Gu Kailai ”“ until recently known as the Jackie Kennedy of China ”“ for complicity in the murder of a British businessman, Neil Heywood.

The link is Ms Gu’s husband, the former Communist Party boss of Chongqing, Bo Xilai, whose lineage and ambition would doubtless have qualified him for a villa at Beidaihe ”“ the traditional summer retreat of China’s politial elite ”“ this crucial year had the Heywood affair not intervened. As leader of one of China’s fastest growing cities, he was a serious player, but a contentious one, too, because of what were seen as his unfashionable ”“ and perhaps dangerous ”“ conservative views.

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Economists often assert that we are in the worst recovery since the Great Depression. Are we?

Not technically, but it’s still unusually bad.

Certainly the economy is in an abysmal state, and we still have about five million fewer jobs than we had when the recession began in December 2007. But the level of economic activity is so low chiefly because the recession itself was so severe; indeed, on many economic indicators, the Great Recession was the deepest (and longest) downturn since the Great Depression.

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Welcome to All Saints’ Episcopal Church located in NE Philadelphia. We have been a worshiping and ministering presence in the Torresdale section of the city for 240 years. Since our beginning in 1772 we have evolved to address the needs of our local community, the greater Philadelphia area and the global community as well.

In this 21st century we are learning what the Apostle Paul meant in his Letter to the Galatians, “… for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Spend a Sunday with us and you will discover Paul’s words in action. People joining you in the pews come from all around NE Philadelphia. We are men and women and children. We are young and old. Some of us are white and some are black. Some have families and some are single. Some of us are straight and some of us are gay. Some of us are people of means and some of us struggle to make ends meet. But when we kneel at the communion rail, hands stretched out, we are, as Garrison Keillor described his own experience of an Episcopal church, “A real anthology of the faith.” We are, indeed, all one in Christ Jesus.

It is our Baptismal Covenant that helps us understand what community in action means. All Baptismal candidates from infancy to maturity are invited to put their whole trust in the grace and love of Jesus Christ our Lord. In the covenant we are asked to embrace life-giving commitments…

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Lost in this discussion are the developments in theology, science, psychology and other disciplines around this topic that inform the work of academics like as the Rev. Dr. Cameron Partridge, a transman who is the Episcopal chaplain for Boston University and a lecturer at Harvard Divinity School. He notes how those with bodies perceived as “different” can make us feel uncomfortable about our own bodies. But transgender clergy bring embodiment into the conversation in an exploration of “what does it mean to be human?”

For now, this appears a question that those commenting about the changes transpiring in the church don’t appear willing to address. After a slight flurry of articles about these trans friendly resolutions in outlets such as the Chicago Tribune and Anglican newspaper Church Times , once a trial rite for same-sex blessings passed, the media coverage shifted to focus solely on this particular LGBT related resolution.

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In Oregon, the number of Latino Episcopalians has increased more than five-fold over the past decade. Church leaders say the influx is, in part, because the denomination’s worship services look and sound familiar to Hispanics raised in the Catholic Church. But Northwest Episcopal Churches are luring Latinos with a focused marketing campaign.

The 10 o’clock high mass at Saints Peter and Paul Episcopal Church in Portland, Oregon probably sounds a lot like it did when the congregation was founded nearly a century ago.

Father Kurt Neilson leads the liturgy, as he has for the past 17 years. He says attendance at the two morning services has been relatively flat. The real growth is in the afternoon.

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O God, whose days are without end, and whose mercies cannot be numbered: Make us, we beseech thee, like thy servant Jeremy Taylor, deeply sensible of the shortness and uncertainty of human life; and let thy Holy Spirit lead us in holiness and righteousness all our days; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

Come, Lord, and reign over us as our rightful King. Rule in our hearts and fill them with thy love; rule in our minds and bring every thought into captivity to thyself; rule in our lives and make them holy like thine own; for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, for ever and ever.

I will sing of thy steadfast love, O LORD, for ever; with my mouth I will proclaim thy faithfulness to all generations. For thy steadfast love was established for ever, thy faithfulness is firm as the heavens.

–Psalm 89:1-2

Nigerian troops have killed 20 suspected members of the militant Islamist group Boko Haram in the north-east of the country, the army says.

One government soldier also died in a shootout in the town of Maiduguri.

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Whilst the British Government seem to be considering easing some sanctions against Mr Mugabe and his personal allies, I am not convinced that the time has come to weaken international opposition to the President of Zimbabwe’s irresponsible, undemocratic, lawless, and at times brutal regime. I certainly won’t be placing an order for a new clerical collar at Wippells just yet.

We cannot allow Robert Mugabe off the hook. When I cut up my clerical collar, I said I would not put it on again until Mr Mugabe had gone from office ”“ we need to stand in solidarity with the people of Zimbabwe and not forget the abuses and exploitation they have suffered at the hands of that administration.

The reason given by Her Majesty’s Government for this ”˜step change’ in relations with Zimbabwe is the work going in to drafting a new constitution for that country. The recent meeting of European Union foreign ministers, which agreed to lift these restrictions on Mr Mugabe’s colleagues, have made this decision dependent only upon whether a ”˜credible’ referendum is held on the new constitution. Perhaps if they had read the draft constitution they might have taken a different view.

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An Afghan worker on a military base in southern Afghanistan opened fire and killed three U.S. troops, military officials said Saturday, bringing the toll to six American military fatalities in 24 hours at the hands of allies.

The NATO force said the attack took place late Friday in Helmand province, the Taliban movement’s heartland, where a turncoat shooting hours earlier claimed the lives of three elite special-operations U.S. Marines.

Compounding the carnage, a rogue Afghan police officer in Nimruz province turned his weapon on fellow Afghan officers Saturday, killing 10 of them, Afghan officials said. The assailant was believed to be a Taliban infiltrator, provincial spokesman Fazel Omer Baloch said.

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The Egyptian president, Mohamed Morsi, has dismissed his military chief as part of a sweeping set of decisions that includes the appointment of a vice-president and the rescinding of a military order that curbed presidential powers.

Presidential spokesman Yasser Ali announced the retirement of Hussein Tantawi, head of the armed forces, and the chief of staff, Sami Anan. They have been appointed as advisers to Morsi.

The president also cancelled the complementary constitutional declaration issued by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (Scaf), announced days before he was declared the victor in June’s elections. The addendum had curbed presidential power and kept much of it in the hands of the military council.

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Hundreds of people gathered at a Sikh temple in suburban Milwaukee spoke of redemption, unity and strength during the first Sunday service there since a gunman killed six people before fatally shooting himself.

The service capped a weekend of events meant to honor the victims and restore the temple as a place of worship. While there were still tears and red eyes, many participants said healing was under way.

Visitors removed their shoes outside and filed past portraits of the victims, shuffling down a flower-lined aisle into the main prayer room. They dropped dollar bills in front of a shrine where their holy book sits and bowed for two to three seconds. Then they sat on the floor -women on the left, men on the right – their heads covered with scarves, and listened as a priest recited religious hymns in the Hindi dialect of Punjabi.

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The gunmen in many of the mass shootings in recent years – including last Sunday’s Sikh temple massacre in Oak Creek – shared a trait that offers a critical clue to abating future attacks.

Each showed clear signs of psychotic behavior and, had they been treated, the disasters might have been avoided, experts told the Journal Sentinel.

Wade Michael Page, who killed six Sikh worshippers before being shot by police and killing himself, was a heavy drinker who was so unstable after his girlfriend broke up with him years earlier that his friends feared he had committed suicide. A psychiatric nurse who lived downstairs from him in Cudahy said if one mental health professional had taken the time to examine him, “a gazillion red flags would have gone off.”

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Have teens? Then you’re likely used to seeing them lighted by a cellphone screen glow.

But a study says the hours kids spend tapping notes is killing their grammar skills with every LOL. With “the culture of mobile communication, quick back and forth, inevitably, there are compromises on traditional, cultural writing,” said S. Shyam Sundar of Pennsylvania State University’s Media Effects Research Lab, which did the study.

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The Catholic Diocese of Youngstown, Ohio, is now home to a basilica.

St. John the Baptist Church in Canton, Ohio, has been granted the title of Minor Basilica by the Holy See. The Vatican decree, received June 19 by Youngstown Bishop George V. Murry, states in part “such honorific title is intended to strengthen the relation of this important church with the Chair of Peter and to make it an ideal center of special liturgical and pastoral ministry in the Diocese,” according to information the diocese released Monday.

The designation means that the Basilica of St. John the Baptist holds the greatest dignity of all the churches in the diocese. Churches are elevated to basilica status because of their historical and architectural value, coupled with their contributions to the community. The process requires a church to supply documents, including: a petition of the bishop; reports related to the origin, history and religious activity of the church; and photographs of the exterior and interior of the church building.

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This evening we are celebrating an especially joyful, even historic, occasion: the reception into full communion with the Catholic Church of 11 members of the Traditional Anglican Communion in Canada.

Their journey to full communion with the Successor of Peter, our Holy Father Benedict XVI, has been a long and sometimes trying one, yet one brimming with hope. I would especially like to express my gratitude to Father Bruce McAllister, who has guided them with such wisdom and concern in their journey.

We give thanks to the Lord for their patience, their perseverance, and above all for their faith.

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The shooting at a Sikh Temple in the Wisconsin town of Oak Creek last Sunday revealed an ugly side to America’s pluralistic society. In a country of immigrants, there are still people who hate or fear those they see as “outsiders,” and when those people have access to semi-automatic weapons, they can put their fear and hatred into action.

The shooter, a former US Army soldier named Wade Michael Page, was a white supremacist, and before he was gunned down by a police officer, Page managed to kill six of the temple’s worshipers and to wound another police officer.

The incident is being treated as a domestic terror incident, with Page’s embrace of the “racial holy war” rhetoric of the far right making this more than just another case of American mass murder. But the shock of the event also hit many Americans at another level. Here, the terrorist was white, and a former US soldier. His victims were Asian. The terrorist’s ideology, white supremacy, was every bit as hateful and destructive as the religious holy war (jihad) of the men who hijacked the planes on Sept. 11….

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The Kaduna Diocese of the Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion) said on Friday that worshippers’ attendance in its churches has dropped by 30 per cent.

The Diocesan Bishop, Most Rev. Josiah Fearon, after the First Session of the 19th Synod in Kaduna, attributed the poor attendance of faithful to the current national security challenge.

Fearon said the drop in church attendance had also contributed to a 60 per cent drop in financial support to the church through the offering of tithes and the Church fund raising for the development of projects.

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13 May 1940 ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.’ We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.
4 june 1940 We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old.

18 june 1940 Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us now. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’

20 August 1940 The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the World War by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. All hearts go out to the fighter pilots, whose brilliant actions we see with our own eyes day after day; but we must never forget that all the time, night after night, month after month, our bomber squadrons travel far into Germany, find their targets in the darkness by the highest navigational skill, aim their attacks, often under the heaviest fire, often with serious loss, with deliberate careful discrimination, and inflict shattering blows upon the whole of the technical and war-making structure of the Nazi power.

The stunning panoramic views of London featured throughout NBC’s coverage of the summer Olympic Games make it hard to imagine the devastation that occurred 72 years ago during the Blitz. While it might harsh your Olympic-induced mellow, NBC’s Tom Brokaw takes an intense look back at how the city survived the barbarism of Adolf Hitler’s Germany in the two years before the U.S. entered World War II with Their Finest Hour (Saturday, 8/7c).

The documentary precedes the final night of competition coverage that includes track and field, and gold medal finals in men’s platform diving and women’s volleyball. But it’s a worthwhile break in the action. “What England went through in 1940 and ’41 will endure forever as a lesson in courage, national resolve and the power of enlightened leadership,” Brokaw told TV Guide Magazine. “Against great odds, the UK kept Hitler from using this island nation as a launching pad for expanding his evil empire. We owe this country and that time a great debt.”

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For anyone who spends time pondering the cost of keeping the lights on and the staff paid at their houses of worship, the Mormon tithing slip has a sort of utilitarian beauty.

Worshipers pick one up at their local chapel, fill it out and hand over their money to a lay leader (having annotated the amounts paid by check, currency or coins, per the instructions on the slip). No annual bill, no passing of the plate. Keep the canary-colored carbon copy for your records.

The fact that the slip looks a bit like something your dry cleaner might give you when you drop off your clothes is part of its appeal. After all, worship is a regular part of many people’s lives. We need to pay for it somehow.

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O Lord Christ, by whose single death upon the cross the members of thy body also die to servitude and sin: Grant us so to crucify the old man, that the new may daily rise with thee in the immortal power of thy free Spirit, who liveth and reigneth with the Father and thee, one God, world without end.

–E. Milner-White

Bless our God, O peoples, let the sound of his praise be heard, who has kept us among the living, and has not let our feet slip.

–Psalm 66: 8-9

Silicon Valley, the epicentre of the global technology industry, is ruled by rationality and science. Data drives decisions, computer code solves problems. And yet there is a strong current of faith that permeates everything ”“ an extreme idealism that motivates entrepreneurs, a staunch belief among engineers that technology can cure the world’s ills and contribute to the progress of humanity.

Sometimes that belief is drawn directly from a Christian teaching. But rarely are such values expressed in the boardroom or on the demo stage. Getting the job done is paramount in Silicon Valley, so religious believers often keep quiet about their faith in public forums, for fear of alienating co-workers or customers, says Jan English-Lueck, a professor of anthropology at San José State University. “Dogmatic faith would get in the way of good work relationships,” she says, “and that is the true sin in Silicon Valley.”

But within Christian circles, a shared faith can also turn into a powerful business alliance. Christians find each other at informal prayer groups at Google and Facebook, and at fellowship gatherings for entrepreneurs, forming social bonds that segue back to the office.

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For 30 days, Mr [Joe] Garner turned to Craigslist to see if he could find ways to get the food, transportation and shelter he needed on a trip around the US.

Would strangers he contacted online be happy to help?

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The main reason I find the Mormon War of 1838 of considerable interest, though, is because Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican candidate for President, is a Mormon. Given the persecution of the Mormons in their early years and the fact that they were completely driven out of Missouri in 1839, it is remarkable that a practicing Mormon could possibly be elected President of the United States this year.

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