She has been arrested 40 or 50 times for acts of civil disobedience and once served six months in prison. In the Nevada desert, she and other peace activists knelt down to block a truck rumbling across the government’s nuclear test site, prompting the authorities to take her into custody.

She gained so much attention that the Energy Department, which maintains the nation’s nuclear arsenal, helped pay for an oral history in which she described her upbringing and the development of her antinuclear views.

Now, Sister Megan Rice, 82, a Roman Catholic nun of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, and two male accomplices have carried out what nuclear experts call the biggest security breach in the history of the nation’s atomic complex, making their way to the inner sanctum of the site where the United States keeps crucial nuclear bomb parts and fuel.

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Despite heroic stories of the protection given by members of Syria’s Sunni majority to Christian shopkeepers, Christian refugees are fleeing into northern Lebanon as fast as Iraq’s three million refugees are pouring from Syria back into Iraq. Indeed, one of the reasons that Russia has refused to abandon President Assad is its feeling of responsibility for Syria’s Orthodox Christian community.

Meanwhile some 90 per cent of the Christians of Homs are said to have fled to Jordan recently, persecuted by a group claiming to belong to Al Qaeda. And among the four members of President Assad’s inner circle killed by the Free Syrian Army on 17 July was General Daoud Rajiha, Syria’s Eastern Orthodox defence minister. The papal nuncio, Archbishop Mario Zenari, described the conflict as “dragging the country towards, destruction, towards unspeakable suffering and death”.
Some of the rebels today angrily accuse Syria’s Christians of collaborating with the regime but a fair number of Christians have supported the rebellion which began as a mere protest movement against a still popular President Assad in March 2011.

It is a far cry from his taking of power 12 years ago…

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First, the reply [from Cardinal Marc Ouellet, the Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops] noted our efforts to defend marriage from attempts to weaken it, especially through last summer’s sadly successful state law which presumed to change the immutable definition of marriage as the lifelong, faithful, lifegiving union of one man and one woman. The Holy See shared our disappointment over the result, but did commend the Catholic community here for vigorously exercising its duty as believers and as loyal citizens in defending marriage.

Secondly, Cardinal Ouellet, on behalf of the Apostolic See, expressed concern about threats to religious freedom in the very country that has been looked to as the guarantor and defender of that first of our liberties given us by God.

Thirdly, and soberly, the letter brought up the continuing painful effects of the sexual abuse crisis, noting how the survivors, their families, the faithful, our priests””the overwhelming majority living virtuously””and the entire Church have suffered…

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….for this very practical woman there is also a practical reason to start contingency planning for a break-up: it is looking ever more likely. Greece is buckling (see article). Much of southern Europe is also in pain, while the northern creditor countries are becoming ever less forgiving: in a recent poll a narrow majority of Germans favoured bringing back the Deutschmark. A chaotic disintegration would be a calamity. Even as Mrs Merkel struggles to find a solution, her aides are surely also sensibly drawing up a plan to prepare for the worst.

This week our briefing imagines what such a “Merkel memorandum” might say (see article). It takes a German point of view, but its logic would apply to the other creditor countries. Its conclusions are stark””not least in terms of which euro member it makes sense to keep or drop. But the main message is one of urgency. For the moment, breaking up the euro would be more expensive than trying to hold it together. But if Europe just keeps on arguing, that calculation will change….

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KIM LAWTON (Managing Editor and Guest Anchor): There has been an outpouring of interfaith sympathy and support for the US Sikh community after last Sunday’s attack (August 5) at a temple near Milwaukee that took the lives of six worshipers. In what officials called an act of domestic terrorism, a gunman with neo-Nazi ties opened fire as local Sikhs””or “sicks” as some adherents call themselves””had gathered for a worship service. Religious groups across the spectrum condemned the attack. Many communities held prayer services and vigils to remember the victims and to pray for religious tolerance. Groundswell, the social action initiative of Auburn Seminary in New York, gathered thousands of messages of hope and healing for Milwaukee’s Sikh community. They called the project “We Are All Sikhs Today.” Groundswell’s director, Valarie Kaur, who is Sikh, delivered the messages in person. She joins me now from Milwaukee.

Valarie, thank you for being with us. Why did you feel it was important to bring these messages?

VALARIE KAUR (Groundswell, Auburn Seminary): Well, …this is a tragedy not just for the Sikh community, but for all Americans, and I know that many Americans were hungry to express their love and support in some way.

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Finding enough qualified men and women to protect America’s cyber networks stands as one of the central challenges to America’s cybersecurity. Even in the computer age, people are essential. In the field of cybersecurity, they are also lacking.

Cybersecurity breaches cost America billions of dollars a year. Meanwhile, cyberattacks on America’s critical infrastructure increased 17-fold between 2009 and 2011. To defend the cybersecurity of both private businesses and government agencies, it is time for a serious geek surge.

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The New York Times’ [February 2012]… story that more than half of births to American women under age 30 now occur outside of marriage, and the conversation spurred by Charles Murray’s new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 ”“ 2010, have shifted public gaze to a population largely ignored in the scholarly literature of the past few decades: the 58 percent of Americans with a high school diploma but no college degree””what some might call “working class.”

Nonmarital births have been common among Americans without a high school diploma for at least thirty years: as the 2010 State of Our Unions reports, in 1982 33 percent of births to women without a high school diploma occurred outside of marriage, compared to 13 percent of births to high-school educated women. But in the past thirty years, nonmarital births to high-school educated women surged: in the late 2000s’, 44 percent of births to high-school educated women occurred outside of marriage. (By comparison, only 6 percent of births to college-educated women were outside of marriage.) It is the behavioral changes of this “moderately educated middle”””the 58 percent of high-school educated Americans””that put the “normal” into “the new normal” that the Times describes.

Furthermore, the “new normal” is not driven primarily by an increase in single mothers, but in the number of cohabiting couples….

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The narrative that has emerged in both media coverage and public discourse since… [the day of the violent shooting in Wisconsin] has been one of religious mistaken identity. It presumes that the killer, identified as a white supremacist named Wade M. Page, may have shot the Sikhs because he ignorantly believed they were Muslim.

Such a story line is accurate as far as it goes. Hundreds of times since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Sikhs have been the victims of bias crimes. The perpetrators have invariably assumed that because Sikh men wear turbans and have beards they are Muslims, even specifically Taliban. How terrible it is that it has taken the slayings in Wisconsin to serve as a national teachable moment about the theology and practices of the Sikh religion.

Yet the mistaken-identity narrative carries with it an unspoken, even unexamined premise. It implies that somehow the public would have ”” even should have ”” reacted differently had Mr. Page turned his gun on Muslims attending a mosque. It suggests that such a crime would be more explicable, more easily rationalized, less worthy of moral outrage.

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Fiscal woes that have caused high-profile bankruptcies in California are surfacing across the country as municipalities struggle with uneven growth and escalating health and pension costs following the worst recession since the 1930s.

Budget crunches already have prompted Michigan lawmakers to authorize emergency fiscal managers, and led the mayor of Scranton, Pa., to temporarily cut the pay of all city workers to the minimum wage.

In a majority of the nation’s 19,000 municipalities””urban and rural, big and small””stagnant property tax revenues, less aid from states and rising costs are forcing less dramatic but still difficult steps.

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In choosing Mr. Ryan, Mr. Romney was looking for a running mate to help shake up the race in the final three months of the race. He is seen as a rising star in the Republican Party and a favorite among conservative activists who view him as deeply committed to their fiscal principles.

But Mr. Ryan, a member of Congress since 1999, is also a lightning rod for Democrats who view him as the epitome of the Republican vision of deep cuts in social spending and entitlement programs. Unlike Mr. Romney, Mr. Ryan has spent nearly his entire career in Washington either in or around the federal government.

As chairman of the House Budget Committee, he pushed his colleagues to boldly stake out an uncompromising position on the nation’s fiscal burdens.

Read it all. (For those who are blog history buffs, you may be interested to recall Barack Obama opts for ”˜bare-knuckle fighter’ Joe Biden).

O God, whose blessed Son became poor that we through his poverty might be rich: Deliver us, we pray thee, from an inordinate love of this world, that, inspired by the devotion of thy servant Clare, we may serve thee with singleness of heart, and attain to the riches of the age to come; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and ever.

O gracious and holy Father, give us wisdom to perceive thee, diligence to seek thee, patience to wait for thee, eyes to behold thee, a heart to meditate upon thee, and a life to proclaim thee; through the power of the Spirit of Jesus Christ our Lord.

–Saint Benedict (c.480”“543)

A Psalm of the Sons of Korah. A Song. On the holy mount stands the city he founded; the LORD loves the gates of Zion more than all the dwelling places of Jacob. Glorious things are spoken of you, O city of God. Among those who know me I mention Rahab and Babylon; behold, Philistia and Tyre, with Ethiopia–“this one was born there,” they say. And of Zion it shall be said, “This one and that one were born in her”; for the Most High himself will establish her. The LORD records as he registers the peoples, “This one was born there.” Singers and dancers alike say, “All my springs are in you.”

-Psalm 87

The Orthodox community’s engagement and population, meanwhile, continue to grow. Orthodox households now make up a third of the Jewish population in New York and its suburbs. The ultra-Orthodox birthrate, meanwhile, is three times that of non-Orthodox Jewish New Yorkers.

But what about the rest of the Jewish population? How can they be offered a sense of community and meaning? What learning could galvanize non-Orthodox Jewish minds, stir our hearts, nourish our souls? How can we include the voices of all those who want to engage in Jewish study, women and men?

I propose a different page for Jewish learning, one that is open to the larger world and bears the impact of modern thinking. It would cleave faithfully to texts, rituals, history and faith while being informed by art, music, drama, poetry, politics and law.

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The York Mystery Plays, a theatrical tradition dating back to the 14th Century, have been resurrected in an epic production involving an Olivier Award-winning director and 1,700 enthusiastic local people.

It is with a mixture of pride and exhaustion that the two directors of the York Mystery Plays talk about the numbers of people taking part in their production, which retells Biblical stories on a near-Biblical scale.

There are two casts of 250 amateur performers, with bricklayers appearing alongside lawyers and children with their grandparents, who have between them been rehearsing for six nights a week for the past four months.

Read it all and make sure to enjoy mae sure to enjoy all six pictures.

Here in the cradle of the Taliban movement, Faizulhaq Mushkani sold his land for $600,000 last year to buy equipment to open a packaging factory in a booming industrial park.

The industrial park””powered by military-run electrical generators””is a pillar of the U.S. strategy against the Afghan insurgency. The arrival of reliable electricity in late 2010 revitalized Kandahar. More than 100 new factories have sprouted.

These days, however, Mr. Mushkani and fellow entrepreneurs are grappling with a fatal flaw in their business plans: They expected the Americans to stick around longer. But, now, with U.S. forces preparing to depart Kandahar next year, the American electricity will disappear, too.

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Influential church historian Diarmaid MacCulloch said he believes Christianity faces a bright future, but predicted the Roman Catholic Church will undergo a major schism over its moral and social teaching.

“Christianity, the world’s largest religion, is rapidly expanding — by all indications, its future is very bright,” said MacCulloch, 60, professor of church history at Oxford University and an Anglican deacon. His latest book, “Silence in Christian History,” will be published in the fall by Penguin.

MacCulloch said in an interview that “there are also many conflicts” within Christianity, “and these are particularly serious in the Roman Catholic church, which seems on the verge of a very great split over the Vatican’s failure to listen to European Catholics.”

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With their finances strained, some higher-earning parents are making their children pick up more of the tab. Among families earning $100,000 or more, students paid 23% of their college costs in 2012 through loans, income and savings, according to Sallie Mae, up from 14% in 2009; the share covered by parents fell to 52% from 61%.

“The boomers are the first generation shifting the cost of college to their kids,” both through increased student borrowing and reduced taxpayer support for higher education, says Susan Dynarski, a professor of education and public policy at the University of Michigan.

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Many parents and clinicians now reject corrective therapy, making this the first generation to allow boys to openly play and dress (to varying degrees) in ways previously restricted to girls ”” to exist in what one psychologist called “that middle space” between traditional boyhood and traditional girlhood. These parents have drawn courage from a burgeoning Internet community of like-minded folk whose sons identify as boys but wear tiaras and tote unicorn backpacks. Even transgender people preserve the traditional binary gender division: born in one and belonging in the other. But the parents of boys in that middle space argue that gender is a spectrum rather than two opposing categories, neither of which any real man or woman precisely fits.

“It might make your world more tidy to have two neat and separate gender possibilities,” one North Carolina mother wrote last year on her blog, “but when you squish out the space between, you do not accurately represent lived reality. More than that, you’re trying to ”˜squish out’ my kid.”

The impassioned author of that blog, Pink Is for Boys, is careful to conceal her son’s identity, as were the other parents interviewed for this article. As much as these parents want to nurture and defend what makes their children unique and happy, they also fear it will expose their sons to rejection. Some have switched schools, changed churches and even moved to try to shield their children. That tension between yielding to conformity or encouraging self-expression is felt by parents of any child who differs from the norm. But parents of so-called pink boys feel another layer of anxiety: given how central gender is to identity, they fear the wrong parenting decision could devastate their child’s social or emotional well-being. The fact that there is still substantial disagreement among prominent psychological professionals about whether to squelch unconventional behavior or support it makes those decisions even more wrenching.

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

The most eye-opening and persuasive parts of the book explore the revenue and benefits to be had from cannabis without a single joint’s being lighted. Throughout human history, cultures from Mongolia to Peru have used the non-psychoactive cannabis plant for food, shelter, clothing and medicine. Early drafts of the Declaration of Independence were written on hemp paper, and the covered pioneer wagons that took America westward were made of cannabis fiber. In 1942, cannabis prohibition was suspended because of a shortage in industrial supply during the war, and the government actually encouraged farmers to grow it, using a propaganda film, “Hemp for Victory.”

The place industrial cannabis is not found yet, Fine points out, is in the above­ground American economy, thanks to its listing as a Schedule I narcotic. The Drug Enforcement Administration’s official stance is that it has no medical value at all: “Smoked marijuana has not withstood the rigors of science ”” it is not medicine, and it is not safe.” O.K., Fine seems to say, but tell that to the doctors with evidence of its ability to shrink tumors and ease the effects of chemotherapy; or to the seniors of Orange County who depend on medical marijuana to treat their arthritis, and the doctor who uses it to treat his glaucoma; or to the 30-year-old Iraq war veteran with the shrapnel injuries who thanks God every day for this drug. It is prescription drugs that are now the leading cause of fatal drug overdoses ”” more than 26,000 each year. Also each year, over 23,000 Americans die of alcohol-related causes. None have died from cannabis alone.

As I said, the issue is loaded. And yet the side that has all the load never seems to win in America….

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Christian households have also enabled the families of foreign athletes to experience “the heart of British home-life” by providing accommodation during the Games, under the Homestay initiative organised by More than Gold.

“Jesus Christ was someone who served people, who met their needs, joined in their celebrations,” Canon Hugh Dibbins, a retired priest, told Radio 4’s Sunday programme this week. “Stories of what happened in the 2012 Olympics are passed on from generation to generation, and contacts continue, even though the Games finish.”

One story likely to make its way across the ocean is the tale of the Madagascan Olympic athletes and their families who landed at Luton with no luggage. On opening the door to guests with only the clothes they stood up in, Sister Anne Spilberg, part of the Homestay scheme, went to Brentwood Roman Catholic Church to ask for help. The immediate donations included 20 bags of clothes.

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The Prelate of the Anglican Church, Archbishop Nicholas Okoh, in an interview with one of our correspondents in Abuja, warned that the country was drifting to anarchy.

He said, “At the rate we are going, the country is drifting fast into anarchy and if people now capitalise on that situation, it will degenerate to dog eat dog.

“If dog eats dog, that is the end of the country. So for me, we go back to government whose responsibility it is constitutionally to provide defence for the people.”

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Following the General Convention, most of you heard me read from the pulpit (or have had an opportunity to read) Bishop Lawrence’s letter to the Diocese. In that letter, he stated that The Episcopal Church had now “crossed a line” in terms of changing the doctrine, discipline and worship of the Episcopal Church in such a way that his own personal conscience could not go. Asking for a point of personal privilege, he addressed the House of Bishops, stating the issues on his heart, and then left the Convention floor, returning early with five of the seven Deputies from our Diocese (Fr. John Burwell and Mr. Lonnie Hamilton chose to stay.)

On Wednesday, the Bishop addressed his clergy for the first time directly. We were shown a film giving a pastoral rationale for the changes in Canon Law that allow transgendered persons (those who have been surgically altered from their birthassigned gender) to have full access to all positions in this Church, including ordination to the priesthood (and one would deduce, the episcopate). It seemed to me that this change was far more troubling to our bishop than the proposed rites for same-sex blessing. The same-sex blessing rites are proposed, provisional, and can only be used with the permission of the local diocesan. In other words, Bishop Lawrence is not in any way bound by them. But these canonical changes are permanent, and it was at this point that the bishop simply said to us, I think I have crossed a bridge.

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Almighty God, who didst call thy deacon Laurence to serve thee with deeds of love, and didst give him the crown of martyrdom: Grant, we beseech thee, that we, following his example, may fulfil thy commandments by defending and supporting the poor, and by loving thee with all our hearts, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

O Heavenly Father, who hast given us a commandment, that we should believe on the name of thy Son Jesus Christ, and love one another: Give us also grace to keep this commandment, that we may evermore dwell in thee, and thou in us, in the power of thy Holy Spirit; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord.

Now six stone jars were standing there, for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus said to them, “Fill the jars with water.” And they filled them up to the brim. He said to them, “Now draw some out, and take it to the steward of the feast.” So they took it. When the steward of the feast tasted the water now become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the steward of the feast called the bridegroom and said to him, “Every man serves the good wine first; and when men have drunk freely, then the poor wine; but you have kept the good wine until now.”

–John 2:6-10

Contrary to Fr Christopher Seton’s reported comments (“New world order as Anglican priests move to a Catholic environment”, The Age, 8/8), the Anglican Church respects those who cannot accept, in good conscience, the ordination of women to the priesthood and the episcopate….Moreover, Fr Seton’s reported assertion “that you’ve got to believe in same-sex marriage” to remain in the Anglican Church is inaccurate and misplaced.

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Christopher Seton leaves one job on September 2 and starts another six days later. In one sense it is exactly the same job, and in another it is completely different. Father Seton is one of four Anglican priests who will be ordained into the Catholic Church in Melbourne on September 8.

Father Seton holds his last service at All Saints Kooyong on September 2. Then he and – so far as he is aware – his entire congregation will regather a week later at the Holy Cross Catholic Church in Caulfield South. There he will minister to the same people (and, doubtless, some new ones), using the same liturgy and singing the same hymns. But now they will be on the opposite side of a once-bitter sectarian divide.

”In a sense, we are just moving office,” Father Seton said yesterday. But he, along with Fathers James Grant, Ramsay Williams and Neil Fryer, will now be priests in the Ordinariate of Our Lady of the Southern Cross, the Catholic Church’s new Anglican wing set up by Pope Benedict for those who felt disenfranchised by the ordination of women and other developments in the Anglican Church.

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