“Robert Siegel speaks with Elaine Pagels, religion professor at Princeton University, about the discovery of an ancient papyrus fragment that suggests some early Christians believed Jesus had a wife, and possibly a female disciple.”

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Every motivated, high-potential young American deserves a similar opportunity. But the majority of very smart kids lack the wherewithal to enroll in rigorous private schools. They depend on public education to prepare them for life. Yet that system is failing to create enough opportunities for hundreds of thousands of these high-potential girls and boys.

Mostly, the system ignores them, with policies and budget priorities that concentrate on raising the floor under low-achieving students. A good and necessary thing to do, yes, but we’ve failed to raise the ceiling for those already well above the floor.

Public education’s neglect of high-ability students doesn’t just deny individuals opportunities they deserve. It also imperils the country’s future supply of scientists, inventors and entrepreneurs.

Read it all and you can learn more about the author there.

Over two-thirds of teens are trying to cover their Internet tracks from their parents, and over a third of parents do not monitor their child’s Internet activity at all. These statistics should highlight the importance of Internet accountability in the home.

John Mangelaars of Microsoft EMEA said parents know their teens are tech-savvy, but this often leads parents to believe their kids don’t need ongoing advice or guidance. “It is incredibly important parents stay actively involved, talking regularly with their kids and using the parental technology tools that are available to them.”

Internet accountability is about setting this expectation of openness and honesty in the home.

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Almighty God, who didst call thy faithful servants John Coleridge Patteson and his companions to be witnesses and martyrs in the islands of Melanesia, and by their labors and sufferings didst raise up a people for thine own possession: Pour forth thy Holy Spirit upon thy Church in every land, that by the service and sacrifice of many, thy holy Name may be glorified and thy kingdom enlarged; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Dear Jesus,
help me to spread your fragrance wherever I go.
Flood my soul with your spirit and life.
Penetrate and possess my whole being so utterly
that my life may only be a radiance of yours.
Shine through me and be so in me that every soul I come in contact with
may feel your presence in my soul.

Let them look up and see no longer me, but only Jesus!
Stay with me and then I will begin to shine as you shine,
so to shine as to be a light to others.

The light, O Jesus, will be all from you; none of it will be mine.
It will be you, shining on others through me.
Let me thus praise you in the way which you love best,
by shining on those around me.
Let me preach you without preaching, not by words but by example,
by the catching force, the sympathetic influence of what I do,
the evident fullness of the love my heart bears for you. Amen.

–John Henry Newman (1901-1990)

But about midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them, and suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken; and immediately all the doors were opened and every one’s fetters were unfastened. When the jailer woke and saw that the prison doors were open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself, supposing that the prisoners had escaped. But Paul cried with a loud voice, “Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.” And he called for lights and rushed in, and trembling with fear he fell down before Paul and Silas, and brought them out and said, “Men, what must I do to be saved?” And they said, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.” And they spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all that were in his house. And he took them the same hour of the night, and washed their wounds, and he was baptized at once, with all his family. Then he brought them up into his house, and set food before them; and he rejoiced with all his household that he had believed in God.

–Acts 16:25-34

Six months ago, the Harvard men’s basketball team was a source of uncommon athletic pride on campus. The team was ranked among the nation’s top 25 for the first time, and when it earned the program’s first berth to the N.C.A.A. tournament in 66 years, students and players spilled into Harvard Square chanting and celebrating.

The next day, Harvard’s staid campus of red-brick buildings was hardly one big pep rally, but from the Harvard bookstore, which printed commemorative basketball T-shirts, to the college’s president, who called the team “a real community building force,” the university seemed to bask in an atypical glow of sporting achievement.

But last week, days after published reports implicated the co-captains of the basketball team in a widespread academic cheating scandal that may involve dozens of varsity athletes, the mood at Harvard had shifted.

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On this week’s podcast, we’re joined by Trevin Wax, who’s packed a lot into his relatively short life: missionary to Romania (where he also met his wife), Southern Baptist associate pastor, Gospel Coalition blogger, and now Managing Editor of The Gospel Project. We take a quick run through Trevin’s bio before settling down to talk about the exciting work he’s been doing in preparing Gospel-centered curriculum for the whole church. We asked Trevin to “sell us” on the package and he did a pretty good job. He also answered some of the criticisms that a project of this nature inevitably attracts.

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Hundreds of Christians from across Australia converged on the nation’s capital this week for an event called ‘Voices for Justice’ that urged politicians to play their part in halving global poverty by 2015.

Voices for Justice is organized annually by Micah Challenge Australia. The Australian campaign is part of a global network inspired by the prophet Micah’s call to “do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” (Micah 6:8).

Voices for Justice brings together participants of all ages from major denominations across Australia for worship, training and one-on-one meetings with politicians.

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(Read this for background first if you are not aware of the story).

Steven Mosher, President of the Population Research Institute, has weighed in on speculation that forced abortions in China may be halted in some areas. He says there is very little chance of that happening.

“Reports that the Chinese Party-State has ended its practice of forcibly aborting women pregnant in violation of the one-child policy are premature,” he said.

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The book’s argument is clear and simple. In the boom of economic and cultural confidence that followed World War II, the main or central or orthodox (he uses those terms interchangeably) stream of Christianity exercised commanding influence in the broader reaches of American life. Douthat supports this claim with an array of statistical data about church building and attendance, but the argument mainly rides on the rails of four case studies: the midcentury careers of the Reformed intellectual Reinhold Niebuhr, the evangelical preacher Billy Graham, the Catholic television personality Fulton J. Sheen and the Baptist social reformer Martin Luther King Jr. Though these men represented different traditions and outlooks, individually and together they exerted both extraordinary and extraordinarily constructive influence on the culture.

Enter the 1960s and things began to fall apart. Multiple influences flowed together, including the growth of political partisanship within the churches, the destabilizing (albeit liberating) effects of contraception, the relativizing impact of the new global consciousness, and the unprecedented surge of financial prosperity, which left traditional vocations less attractive and the three-day weekend more attractive. Seeking to accommodate rather than challenge those trends, uncounted Christians followed Harvey Cox and friends into the Secular City.

Those moves did not work. The mainstream churches lost members, and seminaries lost students. Yet American society, like most societies, shunned a void. And so it was that a river of heretical faiths flowed in to fill that gap

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The Bishop of Oxford, the Rt Revd John Pritchard, has written to the Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, about how the marking of GCSE English this summer has caused “great distress to some of our most vulnerable pupils”. He has also asked for reassurances that proposed changes to GCSEs generally will enable students from poorer backgrounds to continue to flourish.

In a letter which covered a range of subjects Bishop John, chair of the Church of England’s Board of Education, said: “I also need to reflect the great distress to some of our most vulnerable pupils caused by the debacle over GCSE English grades this year. This is a considerable affront to natural justice and efforts to raise the aspirations of pupils from less favoured backgrounds are not made any easier. I would very much like to hear how the changes you propose to GCSE examinations will enable students from the same demographic to achieve and move on to the next stage of their education.”

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The Bishop of Manchester, the Rt Revd Nigel McCulloch, has announced that he is to retire after more than a decade serving Greater Manchester and Rossendale, and 27 years as a Church of England Bishop.

The Bishop’s final formal thanksgiving service will take place at Manchester Cathedral on 25 November 2012, though he will remain Bishop of Manchester until 17 January 2013.

The Bishop, who will be 71 on his next birthday, will retire to Grange-Over-Sands with his wife Celia.

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Youth ministry researcher Chap Clark says, “I’m convinced that the single most important area where we’ve lost ground with kids is in our commitment and ability to ground them in God’s Word.”

As a result, Barry Shafer says, “The church today, including both the adult and teenage generations, is in an era of rampant biblical illiteracy.” Duffy Robbins takes this one step further when he says: “Our young people have become incapable of theological thinking because they don’t have any theology to think about. ”¦ And, as Paul warns us, this ”¦ leaves us as ”˜infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching’ (Ephesians 4:14).”

At the conclusion of the National Study of Youth and Religion, lead researcher Christian Smith reported: “Even though most teens are very positive about religion and say it’s a good thing, the vast majority are incredibly inarticulate about religion. ”¦ It doesn’t seem to us that many teens are being very well-educated in their faith traditions.”

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A black helicopter hovering overhead can lead those below to become worried, scared or suspicious. But when a large aircraft positioned itself over a Prince William County high school’s football field last Wednesday afternoon, students who had just been released for the day excitedly watched as a stuffed bulldog with a red-bandanna parachute emerged.

The big-eyed pup drifted to the turf, delivering a message from a junior boy to a senior girl: “Fall Fest?”

As students look to one-up their classmates for the most outrageous way to ask a girl on a date ”” in this case Patriot High School’s version of a homecoming dance ”” this boy’s approach might have set a new standard. The helicopter flew in low over the school’s grounds, stunning students and setting off a flurry of Twitter messages and photographs before its covert mission was complete….

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God has revived the Church in the past: historical scholarship shows movements of church growth in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and in the Church in contemporary China. Britain is not predestined to become more and more secular. History does not consist of inexorable processes.

To say all this does not mean that there are no problems in seeking a theology of church growth. Talk of church growth can be as redolent of neo-liberalism as of the Christian faith. But the way forward is not to shy away from theological analysis of church growth. It is to develop a thought-out theology.

This would recognise that growth means other things as well as numerical growth. But a theology of church growth would dare to value highly the numerical growth of congregations, and face the theological questions posed by numerical decline. There is some­thing too fatalistic, and too con­venient, about the indifference of many theologians and church leaders to discussing church growth.

–David Goodhew in the September 7, 2012, Church Times (emphasis mine)

Delivering his sermon whose theme was kings and judges, Mr. E.L.C. Chirwa, a lay leader at St. Paul’s Anglican Church in Lilongwe, said that it was the responsibility of Christians to pray for both religious and political leaders for them not to go astray.

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With Muslim leaders in many countries calling for a global law barring what they call insults to Islam, the main non-Catholic world Christian grouping on Monday said just such a law in Pakistan is used to persecute other religions.

Pakistan’s “Blasphemy Law” has driven the country’s religious minorities – Christians, Hindus and Ahmadis, a dissenting Islamic group – into “a state of fear and terror”, said the World Council of Churches (WCC), organisers of a 3-day conference on the law.

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After hitting $54,489 in 2007 (inflation adjusted), median household income has dropped by nearly $4,500:

2007 – $54,489
2008 – $52,546
2009 – $52,195
2010 – $50,831
2011 – $50,054

Median household income is defined by the U.S. Census Bureau as “the amount which divides the income distribution into two equal groups, half having income above that amount, and half having income below that amount.”

Read it all and you can find the full census report there.

A newly revealed piece of papyrus offers fresh evidence that some early Christians believed Jesus was married, according to a Harvard Divinity School professor.

A fourth-century codex in Coptic quotes Jesus referring to “my wife,” Karen King, a scholar of early Christianity, said on Tuesday (Sept. 18). It is the only extant text in which Jesus is explicitly portrayed as betrothed, according to King.

King is calling the receipt-sized slip of papyrus “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife.” She believes it was originally written in Greek, and later translated into Coptic, an Egyptian language.

Read it all and another article is there.

Almighty God, who didst call thy servant Theodore of Tarsus from Rome to the see of Canterbury, and didst give him gifts of grace and wisdom to establish unity where there had been division, and order where there had been chaos: Create in thy Church, we pray, by the operation of the Holy Spirit, such godly union and concord that it may proclaim, both by word and example, the Gospel of the Prince of Peace; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

O most loving and tender Father, preserve us from all faithless cares and selfish anxieties, and help us to cast our burdens upon thee, who hast given us assurance of thy care for us, and hast promised to supply the needs of all who seek first thy kingdom; for the sake of thy Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ.

Blessed be the LORD, the God of Israel, who alone does wondrous things. Blessed be his glorious name for ever; may his glory fill the whole earth! Amen and Amen!

–Psalm 72:18-19

Over 200 people from the UK’s leading businesses met in London this morning to search for a new blueprint for doing better business in Great Britain. They were seeking to unite corporate purpose with personal values so that businesses better serve society. The conference explored the themes of the business need for change, the inevitability of a conflict between profit maximisation and developing common good, and the distinctive practical contribution of a faith based ethical framework to personal and corporate responsibility.

The conference was facilitated by the Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols.

“I think one of the most vivid images that we had this morning was that a duty of business is to contribute to the adhesiveness of a society ”“ to its ”˜glue’ is the phrase that we used ”“ because if a society doesn’t have some glue, then it’s bad for business,” Archbishop Nichols said. “Because it’s difficult to understand that society. It’s difficult to get to appreciate what its needs are and what therefore what business can creatively respond to.”

Listen to it all (a little over 9 minutes).

Islamists almost by definition have a vested interest in continuously fanning the flames of Muslim victimhood. For Islamists, wrath against the West is the basis for their claim to the support of Muslim masses, taking attention away from societal political and economic failures. For example, the 57 member states of the Organization of Islamic Conference account for one-fifth of the world’s population but their combined gross domestic product is less than 7% of global output””a harsh reality for which Islamists offer no solution.

Even after recent developments that were labeled the Arab Spring, few Muslim-majority countries either fulfill””or look likely to””the criteria for freedom set by the independent group Freedom House. Mainstream discourse among Muslims blames everyone but themselves for this situation. The image of an ascendant West belittling Islam with the view to eliminate it serves as a convenient explanation for Muslim weakness.

Once the Muslim world embraces freedom of expression, it will be able to recognize the value of that freedom even for those who offend Muslim sensibilities. More important: Only in a free democratic environment will the world’s Muslims be able to debate the causes of their powerlessness, which stirs in them greater anger than any specific action on the part of Islam’s Western detractors.

Until then, the U.S. would do well to remember Osama bin Laden’s comment not long after the Sept. 11 attacks: “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.” America should do nothing that enables Islamists to portray the nation as the weak horse.

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Read it all (names on bottom right, click on them to get a lot more information).

[Robert] McKee doesn’t believe in God. But if he did, he’d have to believe in hell.

He said that anyone who believes in God and says there is no hell or that hell isn’t forever is a “wussy.”

“If choice doesn’t have any meaning, life doesn’t have any meaning,” he said in the film. “By eliminating hell, these people are sucking the meaning out of life.”

[Filmmaker Kevin] Miller, who attends an Anglican church in Canada, also believes that people have to face the consequences for their actions. But that doesn’t mean that they have to be punished forever.

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The pope also demanded that everyone must have the right to freely choose their own religion, and to practice it publicly, “without endangering one’s life.”

He said the time has come “to move beyond tolerance to religious freedom.”

Further, the pope seemed to link the deprival of religious liberty to Christian flight from the Middle East, warning that the long-standing decline in the region’s Christian footprint means “human, cultural, and religious impoverishment.”

“A Middle East without Christians, or with only a few Christians, would no longer be the Middle East,” the pope said, calling on political leaders to avoid the advent of a “monochromatic Middle East” without religious diversity.

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The number of multicultural churches — those in which at least one in five people is from a different ethnic group — is still relatively tiny. Even within diverse denominations such as the Assemblies of God, where about a third of the churches have minority congregations, or the Southern Baptists, where 20% of churches have minority congregations, only a small percentage meet that one-in-five criteria.

Mark DeYmaz, pastor of Mosaic Church, a diverse non-denominational church based in Little Rock, says he believes the number is going to grow. DeYmaz said his congregation of 600 is about 40% white, 33% African-American, 15% Hispanic, with the rest from a variety of backgrounds.

When Mosaic opened in 2001, DeYmaz said he knew of few diverse churches. Now he knows of several hundred.

“When we get to heaven, the kingdom of God isn’t going to be segregated,” he said. “So why should the local church be segregated?”

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When pregnant women in Poland decide to have an abortion, they take a common but highly secretive step. “I found some phone numbers in the newspaper; I called around,” explains a young blonde woman named Jola. The doctors are listed anonymously in the classifieds section offering to “induce menstruation” or provide “full service.” Everybody understands.

“You cannot use the words ‘abortion’ or ‘termination’; rather, ‘I am pregnant ”“ can you help me?’ Something like that,” she says, speaking of her illegal abortion in the 2009 Polish documentary, “Underground Women’s State.” None of the seven women interviewed give their full name and all are well disguised.

Although the topic has long been taboo in Poland, leaders on both sides of the abortion debate now acknowledge the existence of this hidden, private practice. And this month, the Polish parliament is expected to vote on whether to liberalize its abortion policy, one of the strictest in Europe.

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