A federal judge has temporarily blocked enforcement of a New Orleans law recently used to arrest Christian evangelists preaching on Bourbon Street during Southern Decadence, the annual celebration of gay culture in the French Quarter. Part of the city’s recently enacted “aggressive solicitation” ordinance orders people not to “loiter or congregate on Bourbon Street for the purpose of disseminating any social, political or religious message between the hours of sunset and sunrise.”

“That’s no longer in effect,” ACLU lawyer Justin Harrison said.

Harrison sought a temporary restraining order from U.S. District Judge Eldon Fallon.

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Columbia leaders are trying to prepare the Midlands for an economy based on a leaner federal government and more white-collar jobs in the private sector.

“Everyone is rather bullish on the economy here in the Midlands, but I think nationally we’re seeing people come out of this Great Recession and focus on getting people back to work,” Mayor Steve Benjamin said. “We are aggressively seeking to attract more corporate headquarters, more white-collar jobs and make sure people are prepared for these jobs in the new economy.”

Columbia is projected to lose 16 percent of its federal jobs over the next 10 years as the overextended federal government trims down, according to a new report from IHS Global Insight, prepared for the U.S. Conference of Mayors, which is holding a meeting on workforce skills this week in Dallas.

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Check it out. For those of you following this closely, you will notice there have been significant changes and movements.

What sort of man ”“ for man it will be ”“ does the church need at the see of Canterbury to succeed Rowan Williams?

He should be learned but with a populist touch; a man of prayer as well as a man of action; a sensitive pastor with a hide of leather; a good manager but also a visionary leader with a servant heart; decisive yet subtle; a poet, a prelate, a star performer. In other words, he needs to be “a realised impossibility” as George Bernard Shaw said of William Temple when he was appointed to the job in 1942.

One thing we know is this. He will be a currently serving bishop. This makes it easy for editors to assemble the longlist of candidates and for punters to get the odds. To be honest, they look a dreary lot. But maybe that’s also a prerequisite for high office nowadays.

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Who would you like to be your next Archbishop of Canterbury? You may think this an odd way to put it. You may be Muslim, Jewish, Roman Catholic, atheist, or just vague. How can the Archbishop of Canterbury belong to you?

Yet if you live in England, he does. The Church of England is “by law established”, and so it is there for any citizen who wants it. The Queen is the Church’s Supreme Governor, and her people, regardless of what they believe, are its people. The Archbishop of Canterbury, who stands at the Church’s head, must serve them. He belongs to them.

But we shall not choose him. This process is nowadays controlled by something referred to, with varying degrees of affection, as the Wash House. The Wash House is the old laundry of Lambeth Palace, the Archbishop’s London residence, and it is now inhabited by the Crown Nominations Committee (CNC).

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In 1948, his career as scholar and teacher took a leap forward with his election as fellow and tutor of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he could exhibit his talents in a more formidable academic setting. He swiftly became known as an inspiring New Testament tutor, forming a tutorial “circus” with JR Porter, the Oriel College Old Testament specialist, and Dennis Nineham, the brilliant young chaplain of the Queen’s College, to teach doctrine. With Nineham, Evans gave a memorable series of lectures on the Gospels and the Jesus of history, while not neglecting his pastoral duties.

It was always likely that Evans would be offered a chair; after 10 years at Corpus, he was appointed to the Lightfoot professorship at Durham. However, despite relishing its historic character, he never really settled in the city and the chance to return south came in 1962 with his becoming professor of New Testament studies at King’s College London, where he remained for the next 15 years, teaching and lecturing and continuing his challenging and questioning approach to the New Testament.

In 1977 he retired to a bungalow in the village of Cuddesdon, Oxfordshire, a stone’s throw from the theological college, where he was a frequent and honoured guest. The death of his wife in 1980 was a grievous blow, but he continued to live positively, tending to the students and staff of the college and keeping a host of friendships from earlier days. To one visitor, at age 98 and over a pub lunch, to the inquiry “What’s it like being 98, Christopher?” he replied: “Part of you feels that you shouldn’t be here.”

Read it all (another from the long queue of should-have-already-been-posted material).

In “Something Understood” for BBC Radio 4, Mark Tully talks to the Archbishop of Canterbury about some of the controversies the Archbishop has negotiated throughout his time in office, and considers the premise that “discretion is the better part of valour”

Listen to it all via the link provided.

Average national reading scores on the SAT college entrance exam fell to the lowest level in four decades and only 43 percent of 2012 high school seniors who took the test showed they were fully prepared for college, according to new data released on Monday.

College-bound seniors scored an average of 496 points in reading, down one point from 2011 and a 34-point drop since 1972, the College Board, which administers the SAT test, said in a report.

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Civilians are being “terrorised” 24 hours a day by CIA drone attacks that target mainly low-level militants in north-west Pakistan, a US report says.

Rescuers treating the casualties are also being killed and wounded by second drone strikes, says the report by Stanford and New York Universities.

Drone attacks are thought to have killed hundreds of militants in Yemen and Afghanistan as well as Pakistan.

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Just when the anger and complaints from a weekend of contempt toward replacement officials couldn’t get any hotter, a disputed call trumps it all.

Replacement ref rage peaked Monday night thanks to Seattle’s Golden Tate, and a bizarre touchdown call that will be debated, questioned and re-ignite frustrations over the locked-out officials.

Tate pushed a Green Bay defender out of the way, wrestled another for the ball and was awarded a touchdown on the final play to give the Seahawks a 14-12 victory over the Packers.

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If you had to guess the profile of a person most likely to commit suicide, chances are you would conjure up the image of an angst-ridden teenage boy or young man. Ten years ago, you would have been right; men aged 15-24 were the highest risk group.

However, the Samaritans last week warned that middle-aged men are more likely to take their own life than any other group; older men now account for just under half of the 5,600 or so suicides a year in the UK.

Over the past eight years the number of younger men (while still worrying) who commit suicide has gone down, while the rate of suicides of men aged between 35 and 54 has gone up, almost unnoticed.

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The 14-minute trailer on YouTube enraged Muslims worldwide with its depiction of Muhammad as a womanizer, religious fraud and child molester. Most Egyptian Christians in the U.S. have rejected the movie and say the man and the nonprofit tied to the film are fringe players who are not well-known in the Coptic Orthodox Church, the church for the vast majority of Coptic Christians in America.

A tiny minority of U.S. Copts, however, have used their adopted nation’s free speech protections to speak out against Islam in a way that would not be tolerated in their native Egypt. The few who engage in this anti-Muslim, evangelical activism _ including those behind the movie trailer _ are fueled by that history, said Eliot Dickinson, an associate professor of political science at Western Oregon University who has written a book on U.S. Copts.

“Whoever made this film is such an outlier in their community that it’s completely unrepresentative,” Dickinson said. “But what it does is, it taps into this frustration of always being persecuted back in Egypt and let’s not downplay that. To be a Copt in Egypt now is a very, very difficult life because, especially after the Arab Spring, it’s open season.”

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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 Sergius of Moscow, we may serve thee with singleness of heart, and attain to the riches of the age to come; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

Almighty God, who hast bestowed thy grace upon thy people by thy Son Jesus Christ: Grant us, we beseech thee, to be enriched with his manifold gifts; that patiently enduring through the darkness of this world, we may be found shining like lamps in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ, when he cometh in his kingdom; to whom be praise and glory for ever and ever.

I will open my mouth in a parable; I will utter dark sayings from of old,

things that we have heard and known, that our fathers have told us.

We will not hide them from their children, but tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the LORD, and his might, and the wonders which he has wrought.

He established a testimony in Jacob, and appointed a law in Israel, which he commanded our fathers to teach to their children;

that the next generation might know them, the children yet unborn, and arise and tell them to their children,

so that they should set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments….

–Psalm 78:2-7

Parishioners of St Paul’s Sarhadi Lutheran Church in Mardan, Khyber Pakhthunkwa are calling for the Government to restore their church back to it’s “former glory.” The church which was built in 1937 provides education and health services to the local community ”“ Muslim and Christian alike ”“ and provided substantial support to victims of floods and a major earthquake in recent years, regardless of their religious affiliation.

During a local “protest”on Friday afternoon (21st Sept), over the release of and anti-Muslim movie called “The innocence of Muslims”, a mob broke into a church compound in Mardan near Pashawer, burnt down the church, and destroyed 27 homes in the church compound including the houses of two priests and the school head teacher. The mob burnt bibles and other religious artifacts including books with Islamic text and many question whether blasphemy charges will be laid against the those that have been caught.

The attack took place after the Government called a national holiday, purportedly in sympathy of protests against the film.

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Lahore Bishop Rt Rev Dr Alexander John Malik has strongly condemned the burning of a church in Mardan, reiterating that Pakistani Christians have nothing to do with the people who made the profane movie.

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A mob of hundreds of Muslim men attacked and burnt an 82-year-old church and an adjoining school in northwest Pakistan during a protest against an anti-Islam film, sparking concerns among the minority Christian community.

The mob broke through the gate of the St Paul’s Lutheran Church inside the cantonment in Mardan city, 48 km from the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa capital of Peshawar, on Friday while returning from a rally against the film Innocence Of Muslims.

According to reports from Christians in Mardan, the mob attacked and set on fire the church, St Paul’s high school, a library, a computer laboratory and houses of four clergymen, including Bishop Peter Majeed.

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Saying there are “troubling signs” of abuse in the way hospitals use electronic records to bill for Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement, the Obama administration warned in a letter to hospital associations Monday that it would not tolerate what it called “gaming the system” and vowed to vigorously prosecute doctors and hospitals implicated in fraud.

The strongly worded letter, signed by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, said that “electronic health records have the potential to save money and save lives.” But the letter continued: “There are troubling indications that some providers are using this technology to game the system, possibly to obtain payments to which they are not entitled. False documentation of care is not just bad patient care; it’s illegal.”

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