“We now have a cultural Christmas and a Christian Christmas,” [Professor of religious studies at Morningside College in Iowa] Mr. Bruce Forbes said.

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RICKY MCKINNIE, vocals: The Blind Boys is a group that’s not blind, they just can’t see and that means they might have lost their sight, but they never lost their direction.

Music: I shall not be moved.

CARTER: We feel that we were called by God to do this work.

Music: When God shut Noah in the grand old ark, he put a rainbow in the clouds.

MCKINNIE: No matter what the situation is, I’ll find a way. God will find a way. Like the bible says, “If you trust in the Lord, he’ll make a way” and that’s what He’s done for the Blind Boys.

Read or watch and listen to it all.

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U.S. investors are generally wary about stocks as a way for Americans to build wealth, as 37% say the stock market is an “excellent” or “good” way for average Americans to grow their assets, while 46% consider it “only fair,” and 16% call it “poor.” Large class investors — those with $100,000 or more in investable assets — are significantly more upbeat about the market’s value as a wealth generator than those with less than $100,000 of such assets, but still only 50% rate it positively.

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January 27: A Statement from the C of E College of Bishops on the Pilling Report

December 21: Archbishop Stanley Ntagali comments on the Crisis in the Church of England

December 18: [Anglican Ink] Lament from London: a dying church in England [Pilling]

December 12: Global South Statement In Response To The Pilling Report

December 7: Archbishop Wabukala: GAFCON Chairman’s Advent Letter

November 28: CofE: Pilling Report Recommends Breach of Lambeth Resolution 1:10

The Asian continent has two majority-Christian nations. One, obviously, is the Philippines. Few nonspecialists would know the other example: East Timor. Lying between Australia and Indonesia, it is one of the world’s newest countries””in fact the first new nation of the present century. East Timor is also definitively Christian, with a reported Catholic population of 97 percent. Those bare-bones facts, though, conceal a heroic and often dreadful history, recalling one of the world’s worst atrocities of the late 20th century.

For centuries, East Timor was a Portuguese colony. (The word Timor simply means “east.”) In 1974, a leftist-led revolution in Portugal precipitated a global crisis at the height of the cold war. The Soviet Union and Cuba staged a massive move into Portugal’s African colonies, and the West feared that Timorese liberation forces might create a communist haven in the South Pacific. To prevent that disaster, the United States and its allies supported an Indonesian invasion of East Timor in late 1975.

Political takeovers can take many forms, but this was no simple case of a change of occupiers, with a set of new flags. During their occupation, from 1975 through 1999, the Indonesians ruled with hideous brutality.

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[The] Rev. Steven Maki is the new face of St. Paul’s Anglican Parish on the southwest coast.

He has returned to Newfoundland, the place he was ordained, after several years working on the streets in Boston.

Maki grew up in Lunenburg, Mass., outside of Boston, where he was raised as a Lutheran and a Congregationalist.

He eventually converted to the Anglican Church, saying he was drawn to its traditional elements and considered his faith to be a sort of a bridge between his mother’s and father’s beliefs.

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@pastorbrady: God’s peace and healing to the family of Claire Davis. #arapahoehigh Our hearts are broken at news of her death.” Lord, help.

The Book of Common Prayer and its liturgical descendants are the elements of Anglicanism that will be preserved for former Anglicans and Episcopalians who have entered the Catholic Church will preserve in the new Anglican Ordinariate, an official at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) has reported.

In November 2009, Pope Benedict released the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus, creating a permanent home for Anglicans who wish to be reconciled to the Catholic Church but hoped to retain portions of their “Anglican patrimony”. In an interview published in the December issue of The Portal, Mgr. Steven Lopes of the CDF defined this distinctive “patrimony”.

“We here have thought a lot about what constitutes Anglican patrimony, particularly as it involves the liturgy, and we have a working definition. It is to say that ”˜Anglican liturgical patrimony is that which has nourished the Catholic Faith, within the Anglican tradition during the time of ecclesiastical separation, and has given rise to this new desire for full communion’,” Mgr. Lopes said.

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Augustine says the “order of love” (ordo amoris) is the “brief and true definition of virtue.” According to this order, the human person must love everything in creation according to its proper relationship to God, which means loving God above all creatures and not inordinately loving any creature as the human person’s ultimate end. Living according to the order of love presents one with “the promise that human life might participate in the very trinitarian life and mutual love of God.”

Augustine also speaks of an “order of charity” that ideally “flourishes between husband and wife.” This spousal love is part of the overarching order of love that orients the spouses toward participating in the life and love of the Trinity. Thus the order of charity that ought to flourish between spouses is one aspect of “believers living as a community of mutual love [who] should themselves be the eschatological appearing of God’s own mutual, trinitarian love in history.” In this article I will apply what Augustine says about the order of love in general to the order of love that he says should exist between spouses to show the validity Augustine’s thought has for living out married life today.

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O Lord God, who by thy holy apostle hast taught us always to rejoice in thee, and to be anxious for nothing: Grant, we beseech thee, that, making our requests known to thee, we may be partakers of the peace that passeth all understanding, which thou hast promised us in thy Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him. He who believes in him is not condemned; he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one who does evil hates the light, and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. But he who does what is true comes to the light, that it may be clearly seen that his deeds have been wrought in God.

–John 3:16-21

Listen to it if you wish and the Order of Service is here

The “Nine Lessons with Carols” format was devised by the first Bishop of Truro, Edward White Benson, in 1880. It was adapted and introduced to King’s College, Cambridge by its then Dean, Eric Milner-White, in 1918. The live broadcast of “Nine Lessons” from King’s College on Christmas Eve each year is listened to by millions of people all over the world but many will be unaware of its Cornish roots.

The original music from Christmas Eve 1880 included carols that are no longer in common use, as well as old-fashioned harmonisations of familiar Christmas tunes and parts of Handel’s “Messiah”. The eight hundred people who attended this reconstruction were issued with copies of the original order of service which invited them to join in with certain choruses, as well as giving them directions to kneel and stand in unusual places. These, along with Benson’s sometimes eccentric dynamic markings, were faithfully observed.

…it sets life imprisonment as the penalty for a homosexual act in which one of the partners is infected with HIV, for sex with minors and the disabled, and for repeated sexual offenses among consenting adults, according to the office of a spokeswoman for Uganda’s parliament.

The bill also prescribes a seven-year jail term for a person who “conducts a marriage ceremony” for same-sex couples.

Lawmakers passed the bill unanimously, with no one voicing an objection.

President Yoweri Museveni must sign the bill within 30 days for it to become law.

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From his Christmas Message
“For to us a child is born, a son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall called Wonderful counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace” (Isaiah 9:6)

If you have not realized that this is good news personally FOR YOU, then I encourage you this Christmas to take time to realize that the only thing keeping you from knowing how close Jesus is to you is your own sin. Let this be the Christmas that is not just about meat and eating and new clothes. Let this be the Christmas when you invited Jesus to be in your heart. So close to you that he is in your heart, living there as your Saviour and Lord.

This is the good news that we boldly proclaim and that we are not ashamed of. We believe the Bible is the authoritative Word of God and trustworthy to tell us the Truth. Unfortunately, some in the Anglican Communion members no longer believe the Bible is the infallible Word of God. That’s why I and other Archbishops from the Global South, Sydney, and the Anglican Church in North America organized the second Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) in October in Nairobi. We were altogether 1358 delegates worldwide. These included 169 delegates from Uganda. We are so determined to refuse anything that contradicts the Biblical authority without fear or compromise. I appeal to all Ugandans to join us in this struggle to protect our God given rights.

We are very concerned that our mother Church of England is moving in a very dangerous direction. They are following the path the Americans in the Episcopal Church took that caused us to break communion with them ten years ago.

The Church of England is now recommending that same-sex relationships be blessed in the church. Even though they are our mother, I want you to know that we cannot and we will not go in that direction. We will resist them and, with our other GAFCON brothers and sisters, will stand with those in the Church of England who continue to uphold the Bible as the Word of God and promote Biblical faith and morality.

In our own Church, I call upon all people to let Jesus be the Prince of Peace and strive to maintain the unity of peace by resisting going to law courts to resolve conflicts. Please, let us sit together and seek the mind of Christ for all our various concerns.

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Chicago in winter is not known for being a great place to camp out, much less on top of a building, much less on a former bordello.

Pastor Corey Brooks spent nearly three months in arguably one of the worst campsites ever: the roof of the Super Motel. Even so, he found inspiration in his rooftop tent.

The run-down motor hotel across the street from his church had long served as a hub of drug dealing and prostitution. To shut it down, Pastor Brooks and his parishioners protested every Friday and Saturday night for a year and a half.

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“Every cough and splutter is played out on social media nowadays, from the birth of the future King to the death of a former Prime Minister. Here we round up the tweets that tell the story of 2013….”

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We recommend Doc Martin starring Martin Clunes–funny, touching, and full of the colourful context of an English town.

What would you recommend and why would you recommend it? The more specific you can be the better it is for the rest of us–KSH.

The 18-year-old Belgian-born player was on the fringes of the first-team squad last term but an impressive pre-season led new United boss David Moyes to consider him as a starter.

He scored twice in his first start at Sunderland in October but since then has largely had to bide his time until Saturday’s well-taken 36th minute goal after evading the offside trap.

“Adnan Januzaj is doing really well. We are always hard on him, we always want more but he is doing remarkably well. He can score goals, he is a real talent,” Moyes told the BBC.

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….and among traditional Christians, precisely who doesn’t take that passage seriously when it comes to talking about the reality of sin in this fallen world? Catholics? The Eastern Orthodox? Most of the world’s Lutherans and Anglicans? Pentecostal believers (the fastest growing flock in worldwide Christianity)?

Pretty quickly, CNN sets this up as a rather typical battle between a country-fried preacher (or two) and a real biblical scholar. Yes, that is ONE biblical scholar, from one seminary.

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What Terry doesn’t say is that the MOST revealing thing about the article is that CNN believes their own statement about their own article (“best, fairest, article on Christians and homosexuality you’ll ever read. Fact.”) when it so clearly is at odds with the truth–KSH.

…while we need to acknowledge the things Robertson got wrong, we do not need to pretend that his dismissal from A&E had mainly to do with any of those three things. The A&E network does not have a track record of concern about remarks that are sexually explicit or pastorally insensitive. And I suspect that A&E would not have pulled the plug if this were merely a matter of his remarks about growing up in Louisiana. None of these by themselves caused the offense that has led to the current uproar.

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Yogi Omar was so strapped for cash that he nearly didn’t stop to help a scruffy panhandler who asked him for change on a downtown street corner just after midnight Thursday.

But just as he was about to walk away, something compelled him to turn around and offer the man food and clothing.

“I wanted to give him food more than anything else, really,” Omar, 30 said.

He stopped in his tracks, though, when the man refused his offer of help ”” and instead asked Omar what he could do for him.

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Critics had specifically pointed to Trinity’s Community Covenant Agreement, which says students should abstain from “sexual intimacy that violates the sacredness of marriage between a man and a woman”.

The university “reserves the right to discipline, dismiss or refuse a student’s re-admission” if the agreement is broken.

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Have the Christian churches got it at last? Have they understood that it will soon be too late to halt the slow yet relentless decline they have experienced in this country, and on the continent of Europe, for many years? Yes, they are, finally, beginning to face up to reality. For example, the new Pope, Francis, has just published a truly remarkable document, “Evangelii Gaudium” or “The Joy of the Gospel”, in which he asks the Catholic Church to embark upon a fresh chapter of evangelization, and where he describes in great detail how this should be done. And more quietly, but no less insistently, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, is engaged in the same task.

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The Chapmans acknowledge that they are better off than many people, but they represent a little-understood reality of the Affordable Care Act. While the act clearly benefits those at the low end of the income scale ”” and rich people can continue to afford even the most generous plans ”” people like the Chapmans are caught in the uncomfortable middle: not poor enough for help, but not rich enough to be indifferent to cost.

“We are just right over that line,” said Ms. Chapman, who is 54 and does administrative work for a small wealth management firm. Because their plan is being canceled, she is looking for new coverage for her family, which includes Mr. Chapman, 55, a retired fireman who works on a friend’s farm, and her two sons. “That’s an insane amount of money,” she said of their new premium. “How are you supposed to pay that?”

An analysis by The New York Times shows the cost of premiums for people who just miss qualifying for subsidies varies widely across the country and rises rapidly for people in their 50s and 60s. In some places, prices can quickly approach 20 percent of a person’s income.

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About half of Schaefer’s former church left since news of the wedding became public this spring, a combination of supporters struggling with the turmoil and critics.

“What should be a neutral setting right now ”” a church ”” is not, it’s a hostile place,” said Jon Boger, whose complaint about Schaefer set the case off. “But time heals everything, right?”

Liam Casey, a Zion member, said he had hoped Schaefer would find a way to stay.

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Almighty and everliving God, who didst strengthen thine apostle Thomas with sure and certain faith in thy Son’s resurrection: Grant us so perfectly and without doubt to believe in Jesus Christ, our Lord and our God, that our faith may never be found wanting in thy sight; through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

O God, who didst send thy messengers and prophets to prepare the way of thy Son before him: Grant that our Lord when he cometh may find in us a dwelling prepared for himself; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who came to take our nature upon him that he might bring many sons unto glory, and now with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, ever one God, world without end.

But I call upon God; and the LORD will save me. Evening and morning and at noon I utter my complaint and moan, and he will hear my voice. He will deliver my soul in safety from the battle that I wage, for many are arrayed against me.

–Psalm 55:16-18