Nebuchadnez’zar said to them, “Is it true, O Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed’nego, that you do not serve my gods or worship the golden image which I have set up? Now if you are ready when you hear the sound of the horn, pipe, lyre, trigon, harp, bagpipe, and every kind of music, to fall down and worship the image which I have made, well and good; but if you do not worship, you shall immediately be cast into a burning fiery furnace; and who is the god that will deliver you out of my hands?” Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed’nego answered the king, “O Nebuchadnez’zar, we have no need to answer you in this matter. If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace; and he will deliver us out of your hand, O king. But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the golden image which you have set up.”

–Daniel 3:14-18

An Army chaplain who saved the lives of fellow US soldiers before perishing in a North Korean prison camp has been awarded a posthumous US Medal of Honor.

On Thursday, President Obama presented the highest US military decoration to the nephew of Emil Kapaun, a Catholic priest who died in the Korean War.

Kapaun, an Army captain, was renowned for his bravery and caring.

Read it all.

This blew my mind–watch it all (in case of any trouble, there is another link there). Wow.

The reform of the Church already evident in the words and witness of Pope Francis may be starting, but it won’t be stopping at the revamping of the Vatican Curia and the renewal of the clergy.

It also will involve a thorough reform of the laity, since some of the cancers the cardinals elected him to confront in Rome have metastasized throughout Christ’s mystical body.

In his conclave-changing address to the cardinals four days before his election, then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio identified what he believes is the Church’s fundamental illness: “ecclesiastical narcissism.”

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On Saturday 12th April 1913 +Cosmo, Archbishop of York, drove into the village of Woodlands in his “shiny new motor car”, to the amazement of the villagers, to attend the consecration of the new Church of All Saints. The new Church of St George in Highfields had been consecrated a few weeks earlier. 8½ years earlier there had been no Church. In fact there had been no shops, no school, no squares; no houses at all except Woodlands House (later to become the Park Club) and perhaps the Old Lodge. In just over 8 years a whole community had been born ”“ with one purpose. To house and provide for the men who won the coal at Brodsworth Pit and their families.

Congratulations to them–read it all.

As others have said, she changed the face of Britain, opening up new avenues of possibility in all directions – share ownership, home ownership, the liberalisation of markets, entrepreneurial innovation and so on. She strengthened Britain’s role in the world with her clear policies on defence, the Falklands, Northern Ireland, Communism, Europe, South Africa and more. No-one was in any doubt that there was a force in the land.

I spent the last years of the 1980s in County Durham, so I know some of the deep divisions Lady Thatcher’s policies caused. Billy Elliot country was not an all-singing, all-dancing landscape. It’s almost impossible to find moderate opinions, for or against, on her style of leadership, but the one thing we can all acknowledge is that she was a leader of absolute integrity in terms of her own beliefs. She was an iconic ‘conviction politician.’

Read it all.

(Via email–KSH) 11 April 2013

My dear Friends,

Greetings in the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ!

The situation in Cairo is very sad for us as a Christian community. On Friday 6 April 2013, sectarian clashes erupted once again, this time in El Khosus, in the outskirts of Cairo. The story, according to the director of the police, started by a 12-year old Muslim boy drawing graffiti on the wall of an Islamic school. Two Muslim men rebuked him for doing so, and a Christian man also came and rebuked him. This developed into a big argument and fighting between Christians and Muslims in the area. After the Friday prayers in the mosque, a group of Muslims came out and attacked the Coptic Orthodox church in the area. The result of this was the killing of four Christians and one Muslim, and many injured. Many stores were also vandalized and looted. The Grand Imam sent his assistant, together with a Coptic Orthodox bishop, in order to do a reconciliation. However, one hour after things calmed down, the fighting erupted again.
The next day there was a funeral at the Coptic Orthodox Cathedral in Abassayia the center of Cairo for the Christians who died. Thousands of Christians attended the funeral. Amidst their mourning and grief they were shouting words against the government and against the Muslim Brotherhood. Because of this, as they exited the Cathedral and the church grounds, they were attacked by other Muslims. The police then interfered throwing tear gas. At least one person was killed with over 80 injured. This was the first time in history that the Coptic Orthodox Cathedral was attacked, especially during a time of mourning.

It is worth mentioning that in the last two years, since the beginning of the Revolution of 2011, the number of incidents of sectarian clashes has increased. No one who committed violence or killing has been brought to justice because the government is content to solve the sectarian clashes by reconciliatory meetings. In a statement I made, I urged the government to apply the rule of law as the only way to stop these sectarian clashes. I emphasized the importance of the reconciliatory meetings which we as an Anglican Church are facilitating at several levels. I also emphasized that they are not a substitute to the application of the law. Unfortunately the current government is inexperienced and is not doing enough to include the different political parties in building up Egypt after the Revolution.This contributed to the instability of the Egyptian society, the decrease of tourism, and the bad economic situation.

The Christian community in Egypt right now is mourning and feels challenged in their own country, as some of them have said, “we have been here since the time of the Pharaohs, this is our country! We will not leave whatever happens. ” On the other hand, there are many educated young people who are immigrating out of the country and this is the saddest thing for me as one of the leaders of the church in Egypt, because I believe that the Christian presences is very much liked with the Christian witness.

May the Lord bless you!

–(The Most Rev.) Dr. Mouneer Hanna Anis is Bishop of the Episcopal / Anglican Diocese of Egypt with North Africa and the Horn of Africa and President Bishop of the Episcopal / AnglicanProvince of Jerusalem and the Middle East

Why do so many guys with good doctrine have bad attitudes?

Can you be biblically orthodox and firm in your faith without being brittle or hard-hearted?

Can we be humble and orthodox?

My friend, Josh Harris, thinks so. His book Humble Orthodoxy: Holding the Truth High Without Putting People Down (Multnomah, 2013) is short and to the point, and it’s a point we need to be reminded of. I asked Josh to join me on the blog for a conversation about the importance of holding to the right beliefs the right way.

Read it all.

Liao Yiwu was a reluctant dissident.

A Chinese poet and storyteller nourished on Beat generation literature, he picked fights, drank to excess and despised politics.

“I have never taken an interest in mass movements or foreign imports such as democracy, freedom, human rights and love,” he declared as the student pro-democracy movement unfolded in Beijing in 1989. “If destruction is inevitable, let it be.”

Then came the Tiananmen crackdown. Mr. Liao was transformed….

Read it all.

Read it all.

France’s experiment with the Tobin Tax has proved a spectacular flop. Its finance ministry admits that the scattershot levy on financial transactions has raised just a third of the money expected since August.

Total takings will be a paltry €800m in 2013, but that overlooks the much greater damage inflicted on French finance, industry and the government’s own tax base. “France is shooting itself in the foot,” said Paul-Henri de La Porte du Theil, head of French finance industry AFG.

Jean-Yves Hocher from Crédit Agricole said it would cost his company €17bn. One French banker told Les Echos that the tax was “a weapon of mass destruction that is going to ruin our financial sector”.

Read it all.

It was sad to read the public comments of the Episcopal Bishop of Washington denying the importance, or need for the Bodily Resurrection of Jesus from the dead, going so far as to imply this teaching was “outlandish. ” More on that in a moment, but first some background.

Some time ago I brought a former Episcopalian into the Catholic Church who, after the Rite of Reception gave a great sigh of relief and said, “I know the Catholic Church is not without problems, but at least I know the Bishops actually hold the Christian faith. It is such a relief to be in the harbor of truth.”

I remember at the time wondering with him if that wasn’t a bit of an exaggeration of how bad things were in the Episcopalian denomination (this was about 1990). But he showed me a scrapbook of article after article of dozens of Episcopal “Bishops” denying quite publicly the divinity of Christ, the Virgin birth, the miracles of Jesus, that there was any inherent conflict between Christianity and Unitarianism, etc., not to mention a plethora aberrant moral stances.

Read it all.

More than 200 Presbyterian congregations nationwide – including nine in Sacramento – have been torn asunder over the Presbyterian Church USA’s new rules and the ordination of its first [noncelibate] gay minister, who is a former Sacramento pastor. The rift has resulted in lawsuits, sold churches, broken friendships and scattered congregations.

In a historic vote in October 2011, 427 Fremont Presbyterian congregants voted to leave the national denomination while 164 voted to stay. At the time, the 128-year-old congregation had about 1,200 members.

The vote prompted a church investigation into the schism to determine which faction was entitled to the church property valued at $9 million.

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[Tracy] Wilder, who arrived at St. John’s Ruskin campus in 2001, experienced an abrupt and unexpected role reversal in September. The man who spent his life caring for others learned he had leukemia. Enduring months of intensive chemotherapy, he became reliant on nurses and doctors, on the love of his wife and the kindness of parishioners.

Though hopeful his cancer may go into remission, Wilder, 67, announced in March he is retiring from St. John.

“It’s no fun,” he said. “There is a terrible sense of loss. It’s painful. But I can look back on the last 12 years and feel good about a lot of things.”

Read it all.

Absolutely, positively not to be missed–read it all and enjoy all the wonderful pictures (Hat tip: AH).

Almighty and everlasting God, we thank thee for thy servant George Augustus Selwyn, whom thou didst call to preach the Gospel to the peoples of New Zealand and Melanesia, and to lay a firm foundation for the growth of thy Church in many nations. Raise up, we beseech thee, in this and every land evangelists and heralds of thy kingdom, that thy Church may proclaim the unsearchable riches of our Savior Jesus Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

O God, who by the glorious resurrection of thy Son our Saviour Jesus Christ hast destroyed death, and brought life and immortality to light: Grant that we, being raised together with him, may know the comfort and strength of his presence, and rejoice in hope of thy everlasting glory; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom be dominion and praise for ever and ever.

To the choirmaster. A Psalm of David the servant of the LORD, who addressed the words of this song to the LORD on the day when the LORD delivered him from the hand of all his enemies, and from the hand of Saul. He said: I love thee, O LORD, my strength. The LORD is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer, my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold. I call upon the LORD, who is worthy to be praised, and I am saved from my enemies.

–Psalm 18:1-3

If Dr Karl Deisseroth were an architect, he might be replacing stone or brick walls with floor-to-ceiling glass to build transparent houses. But since he is a neuroscientist at Stanford University, he has done the biological equivalent: invented a technique to make brains transparent, a breakthrough that should give researchers a truer picture of the pathways underlying both normal mental function and neurological illnesses from autism to Alzheimer’s. In fact, the first human brain the scientists clarified came from someone with autism.

Deisseroth and his colleagues reported in the online edition of the journal Nature on Wednesday that they had developed a way to replace the opaque tissue in brains (harvested from lab mice or donated by people for research) with “hydrogel,” a substance similar to that used for contact lenses.

Read it all.

No one knows if Atlanta’s school superintendent or any of the people accused of falsifying test results will go to jail, but they wouldn’t be the first if they do.

Lorenzo Garcia, the former superintendent of schools in El Paso, Texas, has been sitting in a federal prison since last year. He’s the nation’s first superintendent convicted of fraud and reporting bogus test scores for financial gain.

Now, the school district is in turmoil and everybody is blaming everybody else for the scandal.

Read it all.

Someone once asked me if I thought the resurrection was necessary. He meant it in the most sincere way, as a person of both faith and doubt who wondered if we needed to be bound by so unreasonable a proposition that Jesus’ tomb was, in fact, empty on that first Easter morning.

I hesitated in answering, because there seemed to be layers of argument behind the question. My answer was yes, resurrection is the foundation of Christian faith, but probably not in the way he meant it.

To say that resurrection is essential doesn’t mean that if someone were to discover a tomb with Jesus’ remains in it that the entire enterprise would come crashing down. The truth is that we don’t know what happened to Jesus after his death, anymore than we can know what will happen to us. What we do know from the stories handed down is how Jesus’ followers experienced his resurrection. What we know is how we experience resurrection ourselves.

Read it all.

An official with the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina said Monday he believes the dispute over who has the right to claim the centuries-old diocese name and properties in the Lowcountry should be decided in state court, not federal.

“We believe the issues belong in state court,” the Rev. Jim Lewis, Canon to the Ordinary, said. “We certainly have plenty of state precedent in our favor….”

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Lord Carey, who was appointed as leader of the Church of England during Lady Thatcher’s time in Downing Street, said that while there would be disagreement about politics, her time in office “transformed” the UK.
The current Archbishop of canterbury, the Most Rev Justin Welby, said faith has “inspired and sustained” Britain’s only female Prime Minister.
Meanwhile the Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks, who first knew Margaret Thatcher when she was his local MP in north London, said she was a “giant” who was one of the few people to leave a “personal imprint” on the country.

Read it all.

“Christianity is the most persecuted religion in the world.” So asserted German Chancellor Angela Merkel late last year, causing a stir. Merkel echoed a concern expressed by then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who warned in a 2011 speech that Christians face a “particularly wicked program of cleansing in the Middle East, religious cleansing.”

Now, this is not about clerks who say “Happy Holidays” or bans of nativity scenes in public schools. Merkel spoke of real persecution of hundreds of millions of Christians around the world. Indeed, a 2011 Pew Forum study found that Christians are harassed in 130 countries, more than any of the world’s other religions.

The just-released book Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians provides the gory details behind these statistics….

Read it all.

The Church of England’s view of the long-established meaning of marriage has been outlined in a new report – “Men and Women in Marriage” – published this week by the Church’s Faith and Order Commission.

The publication includes a foreword from the Archbishops of Canterbury and York which commends the document for study. The report sets out the continued importance and rationale for the Church’s understanding of marriage as reflected in the 1,000 marriage services conducted by the Church of England every week.

The document also seeks to provide “a more positive background on how Christians have understood and valued marriage” arguing that marriage “continues to provide the best context for the raising of children”.

Read it all and take the time to look at the full report.

Rick Benisasia, who’s in the after-death business, is looking to build an empire.

Mr. Benisasia runs a South Asian-focused funeral home on Derry Road in Malton and wants to open a crematorium beside it. The land, money and demand is there, he says.

For more than three years, he’s waited for his rezoning application to be approved by the City of Mississauga. But a new Mississauga bylaw passed in March says new crematoriums must be a minimum of 300 metres from residential properties, due to concerns over the health effects from their emissions.

Read it all.

Christians live in the tension of confidently proclaiming the Bible’s teaching while respectfully and lovingly pursuing relationships with those who identify as gay for the Glory of God.

I wholeheartedly affirm the third position on the gay marriage question and I commend it to Christians everywhere. I think it is the way forward, because it has historically been the way that Christians have approached these emerging issues. The Apostle Paul said in Ephesians 4:15, “Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.”

When it comes to the gay marriage question, I think Christians would be wise to follow Paul’s advice:

Make growing in the satisfying relationship with Christ your daily goal.
Know truth and boldly speak truth.
Make “lovingness” your method and the manner in which you do all things.

Read it all.

The Leclaire boys share a cheerfully cluttered bedroom in their family’s modest ranch located in a rural village about 20 miles north of Brattleboro. A pair of twin beds line up against one wall and sky-blue curtains printed with planets frame the windows. Pet turtles, crabs and lizards inhabit a row of cages and stuffed animals and art projects fill corners.

The brothers have the same thatch of copper-brown hair, deep green eyes, freckled fair skin and they also share something else. Both Austin, 14, and Max, 11, have a rare genetic disease called Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD), a fatal condition characterized by progressive muscle degeneration and weakness due to lack of dystrophin, a protein that helps preserve muscle cells. There is no cure for DMD and standard treatments like steroids, heart medication and surgery only manage the symptoms. Typically, people with DMD die by their mid-20s.

There is, however, a new drug in trial that shows promise in stabilizing the disease and possibly even allowing some health improvement. The catch is that this is something the Leclaire brothers cannot share; only Max qualified for the trial, and though he has experienced significant health gains during the past 18 months, his older brother can only look on from his wheelchair as his physical condition continues to deteriorate.

Read it all.

We are in a constant battle with a “twisted serpent” whose sole aim is to sow discord and enmity. And words are its main weapon.

We all deal with lots and lots of words every day. Speaking, reports, and waves of emails. And we all know that our words can be misinterpreted, feelings hurt, conclusions jumped to in an instant, especially in fast-paced email exchanges.

Proverbs has a lot to say about words…

Read it all.

Listen to it all.