This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

Read it carefully and read it all.

We beseech thee, O Lord, pour thy grace into our hearts; that we who have known the incarnation of thy Son Jesus Christ, announced by an angel to the Virgin Mary, may by his cross and passion be brought unto the glory of his resurrection; who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

O Lamb of God, Son of the Father, who hast taken away the sin of the world, and art alive for evermore: Grant us the faith that doubts not thy word, and trusts where it cannot see; that taking hold upon thy promises, we may rest in thy love and rejoice in thy mercy, now and always.

Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water, that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers.

–Psalm 1:1-3

I too have had a son die, so I have a sense of the pain Rick and Kay are facing. But their circumstances are different and my heart goes out to them.
At times like these, there really are no words, but there is the Word.
There is no manual, but there is Emmanuel.
God is with us.

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Lin, the first Chinese-American to be play in NBA, and NBA commissioner David Stern said that Lin’s failure to get a major college basketball scholarship or a roster spot through the NBA draft had to do with his Asian ethnicity.

CBS’s 60 Minutes will do a report on Lin’s story Sunday, April 7 at 7:00 p.m. ET/PT, where the Houston Rocket’s point guard sits down and discusses his rags to riches story and his stellar performance that caused the “Linsanity” phenomenon, and the racial obstacles he’s had to overcome.

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The possibility of dividing the United Methodist Church as a way out of persistent conflicts over homosexuality has been raised enough times in recent years to warrant serious reflection on what it would entail. The fact that Episcopalians, Presbyterians and Lutherans have all seen either formal divisions or significant withdrawals of congregations from their denominations over these issues does not bode well for the UMC.

But as tempting as the idea might be as a way out of our conflicts, we would have to think about realities like the following….

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Watch it all and you can read about it here.

Read it all and you can find A.S. Haley’s comments on this there.

You may find basic information about the conference here which includes this summary:

The Gospel Coalition’s 2013 national conference will be a five-day event running April 6 to 10, including a weekend world missions conference and three-day main conference focused on the mission of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke. Both events will be held at Rosen Shingle Creek in Orlando, Florida, and we encourage you to attend them together, but you may also register separately. Overall the event features 80 speakers from around the world aiming to stir your affections for Jesus Christ, equip you to live faithfully in this world, and spread the gospel to the ends of the earth.

You may be also be interested in a schedule which can be found here.

For students now sprinting toward the end of their college days, the finish line may not be much of a relief. More than ever, their gait is slowed by the weight of impending debt.

Thirty-seven million Americans share about $1 trillion in student loans, . It’s the besides mortgages, eclipsing both auto loans and credit cards. And on it grows, an appetite undiminished by the recession.

There are signs that students are catching on to the dangers, however. Dawit Lemma learned his own lessons about loans and is now passing them on to others. He’s the associate director of operations at the University of Maryland’s Office of Student Financial Aid.

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On April 1, the Health Care Committee of the Washington State Senate held a two-hour hearing on what its proponents euphemistically call the “Reproductive Parity Act,” and its opponents describe as the “abortion insurance mandate.” If passed, EHB 1044 would require that if any health insurance plan provided coverage for maternity care, it “must also provide a covered person with substantially equivalent coverage to permit the voluntary termination of a pregnancy.”

The bill has already passed the Washington House of Representatives, 53-43, but in the Senate it may be a different matter. At the hearing one of the bill’s proponents claimed to have a written commitment from twenty-five senators (a bare majority) to vote for the bill, but from the comments of at least one committee member it appeared that the bill might have trouble making it out of committee. (There is a procedure for a bill to be brought to the floor even if it has died in committee, but such cases are rare.)

In his inaugural address (“The World Will Not Wait”), Jay Inslee, the state’s newly elected Democratic governor, surprised many by featuring the bill as one of his priorities.

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At the center of Spain and of ancient Castile, and less than an hour from Madrid, Toledo has always existed in another world. Countless settlers have been drawn to the city’s impregnable perch on a mountaintop, and they have shaped its cultural history: Romans, Visigoths, Moorish caliphates and, in the medieval period, Muslim, Christian and Jewish communities all left their mark on monuments that fill the small city. Domenikos Theotokopoulos””the 16th-century painter from Crete known as El Greco””left his adopted home some of its greatest treasures, including his magisterial painting of “The Burial of the Count of Orgaz.” On a monumental scale (almost 16 feet by 10 feet) and in astonishingly original form, the canvas reflects not only centuries of Toledo’s history as a cultural melting pot, but the profound faith and tolerance that sustained it.

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The President of AYF, Wuse Archdeaconry Council, Barrister Isaac Harrison stated this during a workshop organised for youth, with the theme; “Empowered To Impact The World”, in Abuja.

According to him, “We cannot grant amnesty to people we do not know, we cannot also grant amnesty to people who had already made up their minds that whether there is dialogue or not, they will go on with whatever they are doing, If Boko Haram actually need peace, they will not be killing those that are moving towards that peace.

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An appeal board has overturned an order by the town of Portugal Cove-St. Philip’s to the local Anglican parish to repair the slowly deteriorating church.

The town declared the old building a heritage structure to prevent the parish from demolishing the building in order to build a new one.

However, the parish, which still has ownership of the building, refuses to make repairs and it has been rotting for three years.

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Is this the monster? If you were to believe the worst of everything you ever heard and read about Victoria Matthews, Anglican Bishop of Christchurch, you would expect to meet a terse and autocratic figure, dismissive of contrary opinions and impatient with the public.

In person, Matthews is none of those things. Instead, she is charm itself. She is funny, unpretentious and refreshingly direct. Perhaps it is her tendency to be direct and certain that has got her into trouble. Her easy sense of humour may not always come across either.

Not every reputation squares with reality, of course. But how did this relationship go so wrong?

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Christian leaders called for prayers Saturday in an outpouring of support for Rick Warren and his family after the suicide of the Orange County evangelical pastor’s youngest son.

Among those offering condolences was Harvest Christian Fellowship leader Greg Laurie, who tweeted followers to join him in a prayer for Warren and his wife, Kay.

Laurie, whose adult son Christopher was killed in a 2008 car crash, noted on his blog that he had experienced similar pain. “At times like these, there really are no words, but there is the Word,” he wrote.

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To my dear staff,

Over the past 33 years we’ve been together through every kind of crisis. Kay and I’ve been privileged to hold your hands as you faced a crisis or loss, stand with you at gravesides, and prayed for you when ill. Today, we need your prayer for us.

No words can express the anguished grief we feel right now. Our youngest son, Matthew, age 27, and a lifelong member of Saddleback, died today.

You who watched Matthew grow up knew he was an incredibly kind, gentle, and compassionate man. He had a brilliant intellect and a gift for sensing who was most in pain or most uncomfortable in a room. He’d then make a bee-line to that person to engage and encourage them.

But only those closest knew that he struggled from birth with mental illness, dark holes of depression, and even suicidal thoughts. In spite of America’s best doctors, meds, counselors, and prayers for healing, the torture of mental illness never subsided. Today, after a fun evening together with Kay and me, in a momentary wave of despair at his home, he took his life.

Kay and I often marveled at his courage to keep moving in spite of relentless pain. I’ll never forget how, many years ago, after another approach had failed to give relief, Matthew said “ Dad, I know I’m going to heaven. Why can’t I just die and end this pain?” but he kept going for another decade.

Thank you for your love and prayers. We love you back.

Pastor Rick

O Lord God, who hast revealed in holy Scripture what conquests faith has made both in doing, and in suffering: Grant us no smaller faith than that which overcometh the whole world, that Jesus thy Son is God, very God from the beginning, the First and the Last, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, world without end.

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.Once you were no people but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy but now you have received mercy.

–1 Peter 2:9-10

Popular evangelical Pastor Rick Warren asked members of his Southern California church for prayers as he and his family coped with the apparent suicide of his 27-year-old son.

The church said on Saturday that Matthew Warren took his own life at his Mission Viejo home.

Matthew Warren struggled with mental illness, deep depression and suicidal thoughts throughout his life, Saddleback Valley Community Church said in a statement, after his body was found Friday night.

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Inside the main hall of the Drepung Gomang Institute, gilded statues of Buddha and brilliantly colored images of fierce deities adorn the altar. As the smell of incense wafts through the air, a Tibetan monk chants a sutra, his low tones weaving a soothing, meditative melody.

Dharamsala, India? Lhasa, Tibet? Some remote outpost in the Himalayas? Nope. It’s in a neighborhood of Louisville, Ky. This Tibetan Buddhist temple is one of a growing number of such centers that have found a surprisingly receptive home in the Midwest and parts of neighboring Kentucky.

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At least five people were killed Saturday in clashes between Muslims and Christians, raising new questions over whether President Mohamed Morsi’s Islamist-led government can calm sectarian tensions amid Egypt’s broader political unrest.

Violence between Muslims and Coptic Christians over the last year has been a troubling subplot, especially in the provinces, to the nation’s post-revolutionary political division and faltering economy. There were conflicting accounts over what ignited the latest fighting in Khousous, an impoverished town north of Cairo.

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Yummy Mummy, a little boutique on New York’s Upper East Side, has suddenly become a health care provider/online superstore. The company has been hiring like crazy, and just opened an online call center and a warehouse in Illinois. Yummy Mummy even hired somebody to talk to customers’ health insurance companies.

And new moms now seem more likely to splurge on fancy new breast pumps. Caroline Shany, a Yummy Mummy customer, spent her own money to buy a breast pump for her first baby. She may buy another one now because insurance will pick up the tab.

“Why not?” she says.

Read or much better listen to it all.

Opponents of same-sex marriage resist it because it amounts to redefining marriage, but also because it will invite future redefinitions. If we embrace same-sex marriage, they argue, society will have surrendered any reasonable grounds on which to continue forbidding polygamy, for example.

In truth, proponents of same-sex marriage have never offered a very good response to this concern. This problem was highlighted at the Supreme Court last week in oral argument over California’s Proposition 8, the state constitutional amendment that defines marriage as a union of a man and a woman.

Surprisingly, the polygamy problem that same-sex marriage presents was raised by an Obama appointee, the liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Sotomayor interrupted the presentation of anti-Prop 8 litigator Theodore Olson to pose the following question: If marriage is a fundamental right in the way proponents of same-sex marriage contend, “what state restrictions could ever exist,” for example, “with respect to the number of people . . . that could get married?”

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Two Rowan County lawmakers drew nationwide attention Wednesday for pushing a resolution that says North Carolina and its counties and towns have the right to establish an official religion.

Republican state Reps. Carl Ford and Harry Warren filed the measure this week as Rowan commissioners gear up to fight a lawsuit that seeks to end their habit of opening meetings with specifically Christian prayers.

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For a man who has been dubbed by the US media the world’s first “moral rock star”, it was a modest showing ”“ a mere 5,000 Indians had gathered to hear him. Compared with the 14,000 he had drawn to an open-air sports stadium in South Korea a few weeks before, or the 30m hits he has received for his online lectures in China alone, it was small chapattis. But the lecture, which Sandel staged as a kind of Socratic dialogue with his audience, held everyone spellbound.

Coming from solid middle class background and raised in Minnesota and Los Angeles, Sandel studied at Brandeis University and then got a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, where he discovered his passion for moral philosophy. He never looked back. He has taught at Harvard for most of his adult life and lives with his wife and two sons in Brookline, Massachusetts, just outside Boston.

The philosopher made his reputation in 1982 with his debut book, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, a powerful critique of John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance”….

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At first, the detail seemed like a compelling if random tidbit: The new pope takes the bus.

Then similar stories kept proliferating after Pope Francis’s election last month. His first words as pope were to ask for a blessing before offering one. Hours after becoming pope he called to cancel his newspaper subscription back in Buenos Aires. He chose to live in a guesthouse rather than the sprawling papal apartments. On Holy Thursday, Francis washed the feet of incarcerated women and non-Catholics.

These acts are deemed heroic. Young Catholics by the millions are sharing images of Francis’s good deeds. Many fallen-away Catholics are saying the pope’s gestures of humility might bring them back to the Church.

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With a focus on tax, trade and transparency, the religious leaders argue, the UK Presidency of the G8 has the potential to advance the MDG agenda in ways that strike at the underlying causes of poverty, in particular by ensuring the wealth created by developing countries is not lost through unfair tax practices, a lack of transparency or a failure to secure the benefits of trade for developing countries.

“Meeting the remaining targets, while challenging, is possible ”“ but only if governments do not waiver from the moral and political commitments made over a decade ago,” the letter stresses.

The Rt Rev Nick Baines, Bishop of Bradford, said: “With only 1000 days left to achieve the Millennium Development Goals set by the UN, it is imperative that the G8 Heads of Government set the pace. I shall be tweeting my support using #1000DaysToGo and hoping the flood of comments encourages governments not to waiver.”

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