The security planning for last week’s Boston Marathon, where two bombs went off killing three people and wounding 264, included preparation for such an emergency, a top Massachusetts public safety official said on Wednesday.
“We spend months planning for the marathon. We did a tabletop exercise the week before that included a bombing scenario in it,” Kurt Schwartz, the state’s undersecretary for homeland security, told a panel at Harvard University.
U.S. Pastor Saeed Abedini, who is currently suffering from internal bleeding in Iranian prison, said that he is praying for America in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings that killed three people and left over 200 injured last week.
“Pastor Saeed told family members he had heard about the terrorist bombings in Boston on the prison radio, expressed his concern, and told them he is praying for the victims and their families during this very challenging time for our nation,” the American Center for Law and Justice revealed on Monday.
Archbishop Philip Freier, who led a team to Myanmar in February, is now promoting efforts ”“ incorporating organisations and individuals beyond the diocese – to follow up the two week visit to the country which is only now emerging from 60 years of isolation under a military dictatorship.
In April, he hosted at Bishopscourt a diverse group of 35 people, including several Burmese clergy and other leaders, to discuss priorities in building on the links now established ”“ which has already triggered further networking to plan action.
The Anglican diocese will tomorrow release detailed information on how it arrived at cost estimates for three design options for the Christ Church Cathedral.
Gavin Holley, of the Church Property Trustees, told last night’s Press-hosted public forum on the proposals for the city’s Gothic landmark that he hoped to have the information up on its website by late tomorrow afternoon.
“Churches in Northern Nigeria, amd my diocese in particular, have been recording depletion in the number of faithful attending church services owing to Boko haram insurgencies,” said Catholic Bishop Stephen Mamza of Yola, an area in northern Nigeria where Muslim terrorist violence has been notable. He said that an as yet undetermined number of Catholics have moved from the area out of fear of the violent Islamic sect known as Boko Haram.
We have piles of evidence to show that people overtrust their judgment and overestimate their goodness. Also, there is no easy correlation between self-esteem and actual performance….
This leads to my final question: In society generally, are more problems caused by overconfidence or underconfidence? The financial crisis and the tenor of our political debates suggest that overconfidence and self-idolatry are by far the larger problems. If that’s true, how do you combine the self-critical ability to recognize your limitations with the majestic confidence required to struggle against them?
I guess I’m asking how to marry self-criticism and self-assertion, a blend our society is inarticulate about. I guess I’m wondering, as we make this blend, whether most of us need more of the stereotypically female trait of self-doubt or the stereotypically male trait of self-promotion.
This week, legislators here will consider excise and sales taxes on marijuana of up to 30 percent combined. The proposal emerged from a task force of health officials, representatives of the state’s rapidly developing marijuana industry and others that was commissioned last year to help develop rules for marijuana.
The goal, task force members and lawmakers say, is to set taxes high enough to finance the administration of new laws, but not so high that customers are driven back to the black market.
“We should see a financial benefit as a state that can help pay for enforcement and other fundamental issues,” said Christian Sederberg, a Denver lawyer on the panel whose firm helped draft Amendment 64, the measure legalizing recreational marijuana. “The other side is that if you tax something too high, then you simply crowd out the regulated market. We’re confident we’ll find the right balance.”
The daughter of the Archbishop of Canterbury has called on the church to do more to eradicate the stigma of mental illness, revealing that she sometimes suffers from “unbearable” depression.
Katharine Welby, the 26-year old daughter of Archbishop Justin Welby who took up his new post last month, says she sometimes feels “very low”, with a “black veil of nothing hanging in front of me”….
Read it all (requires subscription) and please take the time to read Katharine Welby’s blog post also.
Yale University is organizing a conference on “Personhood Beyond the Human” for December 6-8, 2013. It will feature, among other proponents of personhood rights for animals, notorious infanticide and bestiality-promoting ethicist Peter Singer.
The conference is co-sponsored by the animal rights group Nonhuman Rights Project and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, in collaboration with the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics and the Yale Animal Ethics Group.
“The event will focus on personhood for nonhuman animals, including great apes, cetaceans, and elephants, and will explore the evolving notions of personhood by analyzing them through the frameworks of neuroscience, behavioral science, philosophy, ethics, and law,” reads a description of the conference on its website.
Militants in a rebel-held area of northern Syria have abducted two bishops travelling from the Turkish border back to the city of Aleppo.
The kidnapping was reported by Syrian state media and confirmed by a member of the official opposition leadership.
Yohanna Ibrahim is head of the Syriac Orthodox Church in Aleppo and Boulos Yaziji leads the Greek Orthodox Church in the city.
The biographical film “42” depicts Jackie Robinson’s courageous battle to break the color barrier in major league baseball. At the same time, the film provides a glimpse of his religious faith, which afforded the strength he needed to overcome fierce opposition.
“It took two Christians to pull this off,” says Chris Lamb, the author of “Blackout: The Untold Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Spring Training” (University of Nebraska, 2004). “Robinson was a Christian and Branch Rickey was a Christian,” he notes. “Sometimes we miss this.”
Lamb was blind to it himself until he researched Robinson’s life for his book. “I kept wondering all these years what kept Robinson together,” he says. “Finally I realized what I missed before ”“ the core came from above.”
“Saving abandoned animals, one ride at a time…”
Guaranteed to brighten your day–watch it all (Note: video is linked at the top, if no video capacity you can read the story. Make sure to check out the map of how long the ride is from Texas to Tok, Alaska where the dog was delivered).
Also, please note that the website for Operation Roger Operation Roger (a ministry which, as the video notes, was begin through a prayer) is there.
Security forces for the Shiite-led Iraqi government raided a Sunni protest camp in northern Iraq on Tuesday, igniting violence around the country that left at least 36 people dead.
The unrest led two Sunni officials to resign from the government and risked pushing the country’s Sunni provinces into an open revolt against Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, a Shiite. The situation looked to be the gravest moment for Iraq since the last U.S. combat troops left in December 2011.
The violence Tuesday started in the Sunni town of Hawija, where shooting erupted during the raid. Security forces had demanded that protesters hand over demonstrators suspected of shooting and killing an Iraqi soldier Friday. The security forces stormed the camp after protesters failed to deliver anyone.
Humanitarian agencies are running low on funds to help millions of people affected by the war in Syria, prompting one United Nations official to warn: “Our capacity to do more is diminishing.”
Syria’s two-year-old war has fueled a humanitarian catastrophe in the region, U.N. officials say. The U.N.’s Security Council has demanded an end to the escalating violence and condemned human rights abuses by all sides.
“Our agencies and humanitarian partners have been doing all we can. The needs are growing, while our capacity to do more is diminishing,” U.N. Under-Secretary General Valerie Amos said in a video appealing for worldwide support of aid efforts.
Lift up our hearts, we beseech thee, O Christ, above the false show of things, above fear, above laziness, above selfishness and covetousness, above custom and fashion, up to the everlasting truth and order that thou art; that so we may live joyfully and freely, in faithful trust that thou art our Saviour, our example, and our friend, both now and for evermore.
Yea, he shall see that even the wise die,
the fool and the stupid alike must perish
and leave their wealth to others.
Their graves are their homes for ever,
their dwelling places to all generations,
though they named lands their own.
Man cannot abide in his pomp,
he is like the beasts that perish.
This is the fate of those who have foolish confidence,
the end of those who are pleased with their portion.
Like sheep they are appointed for Sheol;
Death shall be their shepherd;
straight to the grave they descend,
and their form shall waste away;
Sheol shall be their home.
But God will ransom my soul from the power of Sheol,
for he will receive me.
–Psalm 49: 10-15
Some dodge the stones and bottles thrown at their tents in the dead of night, others watch helplessly as their tarpaulin shelters, huddled in camps sprawled across the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, are destroyed with knives and sticks.
Rights group Amnesty International has collected dozens of such testimonies from Haitians who have been kicked out of makeshift camps set up by those left homeless by the January 2010 earthquake. Many camp residents have moved out, but just over 320,000 Haitians still live in them.
After two troubling outbursts at a local mosque, leaders there told Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev he would no longer be welcome if he continued disrupting services.
Leaders at the Islamic Society of Boston’s mosque in Cambridge say Tsarnaev, 26, who died early Friday (April 19) after a shootout with police, “disagreed with the moderate American-Islamic theology” of the mosque, but they never had “any hint” the brothers might be violent.
Local government officials and a military spokesman in Nigeria agreed that security forces and Islamist militants had battled in recent days in the country’s far northeast. But they offered widely varying accounts Monday of how many people, including civilians, had been killed.
Some officials said about 185 people were slain in the clashes, with some residents blaming government troops in part for the deaths. Security officials put the number lower.
There are few better places in the world where Tim Keller could write a book about career and calling. “New York City is a place where people live in order to work,” says the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan and author most recently of Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work (Dutton). “They basically live more in their work than in their neighborhoods. That . . . means that if you start talking about work, you get right at their hearts.”
In a recent sit-down conversation with This Is Our City executive producer Andy Crouch, Keller explained why he wanted to write a more comprehensive book about faith and work, how he learned to answer congregants’ questions about their work, and what Redeemer has done to equip laypeople to live into their vocations outside the church.
Christ Church, the parish home of George Washington, celebrated its first same-gender blessing April 21.
“As an Episcopal faith community, we witnessed and asked God’s blessings upon the lifelong commitment Melissa Capers and Brunilda Hernandez have made to one another,” said the Rev. Ann Gillespie, Christ Church senior associate rector who officiated at the service. “This is a significant and joyful event, not just in the life of Melissa and Bruni, but in the life of our church. As a congregation, we are taking a historic and faithful step closer to the inclusive, abundant, generous outpouring of God’s kingdom.”
The 19-year-old suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings has told interrogators that the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan motivated him and his brother to carry out the attack, according to U.S. officials familiar with the interviews.
From his hospital bed, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has acknowledged his role in planting the explosives near the marathon finish line on April 15, the officials said. The first successful large-scale bombing in the post-Sept. 11, 2001, era, the Boston attack killed three people and wounded more than 250 others.
If you ask me, I think it’s time we stop walking on eggshells with Islam.
It’s not healthy. This notion that any critique of Islam equates to Islamophobia is absurd and patronizing. It says to Muslims: “We criticize Judaism and Christianity because we think they can handle it, but we don’t think you can.” That’s insulting to Islam and to Muslims.
Every religion needs a good dose of criticism. That’s how they improve and become more human. That’s how they shed their outdated and immoral layers, like slavery and oppression of women. Where would Judaism be today without the centuries of relentless self-reflection and self-criticism that goes on to this day?
Israel’s senior military intelligence analyst said Tuesday that the Syrian government had repeatedly used chemical weapons in the last month, and criticized the international community for failing to respond, intensifying pressure on the Obama administration to intervene.
“The regime has increasingly used chemical weapons,” said Brig. Gen. Itai Brun, research commander in the intelligence directorate of the Israeli Defense Forces, echoing a recent finding by Britain and France. “The very fact that they have used chemical weapons without any appropriate reaction,” he added, “is a very worrying development, because it might signal that this is legitimate.”
Listen here if you wish.
Pastor Rick Warren will join Ed Stetzer on his webshow, “The Exchange,” Tuesday afternoon to talk about his 27-year-old son’s suicide earlier this month.
Stetzer, president of LifeWay Research, will host The Exchange live from the Exponential church planting conference in Orlando, Fla., where Warren had been scheduled to lead two Bible studies.
Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church, Lake Forest, Calif., agreed to an interview with Stetzer about what pastors need to know about grief in their congregations, how his son’s death has changed him and what church leaders can do to raise awareness and reduce the stigma of mental illness.
Culture change in financial services will not be achieved by “light touch” or “heavy touch” regulation, Archbishop Justin said at a Westminster discussion organised by the Bible Society.
Instead the banking sector must adopt “an aim of service to society and not mere rent-seeking, and a culture of virtue based in the realities of daily life and not a fantasy nirvana,” he said.
Describing what this change of culture might look like, the Archbishop said it would require “a ruthless honesty and a deep willingness to be made very uncomfortable indeed through listening to things one does not want to hear”.
…some in Jerusalem, when they heard this, became ‘nervous and sent Barnabas on an “apostolic visitation”: perhaps, with a little sense of humor we could say that this was the theological beginning of the Doctrine of the Faith: this apostolic visit by Barnabas. He saw, and he saw that things were going well.
And so the Church was a Mother, the Mother of more children, of many children. It became more and more of a Mother. A Mother who gives us the faith, a Mother who gives us an identity. But the Christian identity is not an identity card: Christian identity is belonging to the Church, because all of these belonged to the Church, the Mother Church. Because it is not possible to find Jesus outside the Church. The great Paul VI said: “Wanting to live with Jesus without the Church, following Jesus outside of the Church, loving Jesus without the Church is an absurd dichotomy.”
Nearly 200 church leaders and medics will gather in Birmingham, England, this week to plan new initiatives in health care. Against the backdrop of rising chronic illness in the UK, churches and Christian general medical practitioners (GPs) will outline their initiatives to reverse this trend.
Conference convener, and coordinator of the Anglican Health Network, Revd Paul Holley, said, ”˜Whilst the UK’s National Health Service delivers medical services, people’s mental and physical health depends far more on their lifestyles. Poor diets, lack of exercise and relentless stress are taking their toll. More people live alone and lack the support of intimate and community relationships to promote wellbeing’.