Aanglican Bishop of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, Rt Rev Dr Howard Gregory, is suggesting that the media have more to offer.

“While we expect the media to be truthful in reflecting what is happening in our midst, I submit that the journalistic community has a significant role to play in the shaping of our society,” he said. Gregory said the view that media only reflect what is going on is a cop-out.

“If the journalistic community is simply going to reflect the dynamics and values of society, then we are in deep trouble.” Speaking at the World Press Freedom Day Forum at The Knutsford Court Hotel on Thursday, Bishop Gregory said a spirit of individualism is permeating societies and institutions of governance and commerce are taking more control over citizens’ lives. He said there seems to be no exploration of the values which are informing the decisions being made and the extent they influence society’s choices.

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The way some schools in Nevada teach sex education could be changing.

A bill moving its way through the Nevada Legislature would require all districts to provide uniform, medically accurate and age-appropriate sex education lessons. Topics would include abstinence, abortion, contraceptives, domestic violence and sex trafficking. Students would be automatically enrolled in sex education classes under the proposed law, and parents would need to sign a document for their children to opt out of the instruction.

Currently, sex education instruction varies by county, although all counties have sex education advisory boards by law.

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A new poll finds overwhelming support for assisted suicide for the terminally ill among Anglicans, Catholics, Hindus, Sikhs and Jews in Britain, with Baptists and Muslims the only groups that oppose changes to British law, which currently prohibits assisted suicide.

But Britons are debating the topic intensely.

More than seven in 10 (72 percent) members of the established Church of England and 56 percent of Roman Catholics support assisted suicide for the terminally ill, the survey shows.

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Same-sex marriage will never be widely accepted in America for a simple reason: It’s based on a lie. But don’t take my word on this; leading LGBT scholars and activists say as much.

Take Masha Gessen, acclaimed author and former Russian director of Radio Liberty. “Fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we are going to do with marriage when we get there ”” because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change,” Gessen said last year.

Last month, I was part of a debate at the NYU School of Law at which Judith Stacey, a sociology professor at the university, declared: “Children certainly do not need both a mother and a father.”

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Recent Israeli strikes inside Syria may have exposed weaknesses in the regime’s air defenses and could embolden the U.S. and its allies to take more steps to aid rebels fighting the regime there, said lawmakers on Sunday.

“The Russian-supplied air defense systems are not as good as said,” Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Leahy, who heads the appropriations subcommittee on foreign operations, said the Israeli defense forces were using American-made F-16 Fighting Falcon jets to launch the missiles against Syrian targets.

“Keep in mind the Israelis are using weapons supplied by us,” Leahy said. “They have enormous prowess with those weapons.”

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Perhaps the hardest part is that her son once was such a normal boy, a Mount Pleasant kid with loving parents, extended family and a life full of friends and dreams.

But at 17, Jack Youngs’ thoughts turned down a disturbing new path.

He began to rub his hands together anxiously. He hung his head at the table and avoided friends.

The boy who once swam on the neighborhood team and rode his scooter along its tree-lined streets now hid in the safety of his bedroom as he plunged deeper down that lonely turn in his mind.

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Redeemed humanity is still young, it has hardly come to its full strength. But already there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life.

—The Great Divorce, Chapter 11

O Lord Jesus Christ, who didst say that in thee we may have peace, and hast bidden us to be of good cheer, since thou hast overcome the world: Give ears to hear and faith to receive thy word; that in all the confusions and tensions of this present time, with mind serene and steadfast purpose, we may continue to abide in thee, who livest and wast dead and art alive for evermore.

The LORD reigns; he is robed in majesty; the LORD is robed, he is girded with strength. Yea, the world is established; it shall never be moved; thy throne is established from of old; thou art from everlasting. The floods have lifted up, O LORD, the floods have lifted up their voice, the floods lift up their roaring. Mightier than the thunders of many waters, mightier than the waves of the sea, the LORD on high is mighty! Thy decrees are very sure; holiness befits thy house, O LORD, for evermore.

–Psalm 93

“The rectory secretary is out this week, so none of the priests will be receiving their massages.”

–From a church bulletin as submitted by Brite Templeton of Arizona, featured in the June 2013 Reader’s Digest, page 165

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Tony DeLLomo is on a mission from God.

In a hard-to-miss motor home covered with biblical passages, “Jesus is God” signs and an offer of a free Bible, DeLLomo has been spreading the Gospel by parking in high-traffic spots throughout central Florida.

“It’s all to glorify God,” DeLLomo said while wearing a sleeveless, white hooded sweatshirt with “Jesus is King” in red letters.

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Photographer Lalage Snow photographed and interviewed members of 1st Battalion The Royal Regiment of Scotland before they were sent to Afghanistan, after three months’ service, and days after they returned home. Their faces show the toll that fighting in Afghanistan takes on our troops.

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….as the Obama administration prepares to pull 34,000 U.S. troops out of the country by next February and most of the remaining troops by the end of 2014, estimates of the size of the Afghan force trained to take over this lead security role suddenly have grown fuzzy and possibly unreliable.

A new report made public this week by the government’s top watchdog over U.S. spending in Afghanistan casts doubt on whether the U.S.-led coalition and the Afghan government met a goal set in 2011 of enlisting and training a total of 352,000 Afghan security personnel by October 2012. Pentagon officials have said that target was meant to strike a balance between what was needed and what America and its allies could deliver in concert with the Afghan government. Earlier this year, in conjunction with President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address, the White House declared that the goal had been met.

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Andrew Bennett, Canada’s Ambassador for Religious Freedom, today issued the following statement:

“Canada condemns the ongoing violence in Syria in light of the rise in attacks on religious groups over the last few weeks….

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BOB ABERNETHY, host:….The president referred to self-radicalizing. What””how does that work, and what can the Muslim community do to prevent it?

HARIS TARIN (Muslim Public Affairs Council): Well, the phenomenon of self-radicalization is where individuals who do not find a place in mainstream Muslim institutions, places like mosques and organizations, they don’t find a place for their fiery rhetoric, for their violent, extremist rhetoric, so they go online, and they listen to sermons, and they listen to individuals like Anwar al-Awlaki or Adam Gadahn or other folks who misinterpret the religion to give it a violent, violent ideology, and they fall prey to these individuals who are basically online predators, and they get influenced by these individuals to address their grievances through violence….

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ELKADER, Iowa–Amid an expanse of undulating farmland, deep in the steep valley carved by the Turkey River, the town of Elkader sits most of the year in remote obscurity. Population 1,200 and gradually shrinking, it is the seat of a county without a single traffic light.

Improbably enough, this community settled by Germans and Scandinavians, its religious life built around Catholic and Lutheran churches, bears the name of a Muslim hero. Abd el-Kader was renowned in the 19th century for leading Algeria’s fight for independence and protecting non-Muslims from persecution. Even Abraham Lincoln extolled him.

This weekend, for the fifth year in a row, Elkader will welcome a delegation of Arab dignitaries to celebrate this rare lifeline of tolerance, spanning continents and centuries. Coming less than three weeks after the Boston Marathon bombings, which the authorities say were committed by two Muslim brothers, the Abdelkader Education Project’s forum stands more than ever for an affirming encounter between the United States and Islam.

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Call it freedom of religion vs. freedom from religion: The Defense Department was engulfed in a firestorm over religious expression last week, caught in the middle of a tit-for-tat fight between Mikey Weinstein, the former Air Force officer and lawyer at the head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, and retired Army Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin, a senior official with the conservative Family Research Council.

Weinstein met with Air Force officials April 24demanding that the Air Force take stiffer action to stop the intrusion of religion in the work place. The only way to do that, he contends, is to slap offenders with nonjudicial and judicial punishment ”” including courts-martial.

That was enough to light up the opposition….

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In fall 2011, Sebastian Thrun, a research professor at Stanford, and Peter Norvig, the top scientist at Google, teamed up to develop and teach a free, online course on artificial intelligence. Their aim, as Norvig said in , was to develop a course at least as good as, if not better than, the course they teach together at Stanford. They’d put the result online and make it available to everyone, for free.

Over a 160,000 students signed up. About half that many, he explains, participated in some way through to the end. And 20,000 finished the course.

This is an astonishing example of the way MOOCs ”” massively open online courses ”” may be able to transform education as we know it, changing it from the privilege of an elite into a shared commons that is open and free to everyone.

There are grounds for concern, though….

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The Second Global Anglican Future Conference will be held in Nairobi, Kenya, 21st-26th October 2013. The focus will be on our shared Anglican future, as we engage with the missionary theme, ”˜Making Disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ.’

The first conference, GAFCON 2008, was held in Jerusalem. GAFCON gave birth to a movement, the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans. The aims of the GFCA are to proclaim and defend the apostolic gospel within and beyond the Anglican Communion and to recognise and share fellowship with orthodox Anglicans globally, especially those who have been disaffiliated by false teaching and behaviour.

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The airstrike that Israeli warplanes carried out in Syria was directed at a shipment of advanced surface-to-surface missiles from Iran that Israel believed was intended for Hezbollah, the militant Lebanese organization, American officials said Saturday.

It was the second time in four months that Israel had carried out an attack in foreign territory aimed at disrupting the pipeline of weapons from Iran to Hezbollah. The missiles, known as Fateh-110s, had been sent to Syria by Iran and were being stored at an airport in Damascus when they were struck in the attack, according to an American official.

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O Lord, who through spiritual discipline didst strengthen thy servant Monnica to persevere in offering her love and prayers and tears for the conversion of her husband and of Augustine their son: Deepen our devotion, we beseech thee, and use us in accordance with thy will to bring others, even our own kindred, to acknowledge Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord; who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, for ever and ever.

O Lord, heavenly Father, in whom is the fullness of light and wisdom: Enlighten our minds by thy Holy Spirit, and give us grace to receive thy Word with reverence and humility, without which no man can understand thy truth; for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord.

–John Calvin (1509-1564)

Welcome one another, therefore, as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God. For I tell you that Christ became a servant to the circumcised to show God’s truthfulness, in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy. As it is written, “Therefore I will praise thee among the Gentiles, and sing to thy name”; and again it is said, “Rejoice, O Gentiles, with his people”; and again, “Praise the Lord, all Gentiles, and let all the peoples praise him”; and further Isaiah says, “The root of Jesse shall come, he who rises to rule the Gentiles; in him shall the Gentiles hope.” May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.

–Romans 15:7-13

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Judge Kim Dunning of the Orange County Supreme Court handed down on May 1 a surprise ruling in the case involving the property of St. James’s parish in Newport Beach, and held that St. James could not retain title to its property after it voted in 2004 to disaffiliate from the Episcopal Church (USA). But due to the bizarre reasoning she used to reach that conclusion, the ruling — if upheld on appeal — would put a cloud on the title of every previous sale or disposition of any Episcopal parish property in the State since 1980.

The wrinkle in the St. James case — a feature which distinguished it from the cases of two other parishes in the Diocese of Los Angeles (St. David’s Hollywood; and All Saints, Long Beach) which Judge Dunning ruled last September could not retain their properties either — was that St. James had been given an explicit letter from the Diocese in 1991 prior to purchasing the property at issue here, and undertaking the multi-million-dollar expense of developing it….

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Speaking at a gathering of digital advertisers in New York City last night, Mr Schmidt refused to forecast when internet video would displace television, instead declaring: “That’s already happened.”

“It’s not a replacement for something that we know,” he added. “It’s a new thing that we have to think about, to program, to curate and build new platforms.”

YouTube recently surpassed the milestone of a billion unique users a month. Only the Google search engine and social network Facebook are frequented more often by those browsing the internet worldwide.

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Employers kept hiring at a steady pace in April and the government revised up job tallies for February and March, easing fears that the economy is tumbling into a spring slump and propelling blue-chip stocks to record highs.

Nonfarm payrolls rose by 165,000 last month and the jobless rate ticked down to 7.5%, the lowest level since December 2008. The Labor Department also significantly raised hiring estimates for the two prior months, by a combined 114,000 jobs.

But the job gains in April, which were tilted toward the retail and business-services sectors, come alongside mixed signals for the economy almost four years into the recovery. While the housing and auto sectors are accelerating after years of industry turmoil, other major sectors are showing signs of trouble. In short: The Federal Reserve is looking for more broad-based and sustained job growth before easing up on its easy-money policies.

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The Hollywood success of blockbusters like “Passion of the Christ” and “The Blind Side” has faith-based groups and entertainment executives looking to capture segments of the American audience eager for openly religious fare. Mr. Burnett’s “The Bible” has more mouths watering: In its first week of home video release last month, it became the top-selling TV miniseries of all time, selling 525,000 units, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

But theater presents different challenges. “Hollywood is in the business of catching lightning in a bottle twice,” says Jonathan Bock, president of Grace Hill Media, a marketing firm that has helped several Hollywood studios target religious audiences. “With movies, you can toe-dip with small releases or direct to DVD. On Broadway, you swing and hit or miss.”

The Broadway shows about religion that have been the most successful are the less-than-reverent ones….

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