On the way to Jerusalem he was passing along between Sama’ria and Galilee. And as he entered a village, he was met by ten lepers, who stood at a distance and lifted up their voices and said, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.” When he saw them he said to them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went they were cleansed. Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice; and he fell on his face at Jesus’ feet, giving him thanks. Now he was a Samaritan. Then said Jesus, “Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” And he said to him, “Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well.”

–Luke 17:11-19

The debate about marriage equality often centers, however discretely, on an appeal to the Bible. Unfortunately, such appeals often reflect a lack of biblical literacy on the part of those who use that complex collection of texts as an authority to enact modern social policy.

As academic biblical scholars, we wish to clarify that the biblical texts do not support the frequent claim that marriage between one man and one woman is the only type of marriage deemed acceptable by the Bible’s authors.

The fact that marriage is not defined as only that between one man and one woman is reflected in the entry on “marriage” in the authoritative Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000): “Marriage is one expression of kinship family patterns in which typically a man and at least one woman cohabitate publicly and permanently as a basic social unit” (p. 861).

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The second day of Synod… [in 1994] I turned towards the issue that would in many ways define the life and ministry of the diocese, as well as my own, for the next decade. These were some of my remarks on that Saturday…:

We are living in a time when issues of human sexuality have acquired a new urgency in our culture. We did not choose this, and many of us would like it to go away again. But sex is here before us, and we must accept the fact that we are the generation in the church that has to wrestle anew with this old, old question. What is human sexuality for? What has sexuality to do with God, and how can we understand it in the light of our creation by God and our redemption by Jesus Christ?

Little did we know back then al that would lie before us in our attempts to answer these questions faithfully and with compassion. In those days we had never heard of Lambeth Resolution 1:10; no one could have anticipated the Windsor Report; I had never been trained in seminary to spend two days on a witness stand in the Supreme Court of British Columbia.

And yet now, twenty years later, many things have changed….

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Prayers are underway at Namugongo as thousands of Christians commemorate the day the Uganda Martyrs were killed some 127 years ago.

The martyrs who refused to reject their faith in Jesus Christ were killed on the orders of Kabaka Mwanga in 1886.

Read it all (and what a picture!).

Shifting government finances are likely to take an even bigger bite out of growth over the next few years than many now expect, economists at the San Francisco Fed warned Monday.

In a research note, Brian Lucking and Daniel Wilson write fiscal policy headwinds will subtract one percentage point from growth over the next three years beyond the normal fiscal drag that usually comes during times of recovery. If not for the current and likely future stance of fiscal policy, the economy would be growing at a faster rate, which would allow for more robust job growth and, presumably, a more normal stance of monetary policy for the Federal Reserve.

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In June 1962, The Christian Century sent C. S. Lewis a questionnaire asking him what books most influenced his “vocational attitude” and philosophy of life. Lewis politely answered with a list that included: Phantastes by George MacDonald, The Everlasting Man by G. K. Chesterton, The Aeneid by Virgil, The Temple by George Herbert, The Prelude by William Wordsworth, The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell, Descent into Hell by Charles Williams, Theism and Humanism by Arthur James Balfour, and Das Heilige by Rudolf Otto.

Readers of Lewis, especially those familiar with his 1955 autobiography, Surprised by Joy, will recognize most of these titles and understand their importance to Lewis. Indeed, it is likely that many readers came to their own knowledge of writers like MacDonald, Chesterton, and Williams through reading what Lewis had to say about them.

One exception might be the German theologian Rudolf Otto. Lewis wrote to Sister Madeleva in 1934: “I shd. warn you that I am very bad at German and this doubtless influenced my choice of reading.” Thus, even for a man known to be, as George Musacchio commented in C. S. Lewis, Man & Writer, always “reading, reading, reading,” Otto’s Das Heilige, or The Idea of the Holy, might be a surprising item on the Christian Century list.

Read more: http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=24-03-036-f#ixzz2VB0ZL15D

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The retirement savings of more than 80 non-clergy employees of the Diocese of South Carolina and its parishes are being held hostage by their former pension plan at the Episcopal Church (TEC).

The lay employees have been trying to arrange for the rollover of their retirement savings since February, when they first contacted the Church Pension Group, which provides retirement, health and other benefits to employees of The Episcopal Church, its parishes, dioceses and other institutions. The employees became eligible to rollover their funds into another qualified plan when their employer, the Diocese or the parishes that voted to disassociate from the denomination, officially ceased to be employed by any TEC organization or parish.

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On Pentecost Sunday all hell broke loose in Rome. Following Mass that day, the unpredictable Pope Francis laid hands on a demon-possessed man from Mexico and prayed for him. The YouTube video of this encounter was flashed around the world, and the story caught fire: Is Pope Francis an exorcist? The Holy Father’s Vatican handlers were quick to deny such. The pope simply offered a prayer of deliverance for the distraught man, it was said. Exorcism in the Catholic Church is a sacramental, a sacred act producing a spiritual effect, which must be done according to the officially prescribed Rite of Exorcism. And yet what the pope did on Pentecost Sunday in St. Peter’s Square was more than a simple prayer for someone to get better. It looked for all the world like a real act of spiritual warfare.

Timothy GeorgeThe scene now shifts to South America, the continent where Jorge Mario Bergoglio was born and has spent most of his life. The place: All Saints Church, in Steenrijk, Curaçao, in the Anglican Diocese of Venezuela. The date: May 12, 2013, one week before the pope’s exorcism-like event in Rome. The preacher: The Most Reverend Katharine Jefferts Schori, presiding bishop of The Episcopal Church (formerly known as ECUSA). When she was elected to her post in 2006, Father Richard John Neuhaus described it as an occasion of great sadness. His reaction reflected neither personal animus nor schadenfreudlich glee. Rather, he saw her accession to this high office as likely to deepen the pain and division within the Christian community. Sadly, he was right.

In Venezuela, Bishop Katharine also confronted a demon””the one found in her sermon text for the day, Acts 16:16-24. This is Luke’s account of Paul’s exorcism of a manic slave girl in Philippi. The bishop’s sermon was really a polemic against what she called, in postmodernist lingo, “discounting and devaluing difference.”

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For starters, it’s worth bearing in mind that Western civilization is grounded in the belief that once upon a time, God was in his heaven and people went to church regularly. So at any given time, more Americans are likely to think the influence of religion in in decline than the other way around.

That said, what accounts for the rather striking ups and downs in the chart? In its latest release, Gallup emphasizes that these do not reflect changes in personal religiosity ”” and I’m inclined to agree, up to a point. Here’s the story I’d tell about the people’s perception of religion’s influence.

The decline from 1958 through 1972 has to do with the perceived changes in cultural norms associated with “the Sixties.” Call it the “sex, drugs, and rock ”˜n’ roll” effect. The 1970s suggested push-back, or at least a range of religious responses to the changes, from New Age communalism to increased activity of evangelicals in the public square. The election of Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter in 1976 ”” what Time called the Year of the Evangelical ”” pumped up the popular sense that the influence of religion was on the rise.

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Constructed in 1903, it is a brick and stone building designed in the late Victorian Gothic style, according to a news release from the Alabama Historical Commission.

In 1963, the Episcopal Diocese sold the building and parishioners moved to a suburban location. Various congregations used the building.

Most recently, the building was purchased by a Muscle Shoals couple who removed some of the architectural elements for salvage and later donated the building to the Colbert County Historic Landmarks Foundation.

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David Cameron will launch a new taskforce today aimed at confronting Islamic extremism and controlling preachers of hate.

The Prime Minister will chair the first session of the Whitehall body set up after of the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby. It will focus on how the influence of radical preachers in schools, mosques and jails can be curbed.

Ministers including Theresa May, the Home Secretary, and Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, will also look at whether the Government needs enhanced powers to expel foreign-born preachers guilty of hate speech from the UK.

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European governments are figuring out that taxing financial transactions won’t be a magical money machine and that the proposed levy might even damage the European economy.

Reuters first reported Thursday that EU officials are scaling back a transaction tax proposal supported by 11 countries that is supposed to take effect in January. The levy could instead be introduced on a “staggered basis,” one official told the news agency. The first phase might only tax sales and purchases of shares, not bonds or derivatives transactions, and at 0.01% instead of 0.1% as currently proposed. A rate of zero is more appropriate.

Enthusiasm for the tax has been dimming for a while, including in governments that have previously backed it. Christian Noyer, the Governor of the Banque de France, said in Paris on Tuesday that the levy will raise “nothing at all.” One unnamed EU official told Reuters that a scaled-back transaction tax would reap revenue of less than €3.5 billion. The full-fledged levy, as proposed by the European Commission in February, was supposed to rake in €31 billion a year.

Read it all (if necessary another link may be found here.

[this U-shaped pod]… is part of MUSC’s emergency department.
There are no locks on doors. The lone bathroom is the only suicide-proof room.
There is no shower for patients here; nobody is supposed to stay long enough to need one. Yet increasingly, they do.
Psychiatric “boarders,” as they’re called, often dominate this pod intended for short-term, acutely ill patients. At times fully half of MUSC’s ER, among the region’s busiest, has been filled with psychiatric boarders.
These are folks at imminent risk of harming themselves or others and need emergency inpatient psychiatric treatment.
Yet there are not enough beds for them all.

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O God, by whose providence the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church: Grant that we who remember before thee the blessed martyrs of Uganda, may, like them, be steadfast in our faith in Jesus Christ, to whom they gave obedience even unto death, and by their sacrifice brought forth a plentiful harvest; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Grant, O Lord, that we may cleave to thee without parting, worship thee without wearying, serve thee without failing; faithfully seek thee, happily find thee, and for ever possess thee, the one only God, blessed, world without end.

–Saint Anselm (c.1033–1109)

And he said to his disciples, “Temptations to sin are sure to come; but woe to him by whom they come! It would be better for him if a millstone were hung round his neck and he were cast into the sea, than that he should cause one of these little ones to sin. Take heed to yourselves; if your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him; and if he sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times, and says, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive him.” The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!” And the Lord said, “If you had faith as a grain of mustard seed, you could say to this sycamine tree, ‘Be rooted up, and be planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you. “Will any one of you, who has a servant plowing or keeping sheep, say to him when he has come in from the field, ‘Come at once and sit down at table’? Will he not rather say to him, ‘Prepare supper for me, and gird yourself and serve me, till I eat and drink; and afterward you shall eat and drink’? Does he thank the servant because he did what was commanded? So you also, when you have done all that is commanded you, say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.'”

–Luke 17:1-10

Of the half-dozen full-length histories of the battle of Gettysburg written over the last century, none dives down so closely to the experience of the individual soldier, or looks so closely at the sway of politics over military decisions, or places the battle so firmly in the context of nineteenth-century military practice. Allen C. Guelzo shows us the face, the sights, and the sounds of nineteenth-century combat: the lay of the land, the fences and the stone walls, the gunpowder clouds that hampered movement and vision; the armies that caroused, foraged, kidnapped, sang, and were so filthy they could be smelled before they could be seen; the head-swimming difficulties of marshaling massive numbers of poorly trained soldiers, plus thousands of animals and wagons, with no better means of communication than those of Caesar and Alexander.

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The Rt Revd Alastair Redfern, Bishop of Derby, has welcomed the post-2015 development agenda report of the UN Secretary General’s High Level Panel, co-chaired by David Cameron. The report, A New Global Partnership: Eradicate Poverty and Transform Economies through Sustainable Development, builds on the successes of the Millennium Development Goals experiment and calls for an end to absolute poverty by 2030.

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The United States has entered a new phase in the war against al Qaeda and its allies, drawing down from its large-scale combat operations in Afghanistan and moving to more targeted counterterrorism operations where military attack drones will play a major role.

However, the U.S. bishops are now warning increased U.S. dependence on military attack drones for “targeted killings” pose serious moral questions that President Barack Obama, Congress and the U.S. public must consider.

Bishop Richard Pates, head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on International Justice and Peace, wrote a May 17 letter to the White House stating that the military use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or “drones” in certain cases appeared to “violate the law of war, international human-rights law and moral norms.”

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The uprising began in early February with a Taliban commander’s knock on the door of Hajji Abdul Wudood.

The militant leader demanded that Wudood, a stout, weathered man of 60, surrender one of his eight sons, who was accused of spying on the Taliban for the Afghan government.

What Wudood did next triggered a revolt against the Taliban that has spread to a dozen villages in a region that has been among the nation’s most formidable Taliban strongholds.

Fed up with beheadings and homemade bombs that killed 60 people in two villages the previous year, Wudood refused to hand over 25-year-old Abdul Hanan.

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Yet, there is a dark and deeply troubling side to the web. The very unshackled freedom of expression and communication ”“ the revolutionary, even noble, principles on which it was founded ”“ has allowed a despicable underworld of sickening pornography and violent depravity to grow up virtually unregulated.

Those who take an extreme libertarian view would say that this downside of the web, while unpleasant, is a price worth paying for the enormous freedoms the internet brings all of us. However, such an argument cannot be sustained when viewed in the light of heinous murder cases, including, most recently, that of schoolgirl April Jones. Police officers found that Mark Bridger, who murdered five-year-old April, had numerous indecent images on his computer He had also views violent sexual scenes. There is a pattern here. Stuart Hazell, who killed 12-year-old Tia Sharp, regularly downloaded child abuse images on his mobile phone. And such cases do not only involve children. Jane Longhurst was 31 when she was murdered by extreme-pornography obsessive Graham Coutts.

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Why did gay marriage meet such resistance in France, when the same law was passed with little opposition in other liberal democracies ”“ even in traditionally Catholic societies such as Spain, Portugal and Quebec?

France is distinct. Despite its image as a country of free-thinkers and libertines (which it is, in part), France remains a conservative country where family links are extremely strong. The family Sunday lunch is a sacred ritual and it’s not uncommon to see three generations vacationing together.

Contrary to Quebec, where a majority of children are born to unmarried couples, most French middle-class couples get married as soon as they’re having their first child, which will likely be followed by two siblings.

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It’s a rather neat set-up, don’t you think? Get the uneasy bishops to face disciplinary charges, and then soft-soap them with promises of full (well, almost) confidentiality. And then disregard the terms of the Accord entirely, thereby letting the accused bishops know that nothing, absolutely nothing, will stand in the way of intimidating them to whatever extent may be necessary to keep them silent.

In other words, despite your own contempt for the language of the Accord, continue to hold it over them, to intimidate them from attempting to commit such an outrageous act of disloyalty ever again. And if the bishops allow that continuing intimidation to affect their actions, then I pray for them, and for the future of a Church that is in such cynical and calculating hands.

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Religions and cultures with which we are unfamiliar are a lot harder to understand than most of us think. I suspect that most Americans would answer the question “Is Buddhism a religion of peace?” with a yes. The Dalai Lama, Richard Gere, and so on. Even the battling Shaolin monk Kwai Chang Kaine from the old TV series Kung Fu was as peaceful as people would let him be.

But this very day, Buddhists in Burma are accused of violent oppression of Muslims, no less than “ethnic cleansing.” And history includes plenty of examples of violence in the name of Buddhism.

Is Buddhism a religion of peace? It can be.

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Gauteng Premier Nomvula Mokonyane joined the Eldorado community in its battle against drugs.

“We will defeat this demon,” she told members of the Anglican church in a prayer march in Eldorado Park on Sunday.

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But right now, the E.U. project isn’t advancing democracy, liberalism and human rights. Instead, it is subjecting its weaker member states to an extraordinary test of their resilience, and conducting an increasingly perverse experiment in seeing how much stress liberal norms can bear.

That stress takes the form of mass unemployment unseen in the history of modern Europe, and mass youth unemployment that is worse still. In the Continent’s sick-man economies, the jobless rate for those under 25 now staggers the imagination: over 40 percent in Italy, over 50 percent in Spain, and over 60 percent in Greece.

For these countries, the euro zone is now essentially an economic prison, with Germany as the jailer and the common currency as the bars. No matter what happens, they face a future of stagnation ”” as aging societies with expensive welfare states whose young people will sit idle for years, unable to find work, build capital or start families.

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Read the whole letter to Christ Church Episcopal, Greenville here. It is interesting that given a choice the rector of the largest parish in the diocese will not allow such blessings in the parish in which he serves.

Read it all and check out the many links if you have not seen it.

The fire caused an estimated $950,000 in structural damage, which doesn’t include the cost of the property damage lost in the contents of the church. It would have been a formidable sum to a relatively small congregation, but the church’s insurance will cover the cost of the new construction, Bolin said.

A construction crew was on site Friday, digging the footings for the building’s foundations. Ted Hardy, a job supervisor with Jackson/Sims Architects, said the new facility will resemble the original building.

“It will look like a traditional Southern church,” he said.

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