When he first revealed his identity a month ago while in Hong Kong, Mr Snowden used selective disclosures about US global surveillance to rally public opinion in China and Russia. Since then, he has managed to create uproar in Europe with information about the bugging of EU offices and over the past week he has created a new international stir in Latin America.

According to reports this week in the Brazilian newspaper O Globo based on documents provided by the 30-year-old former NSA contractor, the US has been using telecoms infrastructure in Brazil to absorb huge volumes of communications and to spy on governments in the region.

With the US economy looking robust for the first time since the financial crisis, the US is again being seen as an over-weaning superpower that brushes aside smaller nations.

Read it all (another link in case needed is there).

Fewer than 40 percent of Americans see members of the clergy as major contributors to society, with Hispanic Catholics especially unimpressed, a recent Pew Research Center study shows.

The results put the clergy in the middle of 10 professions as far as perceived contributions go, and showed little change from a similar study done in 2009. Members of the military ranked first, with 78 percent saying they contribute “a lot” to the “well-being of society,” and lawyers came in last with 18 percent.

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life published the results Thursda

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In most parts of the world, arranged marriages are a time-honored expression of religious and cultural orthodoxy. Even in modern-day Israel, with its educated and affluent population, the tradition endures in the Hasidic community. But “Fill the Void” is not the critique of sexist repression we might have expected. It’s an artful, character-driven drama that constitutes a minor miracle of empathy.

The source of that empathy is director Rama Burshtein’s own life. She is the first ultra-Orthodox Israeli woman to direct a feature film, and the yearning for independent identity is embodied in her heroine, Shira (Hadas Yaron).

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The L’viv Old Town also houses the Cathedral of St. George, center of the Greek Catholic Archeparchy of L’viv. In the cathedral’s crypt are the tombs of two men whose names do not figure prominently in today’s debates over the corruptions of the Yanukovych regime, but whose dramatic lives may suggest a path beyond the culture of corruption and conformism that threatens to turn Ukraine into a simulacrum of Belarus ”” another country in which the intellectual iron curtain has yet to be torn down, with dire effects on both politics and the economy. Andrey Sheptytsky, a man of broad culture, who was the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church for 43 turbulent years, from 1901 until 1944, is buried there. Next to him is the man Sheptytsky chose to succeed him and whom he secretly consecrated a bishop: Josyf Slipyj, model for the Ukrainian pope in Morris West’s novel The Shoes of the Fisherman, and a leader whose dreams of a Greek Catholic Church nourishing the public culture of a free Ukraine are beginning to be realized by the efforts of one of his spiritual sons ”” who happens to have been born in Syracuse, N.Y.

Whether those dreams come to fruition may be the key factor in determining whether Ukraine, like the Baltic states and Poland, follows the historic path into Europe taken by similar victims of Stalin’s imperialism, or whether it becomes Belarus 2.0: a vast land of shattered hopes and another extension of Vladimir Putin’s imperial revanchism.

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Two-thirds of the way through George Packer’s harrowing and magisterial account of post-2008 America, we meet a Florida boat builder named Jack Hamersma ”“ a rough-hewn, working-class guy who’d climbed up the economic ladder only to find himself drawn into the maelstrom of the real-estate speculation that destroyed huge tracts of suburbia in the wake of the Lehman Brothers collapse.

Like thousands of naïve speculators ”“ the 1920s-era shoeshine boys with the hot stock tip ”“ Hamersma’s savings were tied up in a heavily mortgaged house that lost most of its value after the bubble burst. With repo men circling and foreclosure looming, he retained Matthew Weidner, a small-time Florida lawyer (think Paul Newman in The Verdict) to defend him against the venality of a banking sector that imploded after an orgy of deregulated and frequently fraudulent greed.

The lawyer was able to keep the lenders from foreclosing on Hamersma. But as lawsuit dragged on, Hamersma’s life unwound into insolvency and costly cancer diagnoses. “That happened a lot to Weidner’s clients ”“ the job, the house, their health, usually in that order,” writes Packer, a New Yorker staff writer, novelist and playwright. “Weidner watched Jack shrink before his eyes, dropping a hundred pounds until, three years after that first consultation, he limped into the office one afternoon to discuss his case, wasted legs sticking out of his shorts, a canvas bag hanging over his shoulder, from which a drip tube extended under a bandage on his chest.”

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At 33, my friend (I’ll call her Shannon) had little to show for her five-year relationship with her live-in boyfriend. No ring. No baby. No future. So she finally decided to break up with him.

Back when Shannon and her (younger) boyfriend moved in together, things had looked a lot brighter. They shared a love of indie music and the Charlottesville arts scene. She thought they both wanted a future together. But over time, her boyfriend turned aside her queries about their shared future–queries that started off subtle and became more explicit as the years passed by. Finally, when she turned 33, Shannon told him she wanted a wedding date, to which he responded that he was not ready for marriage.

Shannon’s experience with a live-in boyfriend with commitment issues, it seems, is not all that unusual. According to a new paper from RAND by sociologists Michael Pollard and Kathleen Mullan Harris, cohabiting young adults have significantly lower levels of commitment than their married peers. This aversion to commitment is particularly prevalent among young men who live with their partners.

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A new approach to caring for young adults with developmental, cognitive and intellectual disabilities is quietly rooting and growing in a cozy mustard-colored house behind a West Ashley strip mall.

The dozen or so participants at Healing Farms Ministries recently graduated high school, and said good-bye to all of the structure and help that the school system provided them.

Read it all.

The crown jewels of the Church of England are its parishes. Priests have the cure of souls””not just the churchgoers but of every resident of the neighborhood, where every blade of grass in the entire country has a church that seeks to make itself in some way a blessing to all, where the clergy know that “I can’t know everyone, but everyone can know me.” But this inheritance is under pressure. In the corners of clergy gatherings there are mutterings. Stories are told of spouses or friends in health care and education who see very few patients or students any more, but instead sit behind computers filling in forms about targets and thresholds. The same is said about priests””that a Prussian-style bureaucracy is infesting the poetry of the priest’s relationship to the parish.

In the Church of England, parish clergy are all paid the same; there are no “rich rectors” with well-endowed churches and sprawling expense accounts, so the conventional commercial appraisal””balance sheet healthy, 2 percent pay increase, MBA completed, another 2 percent increase””doesn’t apply. But now appraisal schemes for ministry review have been introduced by some dioceses, and this is the bureaucracy that is resented by clergy who see it, with its target goals, assessments, statistics and accountability, as another layer of control.

When I overhear the clergy grumbling, the elderly Welsh millworker comes to mind, and I find myself asking, “Shouldn’t we pause for a moment and ask ourselves why all these systems and controls have been introduced? Isn’t it because the glorious parish system puts the parish priest in a position of extraordinary trust, and because that trust has gone without honor rather more times than we’d care to admit?”

Read it all.

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The Very Rev. Dr. Samy Fawzy Shehata, dean of St. Mark’s Pro-Cathedral in Alexandria, Egypt, will speak about the Anglican Church in Egypt and its role during the current unrest, a critical time in the life of Egypt, during a Thursday luncheon at the Church of the Holy Comforter. The public is invited to the noon luncheon in the church’s parish hall.

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Australian boys need to be taught an ”alternative way of being men” if the community is to break a cycle of domestic violence fuelled by aggressive and physical stereotypes of masculinity.

University of Western Sydney academic Moira Carmody, who is leading a NSW government-funded project into early intervention programs for boys, says a respectful family environment can conflict with other influences.

”It might not be so cool outside the family, and they might need to be seen as tough and competitive, otherwise they could get beaten up,” she said.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/man-enough-to-eschew-violence-20130713-2pwti.html#ixzz2Z1e05tjE

Read it all.

These photos might cause a double-take. Look closely: These white balls of fur aren’t puppies, or lambs, they’re lion cubs. And they’re adorable. The rare white color is due to a recessive gene.

Seven of the cubs were born in captivity to three South African mama lions since last month.

Read it all and look at all twelve pictures.

For man believes with his heart and so is justified, and he confesses with his lips and so is saved. The scripture says, “No one who believes in him will be put to shame.” For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and bestows his riches upon all who call upon him. For, “every one who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved.” But how are men to call upon him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without a preacher? And how can men preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach good news!” But they have not all obeyed the gospel; for Isaiah says, “Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?” So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes by the preaching of Christ.

–Romans 10:10-17

…it did happen to him, in New Court, Trinity College, during the evening of October 12, 1975. At Eton, he had “vaguely assumed there was a God. But I didn’t believe. I wasn’t interested at all.” That night in Cambridge, though, praying with a Christian friend, he suddenly felt “a clear sense of something changing, the presence of something that had not been there before in my life. I said to my friend, ‘Please don’t tell anyone about this’, because I was desperately embarrassed that this had happened to me, like getting measles.”

Since then, there have been long periods with “no sense of any presence at all’’, but he has never gone back on that night’s “decision to follow Christ’’. This is not his doing: “It’s grace. Grace is a reality: feelings are ephemeral.”

To understand the change in Justin Welby’s life, you need to know what happened before.

Read it all.

Eternal Light, shine into our hearts;

Eternal Goodness, deliver us from evil;

Eternal Power, be our support;

Eternal Wisdom, scatter the darkness of our ignorance;

Eternal Pity, have mercy upon us;

that with all our heart and mind and soul and strength we may seek thy face and be brought by thine infinite mercy to thy holy presence; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

–Saint Alcuin (735-804)

To compare the mentality of a brother bishop to school shooters (see here), or to call him and presumably those close to him “petty deciders or wolves who masquerade as sheep” is incredibly inappropriate for any Christian, not to mention bizarre. I truly have never before heard or read such a spiteful and hate-fueled speech on either side of our present unpleasantness. This type of hateful and over the top language is even worse coming from a leader who claims to speak for the “national Church” and all Episcopalians. Let me be clear: I am an Episcopal priest and the Presiding Bishop does not speak for me. I have no delusion that I share in any ownership of anything outside of my parish and my diocese. The idea that one person, even if one agrees with the present incumbent, can speak for all Episcopalians is sheer lunacy.

To be fair, this centralization of power and influence certainly did not start with the present Presiding Bishop, but we do well to consider the state in which we find ourselves. Power corrupts, and the Presiding Bishop rightly notes that when one figure assumes the power it often leads to abuse, tyranny and corruption. She apparently fails to see how this truth has been demonstrated in her term as Presiding Bishop. Fast tracking bishops to “renounce their orders” rather than letting the House of Bishops speak, inhibiting without the consent of the three most senior active bishops (which the new Title IV conveniently does not require), and setting up new dioceses (which TEC has every right to do) while violating the canons of TEC all point to an office that has overgrown its canonical bounds and is running unchecked.

Read it all.

For Catholics, he wrote, the key isn’t to be pulled into speculation, but to seek a logical and compassionate application of all church teachings linked to homosexuality.

The line between orientation and behavior is crucial, due to a clarification issued by the Boy Scouts: “Any sexual conduct, whether homosexual or heterosexual, by youth of Scouting age is contrary to the virtues of Scouting.”

This firm statement, Peters argued online, “seems wholly in line with sound Catholic teaching against sexual activity outside of marriage and stands in welcome contrast to the indifference toward premarital sex shown by some other youth organizations. Aside from youth programs expressly oriented toward chastity, I know of no other secular organization that so clearly declares all sexual conduct by its youth members to be contrary to its values as does the Boy Scouts.”

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A Church of England court has ruled that Benjamin West’s altarpiece, Devout Men Taking Away the Body of St Stephen, 1776, which was made for one of the most important churches in the City of London can be sold for display in the US. The $2.85m painting is being bought by an anonymous foundation, which is due to lend it to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (The Art Newspaper, April 2013, pp6-7 and June 2013, p3). West was born in America, but worked in England.

In his judgment, delivered on 10 July, Judge Nigel Seed, chancellor of the consistory court of the Diocese of London, ruled that St Stephen Walbrook should be allowed to sell the masterpiece. The painting had been removed from the church in around 1987, in what he described as “perceived illegal actions”, and has since been kept in storage.

Judge Seed was critical of “unlawful actions” taken by two priests at St Stephen Walbrook: one who had originally hung the picture in 1776 without “faculty” approval from the Church of England and the second who had removed it in around 1987, again without the necessary permission. He said: “This case, if nothing else, is an object lesson of the consequences of incumbents behaving as though the church building is a sort of personal doll’s house for them to play with, without reference to the parishioners.”

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Baptized Catholics can now join Anglican ordinariates, according to a modification to the norms made by Pope Francis.

“This confirms the place of the personal ordinariates within the mission of the wider Catholic Church, not simply as a jurisdiction for those from the Anglican tradition, but as a contributor to the urgent work of the New Evangelization,” the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham announced July 9.

A term coined by Blessed Pope John Paul II, the New Evangelization is the common term for bringing the Gospel to formerly Christian nations, and it can be seen in the new outreach to people who were baptized as Catholics but who never completed the process of Christian initiation.

Read more: http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/pope-modifies-norms-for-catholics-seeking-to-join-an-anglican-ordinariate/#ixzz2YzTVcgvK

Read it all.

You’ve probably heard the baleful reports. The number of college students majoring in the humanities is plummeting, according to a big study released last month by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. The news has provoked a flood of high-minded essays deploring the development as a symptom and portent of American decline.

But there is another way to look at this supposed revelation (the number of humanities majors has actually been falling since the 1970s).

The bright side is this: The destruction of the humanities by the humanities is, finally, coming to a halt. No more will literature, as part of an academic curriculum, extinguish the incandescence of literature. No longer will the reading of, say, “King Lear” or D.H. Lawrence’s “Women in Love” result in the flattening of these transfiguring encounters into just two more elements in an undergraduate career””the onerous stuff of multiple-choice quizzes, exam essays and homework assignments.

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The Musi-Café in Lac-Mégantic was always the sort of place where people liked to gather on a summer night. The music was good, the food hit the spot, and the taps ran 25 brands of draft beer. Three years ago, when he was 32, the club’s owner, Yannick Gagné, got tired of leasing, bought the building and doubled the club’s floor space in time for its 10th anniversary. Friday, July 5, seemed like another good day. At lunch Gagné had his photo taken with Christian Paradis, the federal industry minister, who happened to be in town. Later, crowds gathered for two different birthday parties.

The place was at its capacity of around 180 for dinner, but started to quiet down later in the evening. “It was a beautiful evening, but the place wasn’t completely packed,” Gagné said later. He went home shortly after midnight. There were perhaps 50 people still inside and another 30 on the patio. When he got home, Gagné emailed his pregnant wife, 23-year old Lisandra Arencibia Tamayo, telling her she should stop collecting the cover charge at the door and join him at their home less than 700 m from the Musi-Café. Tamayo arrived, fell asleep on the couch””and minutes later, they heard an explosion.

That fireball was only the first of many as a pretty summer night turned to hell. A 72-car train with five locomotives had rolled downhill, unattended, from Nantes, the next town up the road. Each of the tanker cars held tens of thousands of litres of light crude oil.

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It’s been almost 40 years since Dr. Ernest Becker published his Pulitzer Prize-winning study, The Denial of Death. Unlike Becker, three recent books do not attribute the denial of death to more or less universal psychological mechanisms. They lay death’s denial at the feet of sociological and technological developments characteristic of the modern world. Nevertheless, they agree with Becker on one basic point: American society lives in denial that we all die. Further, all three agree that churches have colluded with ”” perhaps have even been captured by ”” this pervasive habit of avoidance. All three authors have had scrapes with death, which drove them from denial. In response, each has issued a call to churches to reclaim their ministry to the dying….

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From here:Our Mission is Jesus Christ

St. John’s Shaughnessy is a small but flourishing congregation,
living our calling as Christians by faithfully walking the Anglican path.
Our road is less travelled.

We do not claim absolute knowledge of the Divine.

We really welcome everyone and are enriched by the dynamic tension of differing beliefs.
We embrace doubt. Pray hopefully. And celebrate diversity.
We practise our faith in our every day lives. Are strongly committed to social justice.
And believe in the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to transform lives.

Come as you are. Leave uplifted.

Some of the congregants began arriving to help. There was Steve Crawford, who had spent his youth in Campus Crusade for Christ, and Gloria Parker, raised Lutheran and married to a Catholic, and Patrick McKenna, who had been brought up as a Jehovah’s Witness and now called himself a pagan.

They had come together with about 20 other members to celebrate the end of their third year as the congregation of the Living Interfaith Church, the holy mash-up that Mr. Greenebaum had created. Yearning for decades to find a religion that embraced all religions, and secular ethical teachings as well, he had finally followed the mantra of Seattle’s indie music scene: “D.I.Y.,” meaning “do it yourself.”

So as the service progressed, the liturgy moved from a poem by the Sufi mystic Rumi to the “passing of the peace” greeting that traced back to early Christianity to a Buddhist responsive reading to an African-American spiritual to a rabbinical song.

Read it all.

Dear Friends,

I’m often asked “What does it mean to be a member of St. John’s?” and I usually answer, “it all depends.” Of course it is possible to wax theological about the fact that through the resurrection, God put all things under Jesus’ feet “and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all” (Eph 1:22-23). Clearly, the church is at the heart of God’s eternal purposes and infinitely precious to Christ. But I think people are usually after a more concrete and practical answer.

There is a very helpful answer to this question on p. 555 of our Book of Common Prayer which enunciates six practical commitments. It states:

Every Christian man or woman should from time to time frame for himself or herself a RULE OF LIFE in accordance with the precepts of the Gospel and the faith and order of the Church; wherein he or she may consider the following:
The regularity of attendance at public worship and especially at the Holy Communion;
The practice of private prayer, Bible-reading, and self-discipline;
Bringing the teaching and example of Christ into everyday life;
The boldness of spoken witness to our faith in Christ;
Personal service to the Church and the community;
The offering of money according to our means for the support of the work of the Church at home and abroad.

“Rule of Life” is an unfortunate title, conjuring images of monastic asceticism and itchy clothing, or more commandments to make us feel guilty, or worse””a list of duties to tick so I can know God cannot ask any more from me. That is not what the Prayer Book intends.
Everything we do in the Christian life is in response to the grace and goodness of God. In the death of Jesus we are remade and flooded with the Holy Spirit, who spreads the love of God and the obedience to God in our hearts. It is true that most monastic orders have a “Rule of Life” (usually poverty, chastity, and obedience), but the old Latin word for ”˜Rule’ is ”˜Regula’””which means a pattern or model to regulate our lives.

So the six principles in the BCP “Rule of Life” are intended to show what a “cross-shaped life” looks like. They are not meant to be read legalistically or as a means to gain God’s favor, but as a way to nourish our love for God and one another in practice precisely because we know God’s favour in Jesus Christ. They are the visible, realistic, and balanced behaviours of those who have been gripped by God’s grace.

I commend them to you for your summer meditation.

–(The Rev.) David Short is rector, Saint John’s, Vancouver, B.C.

By the year 2016, it was predicted last week, the majority of children in Britain will be born out of wedlock. At the moment, the rate of babies with unmarried parents is running at 47.5 per cent, and heading upwards. It’s a funny word, “wedlock”, reeking of ancient custom, with echoes of a key turning inexorably in a heavy door slammed shut on the single life.

The marital state of Britain today suggests that many people, when they hear “wedlock”, react as one might to the ominous clang of prison gates, and retreat. They find it much easier to have a baby together than to tie the knot, even though marriages can be broken, but a baby means (in theory, at least) that you are forever connected in some style to the other parent. There are couples who, if they crave a public statement of permanence, are more likely to seek it in the tattoo parlour than the registry office. Yet, in fact, there is no true “lock” in “wedlock”: the word grew out of the Old English “wedlac”, or pledge-giving, and the “lac” suffix means “offering”: more volition, less imprisonment.

Read it all.

While Lewis is making a very a good point about our relative/analogical knowledge of good and evil, he happens to do so by trading on a widely-popular caricature of the doctrine of total depravity.

Most people are introduced to the teaching by hearing something along the lines of, “That John Calvin, he was such a pessimist. Did you know that he taught that we were totally depraved? That all of us are about as awful as it gets, none of us knows right from wrong, and we’re born simply and utterly wicked? No wonder he was a jerk.” Or something like that.

The problem is, that is neither what total depravity, properly understood, nor John Calvin teach with respect to human nature.

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ABERNETHY: You’ve been to Egypt many times. As you look at it from here, what do you see? How do you characterize the mess it’s in?

[KATE] SEELYE: Well Egypt is facing a very challenging situation as it transitions from an authoritarian regime to a democracy in the future. It’s still very much along a transitional path.

ABERNETHY: But, how do you describe what’s going on?

SEELYE: Well, you know, there are two different views of what just happened. There are those who say that a coup just took place, that a legitimately elected government was just overthrown. You now have the military in office that is rounding up the very Islamists that were ruling Egypt just, you know, a few weeks ago, putting them in prison and closing down the media. You have liberals on the other hand, who supported the recent popular uprising, who say this is the very best thing that could have ever happened to Egypt. They say Morsi, the president, was incompetent, that he was authoritarian, as authoritarian as Mubarak. And they note that the economy was collapsing. There were two months left of wheat supplies. Now, in response to what’s just happened, Gulf countries have committed twelve billion dollars to Egypt. The new prime minister is a renowned economist and the liberals say there’s hope that Egypt will become prosperous and stable once again.

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O God, by whose command the order of time runs its course: Forgive, we pray thee, the impatience of our hearts; make perfect that which is lacking in our faith; and, while we tarry the fulfillment of thy promises, grant us to have a good hope because of thy word; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

–Gregory Nazianzen (329–c.390)

And they went into Capernaum; and immediately on the sabbath he entered the synagogue and taught. And they were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one who had authority, and not as the scribes. And immediately there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit; and he cried out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” But Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be silent, and come out of him!” And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him. And they were all amazed, so that they questioned among themselves, saying, “What is this? A new teaching! With authority he commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.” And at once his fame spread everywhere throughout all the surrounding region of Galilee.

–Mark 1:21-28