U.S. officials said Iran hacked unclassified Navy computers in recent weeks in an escalation of Iranian cyberintrusions targeting the U.S. military.
The allegations, coming as the Obama administration ramps up talks with Iran over its nuclear program, show the depth and complexity of long-standing tensions between Washington and Tehran.
The U.S. officials said the attacks were carried out by hackers working for Iran’s government or by a group acting with the approval of Iranian leaders.
In a historic decision, the Church of South India appointed its first woman Bishop, who hails from a small village in Kurnool.
With her appointment Rev E Pushpalalitha becomes the first woman bishop of the Anglican family churches in South Asia, top CSI officials said.
“I am glad that the supreme authorities of the church chose me but more than that i am glad that the lord chose me,” Rev Pushpalalitha told …[the Times of India].
The Primate of the Church of the Province of Central Africa (CPCA) said there is need for personal sacrifice from Christians in Africa if the Anglican Church there is to become self-sustainable.
Archbishop of CPCA and Bishop of Northern Zambia, the Most Revd Albert Chama, said this in Zambia’s capital Lusaka today during a special ground breaking ceremony to mark the beginning of a large executive housing building project by the Anglican Church in Zambia.
“Christians themselves need to sacrifice a lot by offering their expert services at low or reduced costs to help the Church become self-sustainable,” said the Archbishop. “But self-sustaining does not mean doing away with partners. We need to continue working and walking with others as Christ meant us to be.”
David Moyes has admitted that he is concerned by Manchester United’s start to the season after they went down to their third loss of the campaign against West Brom.
The former Everton manager, who took over from Sir Alex Ferguson after the veteran’s retirement at the end of last term, has come under increasing pressure, and he revealed the home defeat to the Baggies has left him worried about his team.
“I’m concerned after today but only because we didn’t play well,” he told reporters. “There’s a lot of games to go and we’ll try put it right in the games coming up.
What do you get a Nobel Prize-winning poet for his birthday?
The poet, in this case, is T.S. Eliot, and this year he would have turned the intimidating age of 125. It’s a tough question, but New Yorker poetry editor Paul Muldoon has got an answer: a new re-issue of the first edition of Eliot’s groundbreaking poem, The Waste Land.
It’s a jumbled, odd and beautifully dissonant poem ”” well-loved, but sometimes hard to like. The opening lines might be the most famous phrase in modern literature: “April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.”
College-age Americans participating in a new survey of religious identification were evenly divided between three distinct worldviews, Religious, Secular, and Spiritual, according to a groundbreaking report in the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) series from Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., in conjunction with the Center for Inquiry (CFI). The study finds that these three groups have distinctly different positions on political, scientific, and moral questions.
Among the students surveyed, 31.8% identified their worldview as Religious, 32.4% as Spiritual, and 28.2% as Secular. Within each group there was a remarkable level of cohesion on answers to questions covering a wide array of issues, including political alignment, acceptance of evolution and climate change, belief in supernatural phenomena such as miracles or ghosts, and trust in alternative practices such as homeopathy and astrology.
Given a trajectory that seems straight out of sci-fi, I’m worried about the future””specifically what technological advancements mean for our embodied, thinking, knowing, feeling human minds.
These days, we still say things like “I don’t know how” and “I can’t remember it,” but our ignorance rarely lasts long. Seconds later, it gets pulled up on Google or YouTube. The information we don’t know is so close””quite literally at our fingertips””that we forget we don’t know it. The dozens of phone numbers saved in my address book. The recipes saved on my Pinterest board. Google Maps to the nearest whatever. That Bible verse I’m trying to think of.
We instinctually ask our laptops and smartphones to tell us and teach us, things we once relied on other people to do.
It was gray and overcast on Sunday morning, September 15, 1963. Some rain had fallen in the night, but no one knew that the heavens would weep again before the day was done. It was “Youth Sunday” at the church, and Pastor John Cross had announced that he would preach a sermon titled “A Love that Forgives” based on the Gospel text in Luke 23:34, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”
Carolyn Maull, 14, the Sunday School secretary, hurried to fulfill her responsibilities. She greeted visitors, counted Sunday School offerings, and reported the day’s attendance. In the brief interval between Sunday School and the morning worship service, Carolyn stopped by the girls’ restroom and spoke to her friends, Cynthia Wesley, Addie Mae Collins, and Carole Robertson, all 14, and Denise McNair, who was 11. She left the restroom, walked up the stairs to the church office, and answered the ringing phone. A man’s voice said simply: “Three minutes.” He hung up.
Carolyn felt confused. She walked into the sanctuary, where the clock hanging on the wall indicated that the time was 10:22 a.m. Then she heard the blast. Boom! For a second, she thought it was thunder or a lightning strike. Then she realized””it must be a bomb. She vividly remembers two things from that horror-filled moment: the sound of feet scurrying past her to get to the exits, and looking up at the stained glass window””the same one that had brought her such comfort when she looked into the face of Jesus at her baptism. The window was still intact . . . all except the face. Jesus’ beautiful face was gone.
Last Saturday, Michael McDuffee had his first beer since 1994. It was a cold beer, refreshing. It was a long time coming.
“I had been a man convinced that three drinks can quench our thirst: milk, lemonade and a cold beer,” said Mr. McDuffee, who practiced his drinking as a Marine. “And for 20 years I was drinking milk and lemonade.”
Mr. McDuffee is not an alcoholic newly fallen from the wagon, but rather an evangelical Christian professor at Moody Bible Institute, which includes a seminary, an undergraduate college, and radio and publishing arms, with its main campus in Chicago. When he joined the faculty, in 1994, he agreed to abide by its requirement that faculty members, staff and students not drink alcohol, smoke, or have extramarital sex….
Hiding the Christian name on his ID with his thumb, Joshua Hakim approached the gunmen and showed them the plastic card. “They told me to go. Then an Indian man came forward, and they said, ”˜What is the name of Muhammad’s mother?’ When he couldn’t answer they just shot him.”
That’s the way it went inside the Westgate Premier Shopping Mall in Nairobi last Saturday. If you said when asked that you were Muslim, you were let go. If you answered no, you stayed. And maybe died.
More than 60 patrons in that upscale mall in Kenya’s capital breathed their last that day, shot dead by Islamist militants from Somalia who call themselves al-Shabab. The massacre was not al-Shabab’s first attack on non-Muslims….
The Presiding Bishop’s job — and future reputation — is, in effect, on the line. She and her personal Chancellor have been so identified with the litigation agenda of ECUSA (because they run that agenda without interference from anyone else in the entire Church) that they are taking a hit, so to speak, on account of the reversals which that agenda has recently suffered in Texas (Fort Worth), Illinois (Quincy), South Carolina, and yes – let it be said — in San Joaquin (even though there is as yet no final judgment there, ECUSA faces a decidedly uphill battle to convince the California court that its canons allow it to take the property of the withdrawing diocese).
In a (rather desperate, and, some would say) clumsy attempt to protect her prerogatives on the litigation front, the Presiding Bishop (and, as always, her personal Chancellor, whose law firm earns millions each year from the Presiding Bishop’s continuing patronage) asked the “Ecclesiology Committee” to deliver a counter to the “Bishops’ Statement on Polity” promulgated by the Anglican Communion Institute and the Communion Partner Bishops within ECUSA….
That Committee (with membership as noted above) obediently came forth with just such a “Statement”, and presented it to the assembled bishops in Nashville. Wonder of wonders, however — what seemed likely as a rubber stamp of 815’s current litigation claims devolved into a rejection of the Committee’s paper. That rejection was based chiefly on the bishops’ reluctance to submit themselves or their dioceses, by a simple resolution, to any claim of metropolitan authority — but it was also based on their own personal knowledge of the Church’s historical polity.
In the two weeks since Judge Ortbal ruled against the Diocese of Chicago and The Episcopal Church, we have been working hard to understand the ruling, assess its implications, and determine our next steps. Last Friday, September 20, we filed a motion for a stay of judgment in the Quincy trial court stating our intention to appeal the judge’s ruling. We continue to maintain, despite that ruling, that the assets in dispute rightfully belong to the Episcopal Diocese of Quincy, now reunited with the Diocese of Chicago. This will ultimately be decided by the appellate court.
These legal proceedings will continue to unfold and I will keep you updated as they do….
Eternal God, who by the life of thy dear Son hast shown us that there is no minute of our own but we may be doing thy will: Help us to use our time aright, that however we are engaged, in work or leisure or play, we may stand before thee with a pure conscience, acting, speaking and thinking as in thy presence; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord.
–The Pastor’s Prayerbook
On the holy mount stands the city he founded; the LORD loves the gates of Zion more than all the dwelling places of Jacob. Glorious things are spoken of you, O city of God.
–Psalm 87:1-3
World Communion Sunday is one of the best ideas Presbyterians ever had. The idea originated in the 1930s, a time of economic turmoil and fear and the rise of militaristic fascism abroad. Hugh Thomson Kerr, a beloved pastor in the Presbyterian Church, persuaded the denomination to designate one Sunday when American Christians would join brothers and sisters around the world at the Lord’s Table.
The idea caught on. Other denominations followed suit and the Federal Council of Churches (now the National Council of Churches) endorsed World Communion Sunday in 1940. But though the day is still noted in some denominational calendars and program materials, it doesn’t seem to be considered as important as it once was.
Of course, every Sunday is in a sense World Communion Sunday insofar as many churches celebrate the Lord’s Supper every Sunday. But we do not welcome one another at the Lord’s Table….
The Rev. David Huxley didn’t plan on ever coming back to church ”” let alone entering the priesthood.
“I’d grown up Episcopalian, but when I got to be 17 or 18, church kind of lost its appeal,” said Huxley, who moved to Midland last week to take a position as the new rector at St. Nicholas’ Episcopal Church. “I went churchless for many years.”
Huxley became a police officer for the city of Madison, Wis. He worked there for 20 years before finding himself back in the Episcopal church, attending services upon a friend’s suggestion. Still, he never thought of becoming a priest until he kneeled to pray one Sunday and realized how much he missed church.
Leading climate scientists said today they were more certain than ever before that mankind was the main culprit for global warming and warned the impact of greenhouse gas emissions would linger for centuries.
A report, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), played down the fact temperatures have risen more slowly in the past 15 years, saying there were substantial natural variations that masked a long-term warming trend.
It said the Earth was set for further warming and more heatwaves, floods, droughts and rising sea levels as greenhouse gases built up in the atmosphere. The oceans would become more acidic in a threat to some marine life.
The Co-ordinating Committee studied the mandate given by the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) and the Anglican Communion. The focus of this work is to monitor and encourage existing Anglican-Lutheran relations, as well as to advance co-operation between the two Churches in areas where there are not yet any formal agreements. To enable the Committee to function as an encourager as well as a catalyst, the Committee has begun a process of mapping agreements, initiatives and projects in different regions. This mapping project is an ongoing task for the Committee and we urge Churches, in both communions, to provide information to further this task.
The Committee has also initiated a process promoting Anglican-Lutheran collaboration in the observance of the 2017 Reformation anniversary. As part of this the Committee intends to provide study material based around the official LWF theme Liberated by God’s Grace. This material would be designed to be used in joint Anglican-Lutheran study groups where both denominations are present as well as by separated groups. It is hoped that this material will relate to different ages and contexts. The purpose is to highlight that reformation is ongoing and that 16th century Reformation thoughts are relevant for Christians today. The Committee is locating this and all its work within the theological theme of communion in the mission of God.
To Hassan Rouhani, president of Iran:
Before your arrival in New York this week to address the United Nations General Assembly, Iran announced that it had released 80 political prisoners. No doubt the gesture was welcomed by the prisoners and their families, but the release only makes a dent in the hundreds of prisoners being held in Iran for their beliefs””political beliefs or religious beliefs.
I know, because my husband, Saeed Abedini, is an American citizen held in an Iranian prison for the crime of practicing his Christian faith in the country of his birth. I was fortunate enough to encounter your delegation in New York during your visit this week, and while I did not get an opportunity to speak with you directly, I was encouraged that one of your associates accepted a letter that Saeed had written to you.
But I worry the letter wasn’t given to you. So I write you here with Saeed’s plea for justice and freedom….
As some of you may remember, that ad brought to light President Obama’s voting record on infants born alive and the reality of my life as a survivor. As some of you may also remember, that fact check was more like a bias un-check, and although the writer questioned the credibility of my use of the word “discarded” in the ad when describing what it was like for me to survive an abortion and be left to die and was blatantly out to attack that ad and me, scores of people and political commentators from across the nation responded to the Post’s article pointing out the bias of the article and the negative treatment of such a painful experience that my family and I have lived through.
What a difference a year makes.
If Josh Hicks, the fact check writer from the Washington Post, was doing that article now, not only would I have all of the damning evidence about the abortion that I survived that was provided to him last year, including copies of my medical records that reflect the abortion that I survived and the statements by my adoptive parents about what they were told about everything that occurred, but I now also have additional information from a medical professional about the circumstances that surrounded my survival and information from my biological family, whom I’ve been blessed to have enter into my life this year, that further solidifies all that happened thirty-six years ago.
Professor Stephen Hawking has predicted that it could be possible to preserve a mind as powerful as his on a computer – but not with technology existing today….
Prof Hawking was speaking after the premiere of a new biopic about his life, which he narrates himself, at the Cambridge Film Festival.
Asked about whether a person’s consciousness can live on after they die, he said: “I think the brain is like a programme in the mind, which is like a computer, so it’s theoretically possible to copy the brain onto a computer and so provide a form of life after death.
“However, this is way beyond out present capabilities. I think the conventional afterlife is a fairy tale for people afraid of the dark.”
A Stoke-on-Trent vicar has become the star of a real ale festival with a special brew named after him.
The Revd Chris Rushton, a Church of England minister at Holy Trinity, Hartshill, Stoke-on-Trent is hosting a beer festival in the Minton Halls behind the church, starting …[Thursday]at 7.30 pm. and running until Saturday.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has said that the Church Commissioners should invest some of their funds in housing associations and other social enterprises that work to tackle financial inequality.
He made his comments during a question-and-answer session at the National Housing Federation’s annual conference in Birmingham last Friday, where he had delivered a speech calling for a greater partnership between housing associations and the Church of England.
Tess Pendle, the head of My Home Finance, a non-profit organisation that provides low-cost credit and banking facilities to financially excluded people, as an alternative to payday lenders, asked whether “such a partnership might involve financial investment from the Church”.Read it all.
[The heroic man was]…Abdul Haji, the son of a former security minister in the Kenyan government, who had rushed to the mall after getting a text message from his brother who was trapped inside.
“We saw a lot of dead people. Very young people, children, old ladies, you cannot imagine,” Mr Haji told the Kenyan television station NTV.
“From what they were doing, you could tell that these were not normal people. The fact that he was making a joke out of this whole thing made me much more angry and determined to engage them, and to shame them.”
Leaders of the nation’s largest Somali community say some of their young men are still being enticed to join the terror group that has claimed responsibility for the deadly mall attack in Kenya, despite a concentrated effort to shut off what authorities call a “deadly pipeline” of men and money.
Six years have passed since Somali-American fighters began leaving Minnesota to become part of al-Shabab. Now the Somali community is dismayed over reports that a few of its own might have been involved in the violence at the Westgate Mall in Nairobi.
“One thing I know is the fear is growing,” said Abdirizak Bihi, whose nephew was among at least six men from Minnesota who have died in Somalia. More are presumed dead.
Christian de Chergé was a Trappist monk who, with six of his monastic brothers, was killed in Algeria in 1996. The exact circumstances of their deaths remain disputed. They were abducted by a band of radical Islamists, in the midst of a horrendously violent period of civil-religious strife. Only their severed heads were subsequently recovered. To what degree did the Algerian army play a role in their deaths, and with what assistance from French security advisers, wittingly or unwittingly?
Rather, de Chergé gave his life as a reconciling gift thrown into the midst of the hostility and violence associated with antagonistic diversities. His was a witness made quintessentially within our late modern culture of fragmented “globalized” hopelessness….
Christian Salenson’s Christian de Chergé: A Theology of Hope (a translation of the 2009 French original) follows in step with the temper of the times, and takes up the [interest in the] Christian-Muslim… [angle of his thought]. Although this approach has its limitations, the volume, in all of its austere precision and accessibility, is of the highest quality, and deserves to be read as a necessary introduction to de Chergé’s thought. SRead it all.
From snake handlers to trivia buffs, entertainment with religious overtones has gilded the fall TV lineup with the renewals of such ratings-busting shows as “The American Bible Challenge” (GSN), now in its third season, and the return of “Breaking Amish: L.A.,” including a bonus reunion event (TLC). Add ongoing reality shows such as “Preacher’s Daughters” (Lifetime) and the list just keeps growing.
“We are certainly in the midst of a rush of interest in faith-based shows,” says Martha Williamson, executive producer of the CBS hit “Touched by an Angel,” which ran from 1994 to 2003.
The appetite for faith-based shows should hardly be surprising. Some 78 percent of Americans say they are Christian, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center’s Project on Religion and Public Life.
I wrote two very sad letters this week ”“ one to the Primates and Provincial Secretaries of the Anglican Communion suggesting that they request prayers in churches in their dioceses for those who died in the attack on a church in Peshawar in Pakistan last Sunday; today I wrote a letter to Archbishop Wabukala after the tragic deaths at the Westgate Shopping Centre in Nairobi.
Give unto us, O Lord our God, the spirit of courage. Let no shadow oppress our spirit, lest our gloom should darken the light by which others have to live. Remove from our inmost souls all fear and distrust, and fill us daily more completely with thy love and power; through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
“And in praying do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. Pray then like this: Our Father who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, On earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread; And forgive us our debts, As we also have forgiven our debtors; And lead us not into temptation, But deliver us from evil. For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”
–Matthew 6:7-15