If Dowd was only in Charleston to support evolution, then many of us could agree with Sgt. Joe Friday’s inimitable words in Dragnet: “Just the facts, ma’am.”

Dowd clearly wanted to take us beyond the facts.

He paraded before us a great number of scientific and religious figures who supposedly support his thesis that traditional religious concepts, especially those describing God, are part of “private revelation” and therefore not based on hard evidence. In their place, he says that there is such a thing as “public revelation.”

Read it all from the faith and values section of the local paper.

David Moyes has been waiting for a signature victory to kickstart his short, erratic tenure at Manchester United.

Who better to get it against than the Premier League leaders?

After falling short against title rivals Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester City so far this season, United finally delivered when it really mattered by beating Arsenal 1-0 on Sunday thanks to Robin van Persie’s 27th-minute goal against his former club.

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Kurt Vonnegut, one of the most influential American writers of the 20th century, was born on November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis. Vonnegut studied chemistry at Cornell University from 1940 to 1943. After graduating from college he enrolled in the US Army and was given the opportunity to study engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. A year later, Vonnegut was sent to Europe and was captured as a prisoner of war by the Germans during the Battle of Bulge. Vonnegut was living as a prisoner in Dresden when the city was bombed. He managed to survive the bombing because he was working in an underground meat locker. “Slaughterhouse-Five,” the novel many people consider to be Vonnegut’s masterpiece, is based on his experiences during the war. After the war, Vonnegut attended the University of Chicago as a graduate student in anthropology. There he submitted his novel “Cat’s Cradle” as his thesis project. Vonnegut is known for his blend of satire, science fiction, and humor.

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In a San Francisco hotel room not long ago, I absently flipped through one of those forgettable in-room lifestyle magazines aimed at the casual visitor. Set amid ads for marbled steak and glistening sushi, a tourist map occupied the last pages. As do most urban maps, it had segmented the city into its various and iconic neighborhoods””Pacific Heights, the Mission, Haight-Ashbury.

Gazing at this depiction of a city I know only from a smattering of disjointed visits and impressions, I was struck by the regularity in the distribution and size of its neighborhoods. I had the sense that what I was looking at was the expression of some kind of logic””but whether it was the result of government fiat or some curious social alchemy was beyond me. It left me wondering: Is there some human penchant for breaking up space to better fit our cognitive maps?

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Guess what you would say if you had to name five and then go read it all.

With thanks to Kevin Kallsen at Anglican TV

The Vatican has secured the use of the new Internet domain name “.catholic,” but bloggers hoping that platform could ramp up their own digital pulpit will be disappointed ”” the Holy See says it’ll be reserved for church-related organizations, not individuals.

The new rules on how to assign rights to the “.catholic” domain name are part of the larger issue of how to adapt a tradition-bound, 2,000-year-old institution to the fast-paced digital present.

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O Lord of life, who didst raise from the sleep of death the daughter of Jairus the ruler: Extend to us, we pray thee, thy quickening power, that we may know the life more abundant which thou didst come to bring; for the glory of thy holy name.

–Frank Colquhoun

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

In 1888, speaking about the possibility of Mormon literature, the church leader Orson F. Whitney made an audacious promise to his fellow Mormons: “We will yet have Miltons and Shakespeares of our own.” Yet 125 years later, there is no Mormon Milton. There is no Mormon Milosz, no Mormon Munro.

Mormons are, on average, better educated than most Americans, and they have written popular fiction. But Mormon authors tend to cluster in genre fiction, like fantasy, science fiction, and children’s and young adult literature. Orson Scott Card, who wrote “Ender’s Game,” the sci-fi novel on which the country’s current top-grossing movie is based, is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. So is Stephenie Meyer, author of the “Twilight” series.

In the United States, Jews, blacks and South Asians, while they have produced no Milton or Shakespeare ”” who has, lately? ”” have all had literary renaissances. Mormons are more likely to produce work that gets shelved in niche sections of the bookstore. And as it turns out, Mormon authors themselves wonder if their culture militates against more highbrow writing….

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The Archbishop of Canterbury has become president of Livability, the national Christian disability charity which works with churches to help thousands of disabled people in the UK and overseas.

Archbishop Justin Welby’s presidency will help continue the close and historic relationship between the Church of England and Livability, which was formed after two older Christian charities, John Grooms and the Shaftesbury Society, merged in 2007.

In his inaugural letter to the charity, the Archbishop said that “disabled people have much to offer to our local communities, workplaces and to society in general” but that they face “real financial hardship and unacceptable barriers when trying to access education, training, housing, transport and the care they require.”

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Consider giving to local church organizations in the Philippines that are capable of handling donations and capable of empowering local churches, such as the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches or Philippine Relief and Development Services.

Affiliating with international aid organizations that have established relationships and resources (such as the Micah Network, Integral Alliance, World Relief, World Vision, and Samaritan’s Purse) is another way you can ensure you will help rather than hurt.

Overall, our research has found that one of the most effective ways to help after a disaster is to make financial contributions to recognized aid organizations. Financial contributions make sure that the right assistance is available at the right time.

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While legal disputes continue over the name and property of The Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth, the two competing parties are holding their annual church conventions separately.

In 2008, the leadership of the Texas-based diocese voted to cut its ties with The Episcopal Church over growing theological differences. Since then, dispute over who owns the diocese’s property has been debated in court….

Read it all from the Christian Post.

The Rev. Michael Last, retired bishop of the Western Iowa Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, has been called as the interim rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church.

Last, 67, began his new position on Nov. 1.

The previous rector, the Rev. Wendy Abrahamson, left at the end of April to become rector at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Grinnell.

Read it all and the parish website is here.

He screened his last sermon, a 30-minute short film called “The Cross – Billy Graham’s Message To America,” to the assembled crowd, as his waning strength has made it difficult for him to preach from behind a lectern.

“Our country is in great need of a spiritual awakening. There have been times that I have wept as I have gone from city to city and I have seen how far people have wandered from God,” he said. “With all my heart, I want to leave you with the truth– that God loves you.”

Focusing on Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, the film was filmed over the course of last year, partly at Graham’s home in North Carolina.

Read it all and watch the whole video also.

Quebec’s governing party introduced legislation Thursday that would ban public employees from wearing “overt and conspicuous” religious garb, such as headscarves, yarmulkes, large crosses and turbans.

The so-called “Charter of Values” also would require all Canadians living in the province of Quebec to have their faces uncovered when they receive state-funded services, including health care and education. Several other countries have considered restrictions on religious attire, including France, which has banned full veils in public places and headscarves in schools.

The Quebec proposal already has sparked protests and political opposition. Much of the public debate over the charter has focused on the measure’s potential impact on immigrants and their religious beliefs and practices.

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The Mormon church stands to own nearly 2 percent of Florida by completing a deal to buy most of the real estate of the St. Joe Co. for more than a half-billion dollars.

The megapurchase was announced jointly Thursday by a corporate representative of church, which owns the nearly 295,000-acre Deseret Ranches in Central Florida, and by the real-estate and timber business, which has built several communities along the Panhandle coast.

According to the announcement, a church entity, AgReserves Inc., will buy 382,834 acres ”“ the majority of St. Joe’s timberlands ”“ in Bay, Calhoun, Franklin, Gadsden, Gulf, Jefferson, Leon, Liberty and Wakulla counties for $565 million.

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Is there anything worse in sports than a game being decided near or at the very end on a bad call by the referee?

Makes the heart sad.

“This case is about Christians aggressively imposing themselves upon their fellow citizens with the power of government,” says plaintiff lawyer Douglas Laycock. But defense attorney Tom Hungar warned that the case could lead to “government regulating the theological content of prayers, prescribing what is orthodox and what is not in religion.”

Read or watch and listen to it all.

Beginning as a self-described amateur journalist (the best kind), [Stephen Jimenez]…studied Shepard’s murder off and on for 13 years, conducted hundreds of interviews with sources on and off the record, and pored over a public record many thousands of pages long. His comprehensive account corrects the approved version in small matters and large. Shepard was not tied to the rail fence as if crucified, for example, and it’s still not clear, even after Jimenez’s exhaustive reporting, how this piece of misinformation became common knowledge””beyond the obvious explanation that reporters thought the detail was, as the saying goes, too good to check.

More surprisingly, Jimenez concludes that Shepard’s death had nothing to do with homophobia. It was instead the horrific result of a drug deal gone wrong. Indeed, in The Book of Matt, Jimenez offers lots of circumstantial evidence that Shepard and one of his murderers, a violent and drug-addled bit of tumbleweed called Aaron McKinney, were rival dealers in crystal meth. Several named witnesses told Jimenez that the two even had a sexual relationship.

“I knew in writing the book that it would stir up a lot of questions, a lot of conversation,” Jimenez said on the phone, “and it has!”

Read it all.

I will take comments on this submitted by email only to KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

In one of their first decisions as the Central Committee for the World Council of Churches, the newly installed 150-member committee made history Friday by electing Dr Agnes Abuom of Nairobi, from the Anglican Church of Kenya, as the moderator of the highest WCC governing body.

Abuom, who was elected unanimously to the position, is the first woman and the first African in the position in the 65-year history of the WCC.

Two vice-moderators were elected, United Methodist Church Bishop Mary Ann Swenson from the USA and Prof. Dr Gennadios of Sassima of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople.

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Chalk it up to South Carolina notching its best on-time graduation rate ever and higher test scores in most subjects and grades.

Report cards for South Carolina’s schools and districts look better this year than they have since 2009, which was the first year it gave the PASS test to third- through eighth-graders.

Neil Robinson, chairman of the state Education Oversight Committee, called the 2.6 percentage point jump in the state’s graduation rate to 77.5 percent “phenomenal,” and he pointed to the majority of schools statewide that were rated “good” or “excellent” as a sea change compared with when that figure hovered at 32 percent.

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O God of love, who hast given us a new commandment through thine only begotten Son, that we should love one another even as thou didst love us, the unworthy and the wandering, and gavest him for our life and salvation: We pray thee to give to us thy servants, in all time of our life on earth, a mind forgetful of past ill-will, a pure conscience, and a heart to love our brethren; for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass; and taking the five loaves and the two fish he looked up to heaven, and blessed, and broke and gave the loaves to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And they all ate and were satisfied. And they took up twelve baskets full of the broken pieces left over. And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.

–Matthew 14:19-21

Turner, a professor of theology at Yale, has written a fine, idiosyncratic introduction to the saint and his mind that emphasizes what he calls Thomas’ materialism ”” by which he certainly does not mean the currently fashionable and conceptually impoverished notion that nothing but matter exists. Rather, Thomas set himself against the prevailing Platonic-Augustinian “excessively spiritual account of human nature” that seemed to him to neglect our situatedness in the world ”” this world, here, with tomatoes and sisters and backaches. For Plato and his medieval Christian epigones, a soul was a different kind of substance from the body; we still tend to think of soul in these terms, whether we believe in it or not. Thomas denies that a soul is a “thing” that one “has” at all. It is rather the “substantial form,” in the Aristotelian sense, of the body ”” what accounts for its being alive in the way it is. Following Aristotle and Avicenna, Thomas rejects substance dualism, arguing that human beings are “wholly animal,” not part animal and part spiritual, like a Prius ”” the soul is not “in” the body, but is one with it as form, as act and potency are one.

I can’t do justice to Turner’s subtle explication of Thomas’ “Aristotelian physical anthropology” ”” and of his controversial God-centric theology in the “Summa theologiae”; his “Five Ways”; his conception of friendship and the Trinity and the Eucharist; and much else ”” in a brief review. Despite a few missteps in the prose ”” and a surprising overreliance upon lazy tropes of the terrorists-bad-CIA-good variety ”” Turner’s introduction is full of grace notes, such as his decision to contrast Thomas’ sense of “abstraction” with Locke’s empiricism, in order to flesh out the argument that the intellect “cannot be a material agent” (today’s pop neuroscientists would do well to consult the “Summa” on this point). And Turner deftly demonstrates why Thomas’ Third Way ”” the argument for God’s existence from necessity ”” does not commit the basic logical fallacy that many modern philosophers have contended it does.

Read it all.

You’ve heard us say that we like Jesus but not the church, and it’s not because we’re trying to be difficult. It’s because the Jesus we read about enters into the pain of humanity where so often the church people seem to want to float above it.

In the end, it’s not really about what churches say or don’t say. What millennials want is to be seen. Understood. Loved. It’s what everyone wants, really. And for this generation of journeyers? Choosing honesty over cliché is a really great place to start.

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The problem is that preachers and teachers of such messages are not telling us the whole truth. They are not giving us a full understanding of the Good News.

Proverbs is only half of wisdom. The other half is found in the Book of Job. And Ecclesiastes. And Jesus at Golgotha. The other part of wisdom””the deeper wisdom””centers on the folly of the Cross.

Not the Cross as a mere rest stop on the way to Resurrection. Not suffering as a means to an end. Not hardship that builds character and makes us better. That’s more Proverbs wisdom and is true as far as it goes. That’s the theology of glory””if we do this and that, and endure this and that with the right attitude, all will be well.

The theology of the Cross says that God is most deeply met in the suffering itself, not just on the other side of it. Forgiveness of sins is not found after the Cross, but in, with, and under the Cross. This is the “wisdom of the cross” (1 Cor. 1”“2) that is folly to the world.

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The last time I saw Billy Graham in person was in 2005, when he addressed a crowd of 60,000 at Flushing Meadows in Queens, N.Y. It would be, he declared, his final Crusade for Christ. Everyone who watched and heard him understood why. Billy approached the pulpit leaning on a walker and his voice as well as his body wavered as he spoke. He was 86 years old at the time and suffering from Parkinson’s disease, among other ailments.

And yet, for the past three weeks, the face of Dr. Graham, white-haired but ruddy with seeming good health, has gazed down from a billboard overlooking the glitter of New York’s Times Square. The billboard seems to say: “He’s back!”

As it turned out, the billboard was promoting “My Hope America with Billy Graham, ” an outreach video campaign produced by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA). The half-hour program and three “bonus” videos feature segments of Billy preaching when he was still in vigorous and magnetic middle age, plus testimonies from others on how they found Jesus””presumably because of that preaching.

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Terry Dehko and his daughter Sandy Thomas (pictured) run a grocery store in Fraser, Michigan. It sells everything from bread to hand-made sausages. Fairly often, someone takes cash from the till and puts it in the bank across the street. Deposits are nearly always less than $10,000, because the insurance covers the theft of cash only up to that sum.

In January, without warning, the government seized all the money in the shop account: more than $35,000. The charge was that the Dehkos had violated federal money-laundering rules, which forbid people to “structure” their bank deposits so as to avoid the $10,000 threshold that triggers banks to report a transaction to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

Prosecutors offered no evidence that the Dehkos were laundering money or dodging tax. Indeed, the IRS gave their business a clean bill of health last year. But still, the Dehkos cannot get their cash back.

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