At the cemetery of a former Minnesota mental hospital, hundreds of patients were buried in nameless graves marked only with numbers. But disability rights groups and family members are working to identify the graves and give these forgotten dead a respect and dignity they did not receive in life.

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Two local men have been added to the priesthood of the Anglican Church after an ordination ceremony that was held Nov. 9.

The ceremony, which took place at St. Mary’s Catholic Church on the U.S. 45 Bypass in Jackson, included the ordination of the new priests, the Rev. Wesley Adam Gristy and the Rev. Brian Patrick Larsen Wells.

The ordination ceremony was conducted by the Right Reverend Bill Atwood, bishop of the International Diocese of the Anglican Church in North America. Atwood lives with his wife, Susan, in Frisco, Texas.

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The Rev. A. Robert Hirschfeld, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire, will be at Trinity Episcopal Church, 200 High St., Hampton, on Saturday, Nov. 16 to sign the recently adopted Shared Ministry Covenant between that church and Christ Episcopal Church in Portsmouth.

Holy Eucharist with the signing of the covenant will be held at Trinity Church at 5 p.m.; a celebration dinner will follow in the church’s Hobbs Hall at 7 p.m.

All are welcome as the two churches celebrate the culmination of many months’ work ”” and many years’ anticipation.

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The Archbishop of Canterbury isn’t exactly struggling to get the press to notice him at the moment. Of course it always helps to have a royal christening to preside over to gain a decent amount of media exposure. There’s nothing though to indicate that Justin Welby is deliberately trying to court journalists in the fashion of a D list celebrity, it’s more that he is doing what he believes he is called to and people are sitting up and taking notice. In the space of a week along with Prince George’s baptism, Justin Welby has repeatedly been in the papers, taking on the energy companies and bankers (again) as well as flagging up a concern over the proliferation of foodbanks. He also managed to squeeze in trips to Iceland and Kenya for the Global Anglican Future (GAFCON) Conference. Not bad for a week’s work.

The honeymoon period that Welby is enjoying shows little sign of fading any time soon. Even his opposition to the legalisation of gay marriage, which unsurprisingly failed to go down well in some quarters, appears not to have been held against him. Where his predecessor, Rowan Williams continually had the shadow of the Church of England’s attitude to gay relationships and women bishops clinging to him, Justin Welby has been able to avoid getting bogged down in the politics of the church so far.

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This slender, charming book must be approached with a special tact. To read it feels a little like an intrusion on inwardness itself. The volume contains, alongside a lightly corrected transcription, a facsimile of the Sterling notebook in which Flannery O’Connor, just 20 years old, began a journal addressed to God. Written in her neat hand, it is reproduced complete with the empty final pages (her concluding words are “there is nothing left to say of me”) and not omitting a bit of musical notation floating on the inside of the back cover. The prayers, attempts at prayer and meditations on faith and art contained in it were written in 1946 and 1947, while O’Connor was a student in Iowa. The brilliance that would make her fictions literary classics is fully apparent in them.

The complexity of O’Connor’s thinking, together with the largely flawless pages in her hand, suggest that these entries may be fair copies of earlier drafts. Clearly O’Connor’s virtuosity makes her self-­conscious. Young as she was, new to writing, she could only have been pleased, even awed, at having produced these beautiful sentences. Perhaps nothing written is finally meant to go unread, even if the reader is only a creature of the writer’s mind, an attentive and exacting self that compels refinements of honesty.

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O God, who didst call thy servant Margaret to an earthly throne that she might advance thy heavenly kingdom, and didst give her zeal for thy church and love for thy people: Mercifully grant that we who commemorate her this day may be fruitful in good works, and attain to the glorious crown of thy saints; though Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

O God, who, calling Abraham to go forth to a country which thou wouldest show him, didst promise that in him all the families of the earth would be blessed: Fulfill thy promise in us, we pray thee, giving us such faith in thee as thou shalt count unto us for righteousness; that in us and through us thy purpose may be fulfilled; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

–Church of South India

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

Former chairman of the Conservative Party Baroness Warsi told a conference at the Churchill Archives in the University of Cambridge that “the Coalition is the most pro-faith government in the West” ”“ a claim disputed by Labour’s Vice Chairman for Faith Groups, Stephen Timms.

Lady Warsi said previous Conservative governments such as those of Sir Winston Churchill and Baroness Thatcher had considered faith as an essential part of government and Lady Thatcher had regarded “politics as second to Christianity in defining society”.

She added that Churchill and Thatcher would have welcomed the Coalition’s promise to protect the right of town halls to hold prayers and the creation of more faith schools under the Free Schools programme. It had, she went on, ruled out a ban on the full-face veil out of respect for religious liberty and welcomed a ruling that saw a British Airways worker win the right to wear a crucifix at work.

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All Girls Allowed (AGA), a leading faith-based organization pushing for an end to the one-child policy, previously stated on Nov. 5 that “all previous speculations about a possible relaxation of China’s One-Child Policy have now been put to an end, as the Ministry of Health and Family Planning announced on October 29th that the policy will remain unchanged.”

Today, AGA released a new statement:

All Girls Allowed welcomes the news of the policy’s relaxation, but expresses disappointment that the Chinese government has not gone the logical and compassionate route””abolishing the policy altogether. … [T]he greatest indictment against the One-Child Policy is the use of coercion in its enforcement. Untold numbers of forced abortions and sterilizations continue to take place to this day, making it the greatest violence against women and children in the world today.

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As a parent, you spend your entire life trying to protect your children. You provide them with the very best you can; you hope they learn from your mistakes. It’s so easy when they are young and a simple “because I said so” is reason enough.

How, then, do you wrap your head around the fact that your 30-year-old, happily married son has taken his own life? After the initial shock, you review every single decision you ever made with regard to him. “If only” becomes your mantra. Then you look back at his life and remember that he was the most trusting, caring, creative and intelligent human being you’ve ever known.

You want to know what went wrong…

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A signal event in America’s long trial over the tragedy of abortion occurred this week with the publication of a cover story in New York magazine that was simply titled, “My Abortion.” As the cover advertises, the article features “twenty-six personal dispatches from a culture war without end.”

The issue is riveting, offering testimonies from women who have aborted their children””some of them repeatedly. Meaghan Winter begins the article by setting the context in 2013, forty years after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down the Roe v. Wade decision, believing that it has settled the issue….

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