Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was injured in a strike in Iraq’s western Anbar province on Saturday, Iraqi security officials told The Associated Press.

The officials said that they did not know the extent of the top militant’s injuries. Their accounts could not be independently confirmed, and it was unclear if the strike that might have wounded him was carried out by U.S. forces, which had targeted Islamic State leaders in the north of the country on Friday.

American officials said on Saturday that military aircraft had struck a convoy of armed trucks near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul the day before, and that they believed the vehicles had been ferrying some of the group’s commanders. A spokesman for the U.S. Central Command said he could not confirm whether Baghdadi had been in the convoy, which was destroyed in the raids, officials said.

Read it all.

If you haven’t thought much about intersexuality, you’re not alone. Even though approximately 1 in 2,000 people are born with intersex (roughly the same amount as are born with cystic fibrosis or Down’s syndrome) it’s rarely discussed. One of the reasons for this is that doctors have employed a concealment-centered model focused on normalizing””through surgery and medication””the body and often even concealing intersexuality from the patient.

There is also striking lack of agreement among doctors about the precise definition of intersex….

While intersex activists have done an excellent job of re-educating the medical profession about the perils of across-the-board involuntary gender assignment, our cultural commitment to the male/female binary is about the reinforcement of majority rule, tradition, culture, and power. And a great deal of that tradition is about Christianity. According to Genesis, when God created humanity he created “humankind in his image” and “male and female he created them.” The idea that human beings are created in the image of God and divided into two complementary pairs has left a deep impression in our understanding of the world.

Read it all.

It sounds like The Da Vinci Code: a new history book claims that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and fathered two children with her.

The book, The Lost Gospel, will also claim that there was a previously unknown plot on Jesus’s life when he was 20 and an assassination attempt on Mary and her children.

While it may appear to be fiction, the book, which is published later this month, is based on an ancient manuscript held by the British Library.

The authors are Simcha Jacobovici, an Israeli-Canadian writer and film-maker who specialises in ancient historical and archeological investigations, and Barrie Wilson, a professor of religious studies at York University, Toronto.

Read it all (requires subscription).

Our mission is to nurture children in Charleston’s Eastside by providing a safe environment where they can learn and grow.

The Biblical Family Center provides hope and optimism to the Eastside Community of Charleston.

Through our summer camps and after school programs,we provide year round mentoring and support for families. The Biblical Family Center has created a safe space to address risky behaviors, build on protective factors, and improve relationships. We are addressing: school attachment, avoiding self-harm, positive body image, avoiding tobacco, drugs, and alcohol, communicating needs of families, making healthy choices regarding nutrition, self care, recreational activities, and abstinence.

Check it out.

[Stacy Pride’s dog] Paco died this fall, two years after her husband’s death. Pride wanted a special way to say goodbye to a special pet.

Although the family had buried earlier pets, this time she went to McAlister-Smith Funeral & Cremations to have Paco cremated. She picked out a simple copper urn to keep Paco with her family forever. Her daughters bought her a charm with Paco’s nose print because he loved to kiss with his nose.

With that, the family joined a growing number of pet owners scampering for the same kinds of services for pets that they long have relied on to mourn human loved ones.

Read it all.

“Rembrandt: The Late Works,” an exhibition now on view at London’s National Gallery, will linger long in the mind of anyone who has the pleasure to see it. Bringing together approximately ninety paintings, prints, and drawings Rembrandt made at the end of his life, it reveals a great artist working with unprecedented technical command and emotional power, even as the world closes in around him.

In the fifteen years before his death in 1669, Rembrandt suffered one terrible reversal after another. In 1654, his common-law wife Hendrickje Stoffels was condemned as a whore for her relationship with Rembrandt, and this led some important clients to ostracize him. Ever a spendthrift, he went bankrupt two years later and was forced to auction off his house, art collection, and printing press. Despite such desperate steps, he plunged still further into poverty, becoming so destitute he even had to sell the grave of his first wife, Saskia. Worse still, Hendrickje died of the plague in 1663, and Rembrandt’s beloved son Titus died in 1668, leaving him all but alone.

Read it all.

For millennia, scholars have debated what virtues should be part of the moral life. While the seven deadly sins might be more interesting, the virtues””such as prudence, justice and fortitude””have inspired a good deal of deliberation. Which are most important? Who embodies them, who doesn’t and what challenges do they present to mere mortals?

Into this eternal genre steps a team of right-of-center writers known to be more clever or ironical than your average talk-radio listener. (Think “South Park” conservatives, not the sort who hang out at the American Legion hall.) The stated thesis of “The Seven Deadly Virtues,” as editor Jonathan V. Last writes, is that modern Americans do still value virtue. “The problem is that we have organized ourselves around the wrong virtues.” Or at least our moral system has some serious problems. We’re appalled by Donald Sterling ’s racism but skim over his habit of bringing his mistress to basketball games. We like health and authenticity more than temperance and charity. Nonjudgmentalism seems to trump nearly everything, including courage.

It’s an engaging premise, and it is investigated occasionally in “The Seven Deadly Virtues.” But the book is better read for what it is: an excuse to bring more than a dozen talented writers together, give them fussy-sounding concepts such as “Forbearance” and “Chastity,” and see what happens.

Read it all.

“We never know what we truly believe until it’s a matter of life and death. Billy Graham, along with a firefighter and a young woman forced to face the reality of death, share the Gospel message, and what really happens when we die.”

Watch it all and there is more here

As a kid, Tim Scott badly wanted to fit in with the majority white kids at Stall High School, and the black kids, too. And he didn’t want any outward signs of his family’s poverty.

A pair of Converse high tops were the ticket.

But his mom said no.

Read it all.

Remembrance Sunday, the second Sunday in November, is the day traditionally put aside to remember all those who have given their lives for the peace and freedom we enjoy today. On this day people across the nation pause to reflect on the sacrifices made by our brave Service men and women.

Remembrance Sunday will fall on Sunday 9 November in 2014.

Read it all and make sure to look at other links on the site including how the nation remembers.

Probably the most famous and widely read war poem in English and also known, in extract form, as the Ode of Remembrance, For the Fallen was first published in The Times on September 21 1914, just a few weeks after the First World War began on July 28 that year. Binyon was too old to enlist as a soldier in the Great War, but volunteered in hospitals helping wounded French soldiers, and wrote For the Fallen in Cornwall shortly after the Battle of the Marne.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning,

We will remember them.

Read it all.

The Queen has led the nation in remembering service personnel who have died during conflicts, as Remembrance Sunday services are held around the UK.

A two-minute silence was observed before the monarch laid a wreath at the Cenotaph in central London.

Events are being held across the UK and abroad, including in Afghanistan.

Read it all.

Grant us, O Lord, so to enter on the service of our Christian warfare, that, putting on the whole armour of God, we may endure hardness and fight against the spiritual powers of darkness, and be more than conquerors through him that loved us, Jesus Christ our Lord.

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 93:4-5

Dr. Robert Fuller didn’t hesitate to go to Indonesia to treat survivors of the 2004 tsunami, to Haiti to help after the 2010 earthquake or to the Philippines after a devastating typhoon last year. But he’s given up on going to West Africa to care for Ebola patients this winter.

He could make the six-week commitment sought by his go-to aid organization, International Medical Corps. But the possibility of a three-week quarantine afterward adds more time than he can take away from his job heading UConn Health Center’s emergency department.

“I’m very sad that I can’t go, at this point,” said Fuller, who’s helping instead by interviewing other prospective volunteers. Nine weeks or more “gets to be a pretty long time to think about being away from your family and being away from your job.”

Read it all.

Even as the Nigerian military stepped up efforts at beating back the extremist Boko Haram sect from the areas it currently occupies, including the commercial border town of Mubi in Adamawa state, the militants are intensifying attacks on remote communities and villages, residents have told PREMIUM TIMES.

Also, there are reports that three retired Generals of the Nigerian Army narrowly escaped death when Boko Haram insurgents stormed their village asking for their whereabouts.

The insurgents did not succeed in their mission as they (the army Generals) were reportedly not around when the Boko Haram terrorists struck their village of Gashala in Hong Local Government, few kilometers away from Mubi town.

Read it all.

Pastors and congregations representing numerous Christian denominations from around the state gathered at the State House to declare their moral convictions at The Stand rally Saturday.

“We have gathered to declare there is a new day in South Carolina. There is a new day in this nation,” said Dr. Kevin Baird, pastor of Legacy Church in Charleston and director of the S.C. Pastors Alliance, which organized the rally. “We as pastors are here to say that we will not be silent. We will no

Read it all.

GONZALEZ: Erwin McManus is MOSAIC church’s founder and pastor and a man who’s spent his religious career connecting faith to young adults, many of whom grew up with no strong religious beliefs. But McManus says they’re searching for a deeper meaning for their lives.

millenials-post01MCMANUS: You have a generation that is saying we are tapping out of religion in many ways. But what they are not saying is that we are tapping out of a serious search for meaning in life. They are not tapping out of a deep spirituality. In fact, if anything there is an incredible and profound hunger in millennials saying if there is something beyond this life I want to connect to it.

GONZALEZ: Most Americans in their 20s still describe themselves as religious, but according to a poll by the Pew Research Center and Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, one in three millennials has no affiliation with any house of worship. But that doesn’t rule out their embrace of religious beliefs and practices. Experts say the milennials just want to come to faith on their own terms.

BRIE LASKOTA: Millennials, if you had to sum them up in a word, you’d sum them up in terms of choice. Millennials are the most interested in choice. They see it as their American right.

Read or watch it all.

The three most recent, interrelated novels””Gilead, Home, and Lila, which was released last month””are exquisitely imagined human stories that work out many of the theological themes to which Robinson’s writing returns again and again. It is not quite accurate to describe them as “engag[ing] deeply with the thornier aspects of Calvinist theology,” given that Robinson’s characters””themselves devout Calvinists””rue the “crude” use to which certain doctrines (e.g. predestination) have been put. It would be truer to say that Robinson’s novels engage deeply with a theology of amazing grace.

Lila is the story of Reverend Ames’s wife, whose presence in Home and Gilead is shy and mysterious. Until now, readers have only known that she is uneducated, much younger than Rev. Ames, and that she has had a hard life. If Gilead is an old preacher’s letter to his son, explicating the Ten Commandments, and Home is a meditation on the resonance of the story of the prodigal son (and these are reductionistic descriptions, to be sure), Lila is the strange parable in Ezekiel, of God seeing Israel as an orphaned baby, “weltering” in blood, and taking it up, and loving it into life.

“I believe in the grace of God,” Reverend Ames tells Lila, his wife, who, though settled in Gilead, struggles to feel at home, and worries what will become of the people who raised her; the people she loved, none of whom gave much thought to their immortal souls. “For me, that is where all questions end.”

Read it all.

When the congregation of St Saviour’s in the Latvian capital of Riga welcomed a new Priest in Charge they made a little bit of church history. While the Church of England has just accepted the principle of women bishops, the Rt Rev JÄ“ruma-GrÄ«nberga has held the title as a bishop in the Lutheran church in Britain before returning to her family homeland.

Five years ago, at a ceremony in central London, Jāna, who was born in Britain and whose parents were Lutheran refugees, was consecrated as head of the Lutheran Church in Great Britain.

She takes over the church in Riga which itself has a young, revitalised history. After Latvia regained its independence in 1991 the English-speaking congregation was re-formed and has had a formal pastor since 1995.

Read it all.

The Supreme Court announced Friday that it will hear the most serious challenge to the Affordable Care Act since the justices found it constitutional more than two years ago: a lawsuit targeting the federal subsidies that help millions of Americans buy health insurance.

More than 4 million people receive the subsidies, which the Obama administration contends are essential to the act by making insurance more affordable for low- and middle-income families.

But challengers say the administration is violating the plain language of the law. They are represented by the same conservative legal strategists who fell one vote short of convincing the court that the law was unconstitutional the last time around.

Read it all.

“Pregnancy and childbirth were very male experiences for me,” said a 29-year-old respondent in a study reported Friday in Obstetrics and Gynecology. “When I birthed my children, I was born into fatherhood.”

If this statement at first seems perplexing, it’s less so when you realize the person talking is a transgender man ”“ someone who has transitioned from a female identity to a male or masculine identity.

He is one of 41 participants in a study of how it feels to be male and pregnant, a study the authors think may be the first of its kind.

Pregnancy as a transgender man is unlike any other kind. No one expects a man to be pregnant, and the study participants said they were often greeted with double-takes, suspicion and even hostility from strangers and health care providers. “Child Protective Services was alerted to the fact that a ‘tranny’ had a baby,” one participant reported.

Read it all.

if we look at just the 25-to-54 age group, which strips out most students and retirees, the employment-to-population ratio has been slowly improving since it bottomed out at 74.6% (not seasonally adjusted) in February 2011. Last month, 77.3% of all 25-to-54-year-olds were employed, which is well below the indicator’s pre-recession high in October 2006, when 80.7% of people in this age group were employed.

Then again, not all employment is created equal, either. During the Great Recession, the ranks of people working part-time either because they couldn’t find full-time work or because their hours were cut back because of slack demand soared from around 3% of all employed people pre-recession to 6.6% in March 2010. There are fewer such involuntary part-timers now, but last month they still accounted for 4.8% of all employed people (and 2.7% of the entire adult civilian non-institutional population).

Read it all.

[Mark] Driscoll cannot take all the credit for his own downfall. For one thing, any faithful Christian would give Satan his due, for leading Mr. Driscoll astray. Then there is the role played by World, an evangelical Christian newsmagazine that broke one of the most damaging stories about Mr. Driscoll. In March, World reported that $210,000 in Mars Hill church funds had gone to a marketing firm that promised to get “Real Marriage,” a book written by Mr. Driscoll and his wife, on best-seller lists.

World was not the only outlet to take on Mr. Driscoll. The blogger Warren Throckmorton, in particular, persistently chronicled concerns about Mars Hill for the website Patheos. But the story about best-seller lists was also not the first scoop for World, and Mr. Driscoll was not the first conservative Christian leader that the magazine had taken on.

In October 2012, a World reporter, Warren Cole Smith, revealed that Dinesh D’Souza, the conservative author, filmmaker and activist, had attended a Christian conference with a woman not his wife ”” a woman he was introducing as his fiancée. Soon after, Mr. D’Souza resigned as president of King’s College in New York City.

Read it all.

Besides choosing lawmakers, on November 4th voters in three American states and the District of Columbia considered measures to liberalise the cannabis trade. Alaska and Oregon, where it is legal to provide “medical marijuana” to registered patients, voted to go further and let the drug be sold and taken for recreational purposes, as Colorado and Washington state already allow. In DC, a measure to legalise the possession of small amounts for personal use was passed. A majority of voters in Florida opted to join the lengthening list of places where people can seek a doctor’s note that lets them take the drug. However, the measure fell just short of the 60% needed to change the state constitution. Even so, that such a big state in the conservative South came so close to liberalising shows how America’s attitude to criminalising pot has changed.

After this week’s votes only 27 states outlaw all sale or possession of marijuana. In the rest, a thriving “canna-business” is emerging…: trade in the drug is escaping the grasp of organised crime and becoming normal, just as alcohol did after the end of Prohibition. But even as moves to legalise and regularise the business continue at state level, the federal government and Congress remain dead set against the drug. A panoply of federal laws to curb the marijuana trade remain in place; and in recent months the Drug Enforcement Administration has raided cannabis dispensaries in California that are operating under state licences.

Read it all.

[The Diocese of South Carolina]…is blessed with many military families, and countless retirees and veterans and their families. On Nov 9, the Sunday before Veteran’s Day, we ask that you remember and say a prayer of thanksgiving and for God’s safety for all those who have served our nation, all those still serving, and especially for their families.

Read it all.

Read it all.

Almighty God, who hast sent the Spirit of truth unto us to guide us into all truth: We beseech thee so to rule our lives by thy power that we may be truthful in word and deed and thought. Keep us, most merciful Father, with thy gracious protection, that no fear or hope may ever make us false in act or speech. Cast out from us whatsoever loveth or maketh a lie, and bring us all into the perfect freedom of thy truth; through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord.

At the set time which I appoint I will judge with equity. When the earth totters, and all its inhabitants, it is I who keep steady its pillars….

For not from the east or from the west and not from the wilderness comes lifting up; but it is God who executes judgment, putting down one and lifting up another.

–Psalm 75: 2-3; 6-7

Gordon Smith doesn’t leave the house without at least a couple of pairs of socks. The memory of seeing what he calls “hideous” feet ”” toes eaten by frostbite, or reddened and peeling from trench foot ”” reminds him that the gift of a warm pair of clean socks can go a long way on the streets of Edmonton.

“It is such a minuscule gift that I can give them,” Smith said during a Friday morning breakfast at the All Saints Cathedral Anglican Church organized for homeless people in the city.

“They need more, they have nothing and when you give them something that they personally have and own and it’s brand new, it’s their own.”

Smith has been giving out socks for a decade in Edmonton and figures he’s amassed 70,000 pairs of socks, enough to fill an average-sized bedroom, and enough to crown him with the title “sock man,” among some who know him.

Read it all.