In 2006, the television comedy “The Office” aired an episode in which one of the characters, Dwight Schrute, nervously faces the prospect of delivering a speech after winning the title of top salesman of the year for his company, Dunder Mifflin. As a prank, his co-worker preps him for his moment by cribbing a speech from a dictator, coaching him to deliver it by pounding the lectern and waving his arms wildly. Dwight does it, and the audience gives a standing ovation to a manic tirade.

Watching a cartoonish TV character deliver authoritarian lines with no principles, just audacity, was hilarious back then, but that was before we saw it happening before our eyes in the race for the United States presidency.

Donald J. Trump stands astride the polls in the Republican presidential race, beating all comers in virtually every demographic of the primary electorate. Most illogical is his support from evangelicals and other social conservatives. To back Mr. Trump, these voters must repudiate everything they believe.< a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/17/opinion/have-evangelicals-who-support-trump-lost-their-values.html">Read it all.

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

The Rector of Faughanvale Parish has condemned those responsible for a break-in at the home of an elderly parishioner, which took place while she was attending a religious service in her local church.
The incident happened on Friday evening, while the victim was in St Canice’s Church in Eglinton, attending the institution of the parish’s new Rector, Rev Paul Hoey. Thieves broke into the woman’s home in the village and ransacked every room.
The break-in was discovered when the woman returned home after the service. She was extremely shaken by the incident and was comforted by parishioners.

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In a scathing statement, Canon White has now slammed Europe for its response to the migrant crisis. He says it is wrong to focus resources on those already in Europe, when those in real need are the ones left behind.

“I am disappointed by Europe’s response to the refugee crisis,” he said “Not enough is being done to help the most vulnerable, particularly those who have fled religious persecution.

“My charity is providing food, shelter and medicine for hundreds of Iraqi refugee families who have fled ISIS and are now in Jordan. Some have walked across the desert to find safety, with little more than the clothes on their backs.

“When I see angry young men clashing with border police in Hungary and demanding to be let into other EU countries, I feel that the wrong people are at the front of the queue.

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The Governing Body of the Church in Wales has voted narrowly in favour of allowing same-sex couples to marry in the Church. But it appears that the non-binding, advisory-only secret ballot has not produced enough votes in favour to persuade the Bishops to frame new legislation.

The vote on Thursday does not constitute a decision of the Governing Body. Instead, the results ”” and the two-and-a-half-hour debate that preceded the vote ”” will be used to guide the Province’s Bench of Bishops when it meets to discuss the issue in October.

Three options were under consideration: the first would mean no change to the Church’s current teaching and practice on marriage and partnerships; the second would allow same-sex unions to be blessed in the Church in Wales; the third would enable same-sex couples to be married in church.

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Same sex marriages should be conducted by the Church in Wales its governing body believes, but results of a secret ballot held were too narrow for change to be considered now.

Members of the Church in Wales Governing Body voted 61 in favour of gay marriages in church, nine in favour of blessing gay partnerships and 50 for making no change.

The result shows a majority in favour but does not constitute a decision and bishops are unlikely to draft a Bill for gay marriage as any such Bill requires a two thirds majority of each of the three houses the Archbishop of Wales Dr Barry Morgan said.

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After the sixth suicide in his old battalion, Manny Bojorquez sank onto his bed. With a half-empty bottle of Jim Beam beside him and a pistol in his hand, he began to cry.

He had gone to Afghanistan at 19 as a machine-gunner in the Marine Corps. In the 18 months since leaving the military, he had grown long hair and a bushy mustache. It was 2012. He was working part time in a store selling baseball caps and going to community college while living with his parents in the suburbs of Phoenix. He rarely mentioned the war to friends and family, and he never mentioned his nightmares.

He thought he was getting used to suicides in his old infantry unit, but the latest one had hit him like a brick: Joshua Markel, a mentor from his fire team, who had seemed unshakable. In Afghanistan, Corporal Markel volunteered for extra patrols and joked during firefights. Back home Mr. Markel appeared solid: a job with a sheriff’s office, a new truck, a wife and time to hunt deer with his father. But that week, while watching football on TV with friends, he had wordlessly gone into his room, picked up a pistol and killed himself. He was 25.

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If there were any doubts that this has become a tight, hard-fought Canadian general election campaign, that went out the window very early during Thursday night’s leaders’ debate in Calgary.

It was a spirited, sometimes snippy affair that often seemed to spin out of control, as the back-and-forth between the three candidates – Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper and left-of-centre challengers Justin Trudeau of the Liberal Party and Thomas Mulcair of the New Democratic Party – descended into cacophony.

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Almighty God, who didst call thy servant Theodore of Tarsus from Rome to the see of Canterbury, and didst give him gifts of grace and wisdom to establish unity where there had been division, and order where there had been chaos: Create in thy Church, we pray, by the operation of the Holy Spirit, such godly union and concord that it may proclaim, both by word and example, the Gospel of the Prince of Peace; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Grant, O Lord, that we may cleave to thee without parting, worship thee without wearying, serve thee without failing; faithfully seek thee, happily find thee, and for ever possess thee, the one only God, blessed, world without end.

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

With thanks to commenter jhp for the link

..in the “let go and let God” communion the Archbishop of Canterbury proposes, there is no sin to confess. Or perhaps it might be accurate to say that there is no Biblical plumb line to define what sin is. You see, those Anglican churches that have legitimized same sex behavior and marriage have done so over and against the plain meaning of Holy Scripture. That’s why the Archbishop of Canterbury is reduced to speaking about the importance of “culture and context.” Sin, if it can be said to exist at all, is simply a moving target. It is not the heart, soul and conscience-ruining wreck that stems from our fundamental rebellion against God and his high hopes for us. It is simply what we define, shaped by our culture, our desires, what is politically correct and in every case apart from God and His word. We don’t need to “come home”””we are already at home with who we are, and quite content to remain that way.

“So what,” you may say. “Why does it matter, as long as you get on helping the poor, feeding the hungry, serving widows and orphans and others? If you can keep your theology to yourself and get on with ”˜mission’ together, isn’t that the most important thing?” No. A church that serves the poor but fails to faithfully preach the Gospel and disciple believers is missing the mark. Jesus said it all in the Great Commandment: “You shall the love the LORD your God with all your heart”¦and love your neighbor as yourself.” (Matthew 22:36-40) Jesus challenged his people, his Church, to have both the vertical and the horizontal dimension of love””love for God (vertical) and love for neighbor (horizontal). Jesus said “If you love me, obey my commands.” (John 14:15, 23) We find those commands in the Bible. We also find love of neighbor defined by God’s word (see the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10). In fact, we find immutable principles of justice throughout the Bible, Old and New Testaments. What a terrible bargain this new Communion vision asks us to enter””to exchange immutable truths and standards of right and wrong for what is “culturally and contextually” correct. How many secular relief organizations and NGO’s have made that same bargain? It does not make us a family, much less a church, and even less a Communion of churches.

What brings us together as Anglicans isn’t shared mission or endless indaba. What brings us together as Anglicans is a common confession of Jesus Christ as Lord as revealed in the Scriptures. Out of that flows the greatest missionary imperative of all””Christ’s Great Commission to make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:16-20), teaching them to obey all that Christ has commanded””including food for the hungry, and justice for the oppressed.

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The author describes a continuing “debate over bombing Auschwitz.” But there really wasn’t one in 1944. McCloy and the military had made their decision and saw no need seriously to re-examine it. Most American Jewish leaders knew little of Auschwitz and did not call for it to be bombed. Most Americans agreed that bringing the war to an early end should be the military’s top priority.

Mr. Winik writes that “there is little doubt that the refusal to directly bomb Auschwitz was the president’s decision or at least reflected his wishes.” But there is no contemporaneous evidence that the proposal ever reached FDR’s desk. Nearly four decades after the war and after the 91-year-old John McCloy had been repeatedly denounced by critical historians as complicit in Nazi war crimes, because he had failed to send the bombing proposals on to the White House, he did suddenly “remember” having once discussed the idea with the president, who, he claimed, had rejected the notion out of hand: “They’ll only move it down the road a little way. . . . I won’t have anything to do [with it]. . . . We’ll be accused of participating in this horrible business.”

Whether or not those words were ever spoken, they were echoed after the war by Albert Speer, who had been the Nazi minister of armaments and war production. If the Allies had destroyed the gas chambers, he told a historian, “Hitler would have hit the roof. . . . He would have ordered the return to mass shooting. And immediately, as a matter of top priority.” Indeed, after the SS abandoned Auschwitz in January 1945, the ever-resourceful Nazis found ways to murder another quarter of a million Jews before the victory Roosevelt did not live to see finally came that May.

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[Emmanuel] Thomason discovered that South Carolina is one of at least 25 states that have what’s called a “responsible father registry” where unwed fathers can sign up to be notified if their child is put up for adoption, and urged Emanuel to look into it. Thirty-thousand children were born out of wedlock in South Carolina according to the 2014 census, yet less than 300 men signed up for the registry.

But at the time, Emanuel said he didn’t think signing up was necessary. To him, it seemed like a lack of trust for Skylar’s mother. Instead, he and his family focused on organizing a family baby shower. But when Skylar’s mother never showed up, Emanuel got nervous and signed up for the registry.

A few days later, a messenger showed up at Emanuel’s house to hand him papers showing that his daughter Skylar had been born over a week earlier, that she had been given up for adoption and had already been placed with an adoptive family in another state.

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You can find the original post there and the AI post here.