I bless the LORD who gives me counsel; in the night also my heart instructs me. I keep the LORD always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved….Thou dost show me the path of life; in thy presence there is fulness of joy, in thy right hand are pleasures for evermore
Psalm 16: 7-8;11
A Canadian Anglican has been chosen to head one of the world’s most prestigious universities.
Stephen Toope, who has served on a number of high-profile church bodies, was recently nominated as vice-chancellor of the University of Cambridge, according to U of T News. Assuming the appointment will be approved by the university’s governing body, Toope will begin in his new role Oct. 1, 2017. He will be the 346th vice-chancellor in the university’s 800-year history, and is believed to be the first non-Briton to serve in the position.
Toope, who is currently director of the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, said he was completely surprised when he received the offer, unaware the university had even been searching for someone to fill the post.
Third, Eric writes, “It’s a fact that if Hillary Clinton is elected, the country’s chance to have a Supreme Court that values the Constitution ”” and the genuine liberty and self-government for which millions have died ”” is gone. Not for four years, or eight, but forever.” Essentially, this is to say that Hillary is Sauron, and the Presidency the One Ring. “If [she gains] it, your valour is vain, and [her] victory will be swift and complete: so complete that none can foresee the end of it while this world lasts.” But is there any evidence whatsoever that this prophecy ”” Eric’s about Hillary, I mean, not Gandalf’s about Sauron ”” is true? It’s the same claim that Decius makes with his “Flight 93” analogy, but as far as I can tell, none of the people who prophesy so boldly have ever defended it. They just assert it. Saying “it’s a fact” doesn’t making it a fact. The prophecy of ultimate and endless doom is just a guess.
And a despairing guess ”” which is the element of all this that isn’t poor judgment, but rather a sin. If Hillary Clinton is elected, that will not foreclose the possibility of Christian revival in America. And if there ever is Christian revival in America, then surely Eric Metaxas believes that that would be good news for the cause of “genuine liberty and self-government.” Hillary is not mightier than Sauron, and American democracy is not quite that fragile, even if it is profoundly flawed, and the possibility of spiritual renewal is always at hand.
I will take comments on this submitted by email only to KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.
The bells at York Minster are to fall silent for the festive period after the cathedral’s management sacked all of its voluntary bellringers without warning.
The world-famous bells will not be heard again until after the new year, meaning a break with the tradition of ringing them on Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve as well as on Remembrance Sunday.
At a special meeting on Tuesday night all 30 volunteer bellringers were told that bellringing activity at the Minster would cease with “immediate effect” while the management recruited a paid head bellringer, who would in turn select new volunteers in 2017.
There is another moment ”” actually, a single hour ”” that I will never forget.
On the final day, as we waited for Laura’s organ donor surgery, all I wanted was to be alone with her. But family and friends kept coming to say their goodbyes, and the clock ticked away. About 4 p.m., finally, everyone had gone, and I was emotionally and physically exhausted, in need of a nap. So I asked her nurses, Donna and Jen, if they could help me set up the recliner, which was so uncomfortable, but all I had, next to Laura again. They had a better idea.
They asked me to leave the room for a moment, and when I returned, they had shifted Laura to the right side of her bed, leaving just enough room for me to crawl in with her one last time. I asked if they could give us one hour without a single interruption, and they nodded, closing the curtains and the doors, and shutting off the lights.
I nestled my body against hers. She looked so beautiful, and I told her so, stroking her hair and face.
Read it all from the New York Times. If you have a moment, this is a lovely video report also.
Leaders of the Global South have attacked “the inability of existing Communion instruments to discern truth and error and take binding ecclesiastical action”.
In a closing communiqué following the meeting in Egypt, they lamented the failure “to discipline those leaders who have abandoned the biblical and historic faith, to check the marginalisation of Anglicans in heterodox Provinces who are faithful, and in some cases have even sanctioned or deposed them.”
The statement also expressed their grief that some Churches had given “authorisation of liturgies and making pastoral provisions for blessing of civil unions of same-sex couples and blessing or solemnising of same-sex marriage”¦ and ordination those who live in same-sex union”¦
“Churches that condone these practices are severing themselves from their own spiritual roots”¦ they also undermine their moral witness to their own societies, and cause huge confusion among the Anglican faithful in our Churches in this globalising world.”
William Wilberforce convinced his generation that slavery was a sin ”“ a sin that was a curse of the country in which he lived. That belief has not changed. Yet slavery still demeans more than 30 million in our world. This is the reality for thousands, possible tens of thousands, in our own country, not because we think it is acceptable, but because our sin lies in blindness and ignorance.
I have had to learn that myself. Change that and the problem will be transformed. At the heart of that slightly demanding and complex reading a few moments ago, is freedom.
Paul is writing in a world where 30 per cent of the population were slaves and slavery was visible all around, absolutely unchallenged.And he tells the Galatian Christians that in Christ there was no difference between the slave and the free.
One of the forerunners of the Ordinariate is the remarkable parish of Our Lady of the Atonement in San Antonio, Texas.
As a young Anglican seminarian, Christopher Phillips trained for the ministry at Salisbury in England. On his return to the United States he and his wife Joanne, living at that time in Rhode Island, felt the call to be received into full communion with the Catholic Church.
It was 1981 and Pope John Paul II had just given permission for married Anglican priests who become Catholic to be granted a dispensation from the vow of celibacy, thereby allowing them to be ordained as Catholic priests. Permission was also granted for groups of Anglicans to set up “personal parishes” using an Anglican-style liturgy under the supervision of their Catholic bishop.
At the same time Christopher and Joanne were discerning the way forward, a small group of Episcopalians in San Antonio had decided to leave the Episcopal church and seek re-union with Rome. They asked Christopher if he would move to Texas to be their pastor.
The Commission has been very active over the last few years and as it is anticipated that there will be fewer vacant sees in the near future, it is timely to review the way in which it works. The focus of the group will be to explore and provide the theological framework for the Commission as it discharges its responsibilities and to make any recommendations on process in the light of this. The group will be inviting a number of people to meet with it as well as receiving written submissions. It is very conscious of its responsibility to ensure that the full richness and diversity of Church voices are represented and starts its work this week.
It is anticipated that the group will make a report to the Archbishops who have commissioned the work. They have committed to sharing it with General Synod in 2018.
O Thou who hast prepared a place for my soul, prepare my soul for that place. Prepare it with holiness; prepare it with desire; and even while it sojourneth upon earth, let it dwell in heaven with thee, beholding the beauty of thy countenance and the glory of thy saints, now and for evermore.
I love thee, O Lord, my strength.
The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer,
my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge,
my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.
I call upon the Lord, who is worthy to be praised,
and I am saved from my enemies.
The cords of death encompassed me,
the torrents of perdition assailed me;
the cords of Sheol entangled me,
the snares of death confronted me.
In my distress I called upon the Lord;
to my God I cried for help.
From his temple he heard my voice,
and my cry to him reached his ears
Then the earth reeled and rocked;
the foundations also of the mountains trembled
and quaked, because he was angry.
Smoke went up from his nostrils,
and devouring fire from his mouth;
glowing coals flamed forth from him.
He bowed the heavens, and came down;
thick darkness was under his feet.
He rode on a cherub, and flew;
he came swiftly upon the wings of the wind.
He made darkness his covering around him,
his canopy thick clouds dark with water.
Out of the brightness before him
there broke through his clouds
hailstones and coals of fire.
The Lord also thundered in the heavens,
and the Most High uttered his voice,
hailstones and coals of fire.
And he sent out his arrows, and scattered them;
he flashed forth lightnings, and routed them.
Then the channels of the sea were seen,
and the foundations of the world were laid bare,
at thy rebuke, O Lord,
at the blast of the breath of thy nostrils.
He reached from on high, he took me,
he drew me out of many waters.
He delivered me from my strong enemy,
and from those who hated me;
for they were too mighty for me.
They came upon me in the day of my calamity;
but the Lord was my stay.
He brought me forth into a broad place;
he delivered me, because he delighted in me.
The Lord rewarded me according to my righteousness;
according to the cleanness of my hands he recompensed me.
–Psalm 18:1-20
For a storm that inflicted less damage than many had feared, Hurricane Matthew nevertheless impaired or destroyed more than 1 million structures, forced businesses from Florida to North Carolina to close and put thousands temporarily out of work.
In many affected areas, small-business owners were still assessing the damage.
“I’ve never had anything like this in 12 years of business,” said Ami Zipperer, who has two garden supply stores in the Savannah, Georgia, area.
The piece is essentially an op-ed commentary on a survey conducted by Lifeway Research and funded by Ligonier ministries. The defining feature of the survey, at least to me, was an inability for those surveyed to think consistently about their faith. For example, 60% of respondents believed that Heaven is a place where “all people will ultimately be reunited with their loved ones” however 54% percent of respondents said that “only those who trust in Jesus Christ as their Savior” will go to heaven. Adding to the confusion, 64% believe that “God accepts all forms of religion.” It doesn’t take a seminary degree to see the incompatibility of the above viewpoints. The only way I could reconcile the above viewpoints would be with the theologically liberal solution of a Universalist Cosmic Christ, which is probably not what the respondents intended!
And while logical inconsistency might be the defining feature of the survey, it is by no means the most interesting. Apparently, for this survey LifeWay used “stringent criteria” in order to separate “Evangelicals” from Christians in general. Those respondents who identified as “Evangelical” must indicate the Bible as “their highest authority,” that personal evangelism was important and that “trusting in Jesus’ death on the cross is the only way to salvation.” The expectation was that the Evangelicals would perform better on the more theological/biblical portions of the survey than the more generic “Christian” respondents. But as Morris points out in his article for The Federalist, Evangelicals actually performed worse. And the points they scored worse on were not Bible trivia such as “who was the first Apostle called by Jesus,” but rather the Evangelicals struck out on fundamental articles of the Christian faith.
Read it all (emphasis mine).
Ms. Weber had to get a medical marijuana card to buy products for her dog Emmett. That led her to an awkward conversation with a physician who solely prescribes medical marijuana for people.
“I went to the weed doctor and said, ”˜I need a card so I can get it for my dog who had cancer,’” said Ms. Weber, who said she doesn’t smoke pot or drink. “He said, ”˜I don’t have a solution for that.’ So I told him I had insomnia.”
Maureen McCormick, 54, lives in Newport Beach, Calif., and was persuaded of marijuana’s benefits after relatives used cannabis products for their own aches and pains. She thought they would benefit her 14-year-old cat, Bart, who has arthritis in his front legs. “I told the doctor I had a knee that aches, and my shoulder, too,” she said. “I also said I want to use it for my cat.” She got the card in July.
Ms. McCormick is using a tincture by Treatwell, a California company that also makes edibles for humans.
Platform Intentionally
In Divided By Faith esteemed sociologists Emerson and Smith make the following assertion: Racial practices that reproduce racial division are invisible to most whites. If this is true, then our churches need people at the table who help make the invisible visible.
Offer platforms to the issues. Offer platforms to minorities who might feel marginalized. Years ago, I appreciated events like “A Time to Speak” held at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis to discuss race relations in America. These types of events confront racism head-on.
But platforms aren’t reserved for conferences and moderated national panels. The local church has an underused platform. Think about your church’s sermon series over the past nine months. Was racial tension in America addressed? Was any time set aside during service for prayer after tragedies occurred around our nation?
In this worrisome and wearisome election year, Yuval Levin offers a gracefully written, big-picture analysis of American society and politics. Levin, editor of National Affairs and a conservative of the David Brooks type, challenges both Democrats and ReÂpublicans, whom he views as snared in nostalgia for bygone (and not to be recovered) eras.
Progressives long for the post”“World War II era of relative income equality, powerful national institutions, and a highly regulated economy. Conservatives yearn for the cultural conformity of the immediate postwar years and look to the 1980s as the political and economic model. “Our polarized parties are now exceptionally backward-looking,” writes Levin. “They are offering the public a choice of competing nostalgias, neither of which is well-suited to contending with contemporary American challenges.”
Levin’s essay is a work of political philosophy, but there is an implicit theological and moral critique in his analysis. Nostalgia-driven parties and the nation they would lead face the future with more fear than hope, more despair than faith. Levin implicates the Boomer generation, whose “self-image casts a giant shadow over our politics, and . . . means we are inclined to look backward to find our prime.” (Both presidential candidates, one might note, are Boomers.)
Read it all from Christian Century.
Entering the 9th inning, the win probability for the @Cubs was just 2.5%.
🤔#FlyTheW pic.twitter.com/5oN00nhHo1
— Baseball Tonight (@BBTN) October 12, 2016
The Cubs expressed understandable joy and jubilation after their 6-5 comeback victory over the Giants in Game 4 to win the National League Division Series, but mostly they felt rewarded for keeping the faith when everybody but them had lost it. Admit it, you did too.
Just when you concluded the Cubs were done, they reminded everyone how they won 103 regular-season games. Just when you thought their bats had died, they came back to life. Just when Chicago doubted the Cubs the most, they gave everyone reason to believe again.
Just when you started to wonder if this really was the year, the Cubs left the impression the 108-year wait might be ending soon.
THE Dean of Peterborough, the Very Revd Charles Taylor, has bowed out of office with a stinging attack on envious people at the centre of the Church of England who resent “uppity” cathedrals and who wish to impose a “monochrome blandness” on the Church.
In late July, it was revealed that a cashflow crisis at Peterborough Cathedral meant that staff were in danger of not being paid. A loan was secured from the Church Commissioners. At the same time, it was announced that Dean Taylor was planning to retire.
In his farewell sermon on Saturday, Dean Taylor, who is 63, dropped a strong hint that the decision to leave had been forced upon him. Despite hundreds of letters of support, he said, he had not made any public remark about “the circumstances surrounding my ”˜retirement’ ”” although some have alleged that the manner in which it was effected was legally dubious, morally reprehensible, and pastorally disgraceful. Well, they might care to think that. I could not possibly comment.”
The first vision was experienced by a monk named Godwine, “a man of great simplicity and innocence”, who was a former sacristan of the monastery. While asleep on the eve of Wilfrid’s feast, he was woken by sounds in the choir: he heard the singing of the familiar chants appointed for the beginning of the vigil – Domine, labia mea aperies; Deus, in adiutorium meum intende – and the Psalm, Domine, quid multiplicati sunt. Then he heard voices singing Unum Deum in Trinitate fideliter adoremus, cuius fide Deo uiuit sanctus presul Wilfridus – “Let us faithfully worship one God in the Trinity, through faith in whom holy Bishop Wilfrid lives in God”. When he heard this, Godwine thought he must have overslept, so he jumped up and hurried to the choir, chastising himself for his laziness. He reached the entrance to the choir and hesitated, realising that he didn’t recognise the voices which were singing as those of his brother monks.
Then he looked into the choir, and it was empty. Since he could still hear the singing, he thought his eyes must be blurred by sleep, so he went to his usual place in the choir; but as he stood there he could see everything clearly, and there was no one there. But he could still hear singing – a multitude of voices in harmony. “But now it seemed to him that he was not hearing them singing psalms nearby, but rather from above, as if they were in the rafters of the church; and so, ascending as they sang and escaping as they ascended from the ears of the brother listening to them, these holy angels who had come, praising in hymns God who lives gloriously in his saint, once again sought the heavenly realms.”
12 Octobre : Saint Wilfrid, Évêque d'York (634-709)https://t.co/IuwiulK5s8#catholique pic.twitter.com/nwXlLZpl9f
— Ligue Saint Amédée (@SaintAmedee) October 11, 2016
O Lord God, the source of all grace and the judge of all men, who hast invited us to enter thy kingdom, but dost not force our wills to obedience: Grant that we may so use thy present grace that we may not have cause to fear thy final judgment; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
On their return the apostles told him what they had done. And he took them and withdrew apart to a city called Bethsa’ida. When the crowds learned it, they followed him; and he welcomed them and spoke to them of the kingdom of God, and cured those who had need of healing.
–Luke 9:10-11
“It’s been a surreal week. Last Wednesday and Thursday I met the Pope, first for a big service then for a conversation. The service was beautiful, full of a sense of the presence of God. Towards the end the Pope gave a gift, for me and my successors, a beautifully carved wooden Bishop’s staff, modelled on one given to St Augustine by Pope Gregory the Great in 597 ”“ over 1,400 years ago.
“In turn I gave him the cross I was wearing; it is called a Coventry Cross, and is the shape of three nails, modelled on the ones made at Coventry Cathedral after it was bombed in 1940. In the past 70 years they have become a global symbol of peacemaking and reconciliation.
“At that deeply emotional moment, triggered by the cross of nails, I remembered Aleppo, and those driven from homes all round the world as refugees. And then yesterday evening I met Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani 19-year-old shot for campaigning for education for girls, and still doing so. An extraordinary evening.
….something changed for Moore after Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president of the United States, was caught on tape bragging about his ability to sexual assault women. When Trump said, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything,” Moore had had enough.
“I’m one among many women sexually abused, misused, stared down, heckled, talked naughty to. Like we liked it. We didn’t. We’re tired of it,” Moore said. She also had a word about evangelical leaders still supporting Trump: “Try to absorb how acceptable the disesteem and objectifying of women has been when some Christian leaders don’t think it’s that big a deal.”
Moore’s broken silence about the 2016 race””rooted in her own experience with sexual assault””signals a widening gender divide between evangelicals. Increasingly, moderate and conservative Christian women are speaking out about Trump’s brand of misogyny and divisiveness, and condemning support for the nominee or silence about him from male evangelicals.
Before we get to the Sarah Pulliam Bailey round-up for today, it is significant that the Associated Press has produced a feature with the headline, “Why Do Evangelicals Prefer Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton?”
Of course, this headline should have included the word “some,” as in “some evangelicals.” Down in the body of the feature, AP made it rather clear that many ”“ perhaps even most ”“ religious conservatives are not planning to vote for Trump, but against you know who. This is not news to people who follow religion trends, but it will be surprising to some editors at daily newspapers:
Watch and listen to it all.
Correction to today's newsletter: B&C will continue publishing online until the end of 2017 [not 2016].
— Books & Culture (@booksandculture) October 11, 2016
You can find their wonderful website there.
Relations between Moscow and Washington — already at their lowest since the Cold War over the Ukraine conflict — have soured further in recent days as the United States pulled the plug on Syria talks and accused Russia of hacking attacks.
The Kremlin has suspended a series of nuclear pacts, including a symbolic cooperation deal to cut stocks of weapons-grade plutonium.
“I think the world has reached a dangerous point,” Gorbachev, 85, told state news agency RIA Novosti.
Yet Jesus Christ is also the Life. This means he is the one who conquers death and offers life eternal to all. But as many biblical scholars have noted, “eternal life” is about a life of unimaginable quality. A life of beauty.
“Beauty,” wrote psychologist Rollo May, “is the experience that gives us a sense of joy and a sense of peace simultaneously. ”¦ Beauty is serene and at the same time exhilarating; it increases one’s sense of being alive. ”¦ Beauty is the mystery which enchants us.”
Beauty fills us with joy and peace precisely because it indirectly and mysteriously manifests the one who is the Life. One might even paraphrase our Lord and say that Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the beautiful. Or to put it more succinctly, it is in Jesus Christ that we can know, relish, and live into what we here at CT call a “beautiful orthodoxy.” It is in Christ alone that we can know, relish, and live into the truly good, the truly true, and the truly beautiful as manifested in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.
Jimmy Cutter wheeled his pickup through the parking lot of a roadside ice machine Monday, ready to buy a bucket for his home.
But he didn’t get any ice. Without power, the machine would not run. It was the latest challenge in recent days for Cutter, who was among thousands of eastern South Carolina residents dealing with the effects of a weekend hurricane.
“It’s not bad for a few days, but after a while it gets old,” Cutter said Monday.