How do we tune in to the Holy Spirit? How do we get on His wavelength? Sometimes it seems like when my grandsons try to communicate with each other on our walkie talkies. They both press the talk button at the same time and can’t hear what the other is saying. The range of the walkie talkies is about five miles but they yell all the louder at each other from a distance of about ten feet. Sharon and I can hear them both without the walkie talkies quite well thank you. Sometimes Jamison is on channel one and Maxwell is on channel three. They can’t seem to agree to be on the same channel. Here are the lessons learned. First of all, unlike Jamison and Maxwell, we need to get our finger off the talk button and simply listen. Second, never buy a boy anything that will amplify the sound of his voice. Let’s look at one of my favorite passages from the Old Testament to help us understand how God communicates with us.

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Pornography is not new, but the digital age has made it more ubiquitous and accessible than ever before. The technological realities of smartphones and high-speed internet have fundamentally changed the landscape of pornography, and ushered it into the cultural mainstream where it enjoys increasingly widespread acceptance.

In Barna’s landmark study, The Porn Phenomenon (now available to purchase online), commissioned by Josh McDowell Ministry, we interviewed thousands of American teens, young adults and older adults about their views on and use of pornography. Here are ten of the most compelling findings:

1. There is Moral Ambiguity Toward Porn, Particularly Among Younger Americans
Perhaps the most sobering finding from the study is the reality of how accepted viewing porn has become in our culture today, particularly among teens and young adults. Around half of adults 25 and older say viewing porn is wrong (54%), and among teens and young adults 13-24, only a third say viewing porn is wrong (32%). This posture toward porn among younger Americans is confirmed by how they talk about porn with their friends: the vast majority reports that conversations with their friends about porn are neutral, accepting or even encouraging. They generally assume most people look at porn at least on occasion, and the morality of porn is rarely discussed or even considered. Just one in 10 teens and one in 20 young adults report talking with their friends about porn in a disapproving way.

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It is not often that the Church of Ireland has a best seller but such was the demand for Bishop Harold Miller’s guide to the Book of Common Prayer, The Desire of Our Soul, that it sold out. And such has been the continuing demand for it that a reprint has been necessary. The reprint, with an attractive new cover, has just been released and is available from The Book Well online Christian bookshop.

The book is a companion to the Book of Common Prayer 2004. In this guide, Bishop Miller leads the reader through the different services in the Prayer Book, especially the ones newly introduced in 2004. He enables the reader to understand something of the meaning of the liturgies, the reason why they are as they are, and the way in which they can provide the people of God with words which can deepen both public and personal devotion.

The publication also includes a series of charts laying out the structure of many of the services, and a set of questions at the end of each chapter which m

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Leicester City. Champions of England. pic.twitter.com/WRwfysTn2N

— Leicester City (@LCFC) May 2, 2016

It is quite a small room: plain white walls, two three-seater sofas, a couple of pot-plants. If it were not for the black-and-white pictures of 19 Premier League managers hung on the walls, it could be a humdrum suite in a mid-ranking business hotel.

Instead, Claudio Ranieri’s office at the King Power stadium has become the nerve-centre of the greatest fairytale English football has ever seen, the place where plots have been hatched and victories toasted.

Ranieri’s decision to adorn the wall with images of his peers was designed to make them feel at ease when they visited him after matches; instead, they have assumed the look of big-game trophies, all eclipsed by Ranieri and his remarkable band of title winners.

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The decision by Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr to have his supporters seize and then vacate the parliament building in Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone was the act of a man who””at least for now””wants to control rather than destroy the country’s political system.

But this breach has put such a strain on Iraq’s political arrangements, established after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion to balance the interests of the country’s sects and ethnic groups, that once this crisis plays out, there may be not much of a system left to control.

Mr. Sadr, the scion of a prominent Shiite clerical family who once led an insurgency against U.S. occupation forces and was responsible for unleashing some of the country’s worst sectarian violence, denies that he seeks outright power.

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A bookkeeper named Roy Torcaso, who happened to be an atheist, refused to declare that he believed in God in order to serve as a notary public in Maryland. His case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and in 1961 the court ruled unanimously for Mr. Torcaso, saying states could not have a “religious test” for public office.

But 53 years later, Maryland and six other states still have articles in their constitutions saying people who do not believe in God are not eligible to hold public office. Maryland’s Constitution still says belief in God is a requirement even for jurors and witnesses.

Now a coalition of nonbelievers says it is time to get rid of the atheist bans because they are discriminatory, offensive and unconstitutional. The bans are unenforceable dead letters, legal experts say, and state and local governments have rarely invoked them in recent years. But for some secular Americans, who are increasingly visible and organized, removing the bans is not only a just cause, but a test of their growing movement’s political clout.

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…mobilising intelligently demands being willing to ask what habits and assumptions, as well as what chances and conditions, have made possible the risk of evil triumphing. And that leads us into deep waters, to a recognition of how what we tolerate or ignore or underestimate opens the way for disaster, the ways in which we are at least half-consciously complicit. If this is not to be the silly we-are-all-guilty response that has rightly been so much mocked, nor an absolution for the direct agents of great horrors, it needs a careful and unsparing scrutiny of the processes by which cultures become corruptible, vulnerable to the agendas of damaged and obsessional individuals.

This can be uncomfortable. It raises the awkward issue of what philosophers have learned to call “moral luck” ”“ the fact that some people with immense potential for evil don’t actualise it, because the circumstances don’t present them with the chance, and that some others who might have spent their lives in blameless normality end up supervising transports to Auschwitz. Or, to take a sharply contemporary example, that one Muslim youth from a disturbed or challenging background becomes a suicide bomber but another from exactly the same background doesn’t. It is as though there were a sort of diabolical mirror image for the biblical Parable of the Sower: some seeds grow and some don’t, depending on the ground they fall on, or what chance external stimulus touches them at critical moments.

If what interests us is simply how to assign individuals rapidly and definitively to the categories of sheep and goats, saved and damned, this is offensively frustrating. But if we recognise that evil is in important respects a shared enterprise, we may be prompted to look harder at those patterns of behaviour and interaction that ”“ in the worst cases ”“ give permission to those who are most capable of extreme destructiveness, and to examine our personal, political and social life in the light of this.

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You can listen directly or download–at the link here (and if anyone has difficulty the download link is there)

Almighty God, who didst give to thine apostles Philip and James grace and strength to bear witness to the truth: Grant that we, being mindful of their victory of faith, may glorify in life and death the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

We offer to thee, O Lord our God, the work which thou hast appointed for us. Help us to do it heartily and faithfully, as in thy sight and for thy glory, that so we may be drawn nearer to thee and confirmed in thy service, which alone is true freedom; in the name of our Master and Saviour, Jesus Christ.

Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel, thou who leadest Joseph like a flock! Thou who art enthroned upon the cherubim, shine forth before E’phraim and Benjamin and Manas’seh! Stir up thy might, and come to save us!

–Psalm 80:1-2

You can find out a lot more by at their website.

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You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit ”“ fruit that will last”¦ (John 15.16).

It has pleased God to add more mission responsibilities on the shoulders of the Primate of All Nigeria, The Most Rev’d Nicholas D. Okoh. In a meeting of The Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) Primates’ Council held in Nairobi, Kenya, from 18 to 22 April, 2016, The Most Rev’d Nicholas Okoh, was elected the new Chairman of the Council. He succeeds The Most Rev’d Eliud Wabukala, the Primate of the Anglican Church of Kenya…

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[Ted] Landsmark has spent a lifetime moving forward, while studying and learning from the past. He calls the attack at Boston City Hall “the transformative moment in my life,” but he never had any intention of allowing it to define his life. Having grown up in the projects of Harlem, having recovered from childhood polio, Landsmark has gone on to have a remarkable life. He has been an educator, lawyer, designer, social activist and worked in government. He has three degrees from Yale and a doctorate from Boston University, was at the March on Washington and Selma, and been a college president, among other things. And since January, academic vice president at the American College of the Building Arts in Charleston.

“Charleston is a terrific city,” he says, and he is talking not just about the architecture and the food, but as a place for both blacks and whites to live together.

Landsmark started coming to Charleston in the early 1990s, doing research in the Carolinas and Georgia into early African American craftsmen. “In the course of driving around, I fell in love with the place,” he says. He bought a house on Wadmalaw Island more than a decade ago.

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[h/t Pat Dague]

“..Looking for something he couldn’t find.”

Yep–long, haunting, and worth the effort

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Almighty and everlasting God, in whom we live and move and have our being: Grant unto us such purity of heart and strength of purpose that no selfish passion may hinder us from knowing thy will, and no weakness from doing it; but in thy light may we see light, and in thy service find perfect freedom; through 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

The big screen at Bernie’s Tap Room in Waukesha flickers with a baseball game between Texas Christian University and Dallas Baptist. The players are nearly life-size.

But the action on-screen is lost to the 15 people seated at two long tables in front of the game. They are deep in conversation about Jesus, church and life, stopping occasionally for a sip from the pint glass at hand.

Jesus + Beer is in session.

In and near Milwaukee, some people are getting a little faith with their froth. Assemblages like Jesus + Beer are part of a national trend of groups combining Bible study with elbow-bending. Sometimes, it’s just easier to talk religion over a beer, one pastor said. It’s also an idea that goes back to Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation.

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