RECAP + VIDEO: #MUFC is headed for the #UEL final, though a red card hurts their already thin back line https://t.co/cD7iwq4lCe

— NBC Sports Soccer (@NBCSportsSoccer) May 11, 2017

The lawsuit argues that state law and legal precedence require that school districts consider other measures of punishment before expulsion, and that failed to happen in this case.

According to the hearing officer’s report, an administrator at the Northbrook school did not specify whether other measures were considered but said a disciplinary committee that investigated “felt it was important to send a message.”

“If (the student) is allowed to return to school after serving a suspension, then other students could certainly decide that attempting to access a teacher’s account to change grades is worth the risk,” the report said.

The lawsuit contends that the student has not had disciplinary problems at school and that his actions caused no disruption to school operations, factors that the suit contends should have resulted in lesser punishment.

Read it all.

The email read like one that could easily be circulating at any American college in 2017: a professor at Duke Divinity School urged her colleagues to attend a two-day session on how to recognize and combat racism.

The diversity program “provides foundational training in understanding historical and institutional racism,” said the Feb. 6 email by Anathea Portier-Young, an associate professor of the Old Testament, who called it “transformative, powerful and life-changing.”

But to Paul Griffiths, a professor of Catholic theology, the March course was something else: akin to the retraining of intellectuals by “bureaucrats and apparatchiks” in totalitarian societies, he wrote in an email to his fellow professors that afternoon.

Read it all.

Roughly a quarter of a century after the fall of the Iron Curtain and subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union, a major new Pew Research Center survey finds that religion has reasserted itself as an important part of individual and national identity in many of the Central and Eastern European countries where communist regimes once repressed religious worship and promoted atheism.

Today, solid majorities of adults across much of the region say they believe in God, and most identify with a religion. Orthodox Christianity and Roman Catholicism are the most prevalent religious affiliations, much as they were more than 100 years ago in the twilight years of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires.

In many Central and Eastern European countries, religion and national identity are closely entwined. This is true in former communist states, such as the Russian Federation and Poland, where majorities say that being Orthodox or Catholic is important to being “truly Russian” or “truly Polish.” It is also the case in Greece, where the church played a central role in Greece’s successful struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire and where today three-quarters of the public (76%) says that being Orthodox is important to being “truly Greek.”

Read it all.

The Rt. Rev. Mark J. Lawrence, Bishop of the Diocese of South Carolina, will deliver the Address at the 2017 Commencement ceremony of Cummins Theological Seminary in Summerville, SC. The Commencement will take place on Saturday, May 13, 3:00 p.m., in Bethel A.M.E. Church, 407 South Main Street, Summerville.

In September, 2016, Bishop Lawrence was elected to the Board of Trustees of the seminary by the Synod of the Reformed Episcopal Diocese of the Southeast. Also, during this academic year the seminary added three new members to the Faculty — The Rev. Dr. George Gatgounis, instructor in Biblical Hebrew; Fr. John Panagiotou, instructor in New Testament Greek, and the Rev. Dr. Charles Echols, adjunct professor of Old Testament.

Read it all.

It is impossible to deny that culture has shifted. In the West, the church has been removed from its privileged position and has been made one of many options for a pluralistic age. This has long been the reality in places like Europe and the northeastern United States. Yet we are increasingly feeling the effect much closer to home, even in the South Carolina Lowcountry. Now that Western Christians have lost their place at the top of the heap, we are faced with the question of how to respond – but we must first ask how we got here.

Read it all (page 14, then continued on page 16).

Peter Carrell’s comments [which are excerpted and which are posted at the start of Ian Paul’s blog post]…say almost everything that I would want to about the event itself. But there are some wider issues that it is also worth reflecting on.

First, I get the impression that those supportive of a GAFCON move to consecrate a bishop in England from within the Anglican Communion look on the events with a mixture of disdain, frustration and probably some anger. Whereas they had a considered plan which operated within the Communion as a whole, this move has jumped the gun without proper consideration or consultation. And I suspect that GAFCON supporters hope that everyone can see the difference between the two initiatives. But they won’t. Most of those within the Church of England will not be able to tell the difference, and the same will be true of all of those outside the Church. Both initiatives will appear to all but the best informed (and most highly motivated) to be petty, fracturing and unhelpful interference from people outside the Church of England. (I am not claiming that this view is correct—just that this will be the widespread perception.)

Secondly, it is becoming abundantly clear that this sort of approach to dealing with the perceived drift in the doctrine and teaching in the Church is singularly unhelpful.

Read it all and note carefully the links provided in the piece.

You can listen directly here or download it there. Listen carefully for a very important quote from Saint Augustine.

Hope is one of the Theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ”˜thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither.

–C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (San Francisco: Harper, 2001), p. 134

Almighty God, who hast given us powers which our fathers never knew, to probe thine ancient mysteries, and to discover thy hidden treasures: Quicken our conscience, we beseech thee, as thou dost enlighten our understanding; lest, having tasted the fruits of knowledge, we perish through our own pride and disobedience. We ask it for Jesus Christ’s sake.

–Robert W. Rodenmayer, ed., The Pastor’s Prayerbook: Selected and arranged for various occasions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960)

See to it that no one makes a prey of you by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ. For in him the whole fulness of deity dwells bodily, and you have come to fulness of life in him, who is the head of all rule and authority. In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of flesh in the circumcision of Christ; and you were buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead. And you, who were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, having canceled the bond which stood against us with its legal demands; this he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in him.

–Colossians 2:8-15