Lord Jesu, I give Thee my body, my soul, my substance, my fame, my friends, my liberty, and my life; dispose of me, and of all that is mine, as it seemeth best to Thee, and to the glory of Thy blessed Name. Be Thou a light unto mine eyes, music to mine ears, sweetness to my taste, and a full contentment to my heart. Be Thou my sunshine in the day, my food at the table, my repose in the night, my clothing in nakedness, and my succour in all necessities. Amen.

–Frederick B.Macnutt, The prayer manual for private devotions or public use on divers occasions: Compiled from all sources ancient, medieval, and modern (A.R. Mowbray, 1951)

A Prayer 4 the Day from Bp John Cosin 'Be Thou my sunshine in the day, my food at the table..' https://t.co/zsCksvtZZv #anglican pic.twitter.com/rvOXE0hIPV

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) July 29, 2017

But I call upon God; and the LORD will save me. Evening and morning and at noon I utter my complaint and moan, and he will hear my voice. He will deliver my soul in safety from the battle that I wage, for many are arrayed against me.

–Psalm 55:16-18

We welcome the Archbishops’ reminder that the Church of England supported ending the criminalisation of homosexual behaviour among consenting adults, which is no more appropriate than criminalising adultery. We are also glad that they speak of homosexual people who want to follow Christ and are drawn by his love.

However, in calling people to him, Jesus speaks of his yoke and burden not ours. He refers to the yoke or challenge of living the kind of spiritual and moral life he expects. He promises that if we follow him he shares the burden and challenge to enable us to overcome those aspects of our lives that still need to conform to his pattern and teaching. He does not comfort and console us by accepting what is unacceptable to him.

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Gregory said Christians should be cautioned against believing in the view that they must be the gatekeepers of the law against buggery in order to prevent the legalisation of same-sex marriage.

“This submission does not accept the cause and effect relationship which is being introduced into this matter, neither is it advocating homosexual marriages,” he said….

Section 61 of the Offences against the Person Act of 1864 criminalises the ‘abominable’ anal sex – consensual or otherwise. The maximum punishment is 10 years’ imprisonment.

But Gregory argued: “Sexual activity engaged in public spaces is illegal and should continue to be so, whether of an heterosexual or homosexual nature.”

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

This dog saved my life,” his owner, Lance Corporal Jeff DeYoung, a Marine, said. “I trust him more than most human beings.”

Watch it all.

Only 26 percent of couples had their wedding ceremony in a religious institution in 2016, according to data from The Knot’s 2016 Real Weddings Study. That’s down from 41 percent in 2009.

The Knot surveyed nearly 13,000 U.S. brides and grooms, finding that weddings in farms, barns and ranches had gone up, along with weddings in historic buildings and homes. Other popular venues are beach houses, public gardens, wineries and museums.

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It is certainly true that moral perceptions have significantly, fundamentally changed on a number of social issues or behaviors since 2001 — most notably, gay/lesbian relations, having a baby outside of wedlock, sex between unmarried men and women, and divorce. But these attitudinal changes did not occur in isolation. They have occurred alongside important cultural and legal changes, including the rising propensity of divorce following changes to state laws at the end of the 20th century and the gay rights movement that ultimately succeeded in legalizing same-sex marriage in 2015, to name a few.

No such shifts have occurred with respect to polygamy. It remains illegal in all 50 states. And only this year, the state House of Utah, a state that outlawed the practice in 1895 in order to gain admission into the union, passed a bill that would, among other things, increase the penalties for convicted polygamists. And while academic research finds that covert polygamous marriages do exist in the U.S., they are uncommon and are largely confined to some immigrant Muslim groups and Mormon sects that have broken away from the mainstream church.

In short, there is little reason to believe that Americans are more likely to know or be polygamists now than at any other time in the past. But there is one way Americans may feel more familiar with or sympathetic to polygamy: television.

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Priests at one of England’s most visited parish churches have expressed concern over the unholy racket made by tourists who feel obliged to photograph everything they see.

The University Church of St Mary the Virgin, in the heart of Oxford, welcomes hundreds of thousands of tourists each year, but the volume of visitors risks overwhelming the peace of the church, parts of which date from the 13th century.

The Rev Charlotte Bannister-Parker, the associate priest, said in a newsletter that tourists needed to challenge the mentality that “if you don’t take a photo, it did not happen”.

The priest, daughter of Sir Roger Bannister, the first person to run a mile in less than four minutes, said: “I am not usually a grumpy person but I have been overwhelmed by the number of tourists coming through the church and the fact that so many of them seem unaware that this is a sacred space.

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“When your income is not that great, and prices are going up, how are people supposed to survive?”

For the last year, Charles Johnson and his family of five have been caught in an insecure no man’s land. Their family’s low income can’t always stretch to cover everything they need, yet they don’t qualify for public assistance in Georgia. So in his words, “We’re trying to look for any kind of help we can get.”

That’s where Hillside Presbyterian Church comes through. Whoever said small churches can’t do big things?

This small church in the Atlanta area has found its calling in Decatur, Georgia, by meeting tangible needs of people in the community. Over the last 20 years, this church of 124 members—80 active members, most of them between the ages of 50 and 90—has distributed around 800,000 pounds of food to nearly 145,000 people. Hillside has become well known for its food pantry, and people from outside its service area—often sent by other churches—come looking for help.

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A group of disaffected conservative Evangelicals has expressed a wish for an alternative Anglican structure in Britain.

In a statement issued last week, the group — of which several members no longer belong to the C of E — expresses dismay at recent decisions by the General Synod about sexuality, and reveals that they have been meeting to discuss how to “ensure a faithful ecclesial future”.

In a letter in Tuesday’s Daily Telegraph, the group goes further, and declares that there are two kinds of Anglicanism in Britain: “One has capitulated to secular values, and one continues to hold the faith ‘once delivered to the saints’.”

A similar division in the United States and Canada led to the creation of the breakaway Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), the letter-writers note. They conclude: “We look for and pray for a similar renewal of orthodox Anglicanism and of Anglican structures in these islands.”

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28 July 1750. German classical composer Johann Sebastian Bach (aged 64) died. pic.twitter.com/jvZXT7JODF

— Prof.Frank McDonough (@FXMC1957) July 28, 2017

Almighty God, beautiful in majesty and majestic in holiness, who dost teach us in Holy Scripture to sing thy praises and who gavest thy musicians Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frederick Handel and Henry Purcell grace to show forth thy glory in their music: Be with all those who write or make music for thy people, that we on earth may glimpse thy beauty and know the inexhaustible riches of thy new creation in Jesus Christ our Savior; who livest and reignest with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Lift up our souls, O Lord, to the pure, serene light of thy presence; that there we may breathe freely, there repose in thy love, there may be at rest from ourselves, and from thence return, arrayed in thy peace, to do and bear what shall please thee; for thy holy name’s sake.

A #Prayer to Begin the Day from E.B. Pusey https://t.co/EC1OkNDAFZ 'Lift up our souls, O Lord, to the pure, serene light of thy presence.' pic.twitter.com/BitCk43SzH

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) July 28, 2017

And all the assembly kept silence; and they listened to Barnabas and Paul as they related what signs and wonders God had done through them among the Gentiles. After they finished speaking, James replied, “Brethren, listen to me. Simeon has related how God first visited the Gentiles, to take out of them a people for his name. And with this the words of the prophets agree, as it is written,

”˜After this I will return,
and I will rebuild the dwelling of David, which has fallen;
I will rebuild its ruins,
and I will set it up,
that the rest of men may seek the Lord,
and all the Gentiles who are called by my name,
says the Lord, who has made these things known from of old.’

Therefore my judgment is that we should not trouble those of the Gentiles who turn to God, but should write to them to abstain from the pollutions of idols and from unchastity and from what is strangled and from blood. For from early generations Moses has had in every city those who preach him, for he is read every sabbath in the synagogues.”

–Acts 15:12-21

Though the Church of England still discriminates against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people, it recently shifted towards greater acceptance. There has been a backlash from a small but vocal set of members.

The General Synod in July 2017 heard from bishops about plans to look again at pastoral practice and teaching. It also passed motions against conversion therapy aimed at changing sexual orientation, and for welcoming transgender people.

Over the past century, many theologians have made a biblical case for affirming self-giving, committed same-sex partnerships. In recent decades, some have pointed out that gender identity is complex. Acceptance has also grown among churchgoers and the wider public….

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The most rigorous study yet of the effects of marijuana legalization has identified a disturbing result: College students with access to recreational cannabis on average earn worse grades and fail classes at a higher rate.

Economists Olivier Marie and Ulf Zölitz took advantage of a decision by Maastricht, a city in the Netherlands, to change the rules for “cannabis cafes,” which legally sell recreational marijuana. Because Maastricht is very close to the border of multiple European countries (Belgium, France and Germany), drug tourism was posing difficulties for the city. Hoping to address this, the city barred noncitizens of the Netherlands from buying from the cafes.

This policy change created an intriguing natural experiment at Maastricht University, because students there from neighboring countries suddenly were unable to access legal pot, while students from the Netherlands continued….

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In his books, classes, and radio instruction, Robinson taught that sermons should be guided by the biblical text and focus on one idea or theme.

Christianity Today featured Robinson—formerly the senior editor of a fellow CT site, PreachingToday.com—in a 2002 article on the neglected craft of expository preaching:

Robinson has been teaching students about expository preaching for decades. His classic (and recently updated) tome Biblical Preaching, which is used in more than 150 seminaries and Bible colleges, has become the go-to text for aspiring expositors.

“The number of preachers who really begin with the text and let it govern the sermon is relatively small,” laments Robinson. “Today, the danger is that some preachers will read the latest psychology book into the text. They’re not driven by a great theology but, instead, by the social sciences.”

In addition to Biblical Preaching, Robinson wrote more than a dozen books on the topic and regularly taught through radio ministries Discover the Word and Our Daily Bread. He warned preachers about veering into heresy with biblical application; distracting the congregation with sermon illustrations; or ostracizing parts of the audience with tone.

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Of all Austen’s novels, Emma is perhaps the most entirely engaging, the book in which her dexterity of thought is at its most truly dexterous and her contradictory energies most thoroughly enlivening, her strong satiric impulse to emphasize the chaos of life being perfectly balanced with her novelistic impulse to pattern, to scheme and to tidy. George Henry Lewes, writing in 1852 and naming her “the greatest artist that has ever written”, understood Austen’s limits – “she has risked no failures by attempting to delineate that which she has not seen” – but correctly adjudged “Her world is a perfect orb, and vital”, and no book of Austen’s is more perfectly orb-like than Emma. It represents the yin-yang of the Austen universe.

With Emma busy projecting her fancies and fantasies onto others, even more disastrously than Catherine in Northanger Abbey, this is the novel in which Austen comes closest to a rounded presentation not only of human society but also of human consciousness. There are certainly no spasms of rapture and self-revelation of the kind one finds in, say, show-boating Charlotte Brontë, which is exactly why Brontë thought Austen “insensible” and “incomplete” (though surely G. K. Chesterton was correct, that Austen is, in fact, “stronger, sharper and shrewder”). “Anything like warmth or enthusiasm”, Brontë complained,

anything energetic, poignant, heartfelt, is utterly out of place in commending these works: all such demonstrations the authoress would have met with a well-bred sneer, would have calmly scorned as outré or extravagant . . . . The passions are perfectly unknown to her: she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sisterhood . . . . What sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study: but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of life and the sentient target of death – this Miss Austen ignores.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. And wrong again. There is very little throbbing or blood rushing in Austen, but this hardly means that the passions are unknown to her, as is best displayed in Emma in the famous passage in which Emma reflects on Mr Elton’s marriage proposal:

The hair was curled, and the maid sent away, and Emma sat down to think and be miserable. – It was a wretched business indeed! – Such an overthrow of every thing she had been wishing for! – Such a development of every thing most unwelcome! – Such a blow for Harriet! – that was the worst of all. Every part of it brought pain and humiliation, of some sort or other; but, compared with the evil to Harriet, all was light; and she would gladly have submitted to feel yet more mistaken – more in error – more disgraced by mis-judgment, than she actually was, could the effects of her blunders have been confined to herself.

Emma here and elsewhere is most entirely herself, and the stormy sisterhood: “what she was, must be uncertain; but who she was, might be found out”.

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A Saskatoon pastor is taking a page out of Charles Schultz’s classic “Peanuts” comic strip by offering spiritual advice and a glass of fruit punch at a roadside stand in his neighbourhood.

Mark Kleiner of Christ Church Anglican church says the stand is part of a parish initiative to participate more in the community.

He tells CTV Saskatoon they want a minister “that engages with the people around us.”

The stand is strikingly similar to the one where Lucy often counsels Charlie Brown in the “Peanuts” comics.

An overhead sign on the booth promises spiritual help for five cents, while another sign on the front of it reads: “The pastor is IN.”

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Muhammad Asghar kneeled on the floor alongside a couple of dozen fellow Muslims last week silently praying. When he looked up and turned his head, he smiled at the Anglican priest kneeling behind him.

“To my amazement, he came and joined me in the prayer,” Asghar said.

A Christian clergyman kneeling inside a mosque would normally be an unusual occurrence, but in Leamington — the small farming community in southwestern Ontario — it’s become a common sight.

Asghar and many others regularly pray at St. John the Evangelist Anglican Church, where the Muslim community has set up a mosque, thanks to a deal worked out between the two religious communities.

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A statement on the 50th Anniversary of the Act of Parliament passed in 1967 which decriminalised homosexual acts in our Country

Today is the 50th Anniversary of the Act of Parliament passed in 1967 which decriminalised homosexual acts in our Country. The Church of England, led by Archbishop Ramsey, was supportive of the Sexual Offences Act.

In January 2016 the majority of the leading Archbishops of the whole global Anglican Communion – almost 80 million people in 165 countries – confirmed the longstanding view of the Communion that diminishing and criminalising homosexual people is wrong.

The Church, not just the Church of England, but all those who follow Jesus Christ and whose lives are committed to his worship and service, has very often been defined by what it is against. It has condemned many things, and continues to do so, very often correctly, for example when they involve the abuse of the poor, or the weak, or the marginalised.

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Dissatisfaction is the one word that best expresses the state of mind in which Christendom finds itself today. There is a wide-spread misgiving that we are on the eve of momentous changes. Unrest is everywhere. We hear about Roman Councils, and Anglican Conferences, and Evangelical Alliances, about the question of the Temporal Power, the dissolution of Church and State, and many other such like things. They all have one meaning. The party of the Papacy and the party of the Reformation, the party of orthodoxy and the party of liberalism, are all alike agitated by the consciousness that a spirit of change is in the air.
No wonder that many imagine themselves listening to the rumbling of the chariot- wheels of the Son of Man. He Himself predicted that ” perplexity” should be one of the signs of His coining, and it is certain that the threads of the social order have seldom been more seriously entangled than they now are.

A calmer and perhaps truer inference is that we are about entering upon a new reach of Church history, and that the dissatisfaction and perplexity are only transient. There is always a tumult of waves at the meeting of the waters; but when the streams have mingled, the flow is smooth and still again. The plash and gurgle that we hear may mean something like this.

At all events the time is opportune for a discussion of the Church-Idea ; for it is with this, hidden under a hundred disguises, that the world’s thoughts are busy. Men have become possessed with an unwonted longing for unity, and yet they are aware that they do not grapple successfully with the practical problem. Somehow they are grown persuaded that union is God’s work, and separation devil’s work ; but the persuasion only breeds the greater discontent. That is what lies at the root of our unquietness. There is a felt want and a felt inability to meet the want; and where these two things coexist there must be heat of friction.

Catholicity is what we are reaching after….

–William Reed Huntington The Church Idea (1870)

My aim has been to set forth God in Christ as the highest attainable good of the soul. I have taught, or tried to teach, the doctrine of a divine friendship made possible through the Incarnation of God’s Son. I have seemed to find in the simple Creed which tells of a Word made flesh and dwelling among us, not a key which readily unlocks all the closed doors of this mysterious house our souls inhabit, but one to which more bolts yield than yield to any other key that the busy, searching intellect of man has found. The warrant for this belief in “God-with-us” I have sought, and, at least to my own thinking, found, in Holy Scripture, in history and in human nature. The Christ of the Gospels has been the centre of all my theologizing and the authority for all my teachings. If I speak of history as one of the warrants of faith, it is because of the discernible presence in its pages of the Son of Man steadily at work, century by century, building up the walls of his fair City. If I speak of human nature as another one of these warrants, it is because I observe in human nature capacities and desires, sympathies and affections, such as only a humanized God, a God whose being is at some point tangent to our own, can meet and satisfy. In a word, to get away from metaphysical abstractions, and to stick close to personality, to use the filial and brotherly vocabulary in all my speech and to avoid, as far as possible, a philosophical phraseology, which, while it may overawe, can scarcely enlighten, has been my steadfast aim. For, after all, the most cultured congregations are human; and thoughts which cannot be expressed in the words our mothers taught us, may as well be held in reserve, so far as preaching is concerned. Prattle about the Infinite and the Absolute is an easy accomplishment for men who have been to college; but what people need to be persuaded of is that they have a Father in heaven, Who knows them and Who may, in some measure, by them be known; Who loves them and Who may, in some measure, by them be loved.

If to this doctrine of “God in Christ” I have not, in my teaching, linked as closely as some would have liked to see me do, a philosophy of sacramental grace, it has not been from any disposition to undervalue the place of sacraments in religion, but rather from a reluctance to narrow to one channel a stream which so very evidently flows through many.

These last twenty years, be it candidly confessed, have been a rather arduous time for preachers. Not only have they had to encounter far greater difficulty than of old in getting a hearing, because of the increased number of voices in the world, but, even when listened to, they have been almost as men under trial upon the charge of concealing their real beliefs….

Read it all.

O Lord our God, we thank thee for instilling in the heart of thy servant William Reed Huntington a fervent love for thy Church and its mission in the world; and we pray that, with unflagging faith in thy promises, we may make known to all peoples thy blessed gift of eternal life; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

RT @eccalendar “Feast of William Reed Huntington, Priest, 1909.  ”¦ pic.twitter.com/oYJ2Cm9j9Q” http://t.co/RWjUrLkIo7

— St Philip’s Nash (@StPsNashville) July 27, 2015

Almighty God, who hast set thy law of love ever before us: Grant us thy grace that we may never harbour any resentment or ill-feeling in our hearts, but seek at all times the way of reconciliation and peace, according to the teaching of thy Son, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

The herdsmen fled, and told it in the city and in the country. And people came to see what it was that had happened. And they came to Jesus, and saw the demoniac sitting there, clothed and in his right mind, the man who had had the legion; and they were afraid. And those who had seen it told what had happened to the demoniac and to the swine. And they began to beg Jesus to depart from their neighborhood.

–Mark 5:14-17

“People at St Mary’s were part of the campaign to allow gay and lesbian couples to get married in Scotland so it is not surprising that we would want to be able to offer such weddings in the cathedral itself.

“St Mary’s Cathedral, Glasgow is one of the most stunning places that anyone can get married. It is wonderful that more people now have the chance of coming here for their special day.

“I want to live in a world where same-sex couples can feel safe walking down the street hand in hand and in which they can feel joy walking hand in hand down the aisle of a church too.”

The Provost added: “We already have one booking from a couple coming up from England who can’t get married in their local Church of England parish. We are glad to be able to welcome them and expect there will be many others who will follow them”.

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Two Anglican clergymen controversially returned to Holy Orders after being defrocked for their roles in covering up historic cases of child sex abuse, are unlikely to minister again.

Former Bishop of Grafton Keith Slater and Grafton Deacon Rev Pat Comben have been returned to Holy Orders this year after attempts to “depose” them in 2015.

The pair were found to have acted inappropriately to victims of the notorious North Coast Children’s Home who came to them seeking redress for past abuses.

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Here are 250 Ivy League courses you can take online right now for free https://t.co/u3iN7m80xL

— conciergedoc (@DrFerdowsi) July 25, 2017

The 8 Ivy League schools are among the most prestigious colleges in the world. They include Brown, Harvard, Cornell, Princeton, Dartmouth, Yale, and Columbia universities, and the University of Pennsylvania.

All eight schools place in the top fifteen of the U.S. News and World Report 2017 national university rankings.

These Ivy League schools are also highly selective and extremely hard to get into. But the good news is that all these universities now offer free online courses across multiple online course platforms.

So far, they’ve created over 300 courses, of which around 250 are still active. Class Central has made a collection of all these, which you can explore…

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Abolishing slavery involved the clear articulation of principles of the natural law, stated in scripture, in order to overcome the exceptions and accommodations that had previously been made because of sin. Affirming same-sex relationships, by contrast, would require the overturning of clear and established principles of the natural law, stated in scripture, and the complete rewriting of biblical sexual ethics so that it no longer accords with its plain stated meaning. Abolishing slavery meant finally doing away with an institution which the New Testament clearly regards as undesirable, and which its teaching undermined at source. Affirming same-sex sexual relationships would mean approving of conduct which the New Testament is emphatic in condemning as sinful (Romans 1:26-7Open in Logos Bible Software (if available), 1 Corinthians 6:9-10Open in Logos Bible Software (if available), 1 Timothy 1:8-11Open in Logos Bible Software (if available)). The cases could not be more different, or the consequences of failing to recognise this more serious for the standing of the Bible in Christian moral teaching.

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At the heart of the divisions which have beset the Anglican Communion since 2002 is a profound disagreement over sexual ethics, in particular whether same sex unions can be blessed by God in the light of the teaching of the Bible. The teaching of GAFCON is that the Bible is clear on three vital points.

First, that sexual intimacy outside of heterosexual marriage is forbidden by God and not in the best interests of humans.

Second, that persistent behaviour of this sort puts those who engage in it outside the kingdom of God and therefore at risk of losing salvation.

Third, acceptance of this behaviour in the church means that the full gospel cannot be preached, since the full gospel requires repentance from sexual sin.

But there is more to it than that. The Bible tells us that in a society in which the truth about God is supressed, the consequence is godless sexual licence. This is a sign of an unhealthy community in deep trouble.

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