The New England @Patriots are headed to #SuperBowlLII after defeating the Jacksonville @Jaguars 24-20 🏈 pic.twitter.com/63UR0JoYQv
— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) January 21, 2018
ALL 3 times #Eagles played in Super Bowl 🏆 Eagles BEAT Vikings at home in the Playoffs Along the way!
✅ 2017 Conference (38-7)
✅ 2004 Divisional (27-14)
✅ 1980 Divisonal (31-16)#MINvsPHI #vikings#SuperBowlLII #skol #eagles #FlyEaglesFly pic.twitter.com/jI7BVlpRns— Jeff Skversky 6abc (@JeffSkversky) January 22, 2018
[JoAnn] Hesson’s $5,125 loan was scheduled to be repaid over more than seven years, with $495 due monthly, for a total of $42,099.85 — that’s nearly $37,000 in interest.
“Access to credit of this kind is like giving starving people poisoned food,” said consumer advocate Margot Saunders, an attorney with the National Consumer Law Center. “It doesn’t really help, and it has devastating consequences.”
These pricey loans are perfectly legal in California and a handful of other states with lax lending rules. While California has strict rules governing payday loans, and a complicated system of interest-rate caps for installment loans of less than $2,500, there’s no limit to the amount of interest on bigger loans.
State lawmakers in 1985 removed an interest-rate cap on loans between $2,500 and $5,000. Now, more than half of all loans in that range carry triple-digit interest rates.
Church of England leaders are braced for a “controversial” vote on whether it should share ministers with the Methodists as part of plans set to boost struggling rural churches.
The proposals will be debated at the Church’s governing body, the General Synod next month – but senior figures warned that some will see the proposals as “very problematic”.
The plans would allow priest from each church to preach at the other, and would help areas where there are “serious challenges in sustaining a Christian presence”, church leaders suggest.
Though more data is needed, the newer approach seems to have two major advantages, which were important to the Royers. It appears less likely to lead to a premature birth, which can cause many complications for the newborn. And it gives the mother a chance to have a vaginal delivery. Women who have the usual fetal surgery have to give birth by cesarean section, which poses risks for subsequent pregnancies.
For the Royers, the procedure, described in an Oct. 23 article in The New York Times, lived up to its promises. Mrs. Royer’s pregnancy lasted the full nine months, and she had a happy, uncomplicated vaginal birth with her husband by her side. Dr. Belfort delivered their son.
The infant’s back, which previously had the biggest defect the surgeons had ever repaired, now showed barely a hint of it. But incisions on his sides, made during the fetal surgery to loosen enough tissue to cover the hole in his back, had not closed. Those cuts usually heal on their own after birth, but one had a sizable lump of tissue bulging out and needed suturing.
Three hours after he was born, Baby Royer was on an operating table with three plastic surgeons stitching up his sides. The job took less than an hour.
It was the hardest thing I’d ever had to say to my husband, Marc. Three years ago, I sat down and told him: “The idea of having sex just with you for the next 40 years – I can’t do it any more.” But I had come to realise that my life was built around something I didn’t believe in: monogamy.
We had been together for 12 years and had two children, now nine and seven. I love being a mother and I set the bar high from the start – cloth nappies and cooking from scratch. But I needed something more in my emotional and sexual life.
Marc’s reaction was remarkable; he agreed to support me and open our marriage to other partners, although it wasn’t really what he wanted. We started counselling to try to identify the best of what we had, to save it and protect it. Sex is a big part of a relationship, but it is only a part. We didn’t want it to scupper us.
If that sounds difficult, it was. I don’t think we could have done it if we hadn’t spent most of our marriage reading, talking and exploring together.
I quickly embraced the dating scene and discovered another side of my sexual self.
I will take comments on this submitted by email only to KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.
The Anglican Church in Rwanda has elected Bishop Rev. Dr. Laurent Mbanda as the new Archbishop
This comes after months of deliberations and prayer by the Rwanda Anglican House of Bishops which elects the highest priest.
He takes over from Archbishop Onesphore Rwaje who has been at the helm for the last seven years. Bishop Mbanda currently serves as Bishop of Shyira Diocese.
A source intimated to KT Press that Dr. Laurent Mbanda, was overwhelmingly voted through secret ballot. House of Bishops meeting took place on January 17.
We are delighted to announce the launch of the Gafcon YouTube channel. We hope will keep you better informed and equip you to stand up for uncompromised biblical truth.
There are 17 videos posted and we will be adding more regularly. Please do take a moment to have a look.
The first time Ashley McGuire had a baby, she and her husband had to wait 20 weeks to learn its sex. By her third, they found out at 10 weeks with a blood test. Technology has defined her pregnancies, she told me, from the apps that track weekly development to the ultrasounds that show the growing child. “My generation has grown up under an entirely different world of science and technology than the Roe generation,” she said. “We’re in a culture that is science-obsessed.”
Activists like McGuire believe it makes perfect sense to be pro-science and pro-life. While she opposes abortion on moral grounds, she believes studies of fetal development, improved medical techniques, and other advances anchor the movement’s arguments in scientific fact. “The pro-life message has been, for the last 40-something years, that the fetus … is a life, and it is a human life worthy of all the rights the rest of us have,” she said. “That’s been more of an abstract concept until the last decade or so.” But, she added, “when you’re seeing a baby sucking its thumb at 18 weeks, smiling, clapping,” it becomes “harder to square the idea that that 20-week-old, that unborn baby or fetus, is discardable.”
Scientific progress is remaking the debate around abortion. When the U.S. Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, the case that led the way to legal abortion, it pegged most fetuses’ chance of viable life outside the womb at 28 weeks; after that point, it ruled, states could reasonably restrict women’s access to the procedure. Now, with new medical techniques, doctors are debating whether that threshold should be closer to 22 weeks. Like McGuire, today’s prospective moms and dads can learn more about their baby earlier into a pregnancy than their parents or grandparents. And like McGuire, when they see their fetus on an ultrasound, they may see humanizing qualities like smiles or claps, even if most scientists see random muscle movements.
Almighty God, whose deacon Vincent, upheld by thee, was not terrified by threats nor overcome by torments: Strengthen us, we beseech thee, to endure all adversity with invincible and steadfast faith; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
“Vincent [of Saragossa] struggled for the unity of the Church, for undivided love” Augustine pic.twitter.com/Xsn7MVbiUc
— Catholicity&Covenant (@cath_cov) January 22, 2016
O Lord God, in whom we live and move and have our being, open our eyes that we may behold thy Fatherly presence ever about us. Teach us to be anxious for nothing, and when we have done what thou hast given us to do, help us, O God our Saviour, to leave the issue to thy wisdom, knowing that all things are possible to us through thy Son our Saviour, Jesus Christ.
–Robert W. Rodenmayer, ed., The Pastor’s Prayerbook: Selected and arranged for various occasions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960)
Now the point in what we are saying is this: we have such a high priest, one who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in heaven, a minister in the sanctuary and the true tent which is set up not by man but by the Lord. For every high priest is appointed to offer gifts and sacrifices; hence it is necessary for this priest also to have something to offer. Now if he were on earth, he would not be a priest at all, since there are priests who offer gifts according to the law. They serve a copy and shadow of the heavenly sanctuary; for when Moses was about to erect the tent, he was instructed by God, saying, “See that you make everything according to the pattern which was shown you on the mountain.” But as it is, Christ has obtained a ministry which is as much more excellent than the old as the covenant he mediates is better, since it is enacted on better promises.
–Hebrews 8:1-7