Appealing to what Richard Baxter and C.S. Lewis famously called “mere Christianity,” the 6,500 word document drew primarily from New Testament precepts and the Trinitarian doctrine of the Nicene Creed. Affirming a common Christ as Lord and Saviour, ECT declared that “Evangelicals and Catholics are brothers and sisters in Christ.” Recognising the saving power of the cross and the authority of a divinely-inspired Bible, ECT affirmed “together that we are justified by grace through faith because of Christ,” and that “Christians are to teach and live in obedience to the divinely inspired Scriptures, which are the infallible Word of God.”

At the same time as affirming a common Christianity, ECT did not seek to paper over the real and ongoing differences existing between the two traditions — most notably in their ecclesiology, doctrines of the sacraments and scriptural authority vis-à-vis church tradition. Realistic about its scope and ambition, the agreement made it clear that it could not, in itself, resolve these doctrinal disputes stemming from the Reformation.

Shifting to the Christian church’s engagement with society, the ECT recognised the enormous degree of overlap between the Catholic social teaching of the papal encyclicals and Evangelical social ethics, articulated in books such as John Stott’s Issues Facing Christians Today. As such, it called for Evangelicals and Catholics to cooperate in contending for the importance of marriage and family, the sanctity of human life at all stages of development and a free society based on a market economy with humane safeguards to protect the poor and weak from poverty or exploitation.

Prominent Evangelical signatories to ECT included: the Reformed Anglican theologian, J.I. Packer; the founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, Bill Bright; the Evangelical historian, Mark Noll; and the author and cultural commentator, Os Guinness. Meanwhile, from within the Catholic fold, ECT attracted the endorsements of Michael Novak from the Institute on Religion and Democracy; George Weigel, the acclaimed biographer of Pope John Paul II and Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Centre; Cardinal John O’Connor of New York; and Archbishop Francis Stafford of Denver.

Read it all.

“Any time you impeach a president, it’s a historic moment,” said Aimee Brewer, 49, a nurse from Monticello, Florida, who voted for Trump in 2016. “Being impeached is bad, but I don’t know if it’s going to be just a blemish or something bigger. Either way, I’m going to support him.”

She said of the Democrats: “They never really made a decent case against him. We needed a little more proof; it was all circumstantial.”

Concerning her support for Trump, she said: “I don’t necessarily like listening to him and reading his tweets, but I like everything else he’s doing.”

Mark McQueen, 46, is an informational technology engineer with the state government and a Democrat. “We are divided as a society,” he said. “Tensions are high across the land. I think people risk losing faith in the political process.”

Read it all.

Among public, a great divide at moment of Trump impeachment https://t.co/SqMNkzAJzR #KMOV pic.twitter.com/izVmYZ5ufH

— KMOV (@KMOV) December 19, 2019

From there:

Watch Mark Mukan, Director of Mission Operations in Jos, Nigeria, report on the recent baptism of 21 believers from the Gospel Center, Bassa, Nigeria. It is important for us to hear, see and encourage our brothers and sisters around the globe as the Anglican church grows.

Mark could not contain his excitement of the Gospel Center Anglican Church baptism. The baptized were presented with a Bible for their pilgrim journey and Mark reports that their testimonies have been spreading around the surrounding villages. The ceremony included holding a candle a symbol for them to hold forth the light and to share it in areas where God has placed them.

Praise God for what he is doing in the lives of these newly baptized believers!

You can watch the whole video here.

May the grace of the Lord Jesus sanctify us and keep us from all evil; may He drive far from us all hurtful things, and purify both our souls and bodies; may He bind us to Himself by the bond of love, and may His peace abound in our hearts.

–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)

“Then the kingdom of heaven shall be compared to ten maidens who took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom.
Five of them were foolish, and five were wise.
For when the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them;
but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps.
As the bridegroom was delayed, they all slumbered and slept.
But at midnight there was a cry, `Behold, the bridegroom! Come out to meet him.’
Then all those maidens rose and trimmed their lamps.
And the foolish said to the wise, `Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.’
But the wise replied, `Perhaps there will not be enough for us and for you; go rather to the dealers and buy for yourselves.’
And while they went to buy, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went in with him to the marriage feast; and the door was shut.
Afterward the other maidens came also, saying, `Lord, lord, open to us.’
But he replied, `Truly, I say to you, I do not know you.’
Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.

–Matthew 25:1-13

With physicians more likely to become addicted to drugs, compared with the general population, it became a lot more difficult to argue that a drug-dependent person was a “classic psychopath” or inherently “immature and pseudo-aggressive.” The situation was particularly untenable given that, during the fifties and sixties, physicians were the people running most epidemiologic studies and authoring the scientific manuscripts about drug use. They were, unsurprisingly, loath to suggest that the high prevalence of drug addiction among members of their vocation was caused by the fact that doctors are all psychopaths.

And so, instead of blaming that same collective form of psychopathology that they had diagnosed as innate to African-Americans, Latinos and women, epidemiologic papers about addicted doctors quietly gravitated toward different language to talk about drug use and its effects.

In one study from 1966 that compared 100 physicians treated for addiction with 100 matched controls, the authors – physicians themselves, of course – wrote, with a level of subtlety absent in studies of drug use among black Americans, that they found “no correlation between psychiatric diagnosis and drug used” and the study’s participants. As far as the researchers were concerned, doctors couldn’t be crazy, even the ones that overindulged. In a lingering sign of the times, though, the factors the authors deemed most likely to increase the risk of drug use reflected myopic ideas about the root causes of addiction. These included whether participants were married, whether they were Protestant and whether they came from the American South.

Another study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1970, reported that after 20 years of following a group of college students, half of whom had gone into medicine, twice as many of the physicians had used drugs as the group of people who, one assumes, found less respectable careers. Here, the authors again included variables they assumed most relevant to addiction: having had a feeding problem in infancy, having had a private-school education and scoring badly on a math test. Today this kind of paper wouldn’t even make it to a scientific journal editor’s desk, let alone get published.

What these mid-century epidemiologists overlooked about substance use among doctors were the high levels of stress, anxiety and lack of sleep that characterize the medical profession. Coupled with ready access to highly addictive pharmaceutical drugs and a culture of intense competition, doctors were primed to self-medicate.

Having pragmatically turned themselves into their own guinea pigs, doctors had inadvertently revealed their own heightened drug use and, with it, the fatal flaw behind the racist and sexist addiction science they had popularized. This led to only one conclusion: If morally upstanding, intellectually sophisticated white men were succumbing to addiction in droves, then it could not be a disease of the mind. The upshot was that the kinds of variables included in addiction models expanded beyond an individual’s personality or upbringing.

Read it all.

Epidemiological models show how politics, wealth and racism lead to #addiction. Addiction is complex and is not caused by a simple dysfunction of a single neural circuit. https://t.co/V5LZh6kuL7

— Jacek Debiec (@DebiecJacek) December 14, 2019

Matters are different in Eastern Euro­pean countries where Christianity, and especially Catholicism, remain deep­ly rooted in social institutions. In these settings, art still has the capacity to shock and divide. In 2018, the Polish film Clergy (Kler) generated something like a cultural crisis in that country. In a land where religion is deeply intertwined with national identity, the film showed multiple forms of clerical misconduct and concealment, with priestly crimes ranging from child sexual abuse to misconduct with adult women, to embezzlement and alliances with organized crime. The resulting controversy sparked calls for the film to be banned, but it also encouraged many complaints of actual abuse to be reported and publicized.

It appears that apart from monastic settings, churches are generally seen as threatening and deeply suspect places. Even with all the nightmarish images, however, filmmakers keep returning almost despite themselves to core elements of the Judeo-Christian story. I would highlight two examples, each quirky and far removed from traditional Holly­wood Bible epics. The bizarre French-Belgian comedy The Son of Joseph (2016) shows a son searching for his father in a narrative explicitly following a biblical structure, drawing both on the story of Abraham and Isaac and the Nativity. In its weird way, we might call it a parable. Also set in the present day is The Blind Christ (2017), a visually gorgeous Chilean film focused on another kind of quest. After receiving a revelation, a young man—Christ or a prophet?—has to cross a desert to undertake a healing miracle, and his journey involves encounters with many ordinary people, and the stories they tell.

As we enter the second century of Christian cinema, after an especially vibrant decade of cinema, we can say that filmmakers, while anything but uncritical of the faith, still find it a rich vein to mine.

Read it all.

There is an insight that would seem to get us fairly close to the heart of things. It goes like this: in the philosophy of the East, what needs to be proved is the existence of the self. In the West, it is the reverse; a la Descartes, with Berkeley doubling down, the self is the reality outside of which all else, including the world and other beings, is dubious till proven otherwise.

At this point, we’re painfully aware of the cultural snare, oddly dubbed, identity politics. Like Penny Lane, it is very much in our ears, and in our eyes. And, with barely a squint, the connection between it, and that Western view of self, racks to revealing focus. Identity politics, it turns out, is a sad irony. For what passes as identity here is, in fact, inherently, radically, self-insistent. With each new grievance a new sub-identity emerges, indicting enemies from a pool of usual suspects, as well as those amazed to be cast, suddenly, in the part. Indeed, yesterday’s confederate becomes today’s foe with dizzying regularity. To the less inflamed eye, the syndrome is, in truth, a hunger. One that grows ravenous on its present fare — and in a pattern similar to cancer, whose cells, unlike their healthy counterparts, divide without stopping.

In this case, the agents of division are human. The insistence may be confused, but it is willful, and as potentially hazardous. No stardust here. With little to build on, or with, it is, rather, a race to a dead-end of identity, shrunk beyond meaning. More benevolently: Wile E. Coyote, the moment he realizes he has overshot the cliff. Less benevolently: he is taking us with him. Nothing that has been said should be mistaken for a dismissal of injustice, the individuals and groups burdened by it, or the need for genuine remedy.

I do suggest that, if remedy is what we are really after, the modus operandi of identity politics is not just the wrong way to it, it is no way to it at all. What it lacks is gaping, and fatally flawed, namely, acknowledgement of personal culpability, in the first instance, on the part of everyone, in every social wound. It is the default position of authentic humility, upon which noble things can be built.

Read it all.

Identity politics, it turns out, is a sad irony. For what passes as identity here is, in fact, inherently, radically, self-insistent.

READ MORE: https://t.co/y3YqGEKiaH pic.twitter.com/L39cHM7yi1

— Church Life Journal (@ChurchLifeND) December 19, 2019

From there:

“With reference to the recent statement from a pressure group, the accusations made against the Right Reverend Stephen Cottrell are entirely without foundation. It is untrue that Bishop Stephen suggested to a governor of a Church of England School that his views on sexuality were not welcome and he could leave. Bishop Stephen made that clear at the time and subsequently in an Ad Clerum. It is also untrue that Bishop Stephen suggested to any other clergy that they should leave the Church of England. As he is said at his announcement, the Church of England is a Church for all people, welcoming everyone.

“He upholds the teaching of the Church of England that recognises marriage as being between one man and one woman.

“Bishop Stephen has not endorsed gender transitioning in and of itself for children but has pastoral concern for any child affected by gender dysphoria.

“He holds biblical truth as sacred and is in all matters guided by the gospel. Speaking at the press conference for his announcement he said ‘What binds us together is not our views on this issue or that issue, what binds us together is our faith in Jesus Christ. We say water is thicker than blood. It is our baptism and our belonging to each other that really matters’.”

[The] Rev John Parker resigned as both a governor of the school and as a vicar in the Church of England over the disagreement.

He said at the time: “I was basically told by my bishop that if I wished to faithfully follow the teachings of the Bible then I was no longer welcome in the Church. It felt very much like I was being silenced by the Church and the school.”

Kieran Bush, vicar of St John’s, Walthamstow, later backed Rev Parker’s claim, alleging that Bishop Cottrell had “on more than one occasion, told clergy, including John Parker, that if we disagree with the approach the Diocese is taking on matters of human sexuality we should follow our consciences and leave”.

“There were more than thirty clergy at one of the meetings,” he said in a statement in June released through GAFCON, the orthodox fellowship within the Anglican Communion.

Rev Parker was supported during the dispute by Christian Concern, which has criticised the appointment of Bishop Cottrell as Archbishop of York.

Read it all.

…it had been widely anticipated that, once Dr Sentamu retired next June, England’s first black Archbishop might be replaced by England’s first woman Archbishop.

Not so. Stephen Cottrell, the person unveiled yesterday to step into Dr Sentamu’s shoes as the new Archbishop of York, is white, male (obviously) and middle aged (he’s 61).

A missed opportunity? A case of the Church of England bottling it once more on the issue of women in the highest offices?

Not necessarily. Because Bishop Cottrell is very far from being the kind of wealthy, public school-educated Establishment figure that filled the higher ranks of the church for so long.

In fact, he’s a Spurs-loving Essex boy who went to a secondary modern school and studied not at Oxford but at poly – the Polytechnic of Central London, in fact.

And while he undoubtedly comes from the ‘high church’ wing of the CofE (he is ‘Bishop Protector for the Society of St Francis’, an order of Anglican Franciscans very much at the ‘Catholic’ end of the CofE spectrum) he is also unashamedly liberal – and outspoken – on everything from homophobia to the church’s attitude to race.

Read it all.

PROFILE: Bishop Stephen Cottrell, the man named as next Archbishop of York https://t.co/FVKFPNbb9m pic.twitter.com/DKxmhTIRJh

— The Press – Features (@york_features) December 18, 2019

In addition to calculating the most common terms across Christian traditions, researchers also identified the words and phrases that congregations of each major Christian tradition were disproportionately likely to hear in sermons, compared with congregations in the other traditions. Researchers identified these “most distinctive” terms by calculating the share of all churches in a Christian group with sermons that used a given word or phrase over the study period, as well as the share of all churches not in that group where the word or phrase was used, and then dividing the former by the latter to establish a ratio. In addition to converting each word to its stem, as in the preceding analysis, researchers removed any words used in sermons at fewer than 250 churches (4%) or at more than 95% of all churches (6,109).

Some of the findings are commonsensical. For instance, Catholic congregations were 21 times more likely than others to hear the term “homily” at least once during the study period, and they were 15 times more likely to hear “diocese” and “Eucharist.”⁹

In other cases, a tradition’s most distinctive terms may reflect some aspect of its teachings or its lectionary (a calendar of weekly readings). For example, Catholic sermons from the study period are more likely than others to contain the word “paschal,” which refers to Easter and to what the Catholic Catechism calls the “paschal mystery” of the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus.

Certain expressions may be distinctive to the sermons of a particular Christian tradition but not especially common even within that tradition. Evangelical sermons are an especially notable example of this phenomenon.

Evangelical sermons contain a number of distinctive words and phrases relating to sin, punishment and redemption. But most of these terms were used in sermons at fewer than 10% of all evangelical churches across the study period. For instance, sermons from evangelical churches were three times more likely than those from other traditions to include the phrase “eternal hell” (or variations such as “eternity in hell). However, a congregant who attended every service at a given evangelical church in the dataset had a roughly one-in-ten chance of hearing one of those terms at least once during the study period. By comparison, that same congregant had a 99% chance of hearing the word “love.”

In addition to being less common overall, the most distinctively evangelical terms also are less distinctive than those of other Christian traditions. For example, evangelical congregations were only three times more likely than others to hear the phrase “eternal hell” in a sermon during the study period, while Catholic congregations were 12 times more likely than others to hear the word “paschal.”

Read it all.

This is cool: @pewresearch doing computational social science with an analysis of ~50,000 sermons.

The Digital Pulpit: A Nationwide Analysis of Online Sermons https://t.co/dRTUQA6qS7

— Brian Steensland (@BrianSteensland) December 16, 2019

Paulo Guedes, Mr Bolsonaro’s economy minister, was spotted in Congress recently wearing a bracelet with a Bible verse given to him by an evangelical pastor. “These guys support the president,” he beamed. Mr Guedes is leading his own crusade to bring the free-market economics he learnt from Milton Friedman in Chicago to his homeland. The Universal Church’s message that state handouts are no way to live is music to his ears.

The Sunday service featured on its giant screens the story of a believer who raised himself from scavenging on a rubbish dump at the age of 17 to the ranks of the bourgeoisie. Now a successful lawyer and the proud owner of three apartments, he was invited on stage by Mr Macedo to explain how his devotion to the church had transformed his life. His strict adherence to a rule that believers tithe one-tenth of their income to the church — even when eking out an existence on a rubbish dump — was emphasised repeatedly.

Mr Mendonça says the message is an entrepreneurial one. “The same things you hear at a seminar for people starting their own business — the need to believe in your potential and in what you do, to be creative and to take risks — are exactly the same” as the advice in church, he says.

The formula has worked for Mr Macedo. His personal wealth has been estimated by Forbes magazine at $1.1bn, making him one of the world’s richest religious leaders.

Read it all.

Michael Stott: The values promoted by Brazil’s Universal Church of the Kingdom of God and its evangelical siblings are not just reshaping Brazil’s religious beliefs but also its politicshttps://t.co/XGrhOlAdNB

— Financial Times (@FinancialTimes) December 16, 2019

O Lord our God, in whose hands is the issue of all things, and who requirest from thy stewards not success but faithfulness: Give us such faith in thee and in thy sure purposes, that we measure not our lives by what we have done or failed to do, but by our obedience to thy holy will; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

—-Daily Prayer, Eric Milner-White and G. W. Briggs, eds. (London: Penguin Books 1959 edition of the 1941 original)

After this I looked, and lo, in heaven an open door! And the first voice, which I had heard speaking to me like a trumpet, said, “Come up hither, and I will show you what must take place after this.” At once I was in the Spirit, and lo, a throne stood in heaven, with one seated on the throne! And he who sat there appeared like jasper and carnelian, and round the throne was a rainbow that looked like an emerald. Round the throne were twenty-four thrones, and seated on the thrones were twenty-four elders, clad in white garments, with golden crowns upon their heads. From the throne issue flashes of lightning, and voices and peals of thunder, and before the throne burn seven torches of fire, which are the seven spirits of God; and before the throne there is as it were a sea of glass, like crystal. And round the throne, on each side of the throne, are four living creatures, full of eyes in front and behind: the first living creature like a lion, the second living creature like an ox, the third living creature with the face of a man, and the fourth living creature like a flying eagle. And the four living creatures, each of them with six wings, are full of eyes all round and within, and day and night they never cease to sing, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come!”

–Revelation 4:1-8

I believe in man,
maker of himself
and inventor of all science.
And in myself, his manifestation,
and captain of my psyche;
and that I should not suffer anything painful or unpleasant.
And in a vague, evolving deity,
the future-begotten child of man;
conceived by the spirit of progress,
born of emergent variants;
who shall kick down the ladder by which he rose
and tell history to go to hell.
Who shall some day take off from earth
and be jet-propelled into the heavens;
and sit exalted above all worlds,
man the master almighty.
And I believe in the spirit of progress,
who spake by Shaw and the Fabians;
and in a modern, administrative, ethical, and social organization;
in the isolation of saints,
the treatment of complexes,
joy through health,
and destruction of the body by cremation
(with music while it burns),
and then I’ve had it.

–Dorothy Sayers, Christian Letters to a Post-Christian World: A Selection of Essays (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, Trade Paperback edition 1969)

The Vatican is praying that this year’s must-have Christmas gadget will not be an Apple Watch or Kindle, but rather its eRosary device.

The £99 bracelet, which is activated by making the sign of the cross with it, is aimed at tracking a devotee’s progress through a range of prayers and is accessed using an app called Click to Pray. It even doubles as a fitness monitor, tracking the wearer’s steps, location and calories burnt.

In increasingly secular western societies, technology and religion may seem at odds. Since 1993, for example, the number of Britons who think “we believe too often in science and not enough in feelings and faith” has fallen from 43 per cent to 27 per cent, according to the British Social Attitudes annual survey.

Some organised religions, however, are using technology to interact with communities in an attempt to forge connections between devotees and fuel engagement. Religious education, relationships, habits and knowledge are being transformed as social media allows laypeople to network with clerics and other religious figures.

Read it all.

Religions show faith in power of technology https://t.co/okWvcq1Pkr

— Financial Times (@FT) December 4, 2019

The Archbishop of Canterbury speaks of the rise in rough sleeping, foodbank use and increasing personal debt over the last decade of austerity.

He said: “It has got worse over the last nine years. Rough sleeping has gone up. That is a matter of fact. People will argue about the causes but it is a fact it has gone up.

“Foodbank use has risen. There has been a huge rise in the client base of Christians Against Poverty, the debt-counselling charity. Also, people’s tolerance for minorities has gone down. Minority groups have had a much harder time, asylum seekers, immigrants. The use of vitriolic language has gone up significantly. We have had an MP murdered. I am not saying we are in a crisis, I am just saying the direction of travel is not what we want.”

Asked whether he thought politicians realised the damage austerity has done he said: “Yes. Not all of them, obviously. But the vast majority do and they are really concerned about it….”

Read it all.

Inside this week’s Big Issue, The Archbishop of Canterbury delivers his Christmas message, discussing food banks, austerity and rough sleeping.https://t.co/wDik1OuDvc

— The Big Issue (@BigIssue) December 16, 2019

At the height of her fame, Sayers was asked to write a play to be performed in Canterbury Cathedral for an annual festival. Having spent 15 years writing about a sexually adept aristocrat who entered churches more for aesthetic contemplation than spiritual renewal, Sayers hesitated. She finally accepted the commission, due, most likely, to the prestige of her predecessors in the job, T. S. Eliot and Charles Williams.

However, in writing a play about the 12th-century architect who rebuilt part of Canterbury Cathedral after its fiery destruction, Sayers experienced her own baptism by fire. As though a hot coal had touched her lips, she began speaking, through her characters, about the relevance of Christian doctrine to the integrity of work. Intriguing even professional theologians, her play ends with an angel announcing that humans manifest the “image of God,” the imago Dei, through creativity. After all, the Bible chapter proclaiming the imago Dei presents God not as judge or lawgiver but as Creator: “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27).

Even more radically, Sayers’s angel suggests that creativity is Trinitarian. Any creative work has three distinct components: the Creative Idea, the Creative Energy “begotten of that Idea,” and the Creative Power that is “the meaning of the work and its response in the lively soul.” Indeed, Sayers’s angel says of Idea, Energy, and Power, “these three are one.”

Called The Zeal of Thy House, Sayers’s 1937 play ran for 100 performances, having moved from Canterbury to London’s West End. Audiences valued its unusual communication of Christian belief. Rather than endorsing pietistic practices, it celebrated the sanctity of work; rather than obsessing over sexual sins, it denounced arrogant pride as the “eldest sin of all.” The play’s self-aggrandizing protagonist, a womanizer who believes he alone can make the cathedral great again, is humbled by a crippling fall. Only then does he abandon his narcissistic need for mastery and acclaim, telling God, “to other men the glory / And to Thy Name alone.”

Read it all.

Perhaps too subtle, but masterful @CTmagazine article about Dorothy Sayers as a reluctant prophet being relevant at time when “political passions have become the new piety”. Well done @crystalldowning. https://t.co/6vgVQl8PMR pic.twitter.com/0aiEtGxXBM

— Tom Long (@Tom4Surfing) June 14, 2018

I have already, on a previous occasion, spoken at some length on the subject of Work and Vocation. What I urged then was a thoroughgoing revolution in our whole attitude to work. I asked that it should be looked upon, not as a necessary drudgery to be undergone for the purpose of making money, but as a way of life in which the nature of man should find its proper exercise and delight and so fulfill itself to the glory of God. That it should, in fact, be thought of as a creative activity undertaken for the love of the work itself; and that man, made in God’s image, should make things, as God makes them, for the sake of doing well a thing that is well worth doing.

It may well seem to you – as it does to some of my acquaintances – that I have a sort of obsession about this business of the right attitude to work. But I do insist upon it, because it seems to me that what becomes of civilization after this war is going to depend enormously on our being able to effect this revolution in our ideas about work. Unless we do change our whole way of thought about work, I do not think we shall ever escape from the appalling squirrel cage of economic confusion in which we have been madly turning for the last three centuries or so, the cage in which we landed ourselves by acquiescing in a social system based upon Envy and Avarice.

A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste, and such a society is a house built upon sand….

Read it all.

An #InternationalWomensDay salute to Dorothy Sayers: Peter W… #InternationalWomensDay https://t.co/CMPGco7ISr pic.twitter.com/QP6Uxpon4t

— Baker Street Babes (@BakerStBabes) March 8, 2017

“In the world it calls itself Tolerance; but in hell it is called Despair. It is the accomplice of the other sins and their worst punishment. It is the sin which believes nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, loves nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and only remains alive because there is nothing it would die for.”

–Dorothy Sayers, Letters to a Diminished Church: Passionate Arguments for the Relevance of Christian Doctrine (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2004 ed of the original), p.98

Oliphant’s portrait of Dorothy Sayers is very fine, but this photo from her youth captures her strength of personality better.. pic.twitter.com/cUqwR00aiP

— JerryS01 (@JerryS01) October 1, 2018

“[Jesus of Nazareth] was not a kind of demon pretending to be human; he was in every respect a genuine living man. He was not merely a man so good as to be ‘like God’—he was God.

“Now, this is not just a pious commonplace: it is not a commonplace at all. For what it means is this, among other things: that for whatever reason God chose to make man as he is—limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—he [God] had the honesty and courage to take his own medicine. Whatever game he is playing with his creation, he has kept his own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that he has not exacted from himself. He has himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When he was a man, he played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.”

—Creed or Chaos? (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1949), page 4 (with special thanks to blog reader and friend WW)

Happy 125th birthday to the divine Dorothy Sayers—Sherlockian, author, feminist, and legend. pic.twitter.com/ha8CFuVdaV

— Baker Street Babes (@BakerStBabes) June 13, 2018

Incarnate God, who didst grant the grace of eloquence unto thy servant Dorothy to defend thy truth unto a distressed church, and to proclaim the importance of Christian principles for the world; grant unto us thy same grace that, aided by her prayers and example, we too may have the passionate conviction to teach right doctrine and to teach doctrine rightly; We ask this in thy name, who livest and reignest with the Father, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, one God, for ever and ever.

On this day in 1893, Mistery writer Dorothy Sayers, creator of detective Lord Peter Wimsey, was born in Oxford. pic.twitter.com/47KeP2q4al

— Bibliophilia (@Libroantiguo) June 13, 2015

The Queen has approved the nomination of Bishop @CottrellStephen as the next Archbishop of York, Downing Street has announced.

Read the full #ABY98 release: https://t.co/8VQDG0XNkw

— The Church of England (@churchofengland) December 17, 2019

O God, who didst send thy messengers and prophets to prepare the way of thy Son before him: Grant that our Lord when he cometh may find in us a dwelling prepared for himself; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who came to take our nature upon him that he might bring many sons unto glory, and now with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, ever one God, world without end.

–A New Prayer Book (London: Oxford University Press 1923)

“And to the angel of the church in La-odice’a write: ‘The words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of God’s creation. “‘I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth. For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing; not knowing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. 18 Therefore I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, that you may be rich, and white garments to clothe you and to keep the shame of your nakedness from being seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, that you may see. 19 Those whom I love, I reprove and chasten; so be zealous and repent. Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any one hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me. He who conquers, I will grant him to sit with me on my throne, as I myself conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.'”

–Revelation 3:14-22

The military’s most frequent battles are not fought on land, by sea or in the air. They’re fought online, every day, and South Carolina’s defense contractors are trying to stay ahead of the enemy.

Katie Arrington, a former state lawmaker who was appointed in January as a consultant for the Department of Defense, said Charleston in particular is key when it comes to cybersecurity against China, terrorist groups and individuals attempting to undermine government security.

“We’re at war,” Arrington told The Post and Courier. “Cyberwar is real. To think this community isn’t exposed to what our adversaries are trying to do every day in the cyber realm would be remiss. Our cyberwarriors, the people who work in the Charleston defense contractor community, are the first layer of defense.”

That was the theme this week when more than 1,400 business leaders, military officers and government employees gathered in North Charleston for the Charleston Defense Contractors Association’s 13th annual conference to discuss the evolution of warfare. For decades, the federal government has looked to the private sector to come up with solutions. And cyberwarfare is now big business in the Palmetto State.

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The military’s most frequent battles are not fought on land, by sea or in the air.

They’re fought online every day, and South Carolina’s defense contractors are trying to stay ahead of the enemy.https://t.co/k0ZWCRR5Xn

— The Post and Courier (@postandcourier) December 13, 2019

Consider the issue of human sexuality and all the problems we now find associated with it – everything from broken marriages, porn addiction, and gender bender delusions. The world is normalising the promotion of neopagan sexual identity and practices which is causing all sorts of damage and misery.

Says Strachan: “In the twenty-first century, we have witnessed the rise of ideology that seeks to replace divine order with a counterfeit – with what we may call neopaganism. This movement spiritualises sexuality in a design-denying way while rendering sexual practice nothing more than a momentary phenomenon. Sex is both everything and nothing at once.”

The attempt to now mainstream and normalise transgenderism is simply the most recent and most bizarre outworking of all this. A post-biblical age leads to a post-body culture. The great good of the human body as designed by God (consider not just creation but the Incarnation) has been discarded by the sexual radicals.

The lie spoken by Satan to our first parents (‘you can be like God’) has now fully come around: ‘you can now (re)create your own body, and your own sexual identity.’ We can now somehow transcend biology and reality as we choose for ourselves who we are and what we are to become. So now even children are having their bodies horribly mutilated in the vain attempt to become something they are not – and never can be.

In addition to the transgender revolution, there are three other major sexual challenges that the church faces today: feminism, postmarital sexual libertinism, and homosexuality. “Each of these four ideologies is the reversal of biblical teaching and divine design….”

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Minnesota winters are long, brutal and gray. Minneapolis resident Keith Dent has endured 38 of them. But over the last several years, he’s experienced what he calls a “reintroduction to the sun.”

In 2017, Dent helped install, and later subscribed to a massive community solar garden mounted atop Shiloh Temple — a majority black church in north Minneapolis. Today, the 630-panel array provides Shiloh itself, the nearby Masjid An-Nur Mosque and 29 local households with green energy.

The Shiloh project is among hundreds of community solar gardens cropping up nationwide working to solve an obstacle many face when trying to go green: the cost of installing rooftop panels, which for a typical household, runs north of $10,000. The project is also among a growing cluster of initiatives affiliated with faith-based institutions seeking to advance their missions of justice by bringing renewable energy to low income communities.

Dent says his utility bills have dropped noticeably since he first subscribed; “That extra $30 or $40 a month? That’s groceries, that’s gas, that’s ballet shoes,” he says.

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A massive community solar garden mounted atop a majority black church in north Minneapolis provides the church, a nearby mosque and 29 local households with green energy.

And subscribers aren’t just customers of the array — they’re part-owners. https://t.co/zLEreDoVcs

— NPR (@NPR) December 16, 2019

The peak of the tradition in the 20th century has to be Britten’s Ceremony of Carols, composed in the depths of war in 1942. After the war, the rich stream of carols abated somewhat, though there are some fine carols from the Fifties and Sixties such as Anthony Milner’s Out of Your Sleep Arise and William Mathias’s Sir Christèmas. The real surprise, though, has been the upsurge of carol writing in the past 30 years. This is partly due to the efforts of some far-sighted choirmasters who’ve actually commissioned new carols, such as Andrew Nethsingha at St John’s College Choir Cambridge, and the late and much missed Stephen Cleobury of King’s College Choir.

Cleobury commissioned a new carol for the famous Nine Lessons and Carols every year from 1983 onwards, and persuaded some unlikely people to contribute, including the young Thomas Adès. The plaintive, haunted sideslipping harmonies of Adès’s Fayrfax Carol is absolutely typical of him, proving that composers don’t have to repress their natural musicality to write something appropriately festive or (in this case) rapt and mystical.

Even more striking is Judith Weir’s Illuminare Jerusalem, also commissioned by King’s College Choir. She sets a medieval Scottish poem exhorting Jerusalem to be “illuminated” by the wondrous events happening within its walls, in a way that captures the magic of the scene while obeying the ancient verse form.

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Great piece by Ivan Hewitt on the British composers adding to one of our richest musical canons, the Christmas carol https://t.co/mF1DMPRbZT

— David Oldroyd-Bolt (@david_oldbolt) December 15, 2019