It is likely to be the happiest day of your life, but it also guaranteed to be the most expensive.

The average wedding in the UK now costs £30,355, an all-time high, with couples across the UK willing to splurge saying ‘I do’.

Now a church in Cheshire is offering couples the chance to have a wedding for just a fraction of the usual cost.

St John’s Church in Hartford, near Northwich, is recognising the huge expense couples face as they enter married life and offering an affordable alternative.

Dubbed ‘A Grand Wedding’, for just £1,000, a handful of lucky couples will be be given use of the venue, organist, a two-tier personalised wedding cake, invitation and service stationary, a photographer and flowers.

Also included in the package is a catered reception in the church centre for up to 30 guests including a two course meal, with the option to add a further 20 guests for an additional amount.

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A church is offering couples the chance to have a wedding for a fraction of the usual cost https://t.co/JlJMFWdoju

— Manchester News MEN (@MENnewsdesk) January 7, 2019

Saudi Arabia drew international plaudits last year when it lifted a longstanding ban on women driving.

However, restrictions on women remain – most notably, the “male guardianship system”, a woman’s father, brother, husband or son has the authority to make critical decisions on her behalf.

These restrictions were highlighted in early January, when a young Saudi woman fleeing her family barricaded herself in a hotel room in Bangkok saying she feared imprisonment if she was sent back home.

A Saudi woman is required to obtain a male relative’s approval approval to apply for a passport, travel outside the country, study abroad on a government scholarship, get married, leave prison, or even exit a shelter for abuse victims.

“This is something that affects every Saudi woman and girl, from birth to death. They are essentially treated like minors,” the Egyptian-American journalist Mona Eltahawy told the BBC.

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After the confetti fell and the celebration was well into its beginning stages, after he gave his head coach a Wet Willy on live television in a fashion only he could pull off, and after the magnitude of the moment all started to sink in, Christian Wilkins found himself on a golf cart Monday night in California.

The Clemson defensive tackle was on his way to the Tigers’ locker room, where plans to stay up all night were already forming into place and a healthy dose of ecstatic yelling was already echoing off the walls.

Clemson stomped Nick Saban’s mighty Alabama team 44-16 in the College Football Playoff National Championship game Monday night, a performance that will go down as one of the most dominant ever in the sport, and this was Wilkins’ chance to celebrate the one thing he returned to school to accomplish….

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National champions: Clemson dominates Alabama in every aspect, wins Dabo Swinney’s second title. Story by ⁦@gmraynor⁩. #ALLIN https://t.co/4pDNXVRq44

— Mitch Pugh📰 (@SCMitchP) January 8, 2019

Years ago, I started Denver Institute after reading Studs Terkel’s 1971 classic Working, an oral history of working-class Americans. Work, Terkel says, “is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.”

Of course! I thought. This fit well with my graduate school angst (and growing boredom with my assignments). I liked the quote so much that I put it in my email signature.

But somewhere along the way, I forgot that Terkel also believed work was centrally about “violence—to the spirit as well as the body. It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations.”

This didn’t sound like the workplaces I was used to. But the tension between Terkel’s two statements has started to resonate with me. In the past five years, we in Denver have hosted thousands of doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, and other young professionals at our events. But there’s been a conspicuous absence of home care workers, retail sales clerks, landscapers, janitors, or cooks.

Calvin College philosopher James K. A. Smith—who once pulled 10-hour graveyard shifts on an air filter assembly line—observes, “The bias of the [faith and work] conversation toward professional, ‘creative,’ largely white-collar work means that many people who undertake manual or menial labor simply don’t see themselves as having a voice in this conversation.”

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“The antidote to the pernicious effects of power is not giving up power. It is using power sacrificially.”https://t.co/YHujORmyYP

— ShanePike (@ShanePike) January 8, 2019

At the turn of a new year, people often anticipate weddings, births, reunions, a promotion or other joys. Few greeted 2019 this week by counting on a flooded home or a dreaded cancer diagnosis.

Even Jamie Aten, a disaster psychologist who founded the Humanitarian Disaster Institute at Wheaton College, wasn’t prepared for the news he received in 2013, when his doctor told him he had Stage IV colon cancer. Only 35, he had a wife and three young daughters. His academic career had just begun.

But as his oncologist told him, “You’re in for your own personal kind of disaster.”

Indeed, Aten would come to see his encounter with cancer through his field of study, which concerns resilience on the community level (he studied Hurricane Katrina) as well as the individual level.

Now 41, Aten has written about his journey in “A Walking Disaster: What Surviving Katrina and Cancer Taught Me About Faith and Resilience,” which will be published Jan. 14.

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In a recent @RNS interview, @WheatonCollege‘s @drjamieaten speaks about his forthcoming book, A Walking Disaster: What Surviving Katrina and Cancer Taught Me About Faith and Resilience. Read it here: https://t.co/YNmO8QrfrG

— Wheaton Experts (@WheatonExperts) January 8, 2019

Almost everything about services at St Bartholomew the Great church is old-fashioned. Purple-robed choristers process through clouds of pungent incense. The priest, the Rev Marcus Walker, brandishes an ornate golden King James Bible above his head before reading from the 1611 text. The liturgy is a mixture of 16th-century prose and sung Latin. The medieval priory church, which sits a stone’s throw from the central London hospital of the same name, was founded in 1123.

However, the congregation watching on at a recent service were younger than most would expect; at least a quarter were under 35. They had come to observe a handful of men and women, mostly in their late twenties, be baptised into the Anglican faith. Afterwards the millennials gathered inside the stone cloisters to explain why the archaic drama of traditional worship still appealed.

Several said they relished the connection to past generations of believers through reciting the Book of Common Prayer, which English Christians have been using since 1549. Others valued the beauty and history of the choral music and Shakespearean liturgy. They were not simply “young fogeys”, they insisted. Three of the group had separately found their way to St Bartholomew’s after becoming friendly with Walker on Twitter.

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Twentysomethings are flocking to Anglo-Catholic services for traditional worship with not a tambourine in sighthttps://t.co/beu3PYlS68

— The Times of London (@thetimes) January 5, 2019

Lamin was born on MacCarthy Island in the River Gambia. A descendent of an ancient African royal family, he grew up as a Muslim but converted to Christianity. He was educated and taught on four different continents. He earned graduate degrees from the University of Birmingham, England (M.A.), and the University of London (Ph.D.). He received honorary doctorates from the University of Edinburgh and Liverpool Hope University. His major faculty appointments were at the University of Ghana (1975-1978), the University of Aberdeen (1978-1981), Harvard University (1981-1989), and finally Yale (1989-2019). He had a lifetime appointment at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge (1996-2019), and was an Honorary Professional Research Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (1997-2019). He also had temporary appointments at the Centre for the Study of Islam and Christianity, Ibadan, Nigeria (1969-1971); Fourah Bay College, the University of Sierra Leone, Freetown (1974-1975); San Francisco Theological Seminary (summer of 1987); and the Library of Congress, where he was the John W. Kluge Chair in the Countries and Cultures of the South (2004-2005). Lamin took a long and circuitous route from The Gambia to Yale University, but he traveled with international distinction.

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Sad news about our distinguished Professor Lamin Sanneh. https://t.co/AyLiFjjqud pic.twitter.com/GN4RCDpTcR

— Yale Divinity School (@YaleDivSchool) January 7, 2019

Holy God, thou didst choose thy faithful servant Harriet Bedell to exercise the ministry of deaconess and to be a missionary among indigenous peoples: Fill us with compassion and respect for all people, and empower us for the work of ministry throughout the world; through Jesus Christ our Lord who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

A portrait of Deaconess Harriet Bedell at Glade Cross Mission in Everglades City (1958): https://t.co/tKercYeZfu pic.twitter.com/GvaIXVjDhG

— Florida Memory (@FLMemory) May 15, 2018

O Father everlasting, the light of faithful souls, Who didst bring the nations to Thy light and kings to the brightness of Thy rising: fill the world with Thy glory, we beseech Thee, and show Thyself unto all the nations; through Him Who is the true light and the bright and morning star, Jesus Christ, Thy Son our Lord.

–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)

Praise the Lord, all you nations;
laud him, all you peoples.

For his loving-kindness toward us is great, *
and the faithfulness of the Lord endures for ever.
Hallelujah!

–Psalm 117