Scotland’s role as a global leader in ethical finance is being highlighted at a world summit in Edinburgh.

Senior representatives from more than 200 companies and organisations are attending Ethical Finance 2019.

Speakers include Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The summit aims to “help define and shape the transition to a sustainable financial system where finance delivers positive change”.

The event is being hosted by the Scotland-based Global Ethical Finance Initiative (GEFI).

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Edinburgh hosts world summit on ethical finance https://t.co/cEcnvYDH98 pic.twitter.com/XLPDYv7hsI

— BBC Scotland News (@BBCScotlandNews) October 8, 2019

Elderly residents of Inez, the tiny seat of Martin County, Kentucky, deep in the heart of Appalachia, can still vividly remember the day the president came to town. Fifty-five years ago, while stooping on a porch, Lyndon Johnson spoke at length to Tom Fletcher (pictured), a white labourer with no job, little education and eight children. “I have called for a national war on poverty,” Johnson announced immediately afterwards. “Our objective: total victory.” That declaration transformed Fletcher and Martin County into the unwitting faces of the nation’s battle, often to the chagrin of local residents who resented the frequent pilgrimages of journalists and photographers. The story never changed much: Fletcher continued to draw disability cheques for decades and never became self-sufficient before his death in 2004. His family continued to struggle with addiction and incarceration.

Today Martin County remains deeply poor—30% of residents live below the official poverty line (an income of less than $25,750 a year for a family of four). Infrastructure is shoddy. The roads up the stunning forested mountains that once thundered with the extraction of coal now lie quiet, cracked to the point of corrugation. Problems with pollution because of leaky pipes mean that some parts of the county are without running water for days. “Our water comes out orange, blue and with dirt chunks in it,” says BarbiAnn Maynard, a resident agitating for repairs. She and her family have not drunk the water from their taps since 2000; it is suitable only for flushing toilets. Some residents gather drinking water from local springs or collect rainwater in inflatable paddling pools.

The ongoing poverty is not for lack of intervention. The federal government has spent trillions of dollars over the past 55 years. Programmes have helped many. But they also remain fixated on the problems of the past, largely the elderly and the working poor, leaving behind non-working adults and children. As a result, America does a worse job than its peers of helping the needy of today. By the official poverty measure, there were 40m poor Americans in 2017, or 12% of the population. This threshold is extremely low: for a family of four, it amounts to $17.64 per person per day. About 18.5m people have only half that amount and are mired in deep poverty. Children are the likeliest age group to experience poverty—there are nearly 13m of them today, or 17.5% of all American children.

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Child poverty costs America between $800bn and $1.1trn annually, a new report suggests https://t.co/cmdFOvVwt8

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) October 5, 2019

German officials called a live-streamed shooting at a synagogue Wednesday in the city of Halle an anti-Semitic attack after the gunman denied the Holocaust and denounced Jews on the stream before embarking.

Two people have been killed and another two are seriously injured, according to Reuters, and a suspect is in custody. The gunman attempted to force his way into the synagogue, but was unsuccessful after finding the gates shut. The man then went on a shooting spree, killing a woman outside and a man in a nearby kabob shop.

Max Privorozki, Halle’s Jewish community chairman, told the Stuttgarter Zeitung newspaper that approximately 75 people were in the synagogue observing Yom Kippur, known as the Day of Atonement which is the holiest day of the Jewish year and is marked by fasting and solemn prayer.

“We saw via the camera system at our synagogue that a heavily armed perpetrator with a steel helmet and a gun tried to shoot open our doors,” he said. “We barricaded the doors from inside and waited for the police.”

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As Augustine put it in a sermon in 404, “he took flesh from the lump of our mortality, yes, and he too took to himself the death which was the penalty for sin, but didn’t take the sin; instead with the merciful intention of delivering us from sin, he handed over that flesh of his to death.” God doesn’t abstractly solve a problem; God condescends to inhabit and absorb the mess we’ve made of the world. God “has not abandoned humanity in its mortal condition.”

This, Augustine encourages his listeners, should serve as a source of hope in the face of fears and sorrows: “So he handed over this flesh to be slain, so that you wouldn’t be afraid of anything that could happen to your flesh. He showed you, in his resurrection after three days, what you ought to be hoping for at the end of this age. So he is leading you along, because he has become your hope.”

The appeal here is not to the greater good, the free choice of the will, or the constitutive nothingness of creation that corrodes the good. Augustine the pastor and preacher avoids such abstractions. Instead, he appeals to the mystery at the heart of the Christian faith: a humble God who endured evil in order to overcome it. The point isn’t that God has a plan; the point is that God wins. We shall overcome because of what the Son has undergone in our stead.

This isn’t an answer to evil; it is a response. Hope is found not in intellectual mastery but in divine solidarity.

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Saint Augustine, the bishop of Hippo, died aged 76 on August 28, 430 in Hippo, while the Vandals were besieging his Episcopal city. He wrote about 230 books and treatises. More of Saint Augustine’s words survive than those of any other writer of antiquity.https://t.co/Yn02yu8tV7 pic.twitter.com/pjUHKYdjg5

— Trivia Encyclopedia (@edpearce080759) August 28, 2019

If the prophecies concerning the increase of Christ’s kingdom be true, and if what has been advanced, concerning the commission given by him to his disciples being obligatory on us, be just, it must be inferred that all Christians ought heartily to concur with God in promoting his glorious designs, for he that is joined to the Lord is one spirit.

One of the first, and most important of those duties which are incumbent upon us, is fervent and united prayer. However the influence of the Holy Spirit may be set at nought, and run down by many, it will be found upon trial, that all means which we can use, without it, will be ineffectual. If a temple is raised for God in the heathen world, it will not be by might, nor by power, nor by the authority of the magistrate, or the eloquence of the orator; “but by my Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts.” We must therefore be in real earnest in supplicating His blessing upon our labors.

[He employs an obscure passage relating to Jewish repentance after Christ’s return to show the effects of prayer]

The most glorious works of grace that have ever took place, have been in answer to prayer; and it is in this way, we have the greatest reason to suppose, that the glorious outpouring of the Spirit, which we expect at last, will be bestowed.

[He gives examples of the power of prayer]

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OTD in 1843 William Carey died at age 72. He had been a missionary to India. His essay, “An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens”, led to the founding of the Baptist Missionary Society in England. pic.twitter.com/8xjg8Tq0GZ

— SBC History (@SBCHistory) June 9, 2019

Richard Swinburne is a leading philosopher of religion who has played a major role in making a case for Christian belief. As well as writing academic books on the existence of God, the coherence theism, the atonement and the nature of faith and many other topics he has also written a number of more accessible popular books such Is There a God?, The Resurrection of God Incarnate, and Was Jesus God? A practising member of the Eastern Orthodox Church, he deserves to be hailed as one of the greatest living apologists for Christianity.

The soul has long been of interest to Swinburne. The Evolution of the Soul appeared in 1986 and recently he has written Mind, Brain and Free Will. This new book represents an attempt by Swinburne to present his views on the soul in a more accessible way. It is not always easy going but it is worth the careful attention it demands. Swinburne is a strong advocate of substance dualism, arguing that the soul can exist without the body but the body cannot exist without the soul, and he claims this point of view can appeal to atheists as well as to religious believers.

Discussing religious beliefs, he agrees that it is logically possible a soul could become attached to a new body as in re-incarnation but argues the evidence for this is not strong enough. He alludes to Christian and Islamic belief that souls continue after death and are joined to new or revived bodies but declines to discuss this.

What Swinburne does provide is a robust and slightly modified version of Descartes’ argument and a refutation of the idea that mental events are no more than events in the brain….

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Anglicare Australia called for Centrelink’s Robodebt system to be suspended at a Senate committee hearing today.

“The Robodebt system has no human oversight – and it puts the onus onto ordinary people to correct robotised mistakes,” said Anglicare Australia Executive Director Kasy Chambers.

“The Government has already admitted that the system that has saddled people with tens of millions of dollars in false debt. But that is just the tip of the iceberg.

“Many people are simply paying these false debts instead of challenging them. In other cases, the debts are so old that the records to contradict them no longer exist.”

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Merciful God, who didst call William Carey to missionary work in India and didst endue him with a zeal for thy Word that led him to translate Scripture into many local languages and dialects: Give us a heart for the spreading of thy Gospel and a thirst for justice among all the peoples of the world; through Jesus Christ our Savior, who sheds thy light and peace throughout humanity, and who livest and reignest with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

OTD in 1785 William Carey was baptized in the River Nene by John Ryland Jr. They were later co-laborers in the Baptist Missionary Society. Carey is known as the Father of modern missions and served decades in India. pic.twitter.com/bNVKTFRFwf

— SBC History (@SBCHistory) October 5, 2019

O GOD our Father,
let us find grace in thy sight
so as to have grace
to serve thee acceptably
with reverence and godly fear,
and further grace
not to receive thy grace in vain,
not to neglect it and fall from it,
but to stir it up and grow in it,
and to persevere in it
unto the end of our lives;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
—Daily Prayer, Eric Milner-White and G. W. Briggs, eds. (London: Penguin Books 1959 edition of the 1941 original)

Lancelot Andrews: Prayers that Lift the Mind Up to God https://t.co/y6t4VTyefn pic.twitter.com/4cFVwKHfGq

— D.F.G. Hailson (@dfghailson) March 10, 2017

And as he sat at table in the house, behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and sat down with Jesus and his disciples. And when the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” But when he heard it, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.”

–Matthew 9:10-13