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

At a packed 11 a.m. Mass at Holy Child Church in Bridgeville, the Rev. Dennis Yurochko explained he was wearing rose-colored vestments to mark Gaudete Sunday — the third Sunday in the Advent season that signifies a time to rejoice as Christ’s birth approaches.

Another reason for celebration, he told the Roman Catholic congregation, is that Holy Child will officially merge on Jan. 6 with nearby St. Barbara and St. Mary churches to create the new Corpus Christi Parish.

Unlike many parishes in the Diocese of Pittsburgh grappling with empty pews and uncertain futures, Corpus Christi “is thankfully managing growth rather than decline,” Father Yurochko said.

About 10,000 individuals are registered in what will be the new parish, he said, including about 6,600 at Holy Child; 2,700 at St. Barbara, also in Bridgeville; and about 1,500 at St. Mary in Cecil, Washington County.

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A new Catholic parish merger is ‘managing growth rather than decline’ https://t.co/Qsm2d04wgU

— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (@PittsburghPG) December 16, 2019

A Cathedral is to help the Government roll out 5G. Wells Cathedral has offered its land to Voneus, the superfast broadband specialist, to help roll out rural broadband.

The company recently announced that it has been granted powers by Ofcom that will help it accelerate the rollout of superfast broadband services to hard-to-reach UK rural communities by making it easier for Voneus to construct its highspeed infrastructure on public land.

Recently Ofcom made a decision to make more airwaves available in four ‘frequency bands’ including the 3.8-4.2 GHz band, which supports the latest 5G mobile technology and the 26 GHz band, which has also been identified as one of the main bands for the publicly contested 5G in the future.

“With Voneus’ help, we’re turning Wells into a truly digital cathedral with stronger connections to our local community as well as to people living much further afield,” said the Very Rev Dr John Davies, Dean of Wells.

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“INTELLECTUALS HATE REASON,” “Progressives hate progress,” “War is peace,” “Freedom is slavery.” No, wait, those last two are from a different book, but it’s easy to get mixed up. Steven Pinker begins his latest — a manifesto inspirationally entitled Enlightenment Now — with a contrast between “the West,” which he says is critical of its own traditions and values, and “the Islamic State,” which “knows exactly what it stands for.” Given the book’s title, one expects Pinker to be celebrating a core Enlightenment ideal: critical skepticism, which demands the questioning of established traditions and values (such as easy oppositions between “the West” and “the bad guys”). But no, in a surprise twist, Pinker apparently wants us over here in “the West” to adopt an Islamic State–level commitment to our “values,” which he then equates with “classical liberalism” [1] (about which more presently). You begin to see, reader, why this review — which I promised to write last spring — took me all summer and much of the fall to finish. Just a few sentences into the book, I am tangled in a knot of Orwellian contradictions.

Enlightenment Now purports to demonstrate by way of “data” that “the Enlightenment has worked.” [2] What are we to make of this? A toaster oven can work or not by toasting or failing to toast your bagel. My laser printer often works by printing what I’ve asked it to print, and sometimes doesn’t by getting the paper all jammed up inside. These machines were designed and built to do particular, well-defined jobs. There is no uncertainty, no debate, no tradition of critical reflection, no voluminous writings regarding what toaster ovens or laser printers should do, or which guiding principles or ideals should govern them.

On the other hand, uncertainty, debate, and critical reflection were the warp and woof of the Enlightenment, which was no discrete, engineered device with a well-defined purpose, but an intellectual and cultural movement spanning several countries and evolving over about a century and a half. If one could identify any single value as definitive of this long and diverse movement, it must surely be the one mentioned above, the value of critical skepticism. To say it “worked” vitiates its very essence. But now the Enlightenment’s best-selling PR guy takes “skepticism” as a dirty word; if that’s any indication, then I guess the Enlightenment didn’t work, or at any rate, it’s not working now. Maybe it came unplugged? Is there a paper jam?

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By eliminating skepticism from his rendition of the Enlightenment, Pinker has done the equivalent of removing every second word of a book: what’s left behind is not half the sense of the original, but just nonsense. https://t.co/CmV7TpwaUJ

— Ntina Tzouvala (@ntinatzouvala) December 16, 2019

Listen to it all (and note the handout link if desired).

O Christ our God, who wilt come to judge the world in the manhood which thou hast assumed: We pray thee to sanctify us wholly, that in the day of thy coming we may be raised up to live and reign with thee for ever.

Blessed be the LORD, the God of Israel, from everlasting to everlasting! Amen and Amen.

-Psalm 41:13