Watch it all–hats off to her.

Listen to it all.

#GRACE #TRUTH @JohnMPerkins speaks @walnuthillcc Rev/Dr. Clive Calver. @ServeDanbury @mzlizblossom @DebPerkinsJVMPF pic.twitter.com/yBVpfdhgse

— Priscilla Perkins (@PriscillaPerk17) November 8, 2015

Almost 35 years ago American drug regulators approved Prozac, the first in a series of blockbuster antidepressants known as selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (ssris). Prozac and its cousins were lauded by patients and doctors as miracle drugs. They lifted low moods quickly and seemed to have no drawbacks. Divorce, bereavement, problems at work—a daily pill was there to help with that, and anything else which made you sad. Many people have stayed on these drugs for life. In Western countries today between one person in seven and one in ten takes antidepressants.

The shine of ssris has worn off. A growing number of studies show that they are less effective than thought. Drug companies often publish the results of clinical trials selectively, withholding those in which the drugs turn out not to work well. When the results of all trials submitted to America’s medicines regulator between 1979 and 2016 were scrutinised by independent scientists, it turned out that antidepressants had a substantial benefit beyond a placebo effect in only 15% of patients.

Clinical guidelines have been revised accordingly in recent years. No longer are drugs the recommended first line of treatment for less severe cases of depression. For these, self-help guidance, behavioural therapy and recommendations for things like exercise and sleep are preferable. For work burnout, a sick note for time off may suffice. The drugs are to be reserved only for more severe depression, where they can be truly life-saving.

Read it all.

Lots of people who do not need antidepressants are already on them, refilling prescriptions written years or even decades ago. They should be helped to get off the drugs https://t.co/Rbz8cN9ogl

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) October 20, 2022

Bishop Helen-Ann, who was brought up in the North East, will succeed the Right Reverend Christine Hardman who retired as Bishop of Newcastle in November last year.

Bishop Helen-Ann said: “I am absolutely delighted and excited to be the next Bishop of Newcastle. With life-long connections to the whole region covered by the Diocese, I am inspired by the example of the Northern Saints, whose engagement in God’s mission lies deep in the fabric and contours of the land. I am, and will continue to be in this new role, a passionate advocate for the region. I look forward immensely to supporting and encouraging the vital work of the Diocese at every level: parishes and benefices, schools, chaplaincies, clergy and lay together as we continue to engage in God’s mission in the season that lies ahead.”

The Archbishop of York, the Most Reverend Stephen Cottrell said: “I am delighted that Helen-Ann has agreed to become the next Bishop of Newcastle. Helen-Ann brings rich experience and a tremendous passion for communicating the gospel, as well as a deep commitment to championing those often under-represented in our society. Newcastle Diocese is truly blessed to have Helen-Ann as its new Bishop.”

Read it all.

"I am, and will continue to be in this new role, a passionate advocate for the region."

The current Bishop of Ripon, @HartleyHAM, is to become the next Bishop of Newcastle.

Read more at https://t.co/8QXfQq9v3j. pic.twitter.com/9nzQNJisXa

— The Church of England (@churchofengland) October 20, 2022

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]

Read it all.

I’m not afraid of failure. I’m afraid of succeeding at things that don’t matter.

— William Carey (1761–1834) pic.twitter.com/K6N6YT1rrG

— Matt Smethurst (@MattSmethurst) March 24, 2022

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 August 17, 1761
Birth of William Carey, pioneer English missionary to India. He taught at the newly founded Fort William College of Calcutta from 1801 until his death, and helped found the Serampore Press, which made the Bible accessible to over 300 million people. pic.twitter.com/4fgGnoyY61

— ☧ Today in Christian History (@LizBrown217) August 17, 2022

God, our judge and saviour,
teach us to be open to your truth
and to trust in your love,
that we may live each day
with confidence in the salvation which is given
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.

Good morning 🌄.

A beautiful cloudy sunrise.

What are you plans for the day?

📸 Deverox_90 pic.twitter.com/jVw1Rrq6Ag

— Luke | Ireland 🇮🇪 (@MillraceGlamp) October 20, 2022

Trust in the Lord, and do good;
so you will dwell in the land, and enjoy security.
Take delight in the Lord,
and he will give you the desires of your heart.
Commit your way to the Lord;
trust in him, and he will act.

–Psalm 37:3-5

One foot in the past – I stood on the ramparts of Bury Ditches Iron Age hill fort at sunrise for a magical view across the Clun Valley. Emerging from the mist on the right is Burrow Hill, while the Clee Hills are on the horizon. Great morning to be out with my camera! #Shropshire pic.twitter.com/bl86OZDLf1

— ShropshireAndBeyond (@ShropsAndBeyond) October 20, 2022

Groups opposed to the introduction of same-sex…[relationships] in the Church of England have had meetings with bishops as the College of Bishops ponders what to present to the General Synod in February.

A meeting in Lambeth Palace on Tuesday of last week was attended by representatives from the Church of England Evangelical Council (CEEC), the Evangelical Group of the General Synod (EGGS), the Church Society, and Junia, a group for ordained women in the Evangelical tradition.

A representative from Living Out also attended the meeting. Living Out is an organisation that describes its mission as “to see Christians living out their sexuality and identity in ways that enable all to flourish in Christ-like faithfulness”.

All the groups hold that marriage is the only acceptable context for sexual relations, and that a marriage can be only between a man and a woman. They met the Bishop of London, the Rt Revd Sarah Mullally, and the Bishop of Grantham, Dr Nicholas Chamberlain.

Dr Chamberlain is the only openly gay Church of England bishop. At the time of his appointment, he confirmed that he was living in accordance with the House of Bishops’ guidelines, which state that gay clergy cannot be in sexually active same-sex partnerships.

Read it all.

Krista Carr, executive vice president of Inclusion Canada, is one such Canadian. “Most families of children born with disabilities are told from the start that their child will, in one way or another, not have a good quality of life,” she told the National Post. “Canada cannot begin killing babies when doctors predict there is no hope for them. Predictions are far too often based on discriminatory assumptions about life with a disability.”

Roy’s statement is merely the latest episode in a series of euthanasia horror stories from Canada that are shocking even to dulled Western sensibilities. Canada’s Supreme Court overturned criminal prohibitions on assisted suicide in Carter v. Canada in 2015. Shortly afterward, parliament passed Bill C-14 in 2016, which legalized “medical aid in dying” (or MAiD) for adults with “enduring and intolerable suffering” and a “reasonably foreseeable death.” In 2021, Bill C-7 was passed, which legalized MAiD for those struggling with mental illness. Canada has become an international cautionary tale.

Impoverished people are turning to MAiD out of desperation because they cannot access the resources they need or the treatments they require in Canada’s broken healthcare system. The Toronto Star—the largest and most liberal newspaper in the country—called it “Hunger Games style social Darwinism.” The story detailed how one woman is considering assisted suicide because she cannot find an affordable place to live in her city with wheelchair access. Her tale is becoming a common one.

Sixty-three-year-old Alan Philips, who has lived with chronic pain for almost two decades, recently got approved for assisted suicide after trying for eighteen years to get spinal fusion surgery to relieve his agony. He cannot get the surgery and has been prescribed opioids instead. “I cannot get adequate healthcare,” he said.

Read it all.

Canada will soon offer doctor-assisted suicide to patients who suffer from something which (to quote the law) “cannot be relieved under conditions that you consider acceptable." A nightmarish dispatch from @JVanMaren https://t.co/qevH7bVE3L

— Samuel D. James (@samueld_james) October 19, 2022

Can you give an example about how we have missed this message in Scripture?

The central passage I use is Colossians 1:15–20. It begins by speaking about Christ creating all things and ends with how the blood of Christ on the cross is redeeming all things. Most people read this redemption in terms of people. But if you zoom out and realize that the “all things” being redeemed are grammatically the same as the “all things” he has created, then you have a universal picture of redemption.

This is reinforced by Romans 8: how creation is waiting for the redemption that will come through the revealing of the children of God.

The church has sometimes struggled over the correct prioritizing of evangelism and social outreach. Does adding a third issue of creation care become too much for some?

Actually, it is the opposite. People working in poverty have realized for a number of years that they are on a treadmill and moving backwards. You cannot make progress in development and ministering to the poor if there are environmental problems that haven’t been addressed.

Read it all.

Evangelical Creation Care Expert Shares Lessons Learned from Global Tour https://t.co/6AVrwu6VY5 my new article for @CTmagazine, following the presentation in the Middle East pic.twitter.com/jfxhzgKFfv

— Jayson Casper (@jnjcasper) October 19, 2022

Grisly torments. Hideous dismembering. Extreme self-mortification. Voluntary live entombment. The collection and even the theft of human body parts. The celebration of violent death. Such are some of the themes treated in Cult of the Dead. Yet reading this book conveys the feeling of bouncing over bumps at high speed on a sunny day in an all-terrain sports utility vehicle. How can such lugubrious topics provide so much fun? The tale is animated by the telling. With sly wit, subtle humour, agile prose and empathetic imagination, Kyle Smith narrates the growth of one of Christianity’s defining traditions: its adoration of the martyr.

Smith’s interest in the subject was ignited by chance, when he was introduced to a luridly illustrated catalogue of tortures. Treatise on the Instruments of Martyrdom featured spikes and swords, axes and arrows, weights and wheels. Composed in the sixteenth century and translated into English in 1903, this bibliographic find led Smith to contemplate the ways in which martyr cults affected Christian piety and politics, the economic development of the post-Roman West and the very measurement of time.

“Being killed is an event”, Smith notes, quoting Daniel Boyarin. “Martyrdom is a literary genre.” That genre was already enshrined in Christian scripture, with its narrations of Jesus’s crucifixion in the gospels and of the stoning of Stephen in Acts. By the time that the New Testament was firmly canonized (in the early fourth century, impelled by the newly converted emperor, Constantine), the age of the martyrs was, technically, past: pagans could no longer make martyrs of the faithful. How many actually suffered is unknown and unknowable: as late as the 240s, the great theologian Origen commented that their number could easily be counted (Against Celsus 3.8). Nor do we know much about the legal mechanisms that may have brought people to trial. Nor can we date martyrdoms with much security. What we do know is that stories about martyrs were tremendously popular. With Constantine’s conversion their production bloomed.

Read it all (subscription).

Review of ‘Cult of the dead: a brief history of Christianity’ by Kyle Smith.https://t.co/dAC1qpqFnG pic.twitter.com/DSuldreHE8

— Madeleine Davies (@MadsDavies) October 19, 2022

O God of the nations, who didst give to thy faithful servant Henry Martyn a brilliant mind, a loving heart, and a gift for languages, that he might translate the Scriptures and other holy writings for the peoples of India and Persia: Inspire in us, we beseech thee, a love like his, eager to commit both life and talents to thee who gavest them; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Today the Church of England celebrates Henry Martyn, Translator of the Scriptures, Missionary in India and Persia, 1812

Image: Nave window in @TruroCathedral. Photo: Michael Swift, via https://t.co/pdNVLNdw3E. Henry Martyn was born in Truro and educated at Truro Grammar School. pic.twitter.com/yhRlGbXhCX

— The Anglican Church in St Petersburg (@anglicanspb) October 19, 2022

Still our hearts, O Father, as we give thanks for the gift of another day, and enable us to acknowledge that in you we live and move and have our being, and henceforth lead us by your Spirit in the path you are calling us to walk in through Jesus Christ our Lord.

The seventy returned with joy, saying, “Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name!” And he said to them, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. Behold, I have given you authority to tread upon serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy; and nothing shall hurt you. Nevertheless do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you; but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.”

In that same hour he rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, “I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to babes; yea, Father, for such was thy gracious will. All things have been delivered to me by my Father; and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, or who the Father is except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”

Then turning to the disciples he said privately, “Blessed are the eyes which see what you see! For I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it.”

–Luke 10:17-24

Christan Aid is among a consortium of agencies who are calling on the Government to support programmes for debt relief and restructuring to reduce the “choke hold” that sovereign debt has on countries in the global south….

The statement by Christian Aid was timed to coincide with the International Monetary Fund’s annual gathering of economic leaders. At the meetings, held in Washington last week, the Zambian finance minister, Situmbeko Musokotwane, was one of several leaders who called for more action on debt relief and restructuring.

At the…[partial] Lambeth [gathering]…in August, six Anglican Primates added their voices to a call to the UK Government to cancel sovereign debt owed by Zambia and other low-income countries (News, 2 August).

The Primate of Central Africa, the Most Revd Albert Chama, said that servicing the debt put such strain on public finances that cuts had to be made to public services. The debt meant that “ordinary Zambians lose out on health care, education, and development projects which would give them a fair chance to thrive and build futures.”

Read it all.

Americans who are working from home have reclaimed 60 million hours that they used to spend commuting to an office each day. They’re now using that time to get more sleep instead.

That’s the takeaway from a research by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which analyzed data from the American Time Use Survey to see what US workers spent their time on when they weren’t stuck on a crowded train or locked in traffic. The main findings: Employees spent fewer total hours working and substantially more on sleep and leisure.

Read it all.

Today's post (https://t.co/NzO7DjaAqp) examining how remote workers have allocated their time saved by not commuting informs a Bloomberg @business report. https://t.co/QBOvjo1chN

— NY Fed Research (@NYFedResearch) October 18, 2022

You may listen directly or download it if you prefer.

Postcard-Farm-Fresh done in Adobe Illustrator
Proverbs 3:9 NIV

Honor the Lord with your wealth, with the first fruits of all your crops. #EncouragingArt #Fruit #AdobeIllustartor pic.twitter.com/GQrG0KX0na

— Encouraging Art (@CharlesBriley3) September 18, 2020

John hails from the ancient Syrian Christian community in Kerala, India, and trained for ministry at Union Biblical Seminary, Pune. He worked as a youth worker for university students and as a theological educator before his ordination in the Diocese of Calcutta, Church of North India.

He was Curate at St John’s Church, Calcutta, from 1994 and was appointed Vicar at St James’ Church in 1995. John then served as Vicar of St Thomas’ Church in 2000, as well as Chaplain at St Thomas’ Secondary School.

In 2002, John moved to the UK and was appointed Associate Rector at St George’s Church, Beckenham, in the Diocese of Rochester.

Read it all.

Bishop John says of his appointment

“I am delighted and humbled to have received this call to be the next Bishop of Liverpool. I have come to love Liverpool through my numerous visits when my daughter was in university here for six years….

More here: https://t.co/19yVesyvnw pic.twitter.com/tm9YLj9XKk

— Diocese of Liverpool (@LivDiocese) October 18, 2022

Almighty God, who didst inspire thy servant Luke the physician to set forth in the Gospel the love and healing power of thy Son: Graciously continue in thy Church the like love and power to heal, to the praise and glory of thy Name; through the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

Services in the Abbey today will celebrate the Feast of St Luke the Evangelist.

Everyone is welcome to join us for Holy Communion at 12:30pm and for Evensong at 5:00pm. Find out more about worshipping with us: https://t.co/yimqhvvJdy pic.twitter.com/DjTf9RYD5m

— Westminster Abbey (@wabbey) October 18, 2022

Almighty God, who art the author of all spiritual gifts: Bestow upon thy Church in this our day the grace of knowledge, to apprehend the fullness of divine truth, and of utterance to declare that truth to others; that the testimony of Christ may be confirmed among us, and in everything we may be enriched in him, even thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord.

On the banks of the River Taff autumn colours South Wales ⁦@bbcweather⁩ ⁦@Ruth_ITV⁩ ⁦@S4Ctywydd⁩ ⁦@tanwencray⁩ ⁦@ItsYourWales⁩ ⁦@ThePhotoHour⁩ ⁦@ChrisPage90⁩ ⁦@WeatherAisling⁩ ⁦@itvweather⁩ ☀️☀️🍂☀️🍂☀️ pic.twitter.com/t0iqb7Xoja

— Emmawales123 (@EmmaLWales) October 18, 2022

Blessed be the Lord!
for he has heard the voice of my supplications.
The Lord is my strength and my shield;
in him my heart trusts;
so I am helped, and my heart exults,
and with my song I give thanks to him.

–Psalm 28:6-7

A beautiful sun pictured rising by the Baily Lighthouse this morning from the Howth cliff walk. ❤️🌅 Click for full view. @deric_tv @LovinDublin @ThePhotoHour @MetEireann @WeatherRadar_UK @MeaneysWeather @WeatherRTE @AimsirTG4 @annesheridan1 @VisitDublin @DublinLive pic.twitter.com/ZwAwWzqlKf

— Ann Bruen (@AnnBruen) October 18, 2022

Xi Jinping became China’s most formidable leader in decades through a campaign of anticorruption purges that sidelined opponents and suppressed any potential challenge, real or perceived, to his power.

Some political watchers thought the purges would ease once he settled into his role. Ten years into his tenure, his methods have only grown more sophisticated and pervasive.