From there:

MOST glorious Lord of Lyfe! that, on this day,
Didst make Thy triumph over death and sin;
And, having harrowd hell, didst bring away
Captivity thence captive, us to win:
This joyous day, deare Lord, with joy begin;
And grant that we, for whom thou diddest dye,
Being with Thy deare blood clene washt from sin,
May live for ever in felicity!

And that Thy love we weighing worthily,
May likewise love Thee for the same againe;
And for Thy sake, that all lyke deare didst buy,
With love may one another entertayne!
So let us love, deare Love, lyke as we ought.

The Holy Women at the Empty Tomb greeted by an Angel:

"Quid quaeritis viventem cum mortuis?"

BL Lansdowne 383; the 'Shaftesbury Psalter'; England; 12th century; f.13r @BLMedieval pic.twitter.com/Zx4j0KnDDx

— Ennius (@red_loeb) April 6, 2026

‘The General is sorry to be informed that the foolish, and wicked practice, of profane cursing and swearing (a Vice heretofore little known in an American Army) is growing into fashion; he hopes the officers will, by example, as well as influence, endeavour to check it, and that both they, and the men will reflect, that we can have little hopes of the blessing of Heaven on our Arms, if we insult it by our impiety, and folly; added to this, it is a vice so mean and low, without any temptation, that every man of sense, and character, detests and despises it.’

-From his General Orders, 3 August 1776

Below is a portrait, produced by John Trumbull in 1790, of General George Washington at Verplanck's Point on the North River in New York during the American War of Independence. It is found at the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library in Winterthur, Delaware. pic.twitter.com/YoSowxlWrr

— Kevin Kempton (@_Kevin_Kempton_) September 10, 2023

The crisis facing the ACNA is fundamentally a crisis of integrity, stemming directly from this unwillingness to speak plainly. For the Church, confession is not merely an institutional duty; it is the covenantal key to healing.

Our tradition holds that true restoration is rooted in specific, humbling admission. The Apostle James lays out the standard for the community of faith:

“Therefore, confess your sins one to another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.” (James 5:16, ESV)

The Failure to Confess for Healing

By substituting abstract spiritual language for concrete admissions, the bishops prevent the very healing they pray for. Healing—for the wounded, the Province, and the College itself—requires a clear definition of the injury and the sin. A nebulous confession attempts to bypass the painful process of public truth-telling.

The College’s statement reads like a carefully worded legal brief designed to limit exposure, rather than a pastoral lament seeking forgiveness. This is where the corporate double speak does its deepest damage. By using generalized terms, the bishops are engaging in semantic evasion—a classic tactic of risk management—that seeks to confess only what is legally or institutionally unavoidable. We see a leadership that is prioritizing image control over truth-telling, sacrificing its spiritual integrity for the sake of its organizational stability.

Read it all.

Has the ACNA College of Bishops' effort at confession been undermined by its method of communication? Fr. Randall Graf writes "we needed specific admissions of procedural failures, suppressed information, or concrete acts of omission." https://t.co/kh66Y1hW5z

— Jeff Walton (@jeffreyhwalton) December 10, 2025

People used to die. Now, it seems, they pass away. Or — say it quickly and quietly enough no one will even notice — they just pass. Media outlets report the passing of someone famous. Undertakers now refer to the deceased as having passed away when communicating funeral arrangements. Buckingham Palace, announcing the recent death of the Duchess of Kent, stated that she had “passed away peacefully” (News, 12 September). Is this the death of dying?

Euphemisms for death and dying are nothing new. But there is a subtle and important difference between the idioms that we have used in the past, and the increasingly normalised use of “pass” and “pass away”….

Jesus did not pass on the cross; nor did he pass away for our sins. If we believe that our hope of resurrection lies in the resurrection of Jesus, then we need to use the same language about our death as we do about his death. We need to reclaim the language of dying and death.

Read it all.

Went to visit my grandfather (and my great grandparents, greatuncle & greataunt). You hear the sound of the sea from the graveyard.

Hard to believe my grandfather is dead these 12 years. pic.twitter.com/VzExPZg3gW

— John McCafferty (@jdmccafferty) June 22, 2024

Sequoia Capital’s chief operating officer resigned over comments made by partner Shaun Maguire that she regarded as Islamophobic, as political debates sow division at one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful venture capital firms.

Sumaiya Balbale — a practising Muslim who has spoken publicly about how her gender, ethnicity and faith have shaped her career — stepped down after five years at the company in August. Her decision to leave was precipitated by Maguire’s social media posts, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.

Maguire, an outspoken and high-profile investor who is close to Elon Musk, wrote on X in July that New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani “comes from a culture that lies about everything. It’s literally a virtue to lie if it advances his Islamist agenda. The West will learn this lesson the hard way.”

Balbale complained to other senior partners at the firm, who declined to take action against Maguire, arguing he was just exercising his right to free speech, the people said. She left soon after, feeling her position was untenable.

Read it all (subscription).

Sequoia COO quit over Shaun Maguire’s comments about Mamdani https://t.co/3WQUHQ0Qnd

— FT Technology News (@fttechnews) October 22, 2025

In a statement to The Times, a spokesperson for the EHRC said: “This topic raises complex issues relevant to equality and human rights, and therefore our regulatory remit given the EHRC’s statutory powers and duties. As such, we have provided advice to the chair of the working group and the secretary of state for housing, communities and local government and stand ready to continue to do so.

“Legal protections against discrimination and hate crime already exist, so it is unclear what role a new definition would play in addressing discrimination and abuse targeted at Muslims. An official non-statutory definition risks being in conflict with existing legal definitions and provisions, resulting in inconsistency and potential confusion for courts and individuals.

“Should government proceed with adoption of a definition, we advise that this should be subject to a full public consultation so that all the potential risks and benefits can be considered.”

A spokesperson for the communities department said that a full consultation was not necessary under the law.

Read it all (requires subscription).

Islamophobia definition risks breaking the law, watchdog says https://t.co/OMabIwC21R

— Times Politics (@timespolitics) October 21, 2025

The sermons of Andrewes are not easy reading. They are only for the reader who can elevate himself to the subject. The most conspicuous qualities of the style are three: ordonnance, or arrangement and structure, precision in the use of words, and relevant intensity. The last remains to be defined. All of them are best elucidated by comparison with a prose which is much more widely known, but to which I believe that we must assign a lower place – that of Donne. Donne’s sermons, or fragments from Donne’s sermons, are certainly known to hundreds who have hardly heard of Andrewes; and they are known precisely for the reasons because of which they are inferior to those of Andrewes. In the introduction to an admirable selection of passages from Donne’s sermons, which was published a few years ago by the Oxford Press, Mr Logan Pearsall Smith, after ‘trying to explain Donne’s sermons and account for them in a satisfactory manner’, observes:

And yet in these, as in his poems, there remains something baffling and enigmatic which still eludes our last analysis. Reading these old hortatory and dogmatic pages, the thought suggests itself that Donne is often saying something else, something poignant and personal, and yet, in the end, incommunicable to us.

We may cavil at the word ‘incommunicable’, and pause to ask whether the incommunicable is not often the vague and unformed; but the statement is essentially right. About Donne there hangs the shadow of the impure motive; and impure motives lend their aid to a facile success. He is a little of the religious spellbinder, the Reverend Billy Sunday of his time, the flesh-creeper, the sorcerer of emotional orgy. We emphasize this aspect to the point of the grotesque. Donne had a trained mind; but without belittling the intensity or the profundity of his experience, we can suggest that this experience was not perfectly controlled, and that he lacked spiritual discipline.

But Bishop Andrewes is one of the community of the born spiritual, one

che in questo mondo,

contemplando, gustò di quella pace.

Intellect and sensibility were in harmony; and hence arise the particular qualities of his style. Those who would prove this harmony would do well to examine, before proceeding to the sermons, the volume of Preces Privatae. This book, composed by him for his private devotions, was printed only after his death; a few manuscript copies may have been given away during his lifetime – one bears the name of William Laud. It appears to have been written in Latin and translated by him into Greek; some of it is in Hebrew; it has been several times translated into English. The most recent edition is the translation of the late F. E. Brightman, with an interesting introduction (Methuen, 1903). They are almost wholly an arrangement of Biblical texts, and of texts from elsewhere in Andrewes’s immense theological reading. Dr Brightman has a paragraph of admirable criticism of these prayers which deserves to be quoted in full:

But the structure is not merely an external scheme or framework: the internal structure is as close as the external. Andrewes develops an idea he has in his mind: every line tells and adds something. He does not expatiate, but moves forward: if he repeats, it is because the repetition has a real force of expression; if he accumulates, each new word or phrase represents a new development, a substantive addition to what he is saying. He assimilates his material and advances by means of it. His quotation is not decoration or irrelevance, but the matter in which he expresses what he wants to say. His single thoughts are no doubt often suggested by the words he borrows, but the thoughts are made his own, and the constructive force, the fire that fuses them, is his own. And this internal, progressive, often poetic structure is marked outwardly. The editions have not always reproduced this feature of the Preces, nor perhaps is it possible in any ordinary page to represent the structure adequately; but in the manuscript the intention is clear enough. The prayers are arranged, not merely in paragraphs, but in lines advanced and recessed, so as in a measure to mark the inner structure and the steps and stages of the movement. Both in form and in matter Andrewes’s prayers may often be described rather as hymns.

Read it all.

Back home in Southwell Lancelot Andrewes keeps watch. pic.twitter.com/E8solNOHb9

— john milbank (@johnmilbank3) March 8, 2023

Almighty God, who gavest thy servant Lancelot Andrewes the gift of thy holy Spirit and made him a man of prayer and a faithful pastor of thy people: Perfect in us what is lacking of thy gifts, of faith, to increase it, of hope, to establish it, of love, to kindle it, that we may live in the life of thy grace and glory; through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the same Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

25 Sept 1626: d. Bishop Lancelot Andrewes #Southwark #otd translator, devotional writer, he is buried in #Southwark cathedral

( photo:@rhetorician) pic.twitter.com/4ICVjPYglK

— John McCafferty (@jdmccafferty) September 25, 2025

Trends in liturgical revision since the late eighteenth century have moved away from the simplicity of this approach back toward the medieval model of more movable parts and more options in the discretion of the presiding minister. The proliferation of options, rather than being freeing, paradoxically tends toward choice paralysis. ‘Having choices is actually rare in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer’, as Sam Bray and I wrote in How to Use the Book of Common Prayer. ‘Later prayer books have a huge number of choices, making them complicated to use.’ In Morning and Evening Prayer in the 1662 Prayer Book, ‘the only choices you make are about the sentences and the canticles’ and, in both of those cases, the different ‘options serve the same function in the service.’²

The simple, usable design – the commodiousness of the use, as Cranmer put it – reinforces its profitability or usefulness to the praying Christian. A simple structural pattern recurs throughout the Prayer Book: a scripture is read aloud to the assembly and they respond appropriately, in several key places, like the daily confession of sin, by simply doing just what the scripture read aloud says to do. This pattern carries a clear meta-message about the holy scriptures: that they ought to be heard, that their core message is comprehensible, and that they require humble, grateful, obedient response. By scripting the appropriate response – in this case, the confession of sin – the liturgy inculcates its users in a transformative approach to scripture reading that minimizes the risk that God’s word will be profaned.

If reducing options enhances usability then one might conclude that printing a complete service booklet for each unique service, thereby eliminating from view any options that are not used for that particular occasion, is ideal. Moreover, the booklet eliminates the need to flip to proper collect of the day, the Psalms, or look up the scriptures for the day. From the narrow point of view of usability for a novice user in one particular church service, yes, the booklet is better. But the analysis that leads to that conclusion focuses too narrowly on one particular occasion and one particular kind of user – the novice user. But the Prayer Book is not just a manual for ministers planning Sunday morning worship; it has historically served as the rule of life for all Anglicans. Our aim for novice users is not just to facilitate easy participation in one particular service on one particular Sunday, but to draw them into the Prayer Book, to facilitate their familiarity with the Prayer Book and help them discover its value beyond the Sunday morning church service. Printing complete booklets for every service puts us on a trajectory away from those goals in at least three mutually reinforcing ways.

Read it all.

Explore the viability of the Book of Common Prayer in today’s Anglican Communion. This insightful article by @d_n_keane examines the liturgical and theological richness of this powerful work.https://t.co/cGust1IiG9

— The Anglican Way (@TheAnglicanWay) February 13, 2025

Almighty and everlasting God, who by the power of the Holy Spirit didst move thy servant Cyril and his brother Methodius to bring the light of the Gospel to a hostile and divided people: Overcome, we pray thee, by the love of Christ, all bitterness and contention among us, and make us one united family under the banner of the Prince of Peace; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

14 Feb: in the West, the feast of SS Cyril & Methodius #otd co-patrons of #Europe pic.twitter.com/ap3H92HZBi

— John McCafferty (@jdmccafferty) February 14, 2025

Nigel Richards is the reigning world champion of Scrabble in Spanish. Just don’t ask him to order a coffee in Madrid. The 57-year-old New Zealander doesn’t speak a lick of Spanish. 

During the deciding match in November’s Spanish World Scrabble Championship in Granada, Spain, Richards racked up triple-word scores with ENRUGASE (“to wrinkle up”) and ENHOTOS (an archaic word for “familiarity”), before clinching victory with TRINIDAD and SABURROSA (an obscure word that describes the coated residue of the tongue). 

Not that Richards knew the meaning of any of those words. 

One Spanish TV broadcaster called his win the “ultimate humiliation.” The global Scrabble community wasn’t so surprised. Richards had done this before—in French. 

Read it all.

How good is Scrabble’s GOAT? He wins in languages he can’t speak. “He memorizes words as soon as he reads them once…For him, all words are equal in his memory, and he doesn’t need to know their meaning." https://t.co/BzfRLNqVCH via @WSJ @natasha_dangoor

— Gráinne McCarthy (@grainnemcc) February 10, 2025

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

Read it all.

Get a glimpse of the man beyond the momentous speech he delivered at the March on Washington. https://t.co/Zo3sMwtkJB

— Smithsonian Magazine (@SmithsonianMag) January 20, 2025

You can find the full text here.

I find it always is really worth the time to listen to and read and ponder it all on this day especially–KSH.

In Shakespeare’s time, people still lived out their days under the shadow of divine reward and punishment. Lady Macbeth hopes otherwise. “A little water clears us of this deed,” she says as she and her husband rinse their hands of blood. How wrong she was. 

Our leaders could use a dose of the humility of Edward, the Earl of March, who prays, “Ere my knee rise from the earth’s cold face / I throw my hands, mine eyes, my heart to Thee / Thou setter-up and plucker-down of kings.”

King Lear knew what it was to be set up and plucked down, and only in his reduced state did he taste the wonder of grace. Shakespeare often echoes what theologians call “the theology of reversal,” as expressed in the Beatitudes.

In the paradox of grace, he describes in As You Like It, “Sweet are the uses of adversity / Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous / Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.” Dogberry, the comical constable in Much Ado About Nothing, gets his words mixed up in a deeply ironic way when he says to a wrongdoer, “O, villain! Thou wilt be condemned into everlasting redemption.”

Read it all.

William Shakespeare’s honest tragedies and bold assumption of God’s providence offer insight in our contentious election season.

From @philipyancey:https://t.co/O4FQPN9eCB

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) October 23, 2024

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.

Henry Martyn, 1781 – 1812. Priest and Missionary to India and Persia. One of the founders of the Christian church in India and Iran. While in India he translated the NT into Hindustani, Persian, and Arabic, the Psalms into Persian, and the BCP into Hindustani. pic.twitter.com/C69app75TG

— Saint Barnabas Anglican Church (@Barnabas_FW) October 19, 2024

Show, don’t tell

This is one of the first things any writing instructor tells her students. There you are trying to be Ernest Hemingway with your short, spare prose. “The woman is tired,” you write, going straight for the bottom line, but why should your readers believe you? You have told them something you apparently know about the woman, but you have not given them a chance to make up their own minds. You have kept the details entirely to yourself, so that their only choice is whether to believe you or not. Jesus is Lord. God is love. The gospel is true.

“Show them,” your teacher says. “Don’t tell them the woman is tired. Show them how tired she is.” This is much harder. Finding a way to help people see takes more time than telling them what you see. How do you know the woman is tired? What is it about her gait, her posture, her face, her breath that says “tired” to you? If you can find the right words, you may be able to help people name their own tiredness on their way to seeing just how tired this woman is.

“The woman looked as if she had been moving rocks all day, as if everything she had touched since the moment she got up had been heavy, hard, and grey.”

Read it all.

How to make your sermons come alive

Routines, deviations, and other writerly tips, according to Barbara Brown Taylorhttps://t.co/cuqiZYAPsL

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) September 14, 2024

The top translator and overseer of the KJV translation, Lancelot Andrewes was perhaps the most brilliant man of his age, and one of the most pious. A man of high ecclesiastical office during both Elizabeth’s and James’s reigns, bishop in three different cities under James, Andrewes is still highly enough regarded in the Church of England to merit his own minor feast on the church calendar.

Though Andrewes never wrote “literature,” modern writers as diverse as T. S. Eliot and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. have called him one of the great literary writers in English. His sermons feel too stiff and artificial and are clotted with too many Latin phrases to appeal to most today, but they are also filled with strikingly beautiful passages. Eliot, a great modern poet in his own right, took a section of an Andrewes sermon and started one of his own poems with it (“The Journey of the Magi”):

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year for a journey,
and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.

Andrewes served not only as the leader of the First Westminster Company of Translators, which translated Genesis – 2 Kings, but also as general editor of the whole project. He very likely, as Benson Bobrick suggests, drafted the final form of “such celebrated passages as the Creation and Fall; Abraham and Isaac; the Exodus; David’s laments for Saul, Jonathan, and Absalom; and Elijah’s encounter with the ‘still small voice.’”

Read it all.

25 Sept 1626: d. Bishop Lancelot Andrewes #Southwark #otd translator, devotional writer, he is buried in #Southwark cathedral ( photo:@rhetorician ) pic.twitter.com/vQ5UAuY6Ls

— John McCafferty (@jdmccafferty) September 25, 2024

Robinson’s reading is full of telling details and keenly observed parallels. This enables her to show that what Jews term the binding of Isaac is not a test of Abraham’s faith, but a prohibition of the child sacrifice that occurred in some other cultures, for example in Carthage. Although she is familiar with biblical scholarship and makes use of it where necessary, this work is best seen as a close, attentive reading from a literary point of view. In her approach there is something of the sense of astonishment and marvel that is present in her novels. About the first words of Genesis she writes, “When I think there was a day when a human hand first wrote those words, I am filled with awe. This sentence is a masterpiece of compression.”

“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will,” Hamlet said to Horatio. That is the conviction that controls the narrative of Genesis, culminating in its closing, when Joseph says to the brothers who tried to murder him, “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.”

Robinson makes few concessions to the reader. There is no introduction or conclusion; there are no chapter headings or signposts. She just wants her audience to look again at Genesis and see what they make of it.

Read it all.

Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson review – rich literary reading of the first book of the Bible https://t.co/oBAzmJviaq

— Guardian Books (@GuardianBooks) March 13, 2024

Bishop Chip Edgar called the Anglican Diocese of South Carolina to exercise hospitality in his address to the 2024 Convention. The event, which drew more than 300 clergy, delegates and guests to the Cross Schools in Bluffton, was held March 8-9.

“If we are true to our nature as the people God has called to himself, keeping our blessings to ourselves is not an option,” he said.

He urged those present to be ready to welcome the stranger.  “People by the thousands continue to move to South Carolina… Many are unchurched, and study after study suggests that unchurched folks are more likely to visit a church plant than an established church,” he said. “But many are churched, too, and churched folks are more likely to look for churches. To be hospitable, we have to both strengthen our existing churches and plant new ones.”

He made three proposals: “One, that we continue to encourage deaneries to work together to strategize church planting, and we set the goal for ourselves to add a new congregation to our diocese each year going forward; two, we reestablish our Congregational Development Committee to help our existing congregations; and three, that we, as a diocese, continue to raise up and emphasize the ministry and work of deacons in our diocese.”

Read it all.

Join us this Sunday, July 23, 2023 as we, in The Anglican Diocese of South Carolina, pray for Bishop Chip Edgar and Bishop Emeritus Mark Lawrence as they begin their summer respites. #ACNA #ADOSC pic.twitter.com/ipSeFrsA13

— Anglican Diocese of SC (@anglican_sc) July 21, 2023

The Government’s new definition of extremism is likely to “vilify the wrong people” by threatening freedom of speech and the right to peaceful protest, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York have warned.

In a joint statement published on Tuesday afternoon, Archbishops Welby and Cottrell said that the plan also “risks disproportionately targeting Muslim communities, who are already experiencing rising levels of hate and abuse”.

Their statement pre-empts an announcement, expected on Thursday, in which the Communities Secretary, Michael Gove, plans to broaden the official definition of extremism to include individuals and groups who “undermine the UK’s system of liberal democracy” — and ban them from public life.

Read it all.

The Government’s new definition of extremism is likely to “vilify the wrong people” by threatening freedom of speech and the right to peaceful protest, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York have warned https://t.co/T87MOTD9eg

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) March 12, 2024

The death certificate for Ryan Bagwell, a 19-year-old from Mission, Texas, states that he died from a fentanyl overdose.

His mother, Sandra Bagwell, says that is wrong.

On an April night in 2022, he swallowed one pill from a bottle of Percocet, a prescription painkiller that he and a friend bought earlier that day at a Mexican pharmacy just over the border. The next morning, his mother found him dead in his bedroom.

A federal law enforcement lab found that none of the pills from the bottle tested positive for Percocet. But they all tested positive for lethal quantities of fentanyl.

“Ryan was poisoned,” Mrs. Bagwell, an elementary-school reading specialist, said.

Read it all.

Overdose or Poisoning? A New Debate Over What to Call a Drug Death.: Grieving families want official records and popular discourse to move away from reflexive use of “overdose,” which they believe blames victims for their deaths. https://t.co/EE9BNjgr23

— Sophia Devetzi (@SophiaDevetzi) March 11, 2024

According to a new poll from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a First Amendment organization, nearly a third of Americans, including similar numbers of Republicans and Democrats, say that the First Amendment goes “too far” in the rights it guarantees. More than half agreed that their local community should not allow a public speech that espouses a belief they find particularly offensive.

“Those results were disappointing, but not exactly surprising,” said FIRE Chief Research Adviser Sean Stevens in a Tuesday press release. “Here at FIRE, we’ve long observed that many people who say they’re concerned about free speech waver when it comes to beliefs they personally find offensive. But the best way to protect your speech in the future is to defend the right to controversial and offensive speech today.”

The survey, which was conducted in partnership with the Polarization Research Lab (PRL) at Dartmouth College, asked 1,000 Americans about their opinions on free speech and expression. The survey found that “when it comes to whether people are able to freely express their views,” over two-thirds of respondents said they believed America was headed in the wrong direction. Further, only 25 percent of respondents agreed that the right to free speech was “very” or “completely” secure.

Read it all.

In new poll, almost one-third of Americans say the First Amendment goes "too far." https://t.co/UoAuku9D3j

— reason (@reason) February 27, 2024

You can find the full text here.

I find it always is really worth the time to listen to and read and ponder it all on this day especially–KSH.

How is it that the noun “mission” has come so to dominate the avalanche of Anglican reports and episcopal directives? It is oddly contentless, unlike the older word “evangelism”, which suggests that we have the good news of the gospel to impart. What is little understood is how this word has come to be shaped by modern management theory.

Successful managers, Lyndon Shakespeare writes, are “makers of worlds by the use of words”, and those words must have particular qualities: “low in definition and direct reference, vague and mysterious in terms of precise content, easy to say, vivid and radical sounding in metaphorical and imagistic terms”. Two key terms that theorists employ for such world-making are “mission” and “vision”, and readers hardly need to be reminded of the recent use of these words in the Vision and Strategy documents.

The distinction between the two terms is that the vision gives the organisation direction and meaning, while the mission strategy points to how it will realise its purpose. The Church of England, however, while embracing managerialism with an unholy hospitality, has confused mission and vision so that mission has displaced the vision to become an end in itself. Every single facet of our lives as Christians is held to be for the sake of mission, and is subsumed in utilitarian fashion to this end.

Read it all.

Critique of managerialism in the CofE by Alison Milbank ⁦@SaveTheParish⁩ https://t.co/TcJpCXeRK5

— john milbank (@johnmilbank3) October 28, 2023

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 – Henry Martyn was born in Truro and educated at Truro Grammar School. Photo: Michael Swift, via https://t.co/pdNVLNv7se pic.twitter.com/VIzF3LanWg

— The Anglican Church in St Petersburg (@anglicanspb) October 19, 2023

O God, who in thy providence didst call Joseph Schereschewsky from his home in Eastern Europe to the ministry of this Church, and didst send him as a missionary to China, upholding him in his infirmity, that he might translate the holy Scriptures into languages of that land: Lead us, we pray thee, to commit our lives and talents to thee, in the confidence that when thou givest thy servants any work to do, thou dost also supply the strength to do it; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

"I will no longer deny my Lord. I will follow Him outside the camp!"

–Bishop Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky
Here he is depicted in study. pic.twitter.com/Q8ISF2nCpR

— Rev. Brandon ⚓️ (@barukalas) September 2, 2023

Meanwhile, there are common mistakes that quickly lead to “boring” sermons. After decades of advising preachers, in person and in his writings, McKeever warned pastors against:

♦ Assuming that anecdotes about their own lives and faith journeys are appropriate. “It’s important to tell stories when preaching,” he told me. “Personal details can be interesting and relevant. But a steady stream of that kind of content week after week can turn into an ego thing.”

♦ Preparing sermons that would impress seminary professors — but are likely to fail with people who are struggling with issues at work, home, school and in the rest of their daily lives. “If you spend lots and lots of time describing why a specific Greek word is so important, three people in the pews may think that’s wonderful, while everyone else is rolling their eyes.”

♦ Forgetting to clearly state, at least once, a sermon’s big idea. “It’s like reading a newspaper column and thinking, ‘When are you going to say what you’re trying to say,’” he said. “Not all the extras. Not all the mind-numbing details. Not the stuff the writer thought was interesting, without thinking about the readers. What’s your point?”

♦ Failing to deliver a message that is inspiring. McKeever noted that when Abraham Lincoln was asked if he liked a popular preacher’s sermon, he was said to have replied: “Not very much. … He did not ask me to do anything great.”

Read it all.

TERRY MATTINGLY: Boring sermons happen; preachers need to spot them https://t.co/CPADJ9K0NR pic.twitter.com/YkGXHgNuyD

— The Albany Herald (@Albany_Herald) October 1, 2023

O Lord, thou God of truth, whose Word is a lantern to our feet and a light upon our path: We give thee thanks for thy servant Jerome, and those who, following in his steps, have labored to render the Holy Scriptures in the language of the people; and we beseech thee that thy Holy Spirit may overshadow us as we read the written Word, and that Christ, the living Word, may transform us according to thy righteous will; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

September 30 is the feast of Saint Jerome: Illyro-Roman nobleman, hermit, priest, theologian, exegete, mystic, historian, chronologist, hagiographer, adviser to Pope Saint Damasus, translator of the Latin Vulgate, and Doctor of the Church—who died at Bethlehem on this day in 420. pic.twitter.com/s41TrEZHHr

— Tradical (@NoTrueScotist) September 30, 2023

The top translator and overseer of the KJV translation, Lancelot Andrewes was perhaps the most brilliant man of his age, and one of the most pious. A man of high ecclesiastical office during both Elizabeth’s and James’s reigns, bishop in three different cities under James, Andrewes is still highly enough regarded in the Church of England to merit his own minor feast on the church calendar.

Though Andrewes never wrote “literature,” modern writers as diverse as T. S. Eliot and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. have called him one of the great literary writers in English. His sermons feel too stiff and artificial and are clotted with too many Latin phrases to appeal to most today, but they are also filled with strikingly beautiful passages. Eliot, a great modern poet in his own right, took a section of an Andrewes sermon and started one of his own poems with it (“The Journey of the Magi”):

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year for a journey,
and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.

Andrewes served not only as the leader of the First Westminster Company of Translators, which translated Genesis – 2 Kings, but also as general editor of the whole project. He very likely, as Benson Bobrick suggests, drafted the final form of “such celebrated passages as the Creation and Fall; Abraham and Isaac; the Exodus; David’s laments for Saul, Jonathan, and Absalom; and Elijah’s encounter with the ‘still small voice.’”

Read it all.

Today the Church of England celebrates Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop of Winchester, Spiritual Writer, 1626
He oversaw the King James Bible translation & is personally credited for his translation of the Pentateuch
Image: Window in St Giles-without-Cripplegate (Ndoduc, CC BY-SA 4.0) pic.twitter.com/jhZFkQw7Qt

— The Anglican Church in St Petersburg (@anglicanspb) September 25, 2023

But sometimes lonely stands look better over time. When two Jehovah’s Witness sisters refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance in their public school classroom during World War II, they were decidedly unpopular. But their courage resulted in one of the most remarkable statements of constitutional principle in American history, from the Supreme Court’s 1943 ruling in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

In a nation as polarized as our own, the definition of “outsiders” can vary wildly, depending on where they live. In one community, conservative Christians may dominate, and be tempted to censor speech they dislike, to “protect children” or defend the “common good.” In other communities, those same Christians will find their own speech under fire as “hateful” or “discriminatory.”

The consequence is an odd legal reality, an artifact of our divided times. Christians and drag queens — in different jurisdictions and in different courts — are both protecting the First Amendment from the culture wars. They’re both reaffirming a foundational principle of American liberal democracy: that even voices on the margins enjoy the same civil liberties as the powerful and the popular.

In his majority opinion, Justice Gorsuch stated the case well. “In this case,” he wrote, “Colorado seeks to force an individual to speak in ways that align with its views but defy her conscience about a matter of major significance.” The state does not possess such power. It must not possess such power. Otherwise the culture wars will consume the Constitution, and even our most basic rights to speak or not speak will depend on whether we can gain and keep political control. That is not the vision of American pluralism, and it is not the vision that will sustain a united, diverse American republic.

Read it all.

Justice Sotomayor is misstating the case. It was *stipulated* that the business would serve LGBT customers. It just wouldn't create expressive works that convey a message it finds objectionable, regardless of the identity of the customer. https://t.co/BJjZYRRWvB

— David French (@DavidAFrench) June 30, 2023