Prominent black leaders have denounced increasingly popular megachurches, saying many have abandoned Jesus' emphasis on social justice to preach a gospel of wealth and self-help.
producing plastics this way might require some investment, but the long-term gain would be that the process is much cleaner than petroleum-based methods. While using petroleum dumps new carbon dioxide into the air, the carbon dioxide released when extracting chemicals from plants is created from molecules that are already in the ecosystem.
Atheism fields no armies, but Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Islam most certainly do. Never was a bigger lie told than that the Pope has no divisions.
Under Tony Blair's unequal extradition treaty, if Dr Williams opposes the appointment he could be "extraordinarily rendered" from Lambeth Palace to a New Jersey courthouse, thus fulfilling the Pilgrim Fathers' wildest dreams.
Rustle through the cuttings and you will see that almost all the Church's bad news involves bishops. Their appointments are controversial, if not cataclysmic, be they leftwing, rightwing, gay or, worst of all, women. From "Bishop John" of Reading to Bishop Gene of New Hampshire and Bishop Katharine of Nevada, from Hereford's Mappa Mundi to Lincoln's vendetta and the impenetrable faction-fighting at Ripon, Trollope himself could not catalogue the mischief caused to the Anglican church by the episcopacy.
bishops seem to be accidents waiting to happen. Dr Williams should admit as much and abolish the episcopacy. He would save £18m and no end of trouble worldwide.
The Church of England's safety valve is covert schism, its most effective discipline indiscipline. Yet its diplomacy is lumbering and hidebound. Lambeth still cannot make its peace with Rome, as have the Lutherans, or with Wesleyan dissent.
The Presbyterians were right. Bishops are a noisome and bureaucratic pestilence. They were the agents of ecclesiastical power when that power was many days' ride away from provincial England. They shared with monasteries vast territorial wealth, survived the Reformation and, even as the Church declined nationally, proliferated regionally, taxing subordinate parishes to maintain their style of living and governing.It doesn't have to be that way, though. I believe in the bene esse of episcopacy: that is to say that if you don't have bishops, their equivalent tends to get invented: people who handle trans-local relationships between churches and perhaps represent groups of churches tend to appear. The way they are appointed and hold office may differ and the amount of doctrinal or ecclesiological freight they are invested with may vary but essentially, you have an 'apostolic ministry' of some kind.
The middle ages, when everyone was supposedly an active Christian, coped with 20 bishops, and only six were added before the Victorian era. In 1845, there were 30; by 1945 the number had risen to 90. Today there are 114 bishops and suffragans. There is even talk of a third archbishop. This is missionary creep. I was once sent a diocesan agenda proposing an increase in head office staff of 24 and a matching cut of 24 in parochial clergy.The problem is not how many bishops, it's how they function and how they are resourced and more widely than that, how they have been seen culturally within and outwith the church. It is worth reading Gareth Miller's radical proposal for a new provincial structure which I reproduced on my blog a little while back. It seems to me that he outlines some structures that along with my suggestion about stipends, could actually work. Oh and incidently, I think that a church with more ordained deacons [most of those currently exercising the office of Reader are, in all but name, functioning, in Anglican terms, diaconally, let's recognise that] but fewer stipended clerge might be part of what we do. Making room for more bi-vocationality in varying degrees from voluntary to fractional posts is part of the solution. Who knows even bishops who are part time teachers, or welders job-sharing episcopacy with a spouse or one or two other clergy.
The Future of Identity in the Information Society, a project to explore identity issues in Europe, has launched a survey to gauge Europeans’ attitudes about electronic identification programs. Online at www.surveymonkey.com /s.asp?u=431712121747, the survey asks how strongly one agrees or disagrees with statements such as how much one supposes issuing systems will be secure, the difficulty of using an electronic ID card and the value of exchanging data about cardholders among governments and businesses.
A televised event doesn’t communicate anything about a person’s character. It can only affirm or deny talent and attractiveness, I think that the example is weak and does not necessarily carry that connotation; it overstates things. However, I do tend to think that the writer is right with this.
the extensive financial outlay required to pull off a video-venue service communicates to the congregation that only a preacher with a golden tongue has authority to preach the gospel. It conveys the unspoken belief that no one in the satellite congregation has the authority to speak to their context because preaching requires unique talents that only a few actually possess. Like the wizard in The Wizard of Oz, only the larger-than-life giants, painted by pixelated light, and hovering above the congregation, possess these elusive talents. The medium itself nurtures an elite priestly class in which the preacher is set apart from the people. With video venues, we can say goodbye to the priesthood of all believers and hello to the papacy of celebrity.
One of the factors in nuclear is that the costs have got to be met. We know it is expensive but to have an energy review that says we are not going to do it, especially given the carbon problem we face, does not make any sense at all.
Trying to get into the head of a 28-year-old British professional circa 2016 — the people this novel is about — is an interesting exercise, even though people of this generation are easy enough to track down right now: the trouble is, if I ask them questions now, I'm asking a bunch of 18 year olds. Whereas what I'm interested in is what they'll be thinking when they're 28 ...
You were one year old when the Cold War ended. You were thirteen when the war on terror broke out, and eighteen or nineteen when Tony Blair was forced to resign as Prime Minister. You graduated university owing £35,000 in student loans, at a time when the price of entry into the housing market in the UK was over £150,000 (about 4-5 times annual income; the typical age of first time buyers was 35 and rising by more than 12 months per year). Unless you picked the right career (and a high-earning one at that) you can't expect to ever own your own home unless your parents die and leave you one. On the other hand, you can reasonably expect to work until you're 70-75, because the pension system is a broken mess. The one ray of hope was that your health and life expectancy are superior to any previous generation — you can reasonably expect to live to over a hundred years, if you manage to avoid succumbing to diseases of affluence.
For comparison, when I graduated university in 1986, I had no student loans, first homes cost £30,000— or about 2-2.5 times annual income — and the retirement age was 60-65. So it should be no surprise if the generation of 1988 has very different expectations of their future life from the generation of 1964.
Spirituality is not about indulging in self-obsessed navel-gazing, but rather self-transformation through engagement with the other, whether understood as neighbour, or ultimately as God. The kingdom is not within but among us. The opportunity that the monks offered us was a chance to see that the religious life (and more broadly the life of faith) far from being an escape from reality, is in actual fact, a deeper engagement with the truly real. To follow a spiritual path is not to take the easy way out and withdraw from the world, but rather to choose a different and in fact far more challenging mode of being in the world. Learning this simple but profound truth has brought me out of myself, quite literally, into a fuller and more dynamic engagement with life. It has given me a sense of the urgent need to respond to what really matters. To get on with it. Now.
predicted it [the Anglican communion] may need to reconstitute itself into a looser federation of a hard core of central "constituent" national churches willing to sign up to a full doctrinal covenant of shared beliefs and a ring of churches "in association" but outside the constitutional structure, accepting some, but not necessarily all, Anglican beliefs and disciplines. "It is not going to look exactly like anything we have known so far," he warned in the statement, which is being sent to the archbishops and presiding bishops of churches in the third-largest Christian denomination.
"In imagining a huge, virtually infinite wordstream accessed by search engines and populated by teeming, promiscuous word snippets stripped of credited authorship, are we not depriving the written word of its old-fashioned function of, through such inventions as the written alphabet and the printing press, communication from one person to another — of, in short, accountability and intimacy? Yes, there is a ton of information on the Web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile."I have to say that I wasn't, with all respect, that impressed. It rather reminded me of the complaints that were made when movable type print was invented making books cheaper and more available. The complaint about literacy and more freely available books was that it would stop people remembering -which meant learning 'properly'. And yet there is a further strange reversal in this comment of Updike's: for the things he decries, if I'm not mistaken, were things that were routine until cheap printing; we even see the sign in the Bible and early Church writings. There we see quotes not referenced and incorporated freely into text so that you have to be an astute and well-read person to know that they are quotes at times. Where's the accounability there? That kind of accountability is a modern invention. Now that's not to say it's a bad thing but it is to mitigate the potential moral panic. I'm really not sure, either, that the shoddiness of information on the net is something to be more worried about than the shoddiness of information in books -need I mention Erich Von Daniken or "Holy blood, holy grail" to take two examples from recent history? The issue is about how we assess information and actually, I think that the internet may be doing us a favour by making so much info available so easily it forces us to ask critical questions sooner in the research process.
this blog is for friends and waysharers who are exploring or committed to a spirituality based on the Lord's prayer to share info and insights.
Why, many Muslims ask, should they have to speak out against, or apologize for, actions of radicals who do not represent them - people they do not even regard as true Muslims? Many find the very idea of being asked or expected to denounce such acts "extremely offensive and insulting," said Khurshid Drabu, a senior member of the Muslim Council of Britain.
For some of the more than five dozen Muslims interviewed for this story in Amsterdam, Paris and London, it's a sense of shame, or even guilt, that innocents have been killed in the name of Islam; they say those feelings make them seek to be "invisible." For those lucky enough to have jobs, there is little time to protest or even write letters to newspapers. For others, there is fear of being branded anti-Islam in their communities.And it is that latter point which is the most worrying.
the report's conclusions:
* We don't know exactly what impact climate change will have. But we do know that it presents society and the economy with an increasing level of uncertainty as it seeks to manage its risk.
* We believe that it is time for the insurance industry to take a more leading role in understanding and managing the impact of climate change.
* This means that the industry can no longer treat climate change as some peripheral workstream, simply to tick the regulatory and compliance box, or to support its public relations strategy.
* Instead, understanding and responding to it must become "business as usual" for insurers and those they work with. Failure to take climate change into account will put companies at risk from future legal actions from their own shareholders, their investors and clients.
"This is our thesis: the socio-spiritual dynamics that surfaced in mainstream society in the 1980s with New Age spirituality are now being mirrored sociologically inside the church through EC. Please note we are not saying that the EC teaches New Age doctrines or that it is New Age in disguise. The EC and New Age are theologically poles apart. The parallels we draw concern their social phenomena: What New Age was for secular society, the EC is to Protestantism. Both the EC and New Age have arisen as reactions to very broad societal changes and cultural influences."
Within these alternate spiritualities, we have discerned a broad spectrum of positions. There is a distinct "soft end" of the spectrum, which is very consumerist and faddish and pandered to with chic books and trinkets. But there is also a distinct "hard core" - those who are very savvy about the consumerist nature of spirituality and in fact despise its commercialisation. The hard core yearn for depth and integrity to their spirituality.
In New Age thought karma and rebirth have been reinterpreted in a human potential-upwards evolutionary manner. These three outlooks now help people to reshape their understanding of life and death and suffering. These outlooks differ in quite a few ways from the Christian teachings on the purpose of life, the problem of suffering and sin, and the resurrection.
It's also worth noting that the asteroid is meant to be 100 kilometres across – ten times larger than the one that created the Chicxulub crater in Yucat�n, Mexico, which some believe caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. But then it's 6 times smaller than the one heading towards Earth in the movie Armageddon. It's certainly a very dramatic scenario and it doesn't look too good for us. It's good to know there are plenty of potential ways to deflect or destroy deadly asteroids.
When scientists investigate the physical world — provided they ask the right questions and adopt sound scientific methodology — nature has no alternative but to yield its secrets. But applying that methodology to God — or to anyone else with a will of his own — is not a guarantee of success. God might simply decide not to cooperate.
let us be clear that any positive correlation between prayer and a better outcome would not have amounted to proof of God’s existence. Persuasive evidence, maybe, but not out-and-out proof. An alternative explanation might have invoked some kind of direct telepathic link between the minds of the intercessor and patient — one that did not entail God as an intermediary.
The Lord's Prayer, the model prayer for Christians that I pray every day, does not attempt to control a God who withholds care unless cajoled. Rather, by affirming God's nature and human dependence even for daily bread, it prepares one to receive that which God is already providing. Through prayer, people of faith express their praise and gratitude, confess their wrongdoing, voice their concerns, open themselves to the spirit, and seek the peace and grace to live as God's own people.
Some people badly need to be ill for their own sake, and some people badly need to be ill to provide important choices for others. Only in that way can some people be encouraged to make serious choices about the sort of person they are to be. For other people, illness is not so valuable.
Our work has implications for the validity of witness statements and agrees with other studies that show that our mind sometimes fills in memory gaps for us, and we confuse what we imagined occurred in a situation - which is related to what we expect to happen or what usually happens - with what actually happened.
Exploration of Christian ministry from a non-driver's perspective. And, in a global-warming world, exploring the ethical and missional aspects.
in terms of fatalities from all types of crash, SUVs are actually slightly more unsafe than passenger cars. In 1999, for every 100,000 registered vehicles in the US, there were 16.4 fatalities in passenger cars, and 17.8 in SUVs.Filed in: SUVs, accidents, risk
Social Security numbers and other information for nearly 1,500 people working for the National Nuclear Security Administration may have been compromised when a hacker gained entry to an Energy Department computer system last fall. Officials said June 12 they had learned only recently of the breach.
genetics appears to be predictive only if men have hostile attitudes and fathers who never completed high school. Moreover, a genetic predisposition toward aggression could be rebuffed by a mother who nurtures her infant, suggests another study involving primates.
It is the best book I’ve seen on teaching how to use the Lord’s Prayer as a pattern for prayer.... here’s what this book does: it thinks about prayer, dwells on prayer, and teaches all about prayer through the lens of the pattern of the Lord’s Prayer. Worth having.
Daylight Saving Time is deceitful, disruptive, and silly. It's a mass delusion, a demonstration of our unfortunate predilection for following rules and abstract concepts blindly while ignoring the evidence of our senses and the dictates of our bodies. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it started as a performance art piece intended to test the willingness of the public to accept the absurd.
The poll found that 63% of all Britons had a favourable opinion of Muslims, down slightly from 67% in 2004, suggesting last year's London bombings did not trigger a significant rise in prejudice. Attitudes in Britain were more positive than in the US, Germany and Spain (where the popularity of Muslims has plummeted to 29%), and about the same as in France.
Less than a third of British non-Muslims said they viewed Muslims as violent, significantly fewer than non-Muslims in Spain (60%), Germany (52%), the US (45%) and France (41%).
By contrast, the poll found that British Muslims represented a "notable exception" in Europe, with far more negative views of westerners than Islamic minorities elsewhere on the continent. A significant majority viewed western populations as selfish, arrogant, greedy and immoral. Just over half said westerners were violent. While the overwhelming majority of European Muslims said westerners were respectful of women, fewer than half British Muslims agreed. Another startling result found that only 32% of Muslims in Britain had a favourable opinion of Jews, compared with 71% of French Muslims.
Muslim attitudes in Britain more resembled public opinion in Islamic countries in the Middle East and Asia than elsewhere in Europe. That would make explanations that majored on strong links to less westernised Muslim communities in Muslim majority areas strong contenders for explanatory hypotheses. So I will hold that in mind as I contemplate these figures more. Other ideas, though, would be welcome.
Eternal Father,
when the gospel of Christ first came to our land
you gloriously confirmed the faith of Alban
by making him the first to win a martyr's crown:
grant that, following his example,
in the fellowship of the saints
we may worship you, the living God,
and give true witness to Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
It is widely believed the ID scheme is something that was kept in a dusty drawer at the Home Office until opportunities such as a new rabid Home Secretary or a terrorist attrocity made it politically possible to suggest. Is this ID card scheme an object of faith in the government where it doesn’t matter what it is supposed to do, since it is such a fantastic idea in and of itself? It does seem to me that this is how proponents of this scheme view it.
Global warming deniers were the sort of people who believed "the moon landing was staged on a movie lot in Arizona or that the earth is still flat"
he also accused a "small group of very well-to-do polluters" of spending millions of dollars trying to persuade the public there was still a debate to be had. It is exactly the same thing that was done by some of the tobacco companies after the doctors and scientists firmly linked lung disease to smoking."
On reading Andii's blog, however, it strikes me that there is potentially a lot of overlap between Ignatian spiritual discernment and 'Divination'
"The watchdog is launching the investigation after receiving a number of complaints from viewers and newspapers claiming that the competition's eventual winner Suzie Verrico knew she was going to enter the house before she was selected, supposedly at random."
The first-order problems brought on by global warming -- beach houses washing away, sure, but also crop failures, water shortages, floods, catastrophic wildfires, much more severe hurricanes, the spread of new diseases -- should freak us out and give us pause. But they are not necessarily the worst impacts we'll see.
When we mess with something as fundamental as climate, the cascading consequences will be difficult to predict, but some of them have extremely serious implications, like studies showing that climate change and habitat loss may combine to spell doom for one quarter of all the species on Earth, perhaps triggering a series of ecopunkt failures around the planet.
Indeed, one of the most needed sets of worldchanging tools are studies and stories, explanations and visions to help more people catch on quickly to the idea that climate foresight is no longer a luxury and, one way or another, we all live in New Orleans now.
A nice, brief exposition of the Lord’s Prayer. Not overdone; nothing extravagant.
A consideration of the spiritual dynamics of the prayer as a pattern: he explores here why it matters that Jesus does not begin with confession (he calls such a pattern the ‘four spiritual laws’ pattern), etc..
A suggestion that Christians build a Lord’s Prayer organizer or scrapbook, in which sections are devoted to the various petitions and we gather and collect our thoughts and poems and pictures, etc. Quite suggestive.
A list of other suggestions for ways to use the Lord’s prayer: using stones, cards, computers.
A set of reflections on “body prayer” (Doug Pagitt has a book on this).
A clever set of suggestions on how to let the Lord’s Prayer be the guide for constructing a rule of life (Tony Jones wrote a book on this).
The book concludes with an entire set of liturgies (with an apologetic for doing such a thing) that are built on the Lord’s Prayer.
Now here’s what this book does: it thinks about prayer, dwells on prayer, and teaches all about prayer through the lens of the pattern of the Lord’s Prayer.
The Convent's contemplative air, with the focus on inner development ... is pretty refreshing. Why don't the BBC put it on one of their digital channels 24 hours a day?
shantytowns and slums as organic, self-built and largely unplanned models of this kind of efficiency:
These shanties meet many of the ideals of eco-city designers. They are high-density but low-rise; their lanes and alleys are largely pedestrianised; and many of their inhabitants recycle waste materials from the wider city.
From a purely ecological perspective, shanties and their inhabitants are a good example of the new, green urban metabolism. Despite their sanitary and security failings, they often have a social vibrancy and ecological systems that get lost in most planned urban environments.
So perhaps something can be taken from the chaos and decentralised spontaneity embodied in shanties, and combined with the planned infrastructure of a designed eco-city...The key is to put people and ecology joint first.
“Every UK citizen is already paying over £1,500 to clean up the nuclear waste of the last 50 years – and that bill regularly gets revised upwards.
Predicting the next 100,000 years isn't easy. Even the best efforts of scientists and Sci-Fi writers from just thirty years ago to predict the twenty-first century often look embarrassing wrong.
Yet that's how long waste from nuclear power stations has to be kept safe.
Just think how long 100,000 years really is. If the Victorians, or the Tudors, or Norman the Conqueror, or the Vikings, or cavemen had had nuclear power ... we would still be looking after their waste. Do you really think it would have been kept safe during all that time?
"Glaciers may move very slowly, but they have an excellent record when it comes to the transport of large stones from one part of the country to another."
an eBay for local food, putting buyer and seller into direct contact and cutting out middlemen:
Local farmers will be able to post what they have to sell, such as fresh produce and meats. Buyers will be able to browse through the offerings and make online purchases from the farmers. Greenleaf will charge sellers a fee, perhaps 2% of a sale. Buyers will pay an annual subscription fee, that hasn't been finalized, to use the service. Buyers and sellers will be responsible for making their own arrangements for payments and deliveries. Hilleren said she will stay out of the transactions as much as possible.
This appears to be an ingenius, simple tool. Both buyer and seller can get precisely what they want, in the quantity they want, directly from the source.
They thought about it and decided they’d rather hold the team together. So we went down to a thirty-two-hour-a-week schedule for everyone furing a down time. We took everybody’s hours and salary down - executives too.
... two surprises.
First, productivity did not decline. I swear to God we get as much out of them at thirty-two hours as we did at forty. So it’s not a bad business decision. But second, when economic conditions improved, we offered them one hundred percent time again. No one wanted to go back!
I’ve not been a regular meditator for many years. But I can drop my blood pressure significantly if I use my mantra for five minutes in a doctor’s office. And I can use it to help me get to sleep. YMMV, as they say in the car ads.
But is there anything special about the TM mantra? That’s a question this study does not address. What if any short nonsense word works? Or if a non-nonsense word works? If so, then it’s not “TM” that’s helping. Just “M.”
Critics say the decision to make more than 1,000 Dutch fans strip off last Friday is evidence of the extraordinary lengths to which Fifa has gone to protect the interests of World Cup sponsors - at the expense of ordinary fans. Fifa, however, says it has done nothing wrong and is entitled to defend itself against what it calls "ambush marketing".
Recently, I had a long chat with an accomplished Asian theologian who is also bishop of my ecclesiastical denomination. I lamented to him that I have often been accused of being "liberal", "slippery", or "non-evangelical" simply because I suffer a discontentment arising from what I deem to be an Evangelical bankruptcy. My theological positions often place me at the margins of Evangelicalism. He seemed to fully identify with my lament, and responded by saying, "Yes, this places us at the margins of Evangelicalism, but also at the forefront." He went on to mutter something akin to saying that there is often a price to pay for being at the forefront or an agent of change.
I got a response from my MP which got me kind of mad. You'll see why as I reproduce it here. Apologies for the strange changes in types...
