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Filed under: * General Interest • Animals

When it was over, and the balloons had shriveled and the whistles had faded away, Lionel Messi put his hands to his head. Messi, the slick, slippery forward, was rooted to his spot: it was as if he could not believe what he was seeing.

He was not alone. Around him, the Chelsea players threw their arms over one another, hugging in equal parts glee and exhaustion, while the Barcelona players only stared, as if overwhelmed by two sobering truths: on this day, Messi, perhaps the greatest player in the world, could not score. And Barcelona, perhaps the greatest team in the world, could not win.

Instead it was Chelsea, despite playing a man short for nearly an hour in front of a frenzied crowd at the Camp Nou stadium, that advanced to the Champions League final.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Men • Sports • * International News & Commentary • England / UK • Europe • Spain

For a glimpse of how Mormons see themselves....it’s worth visiting the Church History Museum of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints here. Created by believers, for believers, the museum shows how close to the center of American life Mormons consider themselves to be.

The gap is enormous between that perspective and the one embedded in the wider culture. The hit Broadway musical “The Book of Mormon” riotously mocks the church’s doctrine. The high-toned HBO soap “Big Love,” which ended last year, relished the complications of polygamy (once endorsed by the church and long since renounced). Reports of posthumous Mormon baptisms of Holocaust victims have fueled outrage. Accusations of extremism and murder appear in thrillers reaching back to Sherlock Holmes’s first case in “A Study in Scarlet.”

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • History • Religion & Culture • * International News & Commentary • America/U.S.A. • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Faiths • Mormons

For much of this year, Americans' economic confidence has been threatening to break out of the range seen since Gallup began Daily tracking of economic confidence in January 2008. It actually did so by one percentage point when economic confidence reached a new weekly high of -17 in the week ending March 25. After pulling back in early April, confidence in each of the past two weeks is once again within two points of that previous weekly high.

The continued high confidence seen this past week is likely due, at least in part, to gas prices stabilizing and even showing signs of decline....

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Psychology • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Consumer/consumer spending • The Credit Freeze Crisis of Fall 2008/The Recession of 2007-- • Energy, Natural Resources

Steven Wagner, the president of QEV Analytics, a polling firm that recently conducted a survey for The Catholic Association, said religion could emerge as a sleeper issue in the election: “Everyone says this election is about the economy. I can see the issue of religious liberty being what decides the race. If Obama continues to lose Catholics by the margin the Pew poll suggests, that means he could lose the key swing states of Florida, Ohio, Colorado and Iowa.”

Losses in those states could cost Obama the White House, and the states are likely aware of that fact. Wagner noted the administration will likely try to be careful and avoid provoking Catholic activists before the election.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • --The 2009 American Health Care Reform Debate • Law & Legal Issues • * Economics, Politics • Politics in General • Office of the President

It is not be an overstatement to say that evangelicals are experiencing a "sea change"—a paradigm shift—in their understanding of conversion and redemption, a shift that includes the way in which they think about the salvation of God, the nature and mission of the church, and the character of religious experience. Although there is no one word to capture where evangelicals are going in this regard, there is a word that captures what they are leaving behind: revivalism.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Religion & Culture • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches • Evangelicals • * Theology • Pastoral Theology • Soteriology

Christians in the UK are turning increasingly to social media sites like Facebook to share their faith, new research has found.

In a survey on attitudes to online mission by Christian Vision and Premier Christian Media, 64% said they were using social networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to share their faith in an intentional way.

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When you write a post on Facebook about your sudden craving for blue cheese, an advertisement for gout prevention might suddenly pop up on your page. Post the phrase “bacon tidbits,” and you might get an ad for a book called “Forbidden Lessons in a Kabul Guesthouse.”

The robots are watching us. They’re announcing to the world that we just looked at Eames chairs on Pinterest and that we’ve listened to Taylor Swift and Conway Twitty on Spotify. They’re sending us ads labeled “Being Conservative in South Carolina” simply because we checked our e-mail in Charleston. They’re broadcasting the fact that we just read an article called “How to Satisfy Your Partner in Bed.” They’re trumpeting — with an undue amount of enthusiasm — that we just scored 6 points on Words With Friends for making the word “cat.”

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Blogging & the Internet • --Social Networking • Science & Technology • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Consumer/consumer spending • Corporations/Corporate Life

"Archbishops Wabukala, Okoh and Jensen speak about the media release at the opening of the FCA Leaders meeting and about the position of chairman at Anglican Primates meetings."

Listen to it all.

Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Global South Churches & Primates • FCA Meeting in London April 2012

None the less, when clergy who have worked with him criticise him for "African" style, they are making a point which is not racist. The slow schism in the Anglican communion has exposed many people to a style of church leadership which they find repugnant.

The style that people object to is autocratic, and prelatical. The idea that God blesses success, and that might therefore shows forth righteousness, is embedded in a lot of African religious culture. Sentamu's younger brother, for example, is a hugely successful "Prosperity gospel" preacher in Kampala, with a mansion, a Mercedes, and a church where journalists are searched on entry. Authority, in such a church, is fawned on sooner than questioned.

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Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Archbishop of Canterbury • Anglican Provinces • Church of England (CoE) • Archbishop of York John Sentamu

If anything, the situation has been rather the reverse. My impression is that those who have had criticisms or reservations of Dr Sentamu's candidacy have largely kept them to themselves over the past couple of years, precisely because they fear that they may have been accused of racism if they expressed them. Political correctness has served Dr Sentamu well.

Lately, it's true that some of his critics have concluded that their views are as valid and innocent as if he were a white man. And so I've heard these words: Capricious, impulsive, vain with the media and quick to temper (as well, I might add, as words such as prophetic, inspirational, generous and kind). None of these words has anything to do with Dr Sentamu's ethnicity.

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Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Archbishop of Canterbury • Anglican Provinces • Church of England (CoE) • Archbishop of York John Sentamu

A coalition of bishops and leaders from Africa, the Americas and Australasia said it was time for a “radical shift” in how the church is structured away from models of the “British Empire”.

They criticised what they called “revisionist attempts” to abandon basic doctrines on issues such as homosexuality and “turn Christianity merely into a movement for social betterment” during Dr Williams’s tenure.

And they said it was now clear that the leadership in England had failed to hold the 77 million-strong worldwide Anglican Communion together, leaving it in “crisis”.

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Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Archbishop of Canterbury • Global South Churches & Primates • FCA Meeting in London April 2012

In their brief, the bishops and ACI argue that the summary judgment ruling by the trial court in the Fort Worth litigation violated the First Amendment to the United States Constitution because it immersed the court in an impermissible “searching” and “extensive inquiry into religious polity.” Under the Supreme Court’s First Amendment jurisprudence, courts may constitutionally defer to a church authority rather than apply neutral principles of law only if they can identify the appropriate ecclesiastical authority without conducting such an extensive inquiry into church governance. In the case of The Episcopal Church, its governing constitution specifies that the diocesan bishop is “the Ecclesiastical Authority” in the diocese. Acceptance of TEC’s claim that there are other bodies or offices with hierarchical supremacy over the diocesan bishop would require the Court to become embroiled in a searching historical analysis of difficult questions of church polity without any explicit language in the church’s governing instrument on which to base its conclusion. The First Amendment does not permit such a result.

First, look at the summary introduction and then take the time to read the whole argument (36 page pdf).

Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Episcopal Church (TEC) • TEC Bishops • TEC Conflicts • TEC Conflicts: Fort Worth • TEC Polity & Canons • * Christian Life / Church Life • Church History • * Culture-Watch • Law & Legal Issues • Religion & Culture

Social Security, which pays retirement and disability benefits to 56 million Americans, will exhaust its reserves by 2033, three years sooner than previously estimated, a new government report said Monday.

The forecast raises pressure on the White House and Congress to tackle the entitlement program, which many politicians fear changing because of potential voter backlash.

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The largest Colorado congregation of the Presbyterian Church (USA) has voted to leave the denomination over theological differences.

First Presbyterian Church of Colorado Springs voted Sunday morning to leave the Pueblo Presbytery of PC(USA) in large part due to the denomination's decision in 2010 to allow the ordination of non-celibate homosexuals.

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Filed under: * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches • Presbyterian • Sexuality Debate (Other denominations and faiths)

As the president of N.Y.U., Dr. Sexton could certainly teach any course he wanted. And as the former dean of its law school and clerk to a chief justice of the United States, he might have been expected to hold forth on jurisprudence. However, as a child of Brooklyn, as a scholar whose academic robe bears the number 42 in homage to Jackie Robinson, and as a practicing Catholic with a doctoral degree in religion, Dr. Sexton has for more than a dozen years chosen baseball and God as his professorial focus.

“The real idea of the course,” he put it in an interview, “is to develop heightened sensitivity and a noticing capacity. So baseball’s not ‘the’ road to God. For most of us, it isn’t ‘a’ road to God. But it’s a way to notice, to cause us to live more slowly and to watch more keenly and thereby to discover the specialness of our life and our being, and, for some of us, something more than our being.”

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Education • Religion & Culture • Sports

Check it out.

Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Archbishop of Canterbury • Anglican Provinces • Church of England (CoE) • CoE Bishops • * Culture-Watch • Religion & Culture • * International News & Commentary • England / UK

Help us to trust thee, O Lord Christ, when we see thee not, and our way is shadowed by sorrow or doubt; and in thy great goodness reveal thyself to us again, that our hearts may rejoice, and we may walk henceforth in the light of thy presence; for the glory of thy holy name.

Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Church Year / Liturgical Seasons • Easter • Spirituality/Prayer

O LORD, I love the habitation of thy house, and the place where thy glory dwells.

--Psalm 26:8

Filed under: * Theology • Theology: Scripture