It seems to happen whenever Steve Beard hangs out with friends -- especially folks who don't go to church -- talking about movies, television and whatever else is on their minds.

"It may take five minutes or it may take as long as 10, but sooner or later you're going to run into some kind zombie comment," said Beard, editor of Good News, a magazine for United Methodist evangelicals. "Someone will say something like, 'When the zombie apocalypse occurs, we need to make sure we're all at so-and-so's house so we can stick together.' It's all a wink-and-a-nod kind of deal, but the point is that this whole zombie thing has become a part of the language of our time."

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Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • * Culture-Watch • Movies & Television • Religion & Culture

A United Methodist woman in Richmond, Va., said she was acting out of Christian compassion in helping to arrange the burial of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings.

“Jesus tells us to love our enemies, not hate them after they’re dead,” said Martha Mullen, in a phone interview. “That’s why I kind of got this ball rolling.”

Ms. Mullen, a 48-year-old counselor in private practice who studied at a United Methodist seminary, was distressed at news accounts about the difficulty of finding a burial place for Tsarnaev, who died in an April 19 shootout with police.

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Don't be afraid to talk about death and funerals, advises the Bishop of Rochester, the Rt Revd James Langstaff, writing in support of Dying Matters Awareness Week (13-19 May 2013), at http://www.churchofengland.org/our-views/medical-ethics-health-social-care-policy/dying-matters-end-of-life-care.aspx.

Bishop James, the Chair of the Churches Funeral Group, said: "…This week encourages us all to think about how we approach the prospect of our own death and that of those closest to us; it is good and healthy to talk about these things together…"

Dying Matters, a broad-based and inclusive national coalition of 28,000 members, including the Church of England, aims to change public knowledge, attitudes and behaviours towards dying, death and bereavement.

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The mystery surrounding the burial of the body of Tamerlan Tsarnaev has come to an end. The Boston Marathon bombing suspect was buried this week at a small Muslim cemetery in Doswell, Va.

According to his completed death certificate, which was released on Friday, Mr. Tsarnaev was buried on Thursday at Al-Barzakh Cemetery, about half an hour north of Richmond. Officials in Massachusetts had said the body was moved to a burial site out of state. But they had refused to disclose where.

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The former Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, will present a bill to the House of Lords next week which would introduce a system similar to that in place in the US state of Oregon.

It would allow doctors to provide a fatal dose of drugs to patients judged to have less than six months to live....The bill, which will be tabled on May 15, is based on the conclusions of Lord Falconer’s Commission on Assisted Dying, a group of peers and academics which held hearings in the style of a royal commission.

The Commission was dismissed by critics, including the Church of England, as a “self appointed” group of euthanasia supporters.

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Because Dallas wrote on spiritual formation and taught philosophy at the University of Southern California, one might think he came from a background associated with richness of education and culture and resources. In fact, he grew up in very poor circumstances in rural Missouri. His mother died when he was two; her last words to her husband were: "Keep eternity before the children."

Because of impoverished conditions, Dallas grew up in a circle of different families; electricity did not come until he was mostly grown up.

He read a book by Jack London once that contained a passage describing the world from an atheistic point of view. Dallas said that he'd never known books could contain such thoughts and ideas, and his mind was never quite the same after that awakening. He was nine years old at the time.

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Cemeteries and even some mosques have refused to take his body. His city, Cambridge, has urged family members to bury him elsewhere. Republican U.S. Senate candidate Gabriel Gomez and local talk radio host Dan Rae want him dumped in the ocean, like Osama bin Laden. Clergy have largely kept mum.

“The only signs of people who are showing some sort of moral conscience are those few who stand with a card near the funeral home saying (burial) is a corporal work of mercy,” said James Keenan, a moral theologian at Boston College. “To say, ‘we won’t bury him’ makes us barbaric. It takes away mercy, the trademark of Christians. … I’m talking about this because somebody should.”

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While the fight to preserve life is often centered on abortion and capital punishment, the future Pope Francis also warned against a more subtle form of disregard for human dignity: what he called "covert euthanasia."

"In this consumerist, hedonist and narcissistic society, we are accustomed to the idea that there are people that are disposable," among them, the elderly, then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio said in a recently published book.

Citing examples of intentional neglect, the future pope said: "I believe that today there is covert euthanasia: Our social security pays up until a certain amount of treatment and then says 'May God help you.'"

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A new poll finds overwhelming support for assisted suicide for the terminally ill among Anglicans, Catholics, Hindus, Sikhs and Jews in Britain, with Baptists and Muslims the only groups that oppose changes to British law, which currently prohibits assisted suicide.

But Britons are debating the topic intensely.

More than seven in 10 (72 percent) members of the established Church of England and 56 percent of Roman Catholics support assisted suicide for the terminally ill, the survey shows.

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Photographer Lalage Snow photographed and interviewed members of 1st Battalion The Royal Regiment of Scotland before they were sent to Afghanistan, after three months' service, and days after they returned home. Their faces show the toll that fighting in Afghanistan takes on our troops.

Read it all and look at all thirteen images.

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In the context of a widespread prevailing medical and social praxis that endanger that value of life perennially defended by the Catholic Church, it can be useful to offer some reflections on end-of-life issues, specifically on the difference between refusing extraordinary measures and suicide (both doctor-assisted and ‘autonomous’).

A convention held recently at the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome on bioethics and end-of-life issues highlighted a number of fields where the Catholic perspective is in sharp conflict with either current medical practice, and trends threatening to go beyond de facto practice silently occurring between doctor, patient, and relatives in hospitals across the world, to become legislated practices, endorsed by law. One such field merits perhaps special attention, due to the likelihood that a given individual is to come across such a situation in the course of his or her life: the moral question regarding the refusal of possibly life-extending treatment, and the ensuing questions of whether this constitutes suicide, or differs moreover from the refusal of food and water.

In the issue of end-of-life practices, Fr. Maurizio Faggioni, O.F.M., professor of moral theology and bioethics at the Pontifical University “Antonianum” in Rome, affirmed that currently there is a distinction that needs to be made between assisted suicide and a refusing life-extending therapeutic measures.

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Pastor Greg Laurie knows a thing or two about prayer in tough times.

The honorary chairman of this year’s National Day of Prayer (May 2) says prayer was the only thing that got him through his son’s death five years ago. When fellow megachurch pastor Rick Warren lost his son Matthew to suicide, Laurie was the man he most wanted to hear from.

Laurie, 60, who leads the evangelical Harvest Christian Fellowship in Riverside, Calif., talked about prayer, grief and what not to say when a friend’s loved one dies. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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When Christan Rainey joined other firefighter recruits on an orientation tour of North Charleston, he grew silent as they passed by the mobile home where his family once lived.

Rainey, 28, had not laid eyes on the old homestead in Ferndale in seven years. Not since his mother and four siblings, ages 6 to 16, were slaughtered there in a burst of inexplicable violence attributed to his stepfather.

“Looking at it made me feel like it was Day One all over again,” he said softly. “It gave me one of the most eerie spiritual feelings ever.”

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Check out this resource for your awareness and prayers.

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Pastor Rick Warren will join Ed Stetzer on his webshow, "The Exchange," Tuesday afternoon to talk about his 27-year-old son's suicide earlier this month.

Stetzer, president of LifeWay Research, will host The Exchange live from the Exponential church planting conference in Orlando, Fla., where Warren had been scheduled to lead two Bible studies.

Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church, Lake Forest, Calif., agreed to an interview with Stetzer about what pastors need to know about grief in their congregations, how his son's death has changed him and what church leaders can do to raise awareness and reduce the stigma of mental illness.

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Read it all from the Independent. There are two pieces, one for and one against.

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George Beverly Shea, a noted gospel singer and close confidant to evangelical leader Billy Graham, died Tuesday evening after "a brief illness," according to the Billy Graham Evangelical Association. He was 104.

Shea had been hospitalized after a stroke, association spokesman Brent Rinehart said.

In honoring Shea's death, the evangelical organization noted that the singer had "carried the Gospel in song to every continent and every state in the Union."

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For many Christians, Brennan Manning and grace are synonymous. Therein lies the scandal, and the triumph.

Let’s start with the scandal. Richard Francis Xavier “Brennan” Manning was an alcoholic and an addict. He hurt those close to him by compulsive lying, mainly due to hide his drinking, or if not, as he put it, to “stay in practice.” He was a former Franciscan priest, who broke his vows to marry. He later divorced.

But then there’s the triumph. Manning was a powerful writer and speaker, beloved and respected for his passionate witness to the expansiveness of God’s mercy and forgiveness, the availability of intimacy and communion with “Abba, Father,” and the inexhaustible grace of Jesus Christ. And he would know.

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In the gospel passage read by the Prime Minister, Jesus says “I am the way, the truth, and the life”. “I am” is the voice of the divine being. Jesus does not bring information or advice but embodies the reality of divine love. God so loved the world that he was generous: he did not intervene from the outside but gave himself to us in the person of Jesus Christ, and became one of us.

What, in the end, makes our lives seem valuable after the storm and stress has passed and there is a great calm? The questions most frequently asked at such a time concern us all. How loving have I been? how faithful in personal relationships? Have I found joy within myself, or am I still looking for it in externals outside myself?

Margaret Thatcher had a sense of this, which she expressed in her address to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland: “I leave you with the earnest hope that may we all come nearer to that other country whose ‘ways are ways of gentleness and all her paths are peace’.”

I love the child's letter and her response--read it all (video or audio is worth the time).

Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Anglican Provinces • Church of England (CoE) • CoE Bishops • * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals

On a gray and drizzly day, a horse-drawn gun carriage bore the coffin of Margaret Thatcher, draped in the Union flag, to St. Paul’s Cathedral for a ceremonial funeral that has divided British opinion, much as the former prime minister stirred passions during her lifetime.

A hearse had taken the coffin from Parliament as far as the church of St. Clement Danes near the head of Fleet Street where a military guard placed it on the gun carriage for the solemn cortege to St. Paul’s. Crowds of mostly silent people lined the streets near Parliament Square and along Whitehall — one of several major thoroughfares closed to traffic — as the hearse passed by with a display of white flowers.

Some 700 military personnel from three services — the Army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force — lined Fleet Street and Ludgate Hill leading to St. Paul’s. The honor guard included guardsmen in scarlet tunics and distinctive black bearskin hats on the 24 cathedral steps. Military bands played Bells tolled. Crowds lined the street as the gun carriage passed slowly by, some applauding. The procession moved at 70 paces per minute. Well-wishers threw flowers into the road.

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Pat Summerall was the calm alongside John Madden’s storm.

Over four decades, Summerall described some of the biggest games in America in his deep, resonant voice. Simple, spare, he delivered the details on 16 Super Bowls, the Masters and the U.S. Open tennis tournament with a simple, understated style that was the perfect complement for the “booms!” and “bangs!” of Madden, his football partner for the last half of the NFL player-turned-broadcaster’s career.

Summerall died Tuesday at age 82 of cardiac arrest, said University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center spokesman Jeff Carlton, speaking on behalf of Summerall’s wife, Cheri.

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Each suicide leaves behind on average six to ten survivors – husbands, wives, parents, children, siblings, other close friends or family members. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people, including many of our church members, will grieve the loss of a loved one to suicide.

I am one of those people. Some years ago, my father had a stroke that left him partially debilitated. Though he began rehabilitation, one of the side effects of the stroke was clinical depression. He lost all hope and eventually sank into despair. He couldn't see any reason to go on. Three months after the stroke, at age 58, he killed himself.

Though all deaths are tragic, suicide affects us differently than when someone dies in car accident or from a terminal illness. Counselors call death by suicide a "complicated grief" or "complicated bereavement," like death by murder or terrorist attack. Not only do family members grieve the loss of the loved one, they must also face the trauma of the suicide.

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The Bishop of Grantham has criticised the scale and cost of Baroness Thatcher’s funeral, describing it as a “mistake” which may play into the hands of extremists.

The Rt Revd Dr Tim Ellis said the ceremonial event at St Paul’s Cathedral on Wednesday, costing up to £10 million, was “asking for trouble” amid divisions about the late prime minister’s legacy....

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While much of the world’s attention has been focussed on one famous person who died this week, I’d like to reflect on another, Professor Sir Robert Edwards, who died two days ago. Edwards was the pioneer of in vitro fertilisation, of what, slightly inaccurately, came to be called “test tube babies.” It took immense dedication: ten years from the first breakthrough, a fertilised embryo created in the laboratory, to the first child born from the technique, Louise Brown in 1978.

And though towards the end of his life Edwards received the recognition of a Nobel Prize, he had to face a barrage of criticism at the time. People conjured up fears of Aldous Huxley’s brave new world and the manufacture of human beings as if they were machines. There were also some religious groups who saw him as trespassing into the sacred mystery of life itself, of “playing God.”

As Jews we saw things differently. We didn’t see it as the sin of playing God. To the contrary we saw it as responding to God’s invitation to become, in the ancient rabbinic phrase, “God’s partners in the work of creation” and in a particularly moving way.

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An Army chaplain who saved the lives of fellow US soldiers before perishing in a North Korean prison camp has been awarded a posthumous US Medal of Honor.

On Thursday, President Obama presented the highest US military decoration to the nephew of Emil Kapaun, a Catholic priest who died in the Korean War.

Kapaun, an Army captain, was renowned for his bravery and caring.

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As others have said, she changed the face of Britain, opening up new avenues of possibility in all directions - share ownership, home ownership, the liberalisation of markets, entrepreneurial innovation and so on. She strengthened Britain's role in the world with her clear policies on defence, the Falklands, Northern Ireland, Communism, Europe, South Africa and more. No-one was in any doubt that there was a force in the land.

I spent the last years of the 1980s in County Durham, so I know some of the deep divisions Lady Thatcher's policies caused. Billy Elliot country was not an all-singing, all-dancing landscape. It's almost impossible to find moderate opinions, for or against, on her style of leadership, but the one thing we can all acknowledge is that she was a leader of absolute integrity in terms of her own beliefs. She was an iconic 'conviction politician.'

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Rick Benisasia, who’s in the after-death business, is looking to build an empire.

Mr. Benisasia runs a South Asian-focused funeral home on Derry Road in Malton and wants to open a crematorium beside it. The land, money and demand is there, he says.

For more than three years, he’s waited for his rezoning application to be approved by the City of Mississauga. But a new Mississauga bylaw passed in March says new crematoriums must be a minimum of 300 metres from residential properties, due to concerns over the health effects from their emissions.

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... a shocking number [of responses to the Warrens] are taking the moment of media attention to lash out at Warren on their digital tom-toms. The attacks are aimed both at him personally and at his Christian message.

Some unbelievers want to assure Rick and Kay Warren, his wife and Matthew’s bereaved mother, that there’s no heaven where they’ll meet their son again.

“Either there is no God, or God doesn’t listen to Rick Warren, despite all the money Rick has made off of selling false hope to desperate people,” one poster from Cincinnati wrote in to USA Today.

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Gracious God, the Beyond in the midst of our life, who gavest grace to thy servant Dietrich Bonhoeffer to know and teach the truth as it is in Jesus Christ, and to bear the cost of following him: Grant that we, strengthened by his teaching and example, may receive thy word and embrace its call with an undivided heart; through Jesus Christ our Savior, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

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Take the time to listen to it all (and note there is a live excerpt of the Kenyon Commencement address).

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I too have had a son die, so I have a sense of the pain Rick and Kay are facing. But their circumstances are different and my heart goes out to them.
At times like these, there really are no words, but there is the Word.
There is no manual, but there is Emmanuel.
God is with us.

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To my dear staff,

Over the past 33 years we’ve been together through every kind of crisis. Kay and I’ve been privileged to hold your hands as you faced a crisis or loss, stand with you at gravesides, and prayed for you when ill. Today, we need your prayer for us.

No words can express the anguished grief we feel right now. Our youngest son, Matthew, age 27, and a lifelong member of Saddleback, died today.

You who watched Matthew grow up knew he was an incredibly kind, gentle, and compassionate man. He had a brilliant intellect and a gift for sensing who was most in pain or most uncomfortable in a room. He’d then make a bee-line to that person to engage and encourage them.

But only those closest knew that he struggled from birth with mental illness, dark holes of depression, and even suicidal thoughts. In spite of America’s best doctors, meds, counselors, and prayers for healing, the torture of mental illness never subsided. Today, after a fun evening together with Kay and me, in a momentary wave of despair at his home, he took his life.

Kay and I often marveled at his courage to keep moving in spite of relentless pain. I’ll never forget how, many years ago, after another approach had failed to give relief, Matthew said “ Dad, I know I’m going to heaven. Why can’t I just die and end this pain?” but he kept going for another decade.

Thank you for your love and prayers. We love you back.

Pastor Rick

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Popular evangelical Pastor Rick Warren asked members of his Southern California church for prayers as he and his family coped with the apparent suicide of his 27-year-old son.

The church said on Saturday that Matthew Warren took his own life at his Mission Viejo home.

Matthew Warren struggled with mental illness, deep depression and suicidal thoughts throughout his life, Saddleback Valley Community Church said in a statement, after his body was found Friday night.

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An Episcopal pastor and former hospital chaplain has released a book titled Revealing Heaven: The Christian Case for Near-Death Experiences, which chronicles over 200 near-death experiences that people have shared with him. The accounts describe both heavenly and hellish experiences, some of which challenge conservative Christian beliefs.

The Rev. John W. Price, 74, who continues to serve at Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church in Houston, shared in an exclusive phone interview with The Christian Post that he has spoken to more than 237 people who have had near-death experiences, despite his initial reservations.

Ordained as a priest in 1965, Price admits that at the start of his career, he did not believe in near-death experiences at all, and even turned away the first couple of people who tried to share with him visions of what they went through. As he explains in Revealing Heaven, when he became a chaplain at St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital in Houston and more people starting coming up to him with their stories, he started paying closer attention – and his views began changing....

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You can find the the basic information about this there. But make sure, too, to watch this whole excerpt and then find it and try to absorb the whole thing--just an incredible story all the way through.

Update: The official trailer may be watched there.

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A few dozen Ohioans will meet Wednesday evening in a community room at a Panera Bread outside of Columbus for tea, cake and conversation over an unusual shared curiosity.

For two hours, split between small circles and a larger group discussion, they'll talk about death. A facilitator may throw out questions to spark the conversation: How do they want to die? In their sleep? In the hospital? Of what cause? When do they want die? Is 105 too old? Are they scared? What kind of funerals do they want, if any? Is cremation better than burial? And what do they need accomplish before life is over?

This is the Death Cafe, an anything-goes, frank conversation on death that's been hosted at dozens of coffee shops and community centers in American cities from Arizona to Maine since beginning in the Columbus area in July....

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As Kelly McGuire points out in Dying To Be English: Suicide narratives and national identity, 1721–1814, the word has a vexed history. Deploying a pronoun as a prefix in order to describe both an action and a person (a person who is at once victim and perpetrator), it is something of a botched job. The convolutions and impenetrability of the term seem appropriate to a deed which many understand as the consummate rejection – of life, family and community, as of social and religious obligations – although one lesson of all the books under review is that suicides themselves, actual and imagined, tend not to see it that way. Many of the ballads reproduced in The History of Suicide in England, 1650–1850 depict lovers killing themselves in the confident hope of forgiveness and a place in heaven, as of avoiding shame and misery on earth. And even the most hard-line of religious commentators will hesitate to condemn all suicides to hell: as the Calvinist preacher Thomas Beard wrote in 1631, “the mercie of God is incomprehensible”. Overall, there is much evidence of what John Donne called “a perplexitie and flexibilitie in the doctrine” of suicide.

Gradually replacing more overtly judgemental epithets such as “self-murder”, “suicide” became a familiar word in England in the later eighteenth century. Perhaps the availability of a neutral form of language influenced how people thought about voluntary death; there is a relic of the older way of describing it in current references to “self-harm”. It is sometimes argued that apparently more tolerant and sympathetic attitudes to suicide, as to other infractions of the moral law, developed in the eighteenth century as the result of a progressive secularization. But religious as well as civil sanctions against the act persisted, in Britain and in the American colonies – only in Pennsylvania was voluntary death not criminalized – and those official sanctions are not incompatible with sympathy.

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Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • * Culture-Watch • Books • History • Psychology • Suicide • * International News & Commentary • America/U.S.A. • England / UK

Each year, 2.5 million Americans die. For the majority, about 70 percent, deaths happen in a hospital, nursing home or long-term care facility. What happens afterwards is nearly always the same, with few exceptions for religious traditions: A doctor or nurse will sign a death certificate and the body will be whisked to the funeral home, where it's washed, embalmed, dressed, and prepared for a viewing and burial. A family usually sees the dead only a few times: when they die, if there's an open-casket viewing and in the rare case when a casket is opened during burial.

But a small and growing group of Americans are returning to a more hands-on, no-frills experience of death. In the world of "do it yourself" funerals, freezer packs are used in lieu of embalming, unvarnished wooden boxes replace ornate caskets, viewings are in living rooms and, in some cases, burials happen in backyards.

Nobody keeps track of the number of home funerals and advocacy groups, but home funeral organizations have won battles in recent years in states such as Minnesota and Utah that have attempted to ban the practice. Most states have nearly eliminated any requirements that professionals play a role in funerals. It's now legal in all but eight states to care for one's own after death. And the growth of community-based, nonprofit home funeral groups and burial grounds that are friendly to the cause point to an increasing demand.

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Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • * Culture-Watch • Psychology • Religion & Culture • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Consumer/consumer spending • * International News & Commentary • America/U.S.A.

When South Korean widow Yoon Sook-hee, 62, died after a bout of pneumonia in mid-January, she joined a growing number of old people in this Asian country who die alone and was cremated only thanks to the charity of people who never knew her.

Once a country where filial duty and a strong Confucian tradition saw parents revered, modern day South Korea, with a population of 50 million, has grown economically richer, but family ties have fragmented. Nowadays 1.2 million elderly South Koreans, just over 20 percent of the elderly population, live - and increasingly die - alone.

Yoon's former husband, whom she divorced 40 years ago, relinquished responsibility after being contacted by the hospital and told of her death. Her only son was unreachable as he had long broken off all contact with his parents.

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Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • * Culture-Watch • Aging / the Elderly • Religion & Culture • * International News & Commentary • Asia • South Korea • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Faiths • * Theology • Eschatology

On Christmas Eve, Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny paid a graveside tribute to an ally who helped bring him to power amid the worst economic crisis in Ireland’s modern history.

Shane McEntee was a “true friend and confidante, who listened to other people’s problems and made them his own,” Kenny said in his speech, after 3,000 people attended the funeral of the food minister. Three days earlier, McEntee had taken his own life. He was 56 with four children.

While financial hardship has led to a spate of suicides in parts of austerity-hit Europe, the deaths of McEntee and the son of well-known restaurant owners less than a week later have turned the national spotlight onto the issue in Ireland.

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Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • * Culture-Watch • Psychology • Suicide • * Economics, Politics • Economy • The Credit Freeze Crisis of Fall 2008/The Recession of 2007-- • Politics in General • * International News & Commentary • England / UK • --Ireland

Every year in America, 2.5 million people die. In 2011, the last year for which numbers are available, 42 percent were cremated, according to the funeral directors association. That's double the rate of just 15 years ago. In some states, largely in the West, the cremation rate tops 70 percent. In Washington, it's 72 percent; in Nevada, almost 74 percent. (The lowest rate of cremation... is Mississippi's, at 15.7 percent.)

So why the big jump in cremations? There are lots of reasons. One is the softening of the Catholic church's views of the practice. For centuries - until 1963, in fact - the church outlawed it. The church's laws still express a preference for burial. But the outright ban is a thing of the past and now, under some circumstances, bishops can permit a funeral mass with cremated remains present.

Another reason for the rise in cremations is the decline in nuclear families. As more and more Americans live far from hometowns and parents, and as family burial plots have waned in popularity and accessibility, millions have turned to cremation as a practical and cost-effective way to care for a loved one's remains.

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Every day there are small reminders, and here was one: Julia would hang the ornament because her father, Lt. Col. Paul J. Finken, died in Iraq six years ago, killed by a roadside bomb on the final patrol of his yearlong deployment....

The moment capsulized one family’s self-guided journey through loss. Over six years, Mrs. Finken and her daughters, ages 14, 12 and 10, have struggled through different phases of mourning, sometimes together, sometimes on individual calendars. But the one constant has been their determination to remember, without letting memory become a millstone.

“I don’t want to squeeze the life out of the memories, because I want them to still be precious and mean something,” Mrs. Finken said. “I also don’t want the memories to drag us down. Because memories can do that sometimes.”

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Dr. Diogenes Allen, a distinguished scholar in the field of the philosophy of religion, and the Stuart Professor of Philosophy emeritus at Princeton Theological Seminary, died on January 13, 2013, at the age of 80 in hospice care at Chandler Hall, Newtown, Pennsylvania. He joined the Seminary faculty in 1967 as associate professor of philosophy, and became a full professor in 1974. He was named the Stuart Professor in 1981. He retired and was named Stuart Professor Emeritus in 2002.

Allen was born in Lexington, Kentucky, on October 17, 1932. He earned a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Kentucky in 1954, and went on to study at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He earned a B.A. (1957) and later an M.A. (1961) from Oxford. He earned the B.D. (1959), the M.A. (1962) and the Ph.D. (1965) from Yale University. His thesis for his Ph.D. was titled “Faith as a Ground for Religious Beliefs.”

Before joining the Princeton Seminary faculty, he taught at York University in Ontario, Canada, from 1964 to 1967. He also was a visiting professor at Drew University and at the University of Notre Dame during his career....

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Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • * Theology • Seminary / Theological Education

Vicki Grantham of the Cremation Society of Illinois slid open a gray metal door. “This is where everything starts,” she said.

Visitors peered into a huge room chilled to 35 degrees and fitted with stacks of long metal shelves on each side.

Homewood, Ill., Mayor Richard Hofeld backed away a few steps. He supports cremation and intends at some point to be a consumer. Still, he found the sight of the cooler where bodies are kept slightly discomfiting. “We know it’s going to happen, but we don’t want to think about it.”

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So it was that a few weeks later, two first-year nursing students, Cindy Santiago, 26, and Michelle Elliot, 52, arrived at Ms. Keochareon’s tiny house, a few miles from the college. She was bedbound, cared for by a loyal band of relatives, hospice nurses and aides. Both students were anxious.

“Sit on my bed and talk to me,” Ms. Keochareon said. The students hesitated, saying they had been taught not to do that, to prevent transmission of germs. What they knew of nursing in hospitals — “I’m here to take your vitals, give you your medicine, O.K., bye,” as Ms. Santiago put it — was different, after all....

For Ms. Keochareon, this was a chance to teach something about the profession she had found late and embraced — she became a nurse at 40, after raising her daughter and working for years on a factory floor.

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When [my sister] called on Monday, December 10th to inform me that my mother was failing very quickly Allison and I immediately booked a flight for the next morning. We flew to LAX arriving just before noon, rented a car and made the three plus hour drive up the coast, all the while praying that we would arrive in time.

When we got to my sister’s house in Santa Margarita my mother (having insisted my sister have her up) was sitting on the couch with our daughter Adelia, who lives nearby. We spent an hour and a half together talking and laughing. She was lucid and in possession of her faculties, though it was an effort for her to speak. Around 5:00 p.m. she requested to go to bed. Our daughter later told us she thought my mother was going to die some 45 minutes before we arrived but she gently shook her awake and said, “Hold on grandma they are nearly here.” Later I went into her room and read some psalms to her. My brother-in-law soon joined me—I sitting on one side of the bed and he on the other as I read one psalm after another. At one point George and I began to talk about the current challenges the diocese and I were facing with the Episcopal Church. It soon became obvious my mother was listening. I had told her of the various developments in the past months so we she was aware of the challenges. I should tell you I grew up at Trinity United Methodist Church. My mother had been “Mrs. Methodist”—a delegate to District and National Conferences, President of her United Methodist Women and a recipient of the Bishop’s Award. So I looked at her and with a smile jokingly said—“Mom, I guess you were right, I should have stayed a Methodist!” She looked up at me with that knowing look, unable to say much, gave only nod. After dinner I went in and prayed with her the Lord’s Prayer, the 23rd Psalm, parting Prayers, and kissed her good night. As Allison observed later her body was entirely spent. By 5:00 a.m. the next morning, December 12, 2012 she had passed through the curtain that separates this life from that which is to come and into the glorious company of the saints in light.

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Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Episcopal Church (TEC) • TEC Bishops • * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • * Culture-Watch • Children • Marriage & Family • * South Carolina • * Theology • Eschatology • Pastoral Theology

“In terms of dramatic structure, I don’t really buy the humanist verities anymore...I mean, I buy them, they’re a subset of what’s true. But they’re not sufficient. They wouldn’t do much for me on my deathbed. Look at it another way. We’re here. We’re nice guys. We’re doing O.K. But we know that in X number of years, we won’t be here, and between now and then something unpleasant is gonna happen, or at least potentially unpleasant and scary. And when we turn to try and understand that, I don’t really think the humanist verities are quite enough. Because that would be crazy if they were. It would be so weird if we knew just as much as we needed to know to answer all the questions of the universe. Wouldn’t that be freaky? Whereas the probability is high that there is a vast reality that we have no way to perceive, that’s actually bearing down on us now and influencing everything. The idea of saying, ‘Well, we can’t see it, therefore we don’t need to see it,’ seems really weird to me.”

--George Saunders in the New York Times magazine article posted yesterday

Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • * Culture-Watch • Poetry & Literature • * Theology • Eschatology

Aside from all the formal invention and satirical energy of Saunders’s fiction, the main thing about it, which tends not to get its due, is how much it makes you feel. I’ve loved Saunders’s work for years and spent a lot of hours with him over the past few months trying to understand how he’s able to do what he does, but it has been a real struggle to find an accurate way to express my emotional response to his stories. One thing is that you read them and you feel known, if that makes any sense. Or, possibly even woollier, you feel as if he understands humanity in a way that no one else quite does, and you’re comforted by it. Even if that comfort often comes in very strange packages, like say, a story in which a once-chaste aunt comes back from the dead to encourage her nephew, who works at a male-stripper restaurant (sort of like Hooters, except with guys, and sleazier), to start unzipping and showing his wares to the patrons, so he can make extra tips and help his family avert a tragic future that she has foretold.

Junot Díaz described the Saunders’s effect to me this way: “There’s no one who has a better eye for the absurd and dehumanizing parameters of our current culture of capital. But then the other side is how the cool rigor of his fiction is counterbalanced by this enormous compassion. Just how capacious his moral vision is sometimes gets lost, because few people cut as hard or deep as Saunders does.”

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Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • * Culture-Watch • Books • Philosophy • Psychology • Religion & Culture • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Faiths • Buddhism • * Theology • Eschatology

Earlier this year, The Guardian reported about Bonnie Ware, a palliative nurse, who had spent 12 years documenting the last words and dying regrets of those under her care (which eventually resulted in a book). Ware said that people at the end of their lives have “phenomenal clarity of vision,” and therefore we should consider what we might learn from their wisdom.

Ware listed the top 5 regrets (most commonly mentioned) of those on their deathbed. At the end of each regret listed by Bonnie Ware, I share a prayerful reflection about this upcoming New Year.

Read it all prayerfully and carefully.

Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • * Culture-Watch • Aging / the Elderly • * Theology • Pastoral Theology

Darrel W. Ray, a psychologist in the Kansas City area who runs the Web site The Secular Therapist Project, made a similar point in a recent interview. As someone who was raised as a believing Christian and who holds a master’s degree in theology, he was uniquely able to identify what humanism needs to provide in a time of crisis.

“When people are in a terrible kind of pain — a death that is unexpected, the natural order is taken out of order — you would do anything to take away the pain,” Dr. Ray, 62, said. “And I’m not going to deny that religion does help deal with that first week or two of pain.

“The best we can do as humanists,” he continued, “is to talk about that pain in rational terms with the people who are suffering. We have humanist celebrants, as we call them, but they’re focused on doing weddings. It takes a lot more training to learn how to deal with grief and loss. I don’t see celebrants working in hospice or in hospitals, for example. There are secular people who need pastoral care, but we abdicate it to clergy.”

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Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • * Culture-Watch • Children • Life Ethics • Religion & Culture • Violence • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Faiths • Secularism

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Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Episcopal Church (TEC) • TEC Bishops • * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals

We remember this day, O God, the slaughter of the holy innocents of Bethlehem by the order of King Herod. Receive, we beseech thee, into the arms of thy mercy all innocent victims; and by thy great might frustrate the designs of evil tyrants and establish thy rule of justice, love, and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Church Year / Liturgical Seasons • Christmas • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • Spirituality/Prayer • * Culture-Watch • Children

Update: A NY Times obituary has been published this morning--read it all.

Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • * Economics, Politics • Defense, National Security, Military • * International News & Commentary • America/U.S.A.

We give thee thanks, O Lord of glory, for the example of the first martyr Stephen, who looked up to heaven and prayed for his persecutors to thy Son Jesus Christ, who standeth at thy right hand: where he liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting.

Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Church History • Church Year / Liturgical Seasons • Christmas • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • Spirituality/Prayer

One of my friends sent me this this week, and it moved me to tears. Please do take the time to watch it all (in the ten minute range)--KSH.

Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Church Year / Liturgical Seasons • Christmas • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • * Culture-Watch • History • Movies & Television • * Economics, Politics • Defense, National Security, Military

In Fort Stewart, Ga., soldiers from the Third Infantry Division are honored with wreaths laid by their graves. NBC’s Matt Taibbi reports.

A ery important reminder--watch it all.

Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Church Year / Liturgical Seasons • Advent • Christmas • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • * Culture-Watch • Religion & Culture • * Economics, Politics • Defense, National Security, Military • * International News & Commentary • America/U.S.A.

Focusing Wednesday afternoon's service on the victims is a way for some to get through the tragedy, [the Rev. Stephen] McKee said.

"Lighting a candle, there's something tactile about that," he said. "After we leave, those candles will go on. Religion is supposed to bring people together."

He noted that one thing the service at Trinity - or any service or vigil - can't do is explain why it happened.

A important thing to remember is that death and violence didn't just happen on Friday in a small town in Connecticut. Acts of violence occur often, and he noted everyone should work together to prevent them.

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Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Episcopal Church (TEC) • TEC Parishes • * Christian Life / Church Life • Liturgy, Music, Worship • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • Spirituality/Prayer • * Culture-Watch • Children • Education • Violence • * Theology • Theodicy

Blame it on the guns. No, blame the judges who banned God talk in schools, along with most lessons about right and wrong. No, our lousy national mental health care system caused this hellish bloodbath.No, the problem is the decay of American families, with workaholic parents chained to their desks while their children grow up in suburban cocoons with too much time on their hands.

No, it’s Hollywood’s fault. How can children tell the difference between fantasy and reality when they’ve been baptized in violent movies, television and single-shooter videogames? Why not blame God?

These were the questions in 1999 when two teen gunmen at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., killed 13 people and themselves in the massacre that set the standard for soul-searching media frenzies in postmodern America.All the questions asked about Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold are now being asked about Adam Lanza after he gunned down 20 first-graders and six employees at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., before taking his life....

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Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Church Year / Liturgical Seasons • Advent • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • * Culture-Watch • Children • Education • Religion & Culture • Violence • * Theology • Theodicy

Like many women these days, Aran Hissam, 35, of Melbourne, Fla., posted the news that she was pregnant on Facebook. On the morning of an ultrasound last year, she debated on the site whether to learn the baby’s sex, musing “to peek or not to peek?”

When she failed to post an update later that day, friends started to contact her. Ms. Hissam decided to return to Facebook to share the news that her unborn baby, a girl, had been found to have fetal hydrops and given no chance of survival.

“I wanted to communicate the news to get people off my back,” Ms. Hissam said in a telephone interview recently. Although her husband was at first surprised that she would share such emotional news publicly, she said, Facebook seemed like one of the least difficult ways to get the word out.

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That night, Weiss was called to the police station and was assigned to call at the homes of two victims, along with a state trooper and a grief counselor.

He knocked on one door at midnight — that of a husband whose wife had been killed in the shooting — and the next door at 1:30 a.m.

Weiss knew both families well. They belonged to his church.

In all those hours of counseling and comforting, no one asked the priest, “Why?” The question came later, starting on Sunday, and Weiss did not have an answer.

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With a profound sense of loss, but in total reverence to God, the Church of Nigeria Anglican Communion announces the death of our dear former Primate, Archbishop, Metropolitan of our Church, father, grand and great grandfather, the Most Revd. Dr. Joseph Abiodun Adetiloye who passed away peacefully in his sleep at his Millennium house country home, Odo-Owa in Ekiti State in the early hours of Friday 14th December, 2012.

Archbishop Adetiloye died at 83 years after working actively and conscientiously as an enigma. A multi dimensional personality, an icon, a great and true disciple of Jesus Christ was born in Odo-Owa in the Ijero Area, Diocese of Ekiti West in Ekiti State on 25th December, 1929.

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Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Anglican Provinces • Church of Nigeria • * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals

There were four of them growing up in Atlanta, four girls close in age, the daughters of an Episcopal priest and his wife....

...today Sarah Ball Damewood and one sister are all who remain with their father in a family robbed of its pieces by physical and mental illness. In 2009, they lost their mother to complications from a stroke.

In 2010, they lost the oldest of the four sisters to breast cancer. She was just 54.

And this year, they lost Caroline, the youngest daughter. They lost Caroline to herself, to the emptiness she had yet to fill.

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[Dr. H. Wayne Carver II, Connecticut's chief medical examiner] said that in the seven autopsies he himself had performed, the victims had from 3 to 11 wounds.

With the examinations complete and the families informed, the authorities released the names of those killed.

They ranged in age from 6 to 56. Among the children, there were 12 girls killed and 8 boys. All of the children were in the first grade, officials said, and all were 6 or 7 years old. One little girl had just turned 7 on Tuesday.

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Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • * Culture-Watch • Children • Marriage & Family • Violence

A 20-year-old man wearing combat gear and armed with semiautomatic pistols and a semiautomatic rifle killed 26 people — 20 of them children — in an attack in an elementary school in central Connecticut on Friday. Witnesses and officials described a horrific scene as the gunman, with brutal efficiency, chose his victims in two classrooms while other students dove under desks and hid in closets.

Hundreds of terrified parents arrived as their sobbing children were led out of the Sandy Hook Elementary School in a wooded corner of Newtown, Conn. By then, all of the victims had been shot and most were dead, and the gunman, identified as Adam Lanza, had committed suicide. The children killed were said to be 5 to 10 years old.

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Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • * Culture-Watch • Children • Education • Marriage & Family • Violence

Your thoughts, reactions and reflections please.

Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • * Culture-Watch • Children • Education • Marriage & Family • Violence

Loving God, who for the salvation of all didst give Jesus Christ as light to a world in darkness: Illumine us, with thy daughter Lucy, with the light of Christ, that by the merits of his passion we may be led to eternal life; through the same Jesus Christ, who with thee and the Holy Spirit livest and reignest, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Church History • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • Spirituality/Prayer • * Culture-Watch • Women

Watch it all.

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[My friend] Tom asked whether on Saturday afternoon I would accompany him to celebrate a Mass in Hitchcock's house.

I was dumbfounded, but of course said yes. On that Saturday, when we found Hitchcock asleep in the living room, Tom gently shook him. Hitchcock awoke, looked up and kissed Tom's hand, thanking him.

Tom said, "Hitch, this is Mark Henninger, a young priest from Cleveland."

"Cleveland?" Hitchcock said. "Disgraceful!"

After we chatted for a while, we all crossed from the living room through a breezeway to his study, and there, with his wife, Alma, we celebrated a quiet Mass....

Weighing one's life with its share of wounds suffered and inflicted in such a perspective, and seeking reconciliation with an experienced and forgiving God, strikes me as profoundly human. Hitchcock's extraordinary reaction to receiving communion was the face of real humanity and religion, far away from headlines . . . or today's filmmakers and biographers.

One of Hitchcock's biographers, Donald Spoto, has written that Hitchcock let it be known that he "rejected suggestions that he allow a priest . . . to come for a visit, or celebrate a quiet, informal ritual at the house for his comfort." That in the movie director's final days he deliberately and successfully led outsiders to believe precisely the opposite of what happened is pure Hitchcock.

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Americans have a long tradition of pampering and memorializing their pets. Now, technology lets precious friends become precious gems.

The idea of turning the carbon in ashes into man-made diamonds emerged a decade ago as a way to memorialize humans. Today, departed pets are fueling the industry's growth, with a handful of companies selling diamonds, gemstones and other jewelry out of pet remains, including hair and feathers.

Some gems start at about $250, while pet diamonds cost at least $1,400, with prices based on color and size. The diamonds have the same physical properties as mined diamonds, purveyors say.

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From here:

"The entire Chiefs family is deeply saddened by today's events, and our collective hearts are heavy with sympathy, thoughts and prayers for the families and friends affected by this unthinkable tragedy. We sincerely appreciate the expressions of sympathy and support we have received from so many in the Kansas City and NFL communities, and ask for continued prayers for the loved ones of those impacted."

You may also read more there.

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Bishop Cragg was laid to rest in the Oxfordshire churchyard of Holy Trinity, Ascott-under-Wychwood, where he and his wife had lived in their retirement. In the church, a tapestry hangs inside the west wall. We were told this had been a gift from Bishop Cragg because he did not like preaching to a blank wooden wall.

He himself had woven a number of the panels while waiting at stations and airports during his long missionary career. Prayers were led by Canon Christopher Lamb, himself a missionary in Pakistan, and specialist on inter-faith relations, whose doctoral studies were on Bishop Cragg’s theology. The Bible reading was chosen by Bishop Cragg himself – 1 Peter chapter 4: “He who has suffered in the body is done with sin. As a result, he does not live the rest of his life for evil human desires, but rather for the will of God.”

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Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Anglican Provinces • Church of England (CoE) • CoE Bishops • * Christian Life / Church Life • Missions • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals

Born in Sumter, SC, October 25,1922, he is the son of the late Joseph Herbert Haynsworth and Katherine Rees Sumter. Bishop Haynsworth began college at the Citadel in 1940 but was called into active duty during WWII. Upon returning from the war he graduated from the Citadel, Class of 1944. While attending Sewanee: University of the South he spent his summers as a counselor at Camp St. Christopher where he met his wife, Babbie, who was the camp nurse. He received his theological degree from the University of the South in 1949. He was ordained a priest in 1950. He served as a priest in SC and Savannah, GA. In 1960, led to serve as a missionary in Central America he ministered to the people of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua....

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Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Episcopal Church (TEC) • TEC Bishops • * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • * International News & Commentary • Central America • --Nicaragua • * South Carolina

Funeral services will be held Nov. 28 for the Rt. Rev. George Edward Haynsworth, 90, retired missionary bishop of Nicaragua and former assistant bishop in the Diocese of South Carolina.

Haynsworth died Nov. 24 after suffering a heart attack the day before. He lived in James Island, South Carolina.

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After his East Mississippi Community College football team went undefeated and won the 2011 junior college championship, star lineman Derrick "DJ" Wilson was offered full athletic scholarships to four-year colleges in Alabama and Louisiana.

But as the football season came to an end, the 2010 Horn Lake High graduate had more important concerns. His mother, Jelks Wilson, was dying of cancer. Wilson was driving home from school every weekend — an eight-hour round-trip — to care for her and his two younger sisters.

Wilson would wake to the sounds of his mother's soft mumbling. Straining to hear, he realized she was praying.

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The Rt. Rev. George Edward Haynsworth, died peacefully this evening, Saturday, November 24, 2012, from complications of a heart attack he suffered Friday, November 23. Bishop Haynsworth served as former Assistant Bishop under the Rt. Rev. C. FitzSimons Allison, and also served as the Bishop of Nicaragua.

Bishop Haynsworth has always been a kind and supportive friend to me and my family and I am so thankful for his life and witness. I shall remember so many things, but most of all that after he suffered through my first sermon in the diocese of South Carolina at Saint John's, John's Island, in the summer of 1985, he was very gentle and gracious to me as a new seminarian--KSH.

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Amid the furor of the United States elections last week, one surprising story stood out. Against all odds and prognostications, the citizens of Massachusetts voted to reject physician assisted suicide. It seemed impossible – Massachusetts, the first state in the Union to allow homosexual marriage, with a media machine that was favorable to the referendum – appeared sure to win.

The “Dignity 2012” campaign proposed to allow physician-assisted suicide for those diagnosed with a terminal illness with six months or less to live. The American Medical Women's Association and the American medical Student’s Association both endorsed the act, the latter claiming that " that quality of life is an important part of health care” the statement then explained that they “adopted the position of supporting the choice of terminally-ill patients who wish to end their suffering. Death with Dignity encompasses this principle and we thoroughly support it."

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Kenneth Cragg stood out among scholars and theologians as one of very few who had the inner conviction to seek the truth in so deep an engagement with a faith other than his own. As a pen name that he used on a number of occasions emphasized, he sought above all to be a servant of mutual understanding. His desire was not to suggest that he is right but to find what is right and true, what truly expresses our best understanding about God and where Christians and Muslims are on common ground in this.

In seeking to ponder the depths of another faith, there was no suspension or dissolution of his own. At the core of his being was the conviction and experience of the saving grace of God in Jesus Christ. So there can be no dodging the hard questions, no intellectual bargaining or good-natured compromise. His wrestling with understanding Islam has never been a merely academic exercise. Personal relations have always been at its heart. One of his favourite concepts was that of hospitality, not merely in the meeting, listening and conversing but in the mind’s seeking the depth of Muslim intentions.

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“Bishop Kenneth Cragg held a unique position in the world of inter faith dialogue. His powerfully original mind, both analytic and poetic, was able to weave together themes and images from many and diverse religious backgrounds into a fresh theological perspective that still managed to do full honour to classical orthodoxy.

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(Via email--KSH).

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Greetings in the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ!

It was sad to hear this morning that Bishop Kenneth Cragg has passed away. For the last few years, he was physically very weak, but mentally he was clear and alert. Although we were hoping that he would make it to be 100 years old in a few months time, his time came to be with the Lord.

Those who heard Kenneth Cragg talking about Jesus Christ could tell how much he loved the Lord. It is difficult for me to forget his tears every time he talked about the sacrificial love of Jesus.

Bishop Kenneth Cragg was very well-known here in the Arab World for his scholarly writings on Islam. He lived for many years here in the Middle East and developed friendships with many Muslims whom he sincerely loved. Many Muslim scholars loved and respected him too! He wrote and spoke about the major differences between Christianity and Islam, but the love that filled his heart towards Muslims embraced these differences. He also made a great contribution in revealing the common grounds between Islam and Christian-ity. I had the privilege of joining him in several seminars about Islam and Christianity here in Cairo and in the UK. His contribution to our Diocese and the Province of Jerusalem and the Middle East will never be forgotten. We re-member with great affection his time as an Assistant Bishop for the Diocese of Egypt and North Africa from 1970-1974. Until recently, continued to be a faithful and active member of the Egypt Diocesan Association. He was the one who chose the current site of All Saints Cathedral in Cairo, Egypt. We shall remember him as we celebrate the Silver Jubilee of All Saints Cathedral in November 2013.

Kenneth Cragg left a great heritage of the many books that he wrote and the love of God that he shared with many of us.
Please pray for his family.

May the Lord bless you!

--(The Most Rev.) Dr. Mouneer Hanna Anis is Bishop of the Episcopal / Anglican Diocese of Egypt with North Africa and the Horn of Africa, and President Bishop of the Episcopal / Anglican Province of Jerusalem and the Middle East

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Caught this over the weekend, really worth the time. If you do not know the story, you need to--KSH.

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O God, the Maker and Redeemer of all believers: Grant to the faithful departed the unsearchable benefits of the passion of thy Son; that on the day of his appearing they may be manifested as thy children; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and ever. Amen

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Perhaps it’s because I am in my mid-fifties as I write this, but whatever the reason, my mind defaults to thoughts about endurance these days. I want to finish well for the glory of Christ. I want to die well. But I have seen too much quitting and falling and failing to take anything for granted. “Let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall” (1 Corinthians 10:12).

--John Piper, Endurance (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2002), page 17

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We are opposed to Question 2 for these reasons:

The proposed safeguards against abuse are insufficient. Enforcement provisions, investigation authority, oversight, or data verification are not included in the act. A witness to the patient’s signed request could also be an heir.
Assisted suicide is not necessary to improve the quality of life at the end of life. Current law gives every patient the right to refuse lifesaving treatment, and to have adequate pain relief, including hospice and palliative sedation....

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Two states, Oregon and Washington, have legalized physician-assisted suicide through voter-approved ballot initiatives. Massachusetts will become the third if voters approve the so-called Death With Dignity ballot question. The measure would let terminally ill patients with six months or less to live get a lethal prescription. The outcome of that vote could change the landscape for legalized suicide nationwide.

When Dr. Marcia Angell was editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine back in the 1990s, she startled many of her colleagues by arguing that dying patients should have a legal right to kill themselves. She took that stance partly because of what her father did when he was in severe pain from prostate cancer.

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The law on assisted dying is out of step with society's standards of compassion, a public debate on the issue heard.

The debate, organised by the Christian Evidence Society, heard from Lord Falconer, who chaired the Commission on Assisted Dying, which reported earlier this year, and the Revd Professor Nigel Biggar, Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology in the University of Oxford.

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The young American was agitated, increasingly emotional, and had laid a loaded gun on the table. The Soviet Union must grant him a visa as soon as possible, he pleaded. His life was being made intolerable by FBI surveillance and he, a dedicated communist, wished to return to the arms of Mother Russia.

One of the three Soviet diplomats present took the gun and unloaded it before returning it to its owner. There would be no visa in the near future, he explained calmly. Dejected, the American gathered up his documents and departed the Soviet consulate, bound not for his previous home in New Orleans, but Dallas. It was Mexico City, Saturday, September 28 1963, and the man wanting the visa was Lee Harvey Oswald. Fifty-five days later, he would assassinate John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th president of the United States.

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Imagine no "Imagine": it's easy if you are a crematorium with a moratorium on "unsuitable" songs for funerals.

Alongside its most recent survey on popular funeral music, the largest funeral director in the UK, Co-operative Funeralcare, has revealed that one in four funeral parlours has had song requests turned down by clerics. Among them is John Lennon's song, with its lyrics "Imagine there's no heaven"....

Huge numbers continue to ask for Frank Sinatra's version of "My Way". It has received the highest billing in each of the past seven surveys, and is requested at 15 per cent of all funerals. "Time To Say Goodbye", by Sarah Brightman and Andrea Bocelli, is next on the list, followed by Bette Midler's "Wind Beneath My Wings".

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As a rule, the family doctor who has known the patient for years is the best judge of her condition and of the earnestness and independence of her request. But he must also consult another doctor, an outsider, for an independent assessment; that doctor must also put his views in writing. Afterward, both reports are submitted to a monitoring committee, which may ask for further explanation and can refer problematic cases to the Inspector of Health and the Public Prosecutor. But their annual reports show that the monitoring committees do this only very rarely — in 2010, at the rate of one in every 300 reported cases.

We called for the consulting doctor, who spent the better part of an hour with Mathilde. Afterward, he called our family doctor and said he was not sure she was suffering enough.

What is unbearable suffering? It is an impossible question. The monitoring committees have given up trying to define it and adopted the view that the patient’s own judgment is decisive, provided the acting doctor is convinced of its earnestness and sincerity....

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He knew what he was taking on, [Bishop James] Jones says. He was inducted into Hillsborough, and the bereaved families' campaign against what they complained was a grievous injustice and a South Yorkshire police cover-up, in his early days as Liverpool's bishop. In 1999, a year into his post, the Hillsborough Family Support Group asked him to preside at the memorial service for the disaster's 10th anniversary, and they explained their continuing agonies.

So he knew the panel would be examining the actions of the police and other powerful people and organisations, none of whom had been held legally accountable, taken responsibility or at that stage apologised for the failings that caused 96 people to die. The panel's report removed 23 years' distortion of the truth about what happened on 15 April 1989 at Liverpool's FA Cup semi-final against Nottingham Forest.

"I was aware," he tells the Guardian, in his first major interview since the panel reported, "that MPs, the police, the media, the judiciary, possibly the government of the day, were in the frame. People might think we in the church are naive; we're not. We know exactly what we are engaging with."

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Jim Eliot, missionary in South America, wrote years ago in his journal: "When it comes time to die, make sure all you have to do is die."

What does it mean for us to die well? What would you need to do? What needs to happen? Are you prepared for heart-stop day? I want to offer a time–in Adult Class on Sunday mornings–to explore that question and fix our hearts on being prepared for the life which awaits us who know Christ, and not as a stranger....

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The Church of England has refused a family's pleas to have their late father exhumed from a "bleak and dangerous" cemetery and reunited in death with his wife in a more peaceful setting.

Geoffrey Tattersall QC, an eclestiastical judge, said that while he had sympathy with the request, it was not exceptional enough to depart from the principle that a Christian burial should be final.

Sylvia Hill and her two brothers Carl and Andrew Corry wanted to have their father John Corry's remains exhumed from Southern Cemetery in Manchester after 19 years and re-interred in Mill Lane Cemetery, Stockport, in a joint grave with their mother, Elizabeth Corry....

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Jaclyn Kinkade, a 23-year-old doctor's-office receptionist and occasional model, was a casualty of America's No. 1 drug menace when she overdosed and died, alone, in a tumbledown clapboard house in Dunnellon, Fla.

The drugs that killed her didn't come from the Colombian jungles or an Afghan poppy field. Two of the three drugs found in her system were sold to Ms. Kinkade, legally, at Walgreen Co. and CVS Caremark shops, the two biggest U.S. pharmacies. Both prescription drugs found in her body were made in the U.S.—the oxycodone in Elizabeth, N.J., by a company being acquired by generic-drug giant Watson Pharmaceuticals Inc., and the methadone in Hobart, N.Y., by Covidien Ltd., another major manufacturer. Every stage of their distribution was government-regulated. In addition, Ms. Kinkade had small amounts of methamphetamine in her system when she died.

The U.S. spends about $15 billion a year fighting illegal drugs, often on foreign soil. But America's deadliest drug epidemic begins and ends at home. More than 15,000 Americans now die annually after overdosing on prescription painkillers called opioids, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—more than from heroin, cocaine and all other illegal drugs combined.

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A new memorial stone honouring a northern cathedral city’s fallen servicemen and women was dedicated last week.
Wakefield Cathedral’s Canon Michael Rawson conducted a blessing ceremony at Coronation Gardens in Wakefield city centre.

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In Uganda, during the eight years in the 1970's when Idi Amin and his men slaughtered probably half a million Ugandans, "We live today and are gone tomorrow" was the common phrase.

We learned that living in danger, when the Lord Jesus is the focus of your life, can be liberating. For one thing, you are no longer imprisoned by your own security, because there is none. So the important security that people sought was to be anchored in God.

As we testified to the safe place we had in Jesus, many people who had been pagan, or were on the fringes of Christianity, flocked to the church or to individuals, asking earnestly, "How do you prepare yourself for death?" Churches all over the country were packed both with members and seekers. This was no comfort to President Amin, who was making wild promises to Libya and other Arab nations that Uganda would soon be a Muslim country. (It is actually 80 per cent Christian)....

It became clear to us through the Scriptures that our resistance was to be that of overcoming evil with good. This included refusing to cooperate with anything that dehumanizes people, but we reaffirmed that we can never be involved in using force or weapons.

...we knew, of course, that the accusation against our beloved brother, Archbishop Janani Luwum, that he was hiding weapons for an armed rebellion, was untrue, a frame-up to justify his murder.

The archbishop's arrest, and the news of his death, was a blow from the Enemy calculated to send us reeling. That was on February 16, 1977. The truth of the matter is that it boomeranged on Idi Amin himself. Through it he lost respect in the world and, as we see it now, it was the beginning of the end for him.

For us, the effect can best be expressed in the words of the little lady who came to arrange flowers, as she walked through the cathedral with several despondent bishops who were preparing for Archbishop Luwum's Memorial Service. She said, "This is going to put us twenty times forward, isn't it?" And as a matter of fact, it did.

More than four thousand people walked, unintimidated, past Idi Amin's guards to pack St. Paul's Cathedral in Kampala on February 20. They repeatedly sang the "Martyr's Song," which had been sung by the young Ugandan martyrs in 1885. Those young lads had only recently come to know the Lord, but they loved Him so much that they could refuse the evil thing demanded of them by King Mwanga. They died in the flames singing, "Oh that I had wings such as angels have, I would fly away and be with the Lord." They were given wings, and the singing of those thousands at the Memorial Service had wings too.

--Festo Kivengere, Revolutionary Love, Chapter Nine

[See here for further information, and, through the wonders of the modern world, you may also find a copy online there]; this was used by yours truly in a recent teaching on the Book of Acts

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In 1948, his career as scholar and teacher took a leap forward with his election as fellow and tutor of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he could exhibit his talents in a more formidable academic setting. He swiftly became known as an inspiring New Testament tutor, forming a tutorial "circus" with JR Porter, the Oriel College Old Testament specialist, and Dennis Nineham, the brilliant young chaplain of the Queen's College, to teach doctrine. With Nineham, Evans gave a memorable series of lectures on the Gospels and the Jesus of history, while not neglecting his pastoral duties.

It was always likely that Evans would be offered a chair; after 10 years at Corpus, he was appointed to the Lightfoot professorship at Durham. However, despite relishing its historic character, he never really settled in the city and the chance to return south came in 1962 with his becoming professor of New Testament studies at King's College London, where he remained for the next 15 years, teaching and lecturing and continuing his challenging and questioning approach to the New Testament.

In 1977 he retired to a bungalow in the village of Cuddesdon, Oxfordshire, a stone's throw from the theological college, where he was a frequent and honoured guest. The death of his wife in 1980 was a grievous blow, but he continued to live positively, tending to the students and staff of the college and keeping a host of friendships from earlier days. To one visitor, at age 98 and over a pub lunch, to the inquiry "What's it like being 98, Christopher?" he replied: "Part of you feels that you shouldn't be here."

Read it all (another from the long queue of should-have-already-been-posted material).

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Fans and players of both Liverpool and Manchester United paid their respects at Anfield to the 96 fans who died at Hillsborough in 1989.

Flowers, shirts and cards were placed outside the Shankly Gates and the by the memorial to the victims of the tragedy 23 years ago.

And as both teams emerged wearing tracksuits bearing the number 96, while United legend Sir Bobby Charlton presented flowers to Liverpool counterpart Ian Rush before respective skippers Steven Gerrard and Ryan Giggs released 96 red balloons.

Take the time to look at the pictures--deeply moving.

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Two years ago, Matthew Proctor dropped to his knees in the Afghan dirt and watched his best friend bleed to death.

These days, when dreams get disturbing or guilt eats at his gut, there is one person the former Marine corporal is likely to call: Thomas Rivers Sr., his dead friend's father.

When Mr. Rivers, 60 years old and a pharmaceutical executive, feels himself sinking into black depression or misses the pleasures of raising a son, it is the 24-year-old Cpl. Proctor he confides in or invites over for a boat ride. "He lost a best friend, and in a sense I lost a best friend as well as my son," says Mr. Rivers. "That is a bond we share."

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More than seven out of ten MPs refuse to back calls to legalise assisted suicide, according to a new survey released last week....

The poll comes just a week after two newly appointed junior health ministers, Anna Soubry and Norman Lamb, suggested that assisted suicide should be decriminalised and just before the Liberal Democrat Conference where some MPs are expected to push for a change in the law.

It found that just 29% of MPs back moves to introduce assisted suicide, while 59% were opposed and 12% were undecided.

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Those who stand to benefit from someone's death are very likely, sincerely, to see the life they want to end as hardly worth living. This is a nasty fact about human nature, but any kind of humanism that isn't grounded in human nature is no more than ludicrous and sinister self-deception. Our propensity to self-serving self-deception is one reason why Christians must insist that God loves every one of his creatures; no one except God does or could.

No wonder that the most recent piece of anti-euthanasia propaganda that I was sent highlighted a figure of 300,000 incidents of elder abuse every year. Supporters of assisted dying see this point. But it just makes them believe more firmly that the right kind of legislation, with the clearest possible safeguards, will stop unwanted grannies being liquidated for their asset value.

I can't share that confidence. Really demented and unpleasant old people can appear rather less human than foetuses do and the changing interpretations of the Abortion Act show how little legal safeguards are worth when the sentiment behind them evaporates.

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In hopes of a joyful Resurrection, here rests the body of
Col. William Rhett
Late of this parish, Principall Officer of His Majesties Customs in this province. He was a person that on all occasions promoted the publick good of this colony, and severall times generously and successfully centured his life in defense of the same. He was a kind husband, a tender father, a faithful friend, a charitable neighbor, a religious constant worshipper of God.
He was born in London 4th Sept 1666,
Arrived and settled this country 19th Novembr 1694,
And dyed suddenly but not unprepared 12 Janry 1722,
In the fifty-seventh year of his age.

--Found in the Saint Phillips Churchyard, Charelston, S,.C.

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