My friend and fellow Wildcat, Nick Temple, is a retired pastor who lives in Louisville. Although in poor health, he continues his ministry in the ways open to him.
This is his Christmas Blessing for us all. Thanks, Nick.
…their yellow ribbon patriotism and shallow concern fade quickly to apathy and indifference. The living refuse of war that returns are heroes no longer, but outcasts and derelicts, and burdens on the economy. The dead, they mythologize with memorials and speeches of past and future suffering and loss. Inspiring and prophetic words by those who sanction the slaughter to those who know nothing of sacrifice. …
Obama says goodbye to late grandmother in Hawaii – Yahoo! News
President-elect Barack Obama paid his last respects on Tuesday to the woman he called the rock of his family, the grandmother who helped to raise him, before scattering her ashes from a Hawaiian shoreline. …
Man, am I cranky today. First, I am cranky that every time a Christian church does something wonderful and good, you don’t hear about it. Whenever someone’s faith in God performs miracles in their life, the media is silent. But the second some wacko sees the Virgin Mary in a bowl of alphabet soup, or some stupid church in Jacksonville, Florida violates basic Christian principles of Grace, it is all over FOX news or CNN. It is as if any time there is a chance to show how retarded religion and faith are they put it on page one.
I’m talking about the story a few weeks ago about some woman who saw the formerly Virgin Mary in her MRI scan, and the headline on FOX news today that some church in Jacksonville is going all kool-aid cult like on some woman.
So, I am angry at the concerted effort of the media to consistently show faith and religion as stupid and retarded.
But, I am also angry at this church in Jacksonville, Florida, who actually was stupid enough to send a written letter to a former member, telling her she needed to meet with them and repent of her sins, or they would publicly admonish her in front of the entire congregation January 4th. Happy New Year! … more …
via Some Cranky Guy.
Pagan religion welcomes the first cemetery for worshippers of the old Norse gods…
Three Christian graves that already exist at the site will remain, as the descendants have all given their blessing to the new venture….
via The Copenhagen Post.
It is probably fairly clear by now, even if you have only glanced in passing at this blog, that I am not particularly mystically inclined. As Stephen Batchelor writes, “The Buddha was not a mystic. His awakening was not a shattering insight into a transcendental truth that revealed to him the mysteries of God. He did not claim to have had an experience that granted him privileged, esoteric knowledge of how the universe ticks.” Whilst I’m not sure that these days I would be quite as bold as Batchelor is about what the Buddha was or wasn’t like – the distances in time are too great, the records upon which we rely are too compromised – I’m in agreement with the spirit of this quote. Wisdom, as I have suggested before, is simply not the kind of thing that can be esoteric. There may be esoteric knowledge (for example, there are people who know a whole load about the social lives of naked mole rats, which by my standards, and by the standards of most people I know, seems pretty esoteric), but there is no esoteric wisdom.
But what do I mean by “wisdom”?
via thinkBuddha.org.
By making a conscious decision to be cheerful, including when we are in pain, we diminish our identification with unhappy circumstances and strengthen our confidence that we are not entirely at their mercy. This brings us choice – perhaps not over the circumstances themselves, but over how we relate to them. If we choose to respond with cheerfulness, we not only stand a better chance of weathering the storm, but we are subtly strengthening our ability to deal constructively and positively with life’s inevitable insults.
LUCKY SEVERSON: If something seems odd or unusual about these worshippers, maybe it’s the diversity, all the different colors and nationalities of their faces. This is the Wilcrest Baptist Church in Houston, and Pastor Rodney Woo couldn’t be more proud of the cultural and racial mix of his congregation.
Pastor RODNEY WOO (Wilcrest Baptist Church, Houston, TX): I think my main passion is to get people ready for heaven. I think a lot of our people are going to go into culture shock when they get to heaven, and they get to sit next to somebody that they didn’t maybe sit with while they were here on earth. So we’re trying to get them acclimated a little bit.
via December 19, 2008 ~ Interracial Churches | Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.
WASHINGTON (ABP) — A majority of American Christians believe that at least some non-Christian faiths can lead to eternal life, says a new survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
Even among evangelicals, a branch of Protestant Christianity identified with the idea that an individual must be “born again” into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ in order to be saved, nearly as many Christians said many religions can lead to eternal life (47 percent) as those who believe theirs is the one true faith (49 percent).
The survey, released Dec. 18, followed up an earlier poll that found that seven Americans in 10 believe many religions can lead to salvation while less than one quarter say their faith is the only one that is true.
via Associated Baptist Press – Survey says most Americans believe in multiple paths to salvation.
PRESIDENT-ELECT: Over the past few weeks, Vice President-Elect Biden and I have announced some of the leaders who will advise us as we seek to meet Americas twenty-first century challenges, from strengthening our security, to rebuilding our economy, to preserving our planet for our children and grandchildren. Today, I am pleased to announce members of my science and technology team whose work will be critical to these efforts. Continue reading
The roughly 67 million Catholics in the United States make up nearly one-quarter of the American population, but just 6 percent of the global Catholic total of 1.1 billion. Ninety-four percent of the Catholics in the world, in other words, are not Americans, which may help explain why the pope and his lieutenants are not always thinking American thoughts when they get out of bed in the morning.
That’s a useful bit of context to bear in mind in light of a tough new Vatican document on bioethics, released one week ago, that ratchets up the church’s condemnations of embryonic stem cell research, in vitro fertilization, the “morning-after pill” and a host of other techniques it regards as violations of human dignity. …
via Op-Ed Contributor – The Pope’s Real Message for Obama – NYTimes.com.
A tissue reprogramming technique that promises an almost limitless source of stem cells without the need to destroy embryos has been named as the breakthrough of the year by the prestigious journal Science.
via Year that could be turning point on disease – Times Online.
The Winter Solstice marks the time in the year when the Sun is farthest away from the northern hemisphere, which causes the longest night and shortest day of the year. It was celebrated as a time of rebirth for ancient people because it meant the return of the life-giving sun. And they had some very interesting ways of celebrating…
via Winter Solstice December 21 2008 | The Frisky.
In the Northern Hemisphere, the Winter Solstice occurs on December 21, 2008 at 7 :04 AM EST and 12:04 UT (Universal Time).
Brown, whose office requires him to defend state laws unless he cannot find reasonable legal grounds to do so, said after Prop. 8 passed Nov. 4 that he would support the initiative before the state’s high court.
But in a lengthy filing today, he argued that the measure was “inconsistent with the guarantees of individual liberty” in California’s governing charter.
“Proposition 8 must be invalidated because the amendment process cannot be used to extinguish fundamental constitutional rights without compelling justification,” Brown said.
