Barring something significant to report or discuss there will be little or no posting through the weekend. Also please be patient with emails as I anticipate being out of town. Have a great holiday and see you all on Monday.A new two-volume history of Russia’s turbulent 20th century is being hailed inside and outside the country as a landmark contribution to the swirling debate over Russia’s past and national identity.Read the rest here.
Written by 45 historians led by Andrei Zubov, a professor at the institute that serves as university to the Russian Foreign Ministry, the weighty history — almost 1,000 pages per volume — was published this year by AST Publishers and is already in its second printing of 10,000 copies.
Retailing at the rough equivalent of $20 a volume and titled “History of Russia. XX Century,” the books try to rise above ideologically charged clashes over Russia’s historical memory. They are critical both of czarist and Communist Russia, and incorporate the history of Russian emigration and the Russian Orthodox Church into the big picture of a chaotic, violent century. While written from a clearly Christian perspective — one author is a Russian Orthodox priest — the history avoids overt nationalism or anti-Semitism.
Eminent historians in the United States and Poland who often take a critical view of Russia’s passionate, partisan discussion of history lauded its balance.
“Nothing like it has ever been published in Russia,” Richard Pipes, the Harvard University Sovietologist, wrote in an e-mail message, noting that he was trying to raise money for a translation and publication in English. “It is a remarkable work: remarkable not only for Russia but also for Western readers. For one, it has gotten away from the nationalism so common in Russian history books, according to which the Russians were always the victims of aggression, never aggressors.”
Mr. Pipes noted that it made extensive use of Western sources — rare in Russia — and praised its attention to often overlooked questions of the role of morals and religious beliefs.
SYDNEY — When Steve Franklin bought four plane tickets on Qantas last June, he faced an unexpected expense: a surcharge of 7.70 Australian dollars on each of the 136.70 dollar ($126) tickets — just for using his Visa credit card.Read the rest here.
Mr. Franklin, who planned to fly his parents and his 7-year-old twin daughters from Sydney to Adelaide, knew that changes to credit card rules had affected the cost of using plastic, but the extra 5.6 percent seemed excessive.
The charges were the consequence of changes in credit card rules in Australia that were aimed, in part, at reducing the cost of hidden fees for using plastic. But the law, passed six years ago, also allowed merchants to tack on new charges, and many have done just that, in some cases with fees that exceed the old ones.
CAIRO // As the largest religious minority in a nation of Muslims, Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox Christians have long felt a sense of battered yet unimpeachable pride: their faith is strong, their institutions sound and, perhaps most importantly, their presence on the banks of the Nile predates Islam’s by several centuries.Read the rest here.
But over the past few months, the Orthodox church’s traditionally defensive stance has turned to face a new opponent. Prominent Orthodox leaders have publicly accused Protestant Evangelicals – a Christian sect with strong roots in the United States – of recruiting Orthodox youth as part of a broader plot to evangelise Egypt’s estimated eight million Christians.
The growing row among Christian denominations has challenged old assumptions about the pre-eminence of the Orthodox faith in Egypt’s vibrant Christian life.
“There are many rules among [Christians]. One of the most important of these rules is not to recruit people from one church to another,” said Father Abdel Masiih Basiit, the pastor of St Mary’s Orthodox Church of Mostarid in Qalubiya, about an hour north of Cairo. “[The Evangelicals] did not respect this rule.”
While Evangelical leaders acknowledge that they receive financial backing from the United States – just as the Coptic church takes support from the Orthodox diaspora – they have fervently denied that there is any such recruitment scheme. Like any religious institution, community leaders say, Evangelicals welcome all those who want to learn more about their faith. To the extent that Evangelicals do proselytise, it is to those Christians whose faith has lapsed and who may lack allegiance to a specific Christian sect, say Protestant leaders.
Navy SEALs have secretly captured one of the most wanted terrorists in Iraq — the alleged mastermind of the murder and mutilation of four Blackwater USA security guards in Fallujah in 2004. And three of the SEALs who captured him are now facing criminal charges, sources told FoxNews.com.Read the rest here.
The three, all members of the Navy's elite commando unit, have refused non-judicial punishment — called an admiral's mast — and have requested a trial by court-martial.
Ahmed Hashim Abed, whom the military code-named "Objective Amber," told investigators he was punched by his captors — and he had the bloody lip to prove it.
Now, instead of being lauded for bringing to justice a high-value target, three of the SEAL commandos, all enlisted, face assault charges and have retained lawyers.
MOSCOW, November 23 (Itar-Tass) - The Reverend Daniil Sysoyev murdered at the Church of St Thomas on November 19 has been buried at Moscow’s Kuntsevskoye cemetery.Read the rest here.
Father Daniil was buried near the tombs of Prince Nikolai Obolensky and famous publisher Sergei Sabashnikov and next to the Holy Saviour Church.
The funeral service at the Church of Apostles Peter and Paul in Yasenevo was attended by Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia.
The murder of the Reverend Daniil Sysoyev testifies to the grandeur and strength of the Orthodox idea for which he gave his life, he said.
“Very often violence is aimed against those who gives evidence of God and truth. When hatred blurs the eyes and there are no other arguments, they direct violence against those who speak of God and truth. Being unable to resist a priest’s word with their head and heart, they pour torrents of slander and spite upon the clergyman or even raise hand against him,” the patriarch said.
“Father Daniil did much to assert God’s truth. He participated in different discussions and disputes and defended God’s truth to the best of his ability and talent. But perhaps the strongest word he has ever uttered is the one we can all witness now,” His Holiness said.
In his opinion, “when a person is killed for God’s truth, this means that this truth hurts those who resist it and has a great force.”
The Greek Orthodox church of Cyprus has sued Turkey in a European court for allegedly preventing worship at religious sites in the divided island's breakaway Turkish Cypriot north, a church lawyer said Monday.Read the rest here.
The lawsuit with the European Court of Human Rights concerns 520 churches, monasteries, chapels and cemeteries the church lost when Turkey invaded in 1974, after a coup by supporters of union with Greece, said Simos Angelides, a lawyer representing the church.
The Orthodox Christian faithful cannot worship at these sites because they are either derelict or have been converted into mosques, army barracks, stables or nightclubs, Angelides said.
Turkish officials were not immediately available for comment.
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Gold has long been favored by a fringe of the investment world, but this year some of the world's leading hedge-fund managers have loaded up on the precious metal amid concern government efforts to avoid another Great Depression that could undermine major currencies and fuel rampant inflation.Read the rest here.
"I have never been a gold bug," Paul Tudor Jones, chairman of hedge-fund giant Tudor Investment Corp., wrote in an Oct. 15 letter to investors. "It is just an asset that, like everything else in life, has its time and place. And now is that time."
Tudor has been building positions in gold and other precious metals in recent months and they now represent the firm's largest commodities exposure, he noted.
John Paulson's Paulson & Co., one of the world's largest hedge fund firms that made billions betting against subprime mortgages, is launching a new gold fund Jan. 1 and became the largest holder of the SPDR Gold Shares exchange-traded fund /quotes/comstock/13*!gld/quotes/nls/gld (GLD 112.94, +0.64, +0.57%) this year.
Greenlight Capital, run by David Einhorn, reversed a long-time aversion to gold, while Kyle Bass's Hayman Advisors LP held more than 15% of its portfolio in gold and other precious metals earlier this year. Eton Park Capital, headed by former Goldman Sachs /quotes/comstock/13*!gs/quotes/nls/gs (GS 170.01, -2.82, -1.63%) trader Eric Mindich, has also got in on the act.
"I can't remember in 20 years so many respected investors focused on a single strategy," said Bradley Alford of Alpha Capital Management, which invests in hedge funds. "Some of these people are icons of the industry with at least 15-year track records. It's a losing proposition to bet against guys like that. They aren't billionaires because they make bad bets."
WASHINGTON — The United States government is financing its more than trillion-dollar-a-year borrowing with i.o.u.’s on terms that seem too good to be true.Read the rest here.
But that happy situation, aided by ultralow interest rates, may not last much longer.
Treasury officials now face a trifecta of headaches: a mountain of new debt, a balloon of short-term borrowings that come due in the months ahead, and interest rates that are sure to climb back to normal as soon as the Federal Reserve decides that the emergency has passed.
Even as Treasury officials are racing to lock in today’s low rates by exchanging short-term borrowings for long-term bonds, the government faces a payment shock similar to those that sent legions of overstretched homeowners into default on their mortgages.
With the national debt now topping $12 trillion, the White House estimates that the government’s tab for servicing the debt will exceed $700 billion a year in 2019, up from $202 billion this year, even if annual budget deficits shrink drastically. Other forecasters say the figure could be much higher.
In concrete terms, an additional $500 billion a year in interest expense would total more than the combined federal budgets this year for education, energy, homeland security and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
CAIRO — A flurry of executions and death sentences in Iran has raised concern that the government is using judicially sanctioned killing to intimidate the political opposition and quell pockets of ethnic unrest around the nation, human rights groups and Iran experts said.Read the rest here.
In Iran, where there is precedent for executions to surge in the wake of a crisis, human rights groups said there was mounting evidence that the trend had emerged in response to the political tumult that followed the June presidential election. This month, a fifth person connected to the protests was sentenced to death.
In at least one instance, a Kurdish activist was hanged after the government added a new charge, raising concerns that cases with political overtones were drawing more serious penalties.
In the short period between the disputed June election and the inauguration of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in August, 115 people were executed, according to statistics compiled by human rights groups and Iranian news agencies. Though the executions mostly involved violent criminals and drug dealers, the number and pace of the killings appeared to be sending a message to the opposition, said human rights groups and Iran experts.
“The regime never expected to see people demonstrate so openly since the elections,” said Hossein Askari, a professor of international affairs at George Washington University. “The executions are intended to frighten them. It is absolutely intended for that purpose.”
PreambleRead the rest here here.
Christians are heirs of a 2,000-year tradition of proclaiming God's word, seeking justice in our societies, resisting tyranny, and reaching out with compassion to the poor, oppressed and suffering.
While fully acknowledging the imperfections and shortcomings of Christian institutions and communities in all ages, we claim the heritage of those Christians who defended innocent life by rescuing discarded babies from trash heaps in Roman cities and publicly denouncing the Empire's sanctioning of infanticide. We remember with reverence those believers who sacrificed their lives by remaining in Roman cities to tend the sick and dying during the plagues, and who died bravely in the coliseums rather than deny their Lord.
After the barbarian tribes overran Europe, Christian monasteries preserved not only the Bible but also the literature and art of Western culture. It was Christians who combated the evil of slavery: Papal edicts in the 16th and 17th centuries decried the practice of slavery and first excommunicated anyone involved in the slave trade; evangelical Christians in England, led by John Wesley and William Wilberforce, put an end to the slave trade in that country. Christians under Wilberforce's leadership also formed hundreds of societies for helping the poor, the imprisoned, and child laborers chained to machines.
In Europe, Christians challenged the divine claims of kings and successfully fought to establish the rule of law and balance of governmental powers, which made modern democracy possible. And in America, Christian women stood at the vanguard of the suffrage movement. The great civil rights crusades of the 1950s and 60s were led by Christians claiming the Scriptures and asserting the glory of the image of God in every human being regardless of race, religion, age or class.
This same devotion to human dignity has led Christians in the last decade to work to end the dehumanizing scourge of human trafficking and sexual slavery, bring compassionate care to AIDS sufferers in Africa, and assist in a myriad of other human rights causes - from providing clean water in developing nations to providing homes for tens of thousands of children orphaned by war, disease and gender discrimination.
Like those who have gone before us in the faith, Christians today are called to proclaim the Gospel of costly grace, to protect the intrinsic dignity of the human person and to stand for the common good. In being true to its own calling, the call to discipleship, the church through service to others can make a profound contribution to the public good.
“A political system based on force, oppression, changing people’s votes, killing, closure, arresting and using Stalinist and medieval torture, creating repression, censorship of newspapers, interruption of the means of mass communications, jailing the enlightened and the elite of society for false reasons, and forcing them to make false confessions in jail, is condemned and illegitimate,”-Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri in recent comments condemning the Iranian police state.
Prior to the opening of formal conversations between officials of the Holy See and leaders of the Lefebvrist Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), which began on Oct. 26, the mainstream media frequently misrepresented these discussions as a negotiation aimed at achieving a compromise that both sides can live with. That was to be expected from reporters and commentators for whom everything is politics and everything is thus negotiable. Alas, similar misrepresentations came from “Vatican insiders” who suggested that the teaching of the Second Vatican Council was under joint review by the Holy See and the SSPX, which only made matters worse.Read the rest here.
Here is what’s going on here, and what isn’t.
1. The conversations between leaders of the SSPX and the Holy See are just that: conversations. These are not negotiations, for there is nothing to be negotiated; nor is this a dialogue between equal partners. On the one hand, we have the bishop of Rome and those curial officials whose work is an extension of his papal office; on the other hand, we have a society of clergy who have been living in disobedience to the Roman pontiff for decades, and their lay followers, many of whom are more confused than willfully schismatic. The purpose of these conversations is to make clear what the Second Vatican Council taught (especially about the nature of the Church), to listen politely to what the SSPX has to say, and to invite the SSPX back into the full communion of the Catholic Church, which the SSPX broke in 1988 when Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre committed the schismatic act of illicitly ordaining bishops without the authorization of the Roman pontiff (and against the direct, personal pleas of Pope John Paul II).
MOSCOW (Reuters) - A masked gunman entered a church and murdered a Russian Orthodox priest who had received death threats for converting Muslims to Christianity and criticizing Islam, prosecutors and church officials said Friday.Read the rest here.
The killing could threaten delicate relations between the powerful majority Russian Orthodox Church, which has close ties to the Kremlin, and the country's growing Muslim minority of about 20 million.
The gunman approached priest Daniil Sysoyev, 34, in St Thomas Church in southern Moscow Thursday night, checked his name and then opened fire with a pistol, a spokesman for the investigating committee of the Prosecutor-General's office said.
"The main theory is that religious motives are behind the crime," spokesman Anatoly Bagmet said.
Sysoyev died on the way to hospital. His choirmaster was injured in the attack, Bagmet said, and is in hospital under armed guard.
Citing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s call to civil disobedience, 145 evangelical, Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian leaders have signed a declaration saying they will not cooperate with laws that they say could be used to compel their institutions to participate in abortions, or to bless or in any way recognize same-sex couples.Read the rest here.
“We pledge to each other, and to our fellow believers, that no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence,” it says.
The manifesto, to be released on Friday at the National Press Club in Washington, is an effort to rejuvenate the political alliance of conservative Catholics and evangelicals that dominated the religious debate during the administration of President George W. Bush. The signers include nine Roman Catholic archbishops and the primate of the Orthodox Church in America.
To the little boy pictured with his great granduncle who tomorrow celebrates his 97th birthday...
May God grant Prince Otto many (more) years!JERUSALEM — Dov Hikind, a member of the New York State Assembly, was in this disputed city on Wednesday looking for property to buy. He said he was most excited about a new apartment complex overlooking the Old City called Nof Zion.Read the rest here.
At noon, Mr. Hikind led a group of about 50 American Jews in laying a cornerstone for the next phase of Nof Zion, with construction scheduled to start next spring. “I want to buy here,” Mr. Hikind said. “I might make a deal while I am here this time.”
More than a real estate deal, though, it would be a statement: Nof Zion, a private Jewish project, is in Jebel Mukaber, a Palestinian Arab neighborhood of East Jerusalem, in territory Israel captured from Jordan in the 1967 war. Israel claims sovereignty over all Jerusalem; the Palestinians demand the eastern part as the capital of a future state.
Even within Israel, the idea of Jews moving into predominantly Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem stirs heated debate. Two well-known Israeli families refused City Hall’s offer to name the street leading to Nof Zion for their deceased relatives, according to the local Jerusalem press.
But illustrating the complexity of the Jerusalem conundrum, others argue that Jews, Christians and Muslims should be able to live wherever they like. Not allowing Jews to live in certain neighborhoods of the city “is segregation,” said Mr. Hikind, a Democrat who represents several heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn.
Today, on November 15, 2009, at 10.45 at the Military Medical Academy in Belgrade, after receiving the Sacrament, Archbishop of Pec, Metropolitan of Belgrade and Karlovac , Patriarch Pavle of Serbia reposed in the Lord. 
By a decision of the Synod of Bishops, all Western rite communities of our Church, wheresoever they may be, are directly under the authority of the Metropolitan, and not the local ruling bishop. That is, all Western rite communities have been made stavropigial.
The Russian Orthodox Church may sever relations with the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), a major Protestant church of Western Europe that has elected a woman to chair the EKD's council.Source.
The Orthodox clergy say this runs counter to evangelical principles. Analysts fear this could provoke a big inter-faith conflict.
Bishop Margot Kassmann, the first woman to lead the Evangelical Church in Germany, which unites some 24 million Protestants of more than 20 Lutheran and Reformed churches, was elected at the council's meeting on October 28. The 51-year-old bishop of Hanover is divorced and has four daughters.
"We plan to celebrate 50 years of dialog with the German Lutheran Church in late November and early December," Hilarion, the bishop of Volokolamsk and head of the Moscow patriarchy's external church relations department, said on Wednesday. "The celebrations will also mark the end of that dialog."
The Russian Orthodox Church does not accept female clergy.
"A female bishop is a contradiction of the evangelical principles," said Georgy Zavershinsky, the PR head of the external church relations department. "Therefore, there can be no church relations between us. We will most likely have to deal with their church as with a public organization."
Russian Lutherans support the arguments of the Russian Orthodox Church. Alexander Prilutsky, chief secretary of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Ingria (Russia), said female bishops were evidence of "a crisis in the Western society."
"Our relations with Western Protestants have recently become more complicated because of their liberal theological practices," said Bishop Konstantin Bendas, director for temporal affairs at the Russian Associated Union of Christians of Evangelical Faith. "Unfortunately, the West is departing from the evangelical principles. Sweden, for example, has deviated the most by electing a lesbian bishop."
If the inter-faith dialog stops, "this could lead to severance of diplomatic relations between German Christians and the Russian Orthodox Church," said Roman Lunkin, director of the Institute of Religion and Law and a senior researcher at the Russian Academy of Science's Institute of Europe. "This could provoke the largest inter-Christian conflict of the past years."
"I am usually glad to get some of what I want today as opposed to nothing, especially when I know I can still fight for the rest later on."-Ronald Reagan
From the edge of the Thames River in New London, Conn., Michael Cristofaro surveyed the empty acres where his parents’ neighborhood had stood, before it became the crux of an epic battle over eminent domain.Read the rest here.
“Look what they did,” Mr. Cristofaro said on Thursday. “They stole our home for economic development. It was all for Pfizer, and now they get up and walk away.”
That sentiment has been echoing around New London since Monday, when Pfizer, the giant drug company, announced it would leave the city just eight years after its arrival led to a debate about urban redevelopment that rumbled through the United States Supreme Court, and reset the boundaries for governments to seize private land for commercial use.
Pfizer said it would pull 1,400 jobs out of New London within two years and move most of them a few miles away to a campus it owns in Groton, Conn., as a cost-cutting measure. It would leave behind the city’s biggest office complex and an adjacent swath of barren land that was cleared of dozens of homes to make room for a hotel, stores and condominiums that were never built.
The announcement stirred up resentment and bitterness among some local residents. They see Pfizer as a corporate carpetbagger that took public money, in the form of big tax breaks, and now wants to run.
“I’m not surprised that they’re gone,” said Susette Kelo, who moved to Groton from New London after the city took her home near Pfizer’s property. “They didn’t get what they wanted: their development, their big plan.”
MOSCOW -- Russian President Dmitry Medvedev called on his country Thursday to shed its "humiliating" dependence on exports of oil and other raw materials and to adopt a more pragmatic foreign policy aimed at attracting investment and promoting growth.Read the rest here.
In an unusually blunt appraisal of the state of his nation, Medvedev also warned that Russia has been hit harder than most by the global economic crisis and needs to undertake sweeping reforms to build a modern, high-tech economy if it is to remain a world power.
"Our relations with other countries should be focused on the task of modernizing Russia. We mustn't, as they say, puff out our chests," he said during a 100-minute televised address. "We are interested in the flow of capital, new technologies and modern ideas."
Medvedev avoided directly criticizing his patron and predecessor, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who sat without smiling in the audience of lawmakers and other officials at the Kremlin. But the speech represented a subtle rebuke of Putin's legacy. In his most stinging remarks, Medvedev said the country had been "kept afloat" by Soviet-era achievements, without mentioning Putin's eight years as president.
The head of Russia’s Orthodox Church has flown fighter jets and passenger airliners and has tried to convince colleagues of the joys of parachute jumps, according to a senior cleric in Moscow.Source
Patriarch Kirill, enthroned as leader of the world’s 160 million Russian Orthodox believers in February, spends much of his time following rituals little changed since the Middle Ages. But he has other ways to get close to the heavens.
“He has taken the control stick of passenger planes, to which I am a witness, and of fighter jets,” said Archbishop Hilarion Alfeyev, quoted by Interfax news agency.
“Once he even tried to convince me to make a parachute jump,” said Alfeyev, a senior cleric who oversees the church’s relations with other Christian denominations. “I said I was ready so as long as I knew the date in advance so I could leave my papers in order.” He said the 62-year-old patriarch had not yet set a date.
The Greek Orthodox Church is urging Christians across Europe to unite in an appeal against a ban on crucifixes in classrooms in Italy.Source
The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg ruled last week that the presence of crucifixes violated a child's right to freedom of religion.
Greece's Orthodox Church fears the Italian case will set a precedent.
It has called an emergency Holy Synod meeting for next week to devise an action plan.
Although the Greek Orthodox Church has been at odds with Roman Catholicism for 1,000 years, the judicial threat to Christian symbols has acted as a unifying force.
The European Court of Human Rights found that the compulsory display of crucifixes violated parents' rights to educate their children as they saw fit and restricted the right of children to believe or not to believe.
'Worthy symbols'
The head of the Greek Church, Archbishop Ieronymos, shares Catholic complaints that the court is ignoring the role of Christianity in forming Europe's identity.
It is not only minorities that have rights but majorities as well, said the archbishop.
One of his subordinates, Bishop Nicholas from central Greece, lamented that at this rate youngsters will not have any worthy symbols at all to inspire and protect them.
Football and pop idols are very poor substitutes, he said.
The Greek Church has ostensibly intervened in this case in response to an appeal by a Greek mother whose son is studying in Italy.
But without doubt it is concerned that its omnipotence in Greece is under threat.
A human rights group called Helsinki Monitor is seeking to use the Italian case as a precedent.
It has demanded that Greek courts remove icons of Jesus Christ from above the judge's bench and that the gospel no longer be used for swearing oaths in the witness box.
Helsinki Monitor is urging trade unions to challenge the presence of religious symbols in Greek schools.
The socialist government here is also considering imposing new taxes on the Church's vast fortune, but at the same time is urging it to do more to help immigrants and poor Greeks.
Not long ago, big brass-buttoned military coats looked a bit extreme. So did high-button, high-lapel vests and slim tweed trousers. And so did guys who tucked said trousers into high, old-fashioned hunting boots. Now these clothes (along with those ever-present beards and mustaches) look like downtown defaults compared with fall runway looks like cardinal-red tailcoats at Ralph Lauren, capes and bowlers at Alexander McQueen and knee breeches at Robert Geller.Read the rest here.
As with home design, where curio cases, taxidermy and other stylish clutter of the Victorian era have been taken up by young hipsters, many of today’s popular men’s styles have their roots in the late 19th century. There are the three-piece suits once favored by mustachioed Gilded Age bankers; the military greatcoats and boots of Union officers; and the henley undershirts, suspenders, plaid flannel shirts and stout drill trousers worn by plain, honest farmers.
Just ask Taavo Somer, whose restaurant Freemans, with its mounted animal heads and antique oil landscapes, has been one of the trend’s most active petri dishes (and who lives the fantasy sufficiently to enjoy shooting skeet on weekends upstate). Even his eyebrows went up recently when he saw a young man dressed in a bowler, cape, breeches and knee socks on the Lower East Side.
Source.
Tonight, with the aide of some 60 Democrats, women's rights were effectively negated by the US Congress as the House passed the Stupak amendment to HR 3962, the Affordable Health Care Act of 2009.Read the rest here.
More in-depth analysis of how we got here is forthcoming. But one thing is clear: The US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) apparently is running the US government, aided by a cadre of "faith-based advocacy groups," the House Democratic leadership, the White House and members of the Senate.
If you didn't know that before, be clear about it. Know it now.And this is particularly true when it comes to women's rights. Any time there is an "important" vote that implicates women's rights and onto which a politician has hitched their political star--in this case President Obama and Speaker Nancy Pelosi among them--you can bet that the Bishops will be wielding huge influence to make sure no "gains" can be made unless women are screwed. You will hear a lot tomorrow and in the days ahead as to how "this important bill" could not be "held hostage" to any one issue, "it's not perfect," and how "compromises needed to be made," in order to "get things done."
Abandoning the diplomatic language typical of ecumenical pronouncements, the North American Orthodox-Catholic Theological Consultation, chaired by Archbishop Gregory Aymond of New Orleans and Greek Orthodox Metropolitan Maximos of Pittsburgh, has issued a candid critique of the 2007 “Ravenna document,” a modest milestone in Catholic-Orthodox ecumenical relations.Read the rest here.
The Ravenna document, while not purporting to be the Church’s official teaching, was issued by the Joint International Commission for the Theological Dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, chaired by Cardinal Walter Kasper and Metropolitan Ioannis of Pergamon. A month after the document was issued, Cardinal Kasper told other cardinals that “for the first time the Orthodox representatives recognized a universal level of the Church and admitted that at this level there also exists a Protos, a Primate, who can only be the Bishop of Rome according to the taxis [order] of the ancient Church. All the participants are aware that this is only a first step and that the journey toward full ecclesial communion will be long and difficult; yet, with this document we have set a base for future dialogue.”
After praising aspects of the Ravenna document, the North American Catholic and Orthodox participants in ecumenical dialogue issued their candid critique:
Like gold, U.S. dollars have value only to the extent that they are strictly limited in supply. But the U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost. By increasing the number of U.S. dollars in circulation, or even by credibly threatening to do so, the U.S. government can also reduce the value of a dollar in terms of goods and services, which is equivalent to raising the prices in dollars of those goods and services. We conclude that, under a paper-money system, a determined government can always generate higher spending and hence positive inflation.-Ben Bernanke from a speech in 2002
Of course, the U.S. government is not going to print money and distribute it willy-nilly
Click to enlarge.Starting Sunday, cash-strapped California will dig deeper into the pocketbooks of wage earners -- holding back 10% more than it already does in state income taxes just as the biggest shopping season of the year kicks into gear.Read the rest here
Technically, it's not a tax increase, even though it may feel like one when your next paycheck arrives. As part of a bundle of budget patches adopted in the summer, the state is taking more money now in withholding, even though workers' annual tax bills won't change.
Think of it as a forced, interest-free loan: You'll be repaid any extra withholding in April. Those who would receive a refund anyway will receive a larger one, and those who owe taxes will owe less.
...When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s body was borne on a mule-drawn sharecropper’s cart through the thronged streets of Atlanta, the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy wisely and symbolically wore scuffed marching boots under his pulpit robe. “A good funeral,” says Thomas Lynch, a poet and undertaker in Milford, Mich., “is one that gets the dead where they need to go and the living where they need to be.”Read the rest here.
Today, however, our death rituals have become downsized, inwardly directed, static and, as a result, spiritually and culturally impoverished. We tend now to recognize our dead only for their partial passions and whims. They were Mets fans, good for laughs at the office, pleasant companions on the links. At upbeat, open-mike “celebrations of life,” former coaches, neighbors and relatives amuse us with stories and naïvely declare that the dead, who are usually nowhere to be seen and have nowhere to go, will nevertheless live always in our memories. Funerals, which once made confident public pilgrimage through town to the graveyard, now tread lightly across the tiny tableau of our psyches.
Even those mourners who, by will or habit, wish to take their dead to the place of departure often find their way blocked. Some cemeteries, fearing liability lawsuits from falls and the like, no longer allow funeral processions to go the distance to the open grave but encourage the mourners to leave the coffin in a faux sanctuary at the entrance. And many American crematories, unlike their European counterparts, are not designed to allow mourners to accompany the body all the way to the fire. Instead the dead must be dropped off, like a night deposit at the bank.
We hardly complain, though. For the first time in history, the actual presence of the dead at their own funerals has become optional, even undesirable, lest the body break the illusion of a cloudless celebration, spoil the meditative mood and reveal the truths about grief, life and death that our thinned-out ceremonies cannot bear.
