Scrolling around...August 5, 2013

Agnus Dei: Presbyterian hymnal fight makes news
..What followed was a fascinating discussion of atonement theories and God’s love, featuring Protestants, Pope Benedict XVI and church fathers alike.

You could also read about this hymnal debate in Christianity Today and throughout the Christian press and blogosphere. It was huge news and a major point of discussion.

Everywhere, that is, except for in the mainstream media...

Bali: Charismatic churches surge in growth amid a devout—and sometimes violent—Hindu majority
...Christianity in Bali is now growing faster than the population in Indonesia. In the past 15 years, immigration of Christians from other parts of Indonesia and active crusades to encourage conversions of native Balinese have contributed to the growth...

UK’s biggest ‘fatberg’ discovered in London sewer
..."While we've removed greater volumes of fat from under central London in the past, we've never seen a single, congealed lump of lard this big clogging our sewers before.

“Given we’ve got the biggest sewers and this is the biggest fatberg we’ve encountered, we reckon it has to be the biggest such berg in British history.

“The sewer was almost completely clogged with over 15 tonnes of fat. If we hadn’t discovered it in time, raw sewage could have started spurting out of manholes across the whole of Kingston.

“It was so big it damaged the sewer and repairs will take up to six weeks...

Same-Sex Couple to Sue Church of England for Marriage Rights
Following legislation that permits same-sex “marriage” in the U.K. yet prohibits the Church of England from performing the ceremony, two men are planning to sue to be able to marry in their church.

“We are happy for gay marriage to be recognized — in that sense it is a big step. But it is actually a small step because it is something we still cannot actually do,” Barrie Drewitt-Barlow told the Essex Chronicle Aug. 1.

“We need to convince the church that it is the right thing for our community for them to recognize as practicing Christians.”

Georgette Forney: From Abortion Regret to a Life of Redemption and Pro-Life Leadership
Regrets — everyone has them and one of the true indicators of a person’s character is how well he or she can learn from his or her mistakes, failures and errors and move forward to a productive and meaningful life.

A person may be defined by his or her regrets, being ever-crushed under the magnitude of those errors, or one can, with God’s grace, use those experiences to be a blessing to others. One lady who has done just that is Georgette Forney.

Finding herself pregnant as a 16-year-old high-school junior in Michigan, Mrs. Forney made an all-too common decision — she had an abortion and afterwards went to her sister’s house to spend the night so that her mother wouldn’t know what she’d done. She woke up the next day and said, “Yesterday never happened.” For 19 years she continued that denial until randomly looking through the high school yearbook that she’d come across while cleaning house...

U.S. extends embassy closings; warnings renew debate over NSA data collection
The closing of U.S. embassies in 21 predominantly Muslim countries and a broad caution about travel during August that the State Department issued on Friday touched off debate Sunday over the National Security Agency’s sweeping data collection programs.

Congressional supporters of the program, appearing on Sunday morning talk shows, said the latest rounds of warnings of unspecified threats showed that the programs were necessary, while detractors said there was no evidence linking the programs, particularly the massive collection of cell phone records of hundreds of millions of Americans, to the vague warnings of a possible terrorist attack.

Meanwhile, there were no reports of violence or unusual activity in any of the countries where the United States had kept its embassies and consulates closed when they would have ordinarily been open on Sunday...

How Did Rich Connecticut Morph Into One Of America's Worst Performing Economies?
...Although Connecticut lacks a major high tech region, there’s a concentration of executive talent capable of managing large organizations. Many are in financial services.

Despite these attractions, during the past two decades some 300,000 more Connecticut residents have moved out of the state than have moved in. This compares with the current population of about 3.5 million.

Why the exodus?...

AM Radio, Signing Off

...AM’s apologists place blame on societal trends and changing technology. “This is a simple situation,” contends Michael Harrison of Talkers magazine. “It’s not like AM has been doing something to drive away listeners or has been doing something wrong.” If AM hasn’t made mistakes, then what lessons has it to learn? Harrison points to the “economic considerations” of broadcasters. “Things get old. Things get efficient. Things get corporatized.” Indeed they do... image

Here Is Your Big Brother News Of The Day

NYC Wants To Ban ‘Dinosaur,’ ‘Divorce,’ Other Words From School Tests
...The New York City Department of Education is waging a war on words of sorts, and is seeking to have words they deem upsetting removed from standardized tests.

Fearing that certain words and topics can make students feel unpleasant, officials are requesting 50 or so words be removed from city-issued tests.

The word “dinosaur” made the hit list because dinosaurs suggest evolution which creationists might not like, WCBS 880-s Marla Diamond reported. “Halloween” is targeted because it suggests paganism; a “birthday” might not be happy to all because it isn’t celebrated by Jehovah’s Witnesses...

'Blizzarding:' Obama's plan to plow under GOP critics
This is no snow job: President Obama's grassroots organization has developed a plan called 'blizzarding' for his supporters to plow into neighborhoods and communities to sock GOP critics of Obamacare, gun control, and climate change as part of its "Action August."

While other elements of Obama's Organizing for Action are planning high-tech and expensive assaults in August on GOP lawmakers, the 'blizzarding' strategy calls on small groups or even individuals to promote the president's agenda with a door-to-door campaign followed by hyped up social media...

U.S. directs agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans
A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.

Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.

The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don't know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence - information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses...

Albert Mohler: What’s Missing from this Picture?—Fertility on the Rise, Worldview on Display    
...So, there are other factors in play here. And church attendance is one that plays an identifiable role. As Sam Sturgeon commented, “Much of the downturn in births is related to economic factors, but economic factors do not affect the fertility decisions of all parents or future parents. We started to wonder about various groups that might make fertility decisions based on other factors, and religious persons seemed to be a natural group, so we explored this with the data.”

He then added: “Partly because religious communities provide a family-friendly context to the women who attend them, religious women are more likely to have children and to bear a comparatively high share of the nation’s children, compared to their less religious or secular peers.”

Is anyone surprised? And yet, even as this report reveals that religious factors are in play in reproductive decisions, the influence of religion is explained only in terms of the fact that “religious communities provide a family-friendly context to the women who attend them.”...