Dying Churches, Vibrant Churches; The Real Role of Diversity...more

Dying Churches, Vibrant Churches ...Forty years ago, when I was a boy, Arlington was losing population and closing schools. The WWII generation who first suburbanized Arlington had finished their child rearing. Young families were drawn to the outer suburbs. In recent years Arlington has again boomed in population, is building schools, and has become fashionable. Millennials have flocked to Arlington, but so too have young families, and many immigrants. The old Mainline churches, some of them dating originally to the rural past, and which built big buildings after WWII during suburbanization, are mostly empty. Some have closed.

Not far from this soon to be demolished stone Presbyterian church is a large formerly United Methodist sanctuary that once was the virtual cathedral church of United Methodism in Arlington. It’s now occupied by an apparently thriving new Calvinist congregation that cites the Westminster Confession, along with venerable ecumenical church creeds, on its website...

The Real Role of Diversity
...Consider this scenario. Twenty white male Yale students surround a black faculty member, cursing and taunting. If Yale's president expelled them, our power elite would applaud. Now, consider what actually happened at Yale, which was the opposite, students of color cursing and berating a white professor. Had Yale's president expelled them, he would have triggered an institutional crisis that in all likelihood would have cost him his job.

Given the importance of “diversity” for the legitimacy of our ruling class, I can't imagine significant resistance to student demands. What's $100 million when running America is at stake? I'm quite sure nobody important is going to object to scrubbing Woodrow Wilson's name from Princeton's campus, if that what's necessary to re-secure the complaisant cooperation of black students in Princeton's project of being a model of “diversity.” This won't come about because the grown-ups at Princeton and elsewhere are feckless. It's because they know what's at stake—their own legitimacy...

Speaker at huge Intervarsity Christian conference criticizes pro-life efforts as “a big spectacle” A keynote speaker at InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s Urbana missions conference criticized the pro-life movement as “a big spectacle” on Monday in St. Louis where 16,000 evangelical students gathered together.

The comment came from Michelle Higgins, the director of Faith for Justice and a #BlackLivesMatter activist, during her discussion (video) on racial injustice. “We could end the adoption crisis tomorrow. But we’re too busy arguing to have abortion banned. We’re too busy arguing to defund Planned Parenthood,” charged Higgins. “We are too busy withholding mercy from the living so that we might display a big spectacle of how much we want mercy to be shown to the unborn. Where is your mercy? What is your goal and only doing activism that is comfortable?”

The problem here is that Higgins bashes a social justice movement that aides her cause...

Oregon State Seizes Christian Couple's Bank Accounts To Pay Lesbians Over 'Wedding' Cake Dispute

The Islamization of Britain in 2015
Sex Crimes, Jihadimania and "Protection Tax"

Planned Parenthood Attempts To Blame-Shift Onto Pregnancy Centers ...How ironic that Planned Parenthood’s website describes all the elements of prenatal care visits, such as regular checkups during pregnancy and ultrasounds (which most or all Planned Parenthood locations do not do)—yet they claim pro-life care and pregnancy centers are “misleading” if they tell women about abortion but don’t actually perform abortions.

Contrary to what pro-Planned Parenthood politicians, pundits, and celebrities imagine, they are no paragon of women’s healthcare. With no mammograms, few clinics (especially as compared to federally qualified health centers and rural health centers), few ultrasounds, and far fewer patients than those politicians like to claim, it’s hard to see what they’re good for.

Migrant crisis: Over one million reach Europe by sea  More than one million refugees and migrants have reached Europe by sea since the start of 2015, the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) says.

More than 80% of the 1,000,573 people arrived in Greece, with the majority landing on Lesbos island, it said.

About 844,000 travelled to Greece from nearby Turkey. Most of the others - over 150,000 - crossed the Mediterranean from Libya to Italy.

The migrant crisis is Europe's worst since World War Two.

Suddenly, drones are everywhere
...The sudden popularity of drones—and the threat they represent to the public and aviation generally—has spurred the FAA into action. Reports of recreational UAVs interfering with regular air traffic have been running at over 100 a month of late. With some 1.6m recreational drones buzzing the skies (400,000 were expected to be bought in the weeks before Christmas), the FAA has been forced to hurry out safety rules before serious accidents occur...

Surreal photos of crashing waves caught in motion on Lake Erie 

Just Desserts
Sandy Jenkins was a shy, daydreaming accountant at the Collin Street Bakery, the world’s most famous fruitcake company. He was tired of feeling invisible, So he started stealing—and got a little carried away...