The Emmaus Project presents: iLive, iLead, iAm An opportunity for post-confirmation youth ages 12–15 to explore their roles with respect to their lives, their faith, and their community.
This conference will be held at the Lavrock Camp & Conference Centre from 28 July–2 August 2008. It’s free, completely sponsored by the Diocese of Eastern Newfoundland and Labrador, but spaces are limited, and are available on a first-come, first-served basis. An application form is available online at this site from 1 May–1 June, or until all 30 available spaces are filled.
Come be a part of this exciting new opportunity to meet other young people from the diocese and explore what it means to be an Anglican right here and right now!
Did you ever wonder what the crossing of the Red Sea would have looked like? Wonder what it would have looked like from God’s perspective? Biblical scenes have been artistically portrayed in countless media throughout the centuries, but never before like this!
A ‘creative collective’ called The Glue Society, out of Sydney, Australia, was commissioned to create a series of depictions of biblical events as they would have been seen through the ever-watching eye of Google Earth. These are not real Google Earth images — they’ve been photoshopped, but incredibly well, don’t you think? The series of four images also include Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Noah’s Ark, and the Crucifixion. (more…)
From The Times
December 10, 2007
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article3026245.ece
Archbishop discards dog collar ‘until tyrant goes’
In one of the most dramatic political interventions by an Anglican cleric in modern times, the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, cut up his clerical collar on TV yesterday and vowed not to put it back on until President Mugabe was thrown out of office.
Ugandan-born Dr Sentamu, who in his youth fled the atrocities of Idi Amin, told the Sunday AMprogramme on BBC One that the Zimbabwean leader had “taken people’s identity . . . and cut it to pieces”. This had prompted him to do the same.
The protest is unusual in modern Anglicanism in both its courageous iconoclasm and in its stand against Mr Mugabe. Although Dr Sentamu has been an outspoken critic of Mr Mugabe, some senior clergy have balked at speaking out against the dictator for fear of endangering church workers in the country. But his excesses have reached a point where church leaders believe that they must now oppose him in the name of justice and with whatever tools are at their disposal.
Dr Sentamu called upon the people of Britain to unite in opposition both to the Government of Mr Mugabe and the atrocities in Darfur.
During the interview with Andrew Marr, Dr Sentamu said that his clerical collar “is what I wear to identify myself, that I’m a clergyman”.
He said: “You know what Mr Mugabe has done? He’s taken people’s identity, and literally, if you don’t mind, cut it to pieces, and in the end there’s nothing.”
Dr Sentamu went on to chastise African leaders at the Africa-EU summit for their support of Mr Mugabe while the people of the country continued to suffer under what he termed self-destructing racism. “A white man does it the whole world cries. A black person does it, there is a certain sense, oh this is colonialism. I don’t buy this.”
He added that Gordon Brown had been right to boycott the summit because of Mr Mugabe’s presence.
A relatively modern invention, the clerical collar is worn by clergy around the western world. However, it is not obligatory.
The other day, I was reading a very good article written by the Rt. Rev’d Lindsay Urwin, the Bishop of Horsham, England, entitled ‘Living in Two Time Zones.’ Here are some choice excerpts. (more…)
The last time I wrote about Advent, I was lamenting the tension between Christmas and Advent, the ‘Now, Now, NOW celebration of our culture versus the expectation and preparation of our church. The more I’ve been turning it around in my mind the past few days, the more I’ve been asking myself why I ever enjoyed Advent. What’s so great about a season of ‘not yet’?
The more I think about it, the more I think that the best part is the expectation. If you like, make the comparison waiting to take that first bite of an ice cream sandwich. Compare it to the drawn-out, exhilarating expectation before that first kiss. But I’ve also got some first-hand experience of waiting for a Messiah.
I was in Kindergarten. Like you sometimes do in Kindergarten, I got a little bit out of hand one morning. I’m not sure that I remember what exactly I did to get in trouble. I think it had something to do with making too much noise, but it’s a long time ago… Anyway, where other people had been making noise and getting away with it, I was the one who got caught. I was the one who got in trouble. I was the one who had to sit on the ‘baby chair’ at the front of the class.
As I sat there, burning with shame and embarrassment, two other thoughts were foremost in my mind. One was the incredible unfairness of this whole ordeal. Everyone else had been doing exactly the same thing - why was I the only one to get singled out as a baby? And the more I sat there, stewing over the injustice inherent in the Kindergarten ‘baby chair’, all I could think about was this – my grandparents were in town that week, and Poppy Rowe was going to pick me up from school that day. And when Poppy Rowe came, boy, was he going to make Mrs. Payne sorry for putting me in the baby chair! That might have been the only thing to keep me going for the ten minutes? fifteen? that I had to sit in that awful chair.
In the same way, the people of Israel were waiting for God to intervene in their history, and make everything right, just like Poppy Rowe. He was going to put an end to their exile, but things weren’t going to stop there. He was going to turn the whole world upside down.
Looking back on it, though, I realize that it’s probably just as well that Poppy Rowe didn’t come get me right at that moment. He taught school back in the thirties, in the days of ‘the strap’. My guess is that he probably would have had more sympathy for the kindergarten teacher than for me. If he had shown up at that point, I probably would have gotten a lot more than I’d bargained for.
The Jews of Jesus’ time were just itching and waiting for a Messiah to come and make everything better for them. And indeed he came, and in a way, he made the whole business of being human much less of a struggle, but not at all in the way that they expected. Even John the Baptist had to deal with doubts and uncertainty, as he struggled with the fact that Jesus wasn’t exactly the kind of Messiah he had been expecting.
What have you come out to see? What are you expecting from this Christmas? To gain all the blessings God has in store for us, would we be prepared to be surprised? If God is prepared to give us our heart’s desire, would we be prepared to have our prayers answered, not in the way we’re expecting, but in the way that is best for us? As we prepare for Christmas, and the coming of Christ in our hearts, perhaps these are the kind of questions we need to ask ourselves first and foremost.
Do you know this guy? AJ Jacobs has a history of diving into his work head-first. For one writing project, ‘The Know-It-All‘ he read the Encyclopedia Britannica. Cover to cover. To cover. To cover. All 32 volumes. 44 million words. In a year. Then he wrote a memoir of his experiences doing it.
Now he’s taken on a similarly-baffling project. He spent a year following every rule in the Bible, as literally as he could. That means all the rules. Not just your garden-variety, familiar Ten Commandment ones, like “Honour thy father and mother” or “No graven images.” Even the more ridiculous ones like “Don’t mix wool and linen,” “Don’t trim your beard,” and “Stone adulterers.” And his latest book, “The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible” is a part memoir, part reflection on religious fundamentalism.
AJ was born a Jew, but raised agnostic. He’s got some wacky religious elements in his family, including an ex-uncle who went from hippy to Hindu to Orthodox Jewish cult leader. While he never had much religion is his life, he still had cultural connections to his Jewish roots. But he started wondering what he would be able to tell his two-year-old son about religion when the time came. Plus, he started to think that religion and religious fundamentalism might be the biggest issue in America today. Consider: Creationism vs. Evolution. Gay marriage. Abortion. Stem cell research. Fundamentalists often accuse their opponents of being “Cafeteria Christians.” But what would happen if you try to follow the Bible literally, all the time. All of it? (more…)
Have I ever got a Santa vs. Scrooge thing going on these days! Every year I find myself caught between two urges. Both of them very powerful, both of them pretty reasonable, but nevertheless, a lot of the time, they seem pretty incompatible, like I can only listen to one at a time. There’s a Santa voice telling me how much I love Christmas, and wouldn’t it be a good thing to put up the tree and fill my boots with eggnog, and get into the Christmas spirit. Then there’s a Scrooge voice telling me that it’s not Christmas yet, and that we need to be making more of an effort to keep the season of Advent. On the one hand, there’s a Santa hat for Christmas, on the other, a purple chasuble for Advent.
This past week, that tension between Christmas and Advent has been brought into greater focus. (more…)
I don’t know if you caught this or not, but the other week, the UN lowered its estimate of the number of HIV-infected people in the world by about 6 million, from 39.5 million to 33.2 million. This is not just because of an actual decrease in the number of infections, which they estimate at around 6,800 people a day, but also because the UN has had to admit that their data was not as good as it could have been. Their data used to come from blood samples taken from health clinics, rather than from household surveys. I would have thought that blood samples would be more reliable, but research says that this method tends to overrepresent pregnant women, and (especially in developing countries) they are often infected at a disproportionately high rate.
But this news that the infection estimate is lower than we thought is not necessarily good news. It still doesn’t change the fact that more than 2 million people die from AIDS every year. It doesn’t change the fact that millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa are infected, and without addressing the issue, the crisis will only get worse.
But this news has also had a lot of critics claiming that the UN has been over-inflating its estimates for years in order to keep the public afraid of HIV/AIDS and more willing to support research and treatment programs. Think about it: the US doesn’t actually need real terrorism threats in order to encourage people to support the war on terror. All they need is the fear of terrorism. What if someone were to use the fear of AIDS to maintain support for anti-HIV initiatives?
I don’t necessarily think that this is what the UN has been doing, but I do know this. In the 1990s, when I was in junior high, and the HIV epidemic was at its peak, we were constantly being told ‘AIDS is not just a gay disease — anyone can get AIDS.’ That’s true, but I remember the 90s being an age of definite fear. The truth is that while anyone can become infected, outside of Africa, the epidemic is largely concentrated in a few vulnerable groups: men who have sex with men, sex workers and their clients, and intravenous drug users.
As responsible citizens of the world, we have a responsibility to help bring the AIDS crisis in Africa under control. As Christians, surely we have a responsibility to follow Christ’s example of loving ‘even publicans and sinners’ and care for everyone who is suffering, even if it’s because of their greyer moral choices.
But there’s a part of me that can’t shake the question: Have we really been lied to? There’s a trouble when you’re talking about epidemics on the scale of 30 million people - it’s really hard not to generalize. But while the number of infections is, fair enough, higher than we’d like it, have they been telling us for years that it’s higher than it really is so that we’ll be more likely to get involved in the fight against AIDS?
Did you ever wonder what the crossing of the Red Sea would have looked like? Wonder what it would have looked like from God’s perspective? Biblical scenes have been artistically portrayed in countless media throughout the centuries, but never before like this!
The other day, I was reading a very good article written by the Rt. Rev’d Lindsay Urwin, the Bishop of Horsham, England, entitled ‘Living in Two Time Zones.’ Here are some choice excerpts.
The last time I wrote about Advent, I was lamenting the tension between Christmas and Advent, the ‘Now, Now, NOW celebration of our culture versus the expectation and preparation of our church. The more I’ve been turning it around in my mind the past few days, the more I’ve been asking myself why I ever enjoyed Advent. What’s so great about a season of ‘not yet’?
Do you know this guy? AJ Jacobs has a history of diving into his work head-first. For one writing project, ‘
Have I ever got a Santa vs. Scrooge thing going on these days! Every year I find myself caught between two urges. Both of them very powerful, both of them pretty reasonable, but nevertheless, a lot of the time, they seem pretty incompatible, like I can only listen to one at a time. There’s a Santa voice telling me how much I love Christmas, and wouldn’t it be a good thing to put up the tree and fill my boots with eggnog, and get into the Christmas spirit. Then there’s a Scrooge voice telling me that it’s not Christmas yet, and that we need to be making more of an effort to keep the season of Advent. On the one hand, there’s a Santa hat for Christmas, on the other, a purple chasuble for Advent.
I don’t know if you caught this or not, but the other week, the 