Son of top Hamas leader converts to Christianity

‘I hope my father and family open their eyes to Jesus and the Kingdom of God’
Posted: July 31, 20081:35 pm Eastern
By Aaron Klein© 2008 WorldNetDaily
Sheik Hassan Yousef (Passia.org)JERUSALEM – The son of one of the most popular leaders in the Hamas terrorist organization has moved to the U.S. and converted to Christianity, it has emerged. (more)
Wow! Pray for him because his life is now in danger. (As evidenced by this story) And pray that others might have a similar experience

Family and Faith: The Roots of Prosperity, Stability and Freedom

The sumer of love has caused alot of pain and grief as the article here outlines in part. The chart to the left shows the results of a culture without restraint and without boundaries. Abstinence programs are bashed in the media in this country because they supposedly have no effect. A questionable claim considering the short time they have been implemented. But no one likes to talk about the obvious and devastating results of the alternative.
From Heritage:
To understand why I call this the Culture of Rejection and Alienation in America, let’s look at Chart 1, which shows the stunning increase in the numbers of children entering broken families after 1950. Children enter a broken home in two ways—by out-of-wedlock births or by their parents’ divorce. To understand the extent of this increasing ratio of rejection, consider:
In 1950, for every 100 children born, 12 entered a broken family—four born out of wedlock and eight from their parents’ divorce.
By the mid-1990s, 58 out of every 100 children born in the United States entered a broken home. (more at the Heritage link above)

Reality Says Cohabitation a Disaster for Marriage but Poll Shows Public Believes Otherwise

From Lifesite
Living together before marriage has skyrocketed since the 1960s, when Western cultures began to cast off traditional sexual mores; but the same period has seen a correlating upsurge of divorce.
The evidence has prompted a number of studies that have indicated that by trying to avoid divorce by cohabitation, unwed couples seriously compromise their marital success. A 2006 report published in the journal Demography indicated one-half of all cohabiting unions collapse within a year and 90 percent within five years.
“The common view of cohabitation as a steppingstone to marriage needs to be seriously questioned,” commented Daniel Lichter a professor of policy analysis at Cornell University and the study’s lead researcher. “Instead, serial cohabitation may be an emerging norm as cohabiting unions form and break up,” he said. “If marriage promotion programs hope to target poor cohabiting women, our results seemingly suggest that the likelihood of success is not assured.”(more)

"Jesus of Nazareth" study guide

I think it sounds cool and I’m not even Catholic…
From Insight Scoop:
On September 15th the paperback edition of Pope Benedict XVI’s Jesus of Nazareth (featuring a new index) will be available from Ignatius Press. The Jesus of Nazareth Study Guide will also available on the same date. Here is the description:
This easy-to-use companion study guide helps the readers who approach Joseph Ratinger/Pope Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth without the benefit of extensive theological or biblical training. The goal is not to replace Benedict’s book but to make it more accessible, more fruitful for the average reader—whether lay, religious, priest or deacon…(more)

Stealing from Supernaturalism

From InsideCatholic
…Atheism — and particularly the New Atheism — is an acid that inevitably corrodes the natural apprehension of the human person as a supernatural being. A New Atheist bravely steals and desecrates the Eucharist and then declares in his Manifesto justifying the deed:

Nothing must be held sacred. Question everything. God is not great, Jesus is not your lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet. You are all human beings who must make your way through your life by thinking and learning, and you have the job of advancing humanity’s knowledge by winnowing out the errors of past generations and finding deeper understanding of reality. You will not find wisdom in rituals and sacraments and dogma, which build only self-satisfied ignorance, but you can find truth by looking at your world with fresh eyes and a questioning mind.

Nothing Must Be Held Sacred — except the three-pound piece of meat behind the eye of the New Atheist; reason; intellectual liberty; science; their loved ones; human dignity (for humans they happen to like); and countless other things they don’t think about while penning these unthinking dogmas and engaging in these strange sacramental rites of desecration. In short, passionate love of the sacred is what fills the rhetoric of the New Atheists with such fire.

Meanwhile, really truly atheist philosophers like Richard Rorty have the number of the New Atheists and their moral posturing. He writes that there is no universally valid answer to moral questions such as, “Why not be cruel?”

Anybody who thinks that there are well-grounded theoretical answers to this sort of question . . . is still, in his heart, a theologian or a metaphysician. He believes in an order beyond time and change which both determines the point of human existence and establishes a hierarchy of responsibilities. (more)

Canadian woman gives birth to 18th child

No doubt you’ve heard the story :
ABBOTSFORD, British Columbia – A Romanian immigrant has given birth to her 18th child in British Columbia, making her the province’s most prolific mother in 20 years.
Proud dad Alexandru Ionce said Saturday that his 44-year-old wife, Livia, gave birth on July 22. Their daughter Abigail weighed in at 7 pounds, 12 ounces (3.5 kilograms).
“We never planned how many children to have. We just let God guide our lives, you know, because we strongly believe life comes from God and that’s the reason we did not stop the life,” Alexandru Ionce said.

“Marital love just allowing and producing life“ as they said over at Touchstone..

Bruni-Sarkozy and the Unbearable Lightness of Nudity

From the proexistence Blog..some good thoughts:
France’s First Lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy seems to have second thoughts about having “posed for too many nude photos.”Good for her, and yet: How is this possible?Is she no longer “proud of my body”? What? She wants something special, private, reserved, unknown to others, with her husband?As if human love between husband and wife is more than the publicly accessible physics and chemistry of firing neurons.Here’s what may be bubbling to the surface: Despite the pronouncements of Darwinian and atheistic theory, human beings in fact are more than flesh, skin surfaces, and matter. (more)

Court says no to prayers in Jesus’ name

A praer to Ceaser is ok- that’s comforting… From OneNews Now
RICHMOND, Va. – The Fredericksburg City Council’s policy prohibiting a member from opening meetings with a prayer mentioning Jesus does not violate his free-speech rights, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.

A three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously rejected the Rev. Hashmel Turner’s lawsuit challenging a nonsectarian prayer policy adopted by the council in 2005. The court said the policy does not violate Turner’s rights because the prayer is “government speech,” not individual speech.

Turner filed the lawsuit after the mayor refused to recognize him to open the meeting with prayer. Turner, an ordained minister and part-time pastor of the First Baptist Church of Love, had told the mayor he planned to pray in the name of Jesus Christ in keeping with his faith and in defiance of the new policy….(more)

Hard Summer

I read an interesting quote over at “And sometimes tea” it’s from from Mason Cooley, and goes like this “Writing about an idea frees me of it. Thinking about it is a circle of repetitions.”
And so I beg your patience while I try it out.
It’s been a hard summer. Death is everywhere. A friend at church who died in a car accident on the way to choir practice. My youngest son’s den leader dying from cancer. My oldest son’s assistant scoutmaster on the last leg of his earthly journey, also from cancer. I am not new to this. My dad died when I was 20. I’ve had a grandmother die and the lady who was like a second mother to me, who kept me while my parents worked from the time I was 6 weeks old till I was in 5th grade died last summer. Her husband and two boys, again like a second family, having preceded her. Less than a month after returning from Iraq, a friend of mine was shot down and killed. It was at that point that this death thing got really hard. Don’t get me wrong, when a boy loses his dad, he never gets over that, but lately it just seems to be piling up. My dad had a bad heart and had a heart attack and a stroke before his second heart attack finally took him as he walked/jogged his dailey 2 miles (I think this proves exercise is bad for you but I could be wrong). He was 55.
As young as that is, and it’s younger every year, I could kind of explain that, I guess I saw it coming. And maybe that’s why this summer has been so hard, and why my friend getting shot down was so hard- I didn’t see it coming and it doesn’t make sense. To quote my 13 year old after a visit to his assistant scoutmaster in the hospital. It sucks. He is leaving behind an 18 year old boy and a wife. Our den leader leaves behind a wife and 3 boys under 8, one born just this last December. My pilot friend a 3 year old and a wife. My son is right. It sucks. and I hurt all over sometimes and the hurt stretches, like an ugly un-healed scar, all the way back 24 years. My comfort in this, is that God thinks death sucks too. I once read a translation of Jesus’ reaction to Lazarus’ death as something akin to “the snort of war horse,” God hates death. It’s not the way He intended and some day, the pain will be gone and the tears will be dried. In the mean time, God weeps with us.

The Messiah Channel

Required reading from Touchstone
Bypassing Jesus
Wright, after all, is not making this stuff up. He is preaching a form of liberation theology. The liberation theologians see the gospel of Christ crucified and resurrected, the message of deliverance from the reign of sin and death through repentance and faith, as “pie in the sky.” Liberation theology offers economic and political salvation in the here-and-now, making the Scripture illustrative of how to navigate out of oppression.
This is not the gospel as proclaimed by the prophets and apostles, a gospel that centers on Jesus Christ and him alone. The clips of the Wright sermons should outrage us. But we should be outraged first as Christians. The most egregious aspect of his statements is not what he is saying about America, but what he is not saying about the gospel.
But one does not have to be a political radical to bypass Jesus at church. White, upwardly mobile, pro-America preachers preach liberation theology all the time, with all the fervor of Jeremiah Wright, if not the anger.
Just take a look at the best-selling authors in Christian bookstores. Listen for a minute or two to the parade of preachers on Christian television and radio. What are they promising? Your best life now. What are they preaching about? How to be authentic. How to make good career choices. How Hillary Clinton fits into Bible prophecy.
How many times have we heard conservative preachers use the Bible in exactly the same way that Jeremiah Wright uses it? Wright uses the Scripture as a background to get to what he thinks is the real issue, psychological or economic or political liberation from American oppression. Others use the Scripture as a background to get to what they think is the real issue, psychological or economic or political liberation through the American Dream. (more)