“Focus on the Family announced today that it is eliminationg [sic] 202 jobs in the coming weeks — 149 through layoffs and 53 by not filling vacant positions. It’s the biggest layoff in the history of the Colorado Springs-based ministry …”
Via Talking Points Memo.
Albuquerque, N.M., is no different from any other American city, in terms of its religious life; you’ve got churches, synagogues, a couple of Unitarian congregations and a mosque. But an abandoned gas station along old Route 66 is the unlikely home for another kind of Sunday-morning service, and it’s one that you won’t find anywhere else. It’s called the Church of Beethoven.
NPR tells about the spiritual experience you can get at a former gas station.
Thanks to Veronica for the tip.
Dobson says that he and other pastors have been praying to God for his intervention in the election: “We were just asking for, rather boldly asking, for a miracle with regard to the election this year.”
Whoever would like to make a commitment to pray for Sarah Palin can go to www.prayforsarahpalin.com and enter their zip code. A marker will automatically be placed on the prayer coverage map, which can be viewed live in Google maps. There are approximately 43,000 zip codes in the United States. Our goal is to have people praying for Sarah Palin in every zip code. I believe prayer changes things.
If you pray for a torrential downpour to disrupt the acceptance speech of a candidate you do not support, but the night of the speech is clear and pleasant.
But then speeches in favor of the candidate you do support are altered by a massive storm more than a thousand miles away.
Then don’t you have to take that as a message from God? How could one be an answer to prayers and not the other?
A beautiful day in Denver it seems. I guess God answers prayers after all.
It’s just that sometimes the answer is “No!”
Or maybe even “Hell, no!”
Today, August 15, is the Feast of the Assumption, the principal feast of the Blessed Virgin. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, the feast celebrates both the “happy departure of Mary from this life” and the “assumption of her body into heaven.” That she “was taken up body and soul into heavenly glory, when her earthly life was over, and exalted by the Lord as Queen over all things” is a principle of Catholic dogma.
I don’t know where this ass clown got his religious upbringing, but where I got mine this sort of thing would have been considered blasphemous.
He’s a representative of Focus on the Family.
And, yes, I acknowledge he may just be trying to be funny. Even so, it seems like taking God’s name in vain to me.
“Workers at a marble company in Dallas say they have a slab of natural granite that has the image of Jesus in it.”
That must be the Rock of Ages we’ve heard about.
“Nearly seven-in-ten Americans (68%) believe that angels and demons are active in the world.”
74% of Americans believe in an afterlife and heaven (“a place where people who have led good lives are eternally rewarded”).
59% believe in hell (“where people who have led bad lives and die without repenting are eternally punished”).
So what do the 15% who believe the good are rewarded, but don’t believe in hell, think happens to the bad guys?
In football the object is for the quarterback, also known as the field general, to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack that punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy’s defensive line.
In baseball the object is to go home!
I give you my revised list of the two commandments:
Thou shalt always be honest and faithful to the provider of thy nookie and Thou shalt try real hard not to kill anyone, unless of course they pray to a different invisible man than you.Two is all you need; Moses could have carried them down the hill in his fuckin’ pocket. I wouldn’t mind those folks in Alabama posting them on the courthouse wall, as long as they provided one additional commandment:
Thou shalt keep thy religion to thyself.
George Carlin, 1937-2008
Note: Website has audio.
South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford (R) yesterday allowed legislation authorizing a Christian-themed specialty license plate to become law without his signature. This means that the state Department of Motor Vehicles may issue a controversial new “I Believe” plate that displays a cross superimposed on a stained glass window.
Commenting on a potato with a growth inside in the shape of a cross, a skeptic at Bad Astronomy Blog remarked:
“Now, a sweet potato might be more convincing. After all, like He Himself said, ‘I yam that I yam’.”
“If you have a few hundred followers, and you let some of them molest children, they call you a cult leader. If have a billion, they call you ‘Pope.’”
Bill Maher via Crooks and Liars.
I’ll let this play out before I render judgment on this issue, but it really puts Obama’s smear merchants in a bind — do they push false rumors that he’s a secret Muslim bent on delivering America to Al Qaida, or is he a member of an intolerant and radical black Christian church?
Let’s hope it’s a case of two negatives being a positive.
Though some (including a frequent commenter here at NMK) are capable of holding contradictory thoughts.
A sweeping new study of religious affiliation in the United States finds a country in which Protestants are becoming a minority, Catholicism is becoming heavily Hispanic, and the number of people who say they are not affiliated with any religion is growing.
The study, which is the most comprehensive such examination in at least a half century, finds the United States to be in a period of unprecedented religious fluidity, in which 44 percent of American adults have left the denomination of their childhood for another denomination, another faith, or no faith at all.
The Boston Globe had this brief report. The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life conducted the study.
It began 150 years ago today.
Bernadette Soubirous was born in 1844, the first child of an extremely poor miller in the town of Lourdes in southern France. The family was living in the basement of a dilapidated building when on February 11, 1858, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to Bernadette in a cave above the banks of the Gave River near Lourdes. Bernadette, 14 years old, was known as a virtuous girl though a dull student who had not even made her first Holy Communion. In poor health, she had suffered from asthma from an early age.
There were 18 appearances in all, the final one occurring on the feast of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, July 16. Although Bernadette’s initial reports provoked skepticism, her daily visions of “the Lady” brought great crowds of the curious. The Lady, Bernadette explained, had instructed her to have a chapel built on the spot of the visions. There the people were to come to wash in and drink of the water of the spring that had welled up from the very spot where Bernadette had been instructed to dig.
According to Bernadette, the Lady of her visions was a girl of 16 or 17 who wore a white robe with a blue sash. Yellow roses covered her feet, a large rosary was on her right arm. In the vision on March 25 she told Bernadette, “I am the Immaculate Conception.” It was only when the words were explained to her that Bernadette came to realize who the Lady was.
Few visions have ever undergone the scrutiny that these appearances of the Immaculate Virgin were subject to. Lourdes became one of the most popular Marian shrines in the world, attracting millions of visitors. Miracles were reported at the shrine and in the waters of the spring. After thorough investigation Church authorities confirmed the authenticity of the apparitions in 1862.
Bernadette Soubirous died, a nun, at age 35. She was canonized by the Catholic Church in 1933.
One wonders exactly what “scrutiny” means in this case.
24-year-old Jennifer Jones won the best actress Oscar for playing the 14-year-old French girl in the 1943 film Song of Bernadette.
Strange Maps has a interesting map that has U.S. counties color-coded to show the leading religious denomination for each county. Worth a glance.
I don’t like living in a war-mongering, arrogant, debtor nation. But I really don’t like living in a nation where ignorant people like this run for president and receive votes.
“I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution,” Huckabee told a Michigan audience on Monday. “But I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that’s what we need to do — to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view.”
La celebración en la cual los niños reciben los juguetes no es sino hasta el 6 de enero, “el día de Reyes” o Los Reyes Magos. Fueron los Reyes Magos quienes le llevaron los regalos al Niño Jesús, por consiguiente, son ellos quienes traen los regalos a los niños y a las niñas que se han portado bien. Los niños ponen sus zapatos cerca de la ventana para que los Reyes Magos le pongan el regalo en su zapato. Si el regalo es más grande que el zapato, entonces lo ponen al lado. Varios niños reciben un par de zapatos (calzado) nuevo como regalo.
El día Reyes se celebra con una merienda que consiste de chocolate caliente y la Rosca de Reyes La merienda se lleva a cabo entre las 5 y las 7 de la tarde y no es una comida pesada, sino algo así como lo equivalente al “High Tea”.
La Rosca de Reyes es un pan en forma de guirnalda que está hecha con muchos huevos y es muy grande, está cubierta con frutas cristalizadas y azúcar encima, pero adentro hay una figurita de cerámica que representa al Niño Jesús. La persona a la que le toque la pieza del pan con la figurita, tiene que ser el Padrino o la Madrina del Niño Jesus en el Día de la Candelaria, el dos de Febrero.
Today is the Epiphany, one of the three major Christian celebrations along with Christmas and Easter. The Epiphany is celebrated by most Christians on January 6 to commemorate the presentation of the infant Jesus to the Magi or three wise men.
The celebration of the Epiphany began in the Eastern Church and included Christ’s birth. However, by the 4th century, the various calendar reforms had moved the birth of Christ to December 25, and the church in Rome began celebrating January 6 as Epiphany.
Epiphany is derived from the Greek epiphaneia and means manifestation or to appear. In a religious context, the term describes the appearance of a divine being in a visible or revelatory manifestation.
In Latin America, today is Día de los Santos Reyes, the day to exchange Christmas presents to coincide with the arrival of the three gift-bearing kings or wisemen.
Though advertisers and merchants would have us believe that the Christmas season begins at Thanksgiving (or possibly Halloween), liturgically it begins on Christmas Eve and extends until Twelfth Night, the eve of the Epiphany.
The Twelve Days of Christmas are Christmas through January 5th. Tonight is Twelfth night.
“Christmas is a time when people of all religions come together to worship Jesus Christ.”
— Bart Simpson
Thanks to The Sonoran Son.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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