Recent advances in AIDS treatments have lowered concerns about the disease, and AIDS education efforts, whether they emphasized abstinence or condom use, have flagged. Perhaps as a result, teenage sex rates have risen since 2001 and condom use has dropped since 2003. Abortion rates have held steady for a decade, although numbers from 2005 and 2006 are not available.
To believe in an absolute religious truth is to believe that the object of my belief is not vulnerable to the contingencies of human history: God’s mind and character cannot be changed by what happens here in the world. God does not fail because I fail to persuade others or because my community fails to win some kind of power. In plain English, religious violence suggests religious insecurity.
It is important to bring St. Nicholas’ Christmas cheer to New York because of the saint’s historic significance in the city — the first church in Fort Washington was called St. Nicholas and St. Nicholas Avenue is a main thoroughfare. “One of New York’s great hotels was St. Nicholas on Broadway and the Russian Orthodox has its glorious St Nicholas Cathedral on 97th,” he said. “St. Nicholas, of course, is the name of the church destroyed at 9/11, and whose return as a church many eagerly await.”
The concept is simple. Shoppers browse a list of 13 local charities and the services each one can provide for a donation of $10, $25 or $50. Then the shopper makes a donation in the name of a friend or family member, either for one of those amounts or an amount of their choosing. Details about the donation are written on small certificates printed on card stock. The gift-giver tucks the certificate into a holiday card, and the alternative gift is ready for giving.
Look for your mother of old. This is one of the deep stories of humanity—an archetype coded deep in our understanding that resonates at a subconscious, an unconscious, level. Look for your mother of old. And, lifting my eyes from my armchair Aeneid, I find it again in books dotting my shelves—from Asimov’s Foundation series to the Holy Scriptures themselves.
We can choose the light. Choosing the good and the light is not always an easy process. Many give up on growth in the Christian life because they find it difficult to shake their destructive patterns of behavior. We have learned we should choose the good, but we do not always understand the role of desire. If we do not understand desire, we will never understand choice. Desire is what saves us in the Christian life.
…the House of Bishops has “ignored my views for nearly twenty years” and blamed the wider Episcopal Church for any decision by the diocese to sever its ties and attempt affiliation with another province of the Anglican Communion.