Presidential candidates of both parties this year are talking much more about their faith than in previous years. Is this good for the country? And does it even help the candidates? The Christian Science Monitor talks to analysts who say that it is not doing much good for anybody.
Gallup released the results of a poll on faith in America done earlier this month, and has a useful analysis of the importance of faith in the United States over the last few decades.
Dante’s Paradiso is the least read and least admired part of his Divine Comedy. The Inferno’s nine circles of extravagant tortures have long captured the popular imagination, while Purgatorio is often the connoisseur’s choice. But as Robert Hollander writes in his new edition of the Paradiso, “One finds few who will claim (or admit) that it is their favorite cantica.” (A cantica, or canticle, is one of the three titled parts of the poem.) The time is ripe to reconsider Paradiso’s neglect, however, since three major new translations of the poem we know as the Divine Comedy are coming to completion.
God of good news,
today you begin again to reshape our lives and communities.
You do not start from the outside, but from within.
You begin in the hidden place.
The good news, to my mind, is that there are many Communion minded people who seek comprehensiveness and unity for true… They are not of one mind, but they are of one desire to remain in communion by virtue of baptism and a common identity as Anglicans.