Everybody knows about the ball dropping, but Good Riddance Day in Times Square is a newer tradition, only two years old. “SHRED YOUR BAD MEMORIES – EVERYTHING FROM WORTHLESS STOCK CERTIFICATES AND DEPRESSING BANK STATEMENTS TO PHOTOS OF OLD LOVERS AND DEAR JOHN LETTERS – IN THE HEART OF TIMES SQUARE,” read the invitation on Craigslist.
Step right up and make your New Year’s resolutions public on this open thread.
Religious people are self-controlled not simply because they fear God’s wrath, but because they’ve absorbed the ideals of their religion into their own system of values, and have thereby given their personal goals an aura of sacredness. Nonbelievers could try a secular version of that strategy.
BBC: On Sunday five bishops questioned the morality of policies and whether people should be urged to spend more. One said Labour was “beguiled by
The days are growing noticeably shorter; the nights are longer, deeper, colder. Today the sun did not rise as high in the sky as it did yesterday. Tomorrow it will be still lower. At the winter solstice the sun will go below the horizon, below the dark.
The Anglican Communion Office website has been very slow to update their directories of diocese to reflect actual leadership of the actual dioceses of Pittsburgh, Fort Worth and Quincy.
The Synod of the Church of England voted last July to move forward with the ordination of women to the episcopate using a so-called “Code of Practice” and turned aside parallel oversight schemes. The proposal released this week in advance of February’s synod includes a scheme of “complementary” male bishops and judicial review for unhappy parishes.
There is a closer relationship between the worlds of finance and religion than we might imagine. My ten pound sterling note says: I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of Ten Pounds. This once meant gold; what’s more important, and what actually functions, is the promise. Money is trust and relationship, and when it breaks down so does the economy.
At a depot in New Orleans, Mississippian Frances Joseph-Gaudet approached an unknown woman who was in tears, intending to give her a simple word of sympathy and a shoulder to lean on. She quickly learned that the stranger wept over the fate of her son, who was on his way by train to a state penitentiary for a crime that he supposedly did not commit.
For 15 years members of the Baltimore Hebrew Congregation have served food at Our Daily Bread feeding program on Christmas Day so Christians can celebrate