Pro-life Day of Silent Solidarity- October 20

Since January 22, 1973 over 50,000,000 babies have had their voices silenced through surgical abortion in this nation alone.

Over 4,000 children have their lives taken each day in the name of choice.

Over 4,000 women are emotionally damaged every day.

On October 20, 2009 people from all over this nation will give up their voices for a day in solidarity for these children. Red arm bands and duct tape will identify them as taking part in the Pro-life Day of Silent Solidarity. They will carry fliers explaining why they are silent and educate others about the plight of the innocent children we are losing every day.

Are you willing to give up your voice for a day for those who will never have a voice?

Be sure and go to silentday.org and register for the Pro-life Day of Silent Solidarity.

Street Preacher Arrested in UK

A 29-year-old street preacher has been released on bail following an arrest in Maidstone, Kent
The arrest came after an initial warning by Manchester Police at the end of July. Miguel Hayworth was approached by Police Officers in St Anne's square, Manchester, where he was threatened with an arrest and a warning that reading portions of scripture in public could be classed as an offence under Section 5 of the Public Order Act.
The Police issued the warning when they received a complaint about his conduct being offensive and inciting racial and religious hatred.
Onn Sein Kon, Mr Hayworth's case worker from the Christian Legal Centre said: "The police did not pursue this line when they issued the warning, so an investigation is being made into the nature of the offence."
Mr Miguel read from Romans 1 to 6, which deals with sexual orientation. Mr Kon said this case is similar to that of Pastor Harry Hammond, who held anti-homosexuality placards in Bournemouth Square whilst reciting from the book of Revelation, and was later issued with a public order offence.
Mr Hayworth was arrested on Monday morning for preaching from the same part of the Bible. "Romans 1 to 6 is his normal modus operandi,” said Mr Kon, "but under the Human Rights Act, why should this be an offence at all?"
Andy Banton, General Secretary of the Open Air Mission, said: "We got legal advice on this two years ago so preachers know their responsibilities before the law and their rights and as far as that is concerned, we're free to preach the Christian message. The difficulty is that the legislation is very grey and open to interpretation, which invites mischief-makers.
“In the past, people have run with false accusations against street preachers because of disagreements with what they have to say. For some, the Bible is incompatible with their modern lifestyle. A person who goes into a court of law swears an oath on the Bible, so for people to be arrested for quoting it seems ludicrous.”
In an extract from a letter stipulating the rights of Preachers, Ormerods Solicitors note that freedom of speech "includes not only the inoffensive but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative, provided it does not tend to provoke violence.
“Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having."
Mr Banton added: "So few people are attending church, under 10 per cent a week, so 90 per cent aren't hearing the most important message in the world. We're braving the fear and going into the public place."

British woman with connection to Amnesty International leaves over abortion

The British woman Fiorella Nash owes the release of her father from prison in Malta in the 1970s to Amnesty International.

For Nash, supporting the organization over the years was a given, but recently she decided to suspend her support because of group's pro-abortion agenda.
According to the website Religion Confidencial, “Fiorella Nash owes her father’s life to Amnesty International. For many years she worked with the NGO until she became aware of its pro-abortion slant.”

Since its founding by Catholic British lawyer Peter Benenson, Amnesty has been one of the human rights groups that was most supported by Catholic and Protestant believers in the United Kingdom.

When August 2007 rolled around, Amnesty raised the ire of some of its strongest supporters by revealing its intention to campaign for access to abortion.

The decision to move from not having a position on abortion to campaigning for it led bishops and lay people around the world to withdraw their membership from the organization, calling the abortion agenda a betrayal of the group's founding principles.

“Amnesty has focused its most recent campaign on the government of Nicaragua, accusing it of being responsible for the deaths of pregnant adult and teen women because of its laws against abortion,” the website reported.

According to Nash, who works at the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, she cannot support Amnesty because of its pro-abortion agenda. “Its conferences on the issue only include pro-abortion speakers, there is no open debate on the issue,” she said.

Nash was pregnant when Amnesty publicly revealed its pro-abortion slant. “I was pregnant with my first son and I thought, ‘When my father was in a defenseless situation I helped him. What am I doing now to help the equally defenseless unborn?’”

Socionomics

Here is the direct link: YouTube.com

Socionomics postulates that social mood drives financial, macroeconomic and political behavior, in contrast to the conventional notion that such events drive the social mood. The counter-intuitive premise of the socionomic hypothesis—that in contexts of uncertainty, endogenous processes (not exogenous causes) create patterns of social behavior—has gained attention in academic journals, books, the popular press, at academic conferences and in research...

Married deacons within three years

Irish parishes will see married men baptising babies and performing weddings within three years as a new training programme for deacons gets underway.

Just short of twenty men, many of them married, from the Archdiocese of Dublin and the Diocese of Elphin will commence their 3-year studies for the permanent diaconate starting early next month.

Once ordained the deacons can serve a number of functions in a parish including performing baptisms and officiating at weddings and funerals.

The ministry of permanent deacons, while popular in the early Church had fallen into disuse by the Middle Ages, and was only reintroduced by Vatican II (1962-65).

Irish Church leaders received permission from the Vatican in 2001 to proceed with the restoration of the permanent diaconate and in 2005 the Holy See approved a specific National Directory and Norms for Ireland which provides for the training of deacons.

Initially eleven of the 26 dioceses in Ireland ARE introducing permanent deacons into their parishes; Dublin and Elphin are at the most advanced stage having had potential candidates preparing to commence formal studies for the past twelve months.

Deacons combine their ministry with their career and normally serve the Church in a part-time capacity. To facilitate the fact that candidates have to combine their studies with holding down a job the three-year programme is delivered through a variety of evening and weekend courses.

In a similar fashion to priestly training, formation consists of the four areas of pastoral formation, spiritual formation, human formation and academic formation.

A married man must have reached the age of 35 before he can be ordained to the permanent diaconate. He must also have the formal consent of his wife.

Unmarried candidates must have reached the age of 25 before they can be ordained as permanent deacons.

In keeping with the tradition of the Church, those who are ordained as single men make a solemn promise of celibacy.

Spain's Justice Minister says doctors not allowed to object to abortion

The Collegial Medical Organization and various pro-life groups in Spain have strongly rejected statements by the country’s Minister of Justice, Francisco Caamano, who said Thursday that “there is no room for conscientious objection” when it comes to abortion.

The president of the Collegial Medical Organization, Dr. Juan Jose Rodriguez Sendin, said, “The right doctors have in Spain to conscientious objection is going to be respected, whether they like it or not, and it is better this is accepted on good rather than on bad terms.”

Conscientious objection is universally recognized in the medical profession, he insisted, noting that the commitment not to kill, not to abort, not to take part in torture, not to betray patients has been part of medical practice for more than 40 centuries.

“It should not seem strange to any normal person that doctors do not want to perform abortions, what ought to seem strange is the opposite,” he added. “Because it is not an ideological problem, it is simply a question of freedom. For this reason, we are going to defend the right of doctors to conscientious objection,” Rodriguez said.

The Association for the Defense of Conscientious Objection issued a press release calling the statements by the Minister of Justice “sectarian, imprudent and revealing of a manifest scorn for constitutional law, which considers conscientious objection to abortion a right of doctors and other health care professionals.”

“For the vast majority of doctors, the rejection of abortion is not based on moral principles but on the conviction that it presupposes ending human life,” the association warned.

It also noted that conscientious objection is the last resort for a citizen “when an obligation imposed by law causes rejection or a grave moral conflict.” “We are certain that the Minister would not want to ‘taste his own medicine’ if he found himself in other circumstances,” the group said.

“We deplore the ‘crusade’ that has been launched in recent days against freedom of conscience,” the association said, calling on the Minister of Justice to publicly clarify “whether his respect for freedom of conscience is sincere or is subject to political interests.”

Right to Life spokesperson, Gador Joya, warned Caamano that no minister and no government “can force a doctor to end a human life and harm the health of his patients. No matter what Mr. Caamano says, we doctors protect life and care for our patients. The vast majority does not practice abortion nor will we,” she stressed.

Property Dispute Indicates Widening Church Gap

A local Episcopal parish that is defending its property against a claim from the Episcopal Church is filing a brief in a similar California case.

The Church of the Good Shepherd in Rosemont filed an amicus brief in a case against St. James Anglican Church Newport Beach, where the local Episcopal diocese is claiming St. James' property because the church withdrew from communion with the Episcopal Church.

The amicus, or friend of the court filing, outlines Good Shepherd's side of the Montgomery County dispute for the court's benefit. St. James has appealed a previous ruling of the California Supreme Court to the Supreme Court of the U.S.

"We see our amicus brief for St. James, Newport Beach as an act of witness to our parish motto – non ministrari, sed ministrare – not to be ministered unto, but to minister," said Bishop David Moyer, the rector at Good Shepherd. Bishop Moyer added that the brief was filed out of "thanksgiving for the many blessings we have received from near and far in our struggles for the Gospel and the Catholic religion."

Earlier this year, the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania filed an action in the Montgomery County Orphan's Court to claim Good Shepherd’s real estate. The diocese asserts that the property “is held in trust for the Episcopal Church and the Diocese,” and accuses Bishop Moyer and the Good Shepherd Vestry of acting outside the discipline of the church. The case against Good Shepherd is unprecedented, since in other property disputes with the Episcopal Church around the country, the parish in question has left the church, but continued to hold the property. Good Shepherd has never left the Episcopal Church, the foundation for the diocese's argument in the property case.

"I think probably the first thing to recognize here is that in many of these cases around the country these cases are dealing with a parish or diocese that has withdrawn from the Episcopal Church," said Paul Danello, a lawyer with Baker and Daniels, a law firm in Washington that is defending Good Shepherd.

Mr. Danello said that much of the Episcopal Church's argument rests on canons that were unilaterally imposed on the parishes.

The Church of the Good Shepherd was founded in 1869 in Wayne, Pennsylvania. The parish was incorporated and admitted to the Diocese of Pennsylvania shortly thereafter. At first services were held in community halls and public school buildings as the search for a suitable location proceeded. In 1872 land was bought on the north side of Lancaster Avenue in Villanova, and a church was built. The current church building was built in 1894 in Rosemont.

Good Shepherd was founded under the influence of the Oxford Movement, a 19th Century movement in Anglicanism that placed emphasis on the sacraments, holiness of life, and outreach and service to those less fortunate.

There has been no ruling in the Good Shepherd case, and both Mr. Danello and a spokesperson for the Diocese of Pennsylvania said they are waiting for word from the court. However, leaders at Good Shepherd said that the current disputes over property are signs of much more important issues at play in the Anglican Communion.

In recent years, the Episcopal Church has acted as a lightning rod surrounding the understanding and interpretation of religion. An uproar arose in the Communion over the 2004 ordination of Bishop Gene Robinson, as the ninth bishop of the Diocese of New Hampshire and the first openly gay Episcopal bishop.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has led an Anglican Communion increasingly split between a push for legitimizing homosexuality and strict interpretation of biblical prohibitions of it. The Episcopal Church ignored Archbishop Williams' pleas for restraint, instead opting to accept gay bishops and adopt a ritual to bless gay unions. Less than two weeks later, several openly gay candidates had been nominated to serve as bishops in dioceses around the country.

A group of bishops boycotted the once-a-decade Lambeth Conference last summer, opting to hold a rival conference instead. The Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) endorsed the traditional religion, including the primacy of scripture and the Apostle's Creed. Since GAFCON, a number of parishes have split from the Episcopal Church and joined a rival communion, the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA). ACNA is hoping for communion with Canterbury.

"You have this huge chasm that exists in the Anglican Communion right now," said Bishop Moyer. "The Anglican Communion really doesn't exist anymore as a communion because there is not common faith and common order. The whole thing is imploded. It's like people are going in opposite directions at a faster rate than ever before. Conservative Anglicans have bound themselves together for strength, and other Anglicans are looking outside the Anglican world. ACNA has said 'we will preserve Anglicanism as we understand it.' And others are saying that Anglicanism must be in communion with something much bigger and much larger."

In the middle of the rising tide in the Episcopal Church, Good Shepherd's leaders are feeling the brunt of pressure from the Episcopal Church concerned with keeping its property amidst growing defection by conservatives. At first blush, the Episcopal Church's arguments are simply that of a diocese trying to oust ineligible leadership at an innocent parish. But Mr. Danello said that the interior issues of the church have now inappropriately found their way into a civil court.

"What we have here is a civil case that could potentially end up in Pennsylvania Supreme Court," said Mr. Danello. "Who's entitled to hold office, priestly and Episcopal ordination, these are the kinds of issues that most people look at and say [that] this isn't for a civil court to decide. To present these issues under the camouflage of a property dispute seems to us to be an abuse of the civil court system."

The most prominent point of contention for the diocese appears to be Bishop Moyer, who ran afoul of Bishop Charles Bennison about six years ago, leading to his deposition amid accusations that he abandoned the church. Bishop Moyer was immediately received into the province of central Africa and transferred to the Diocese of Pittsburgh. In anticipation of the deposition, both the present and past Archbishops of Canterbury said Bishop Moyer would be accepted into the Church of England as a priest in good standing.

"[The diocesan dispute] is a theological issue," said Bishop Moyer. "The Episcopal Church holds a revisionist system concerning doctrinal matters. We uphold what the church has taught for centuries. These doctrinal issues are ones where there is a broad sweep of the Anglican Communion [to be considered]. The Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania has taken on to itself to be the sole arbiter of these issues. We're not doing anything wrong. We're loyal, faithful sons and daughters. We're just trying to be a church. The Diocese of Pennsylvania says they don't like the way we're being a church."

Bishop Moyer said that people in the pews are being alienated because of the way the diocese is pursuing its case, and seemed saddened at the prospect of the parish being forced from its church.

"The people here are the Anglo-Catholic parish on the main line," he said. "We have a unique history and heritage. People are drawn here for that reason. If this church was removed from this building, I don't think they'd be successful in founding another Episcopal parish here, because there are already many Episcopal parishes on the main line."

In 1989, the parish affiliated with the Episcopal Synod of America, now called Forward in Faith North America, and is now one of several parishes in the Diocese of Pennsylvania that are so affiliated.

"Good Shepherd belongs in the Anglo-Catholic tradition of worship, teaching, mission, and has remained steadfast in Christian orthodoxy since its founding," reads the parish's website. "Two basic pillars of parish life have been Catholic worship and Christian outreach."

Homeless NYC Holocaust survivor leaves $100,000 gift

JERUSALEM (AP) —Hebrew University has received a surprise donation of more than $100,000 from an unexpected benefactor — a woman who survived the Nazi Holocaust and appeared to be destitute, a university official said Sunday.

Upon her death two years ago, a homeless Holocaust survivor living on the streets of New York City willed the gift to the university. The Jewish woman lived out of a shopping cart in Manhattan and had no known relatives, said Yefet Ozery, Hebrew University's director of development and public relations.

"She lived as a very poor woman. And when she died at the age of 92, it was discovered she had accumulated close to $300,000," Ozery said.

The university first learned about the gift three months ago but did not receive the money until this week. It will be used to fund scholarships for medical research students, according to the woman's wishes, Ozery said, refusing to disclose her name. The story was first reported by The Jerusalem Post daily.

Not much is known about the woman, who had no known connection to the university. She left the other half of her savings to various causes and beneficiaries, though Ozery said it is unknown how she amassed the small fortune.

"No one knows where she got it from. But she probably lived penny to penny. She probably saved it to do good for the world and for the Jewish people," Ozery said.

The woman's last known employer was a Jewish man in New York, who hired her to move his car to avoid parking tickets in exchange for a hot meal and a room, Ozery said. The woman also left that employer a portion of her savings.

Student invents solar-powered fridge for developing countries

Proving once again that the best ideas are often the simplest, 21-year-old student/inventor/entrepreneur Emily Cummins has designed a brilliant portable solar-powered refrigerator that works based upon the principle of evaporation. Employing a combination of conduction and convection, the refrigerator requires no electricity and can be made from commonly available materials like cardboard, sand, and recycled metal.

Simply place perishable foods or temperature-sensitive medications in the solar refrigerator’s interior metal chamber and seal it. In-between the inner and outer chamber, organic material like sand, wool or soil is then saturated with water. As the sun warms the organic material, water evaporates, reducing the temperature of the inner chamber to a cool, 6 ºC [43 ºF] for days at a time!

After winning £5,000 from York Merchant Adventurers for her idea, Emily delayed going to college for a year to take her refrigerator to Africa for further development. She made six versions during the initial phase of production and helped make more than 50 during the trip where locals in Namibia nicknamed her “The Fridge Lady“. The refrigerator has since rolled out in Zambia, Namibia and South Africa and Emily believes thousands more may be in use as the design passes from community to community through word-of-mouth.

Emily explained: “I set about looking at how I could make a sustainable version after asking people what luxury they couldn’t live without and one of the answers that kept coming up was ‘fridge’…I wanted to keep it really simple and so I set about researching how we cooled things years ago. The simplest method of cooling something could be seen when you look at how we cool biologically—through sweating or evaporation. That idea led me to the design and the fridge was born.”

Emily has been inventing from an early age - she received her first hammer at the tender age of four from her grandfather who was an engineer, and she soon set to work making toys and rabbit hutches. At 16 Emily won a regional Young Engineer for Britain Award for creating a toothpaste squeezer for people with arthritis, and the next year went on to win a Sustainable Design Award for a water-carrier made from wood and rubber tubing. In 2007 Emily was named the British Female Innovator of the Year, and last year was short-listed for Cosmopolitan’s 2008 Ultimate Women of the Year Competition.

“I do want to use my skills to make a difference,” Emily says. “I’m not interested in making a bigger TV or greater sound system. I want to create change for the better.” Well said. We know we’ll hear much more from Emily in the future.

(note: although this technology is not new it is exciting to see it's sucessfull implementation... see also the Pot-in-Pot Refigerator)