The Archbishop of Dublin said Thursday that an upcoming report on child sexual abuse involving Catholic priests will likely reveal that thousands of youngsters were abused from 1975 to 2004.

The report “will shock us all,” said Diarmuid Martin, during Mass at Dublin’s Pro-Cathedral.

The archbishop said the report, compiled by the Dublin Archdiocese Commission of Investigation, is expected to show that “thousands of children or young people across Ireland were abused by priests in the period under investigation and the horror of that abuse was not recognized for what it is.”

Source:  msnbc.com

Here is the new lesson for this week - enjoy:

As you grow up, dear lady in training, there is one thing you need to remember: There are no people more important than your family. Your parents, your siblings, your grandparents, even aunts and uncles, cousins - these people are your brethren first and foremost, and until you marry into your future husband’s family, your family is the group of people who you learn and benefit from, and who benefits from your skills and talents.

Read the Whole Lesson here.

Tags: how to be a lady

A gentle word of warning to all Christians who have discovered that the Passover is a feast to be kept for all times:  Think again before you buy a lamb for your Passover meal if you do not wish to nullify Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, and read this article:

The Passover Sacrifice

Tags: Passover

Please remember that ladies do not just sit around looking pretty….  Here is the new lady lesson to consider:

If so far you had the impression that ladies mainly sit around, behave well, eat crumpets, drink tea and generally look pretty, I have to disappoint you, dear lady in training.  An important part of a lady’s general disposition is her positive attitude towards work.  Not only does she work diligently and avoid idleness, no, she seeks work out, joyfully so, takes responsibility and does everything that benefits first her father’s, and later her husband’s household.

Read the Whole Lesson here.

Tags: how to be a lady

When Yumiko Iwate’s pay was cut last year, she and her female colleagues all agreed there was only one thing to do: find a husband.

“I want to get married soon, hopefully by the end of this year,” said Iwate, a 36-year-old employee at a mail-order retailer in Tokyo. “The recession made me realize I’m not going to make as much money as I expected, and I’d be more stable financially if I had double income to fall back on.”

Women the Japanese call “marriage-hunters” are looking to tie the knot as companies from Toyota Motor Corp. to Sony Corp. fire thousands of workers and the nation heads for its biggest annual economic contraction since 1945. Marriages surged to a five-year high of 731,000 in 2008 as wages stagnated and the unemployment rate rose for the first time in six years.

“Financial concerns are a major reason for the increase in marriage-hunting,” said Toshihiro Nagahama, chief economist at Dai-Ichi Life Research Institute in Tokyo. “Women are motivated more than ever to find a financially sound partner.”

The trend marks a reversal for women who put careers over families after Japan implemented equal labor rights 23 years ago. The number of marriages in the following decade slid 4.5 percent to an annual average of 746,000 compared with the decade before. Despite equal rights, women still make 43 percent less than men, giving them more reason to seek a partner during recessions.

Source: Bloomberg.com

A little late, but here it is:  The new lady lesson is out !  Enjoy.

Nowadays, girls oftentimes only think of purity in terms of entering marriage untouched. This particular area of purity is particularly important because once you become “one flesh” with a man, he is your husband before God, and there is to be only one husband in your life.

While this is certainly a purity to protect and to reserve for your future husband, dear lady in training, it is by far not the only area in which purity matters. So what else is there to pay attention to in terms of purity ?

Read the Whole Lesson here

Tags: how to be a lady

"Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap."
Galatians 6:7 

President Obama has been without a pastor or a home church ever since he cut his ties to the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. in the heat of the presidential campaign. But he has quietly cultivated a handful of evangelical pastors for private prayer sessions on the telephone and for discussions on the role of religion in politics.

All are men, two of them white and three black — including the Rev. Otis Moss Jr., a graying lion of the civil rights movement. Two, the entrepreneurial dynamos Bishop T. D. Jakes and the Rev. Kirbyjon H. Caldwell, also served as occasional spiritual advisers to President George W. Bush. Another, the Rev. Jim Wallis, leans left on some issues, like military intervention and poverty programs, but opposes abortion.

None of these pastors are affiliated with the religious right, though several are quite conservative theologically. One of them, the Rev. Joel C. Hunter, the pastor of a conservative megachurch in Florida, was branded a turncoat by some leaders of the Christian right when he began to speak out on the need to stop global warming.

But as a group they can hardly be characterized as part of the religious left either. Most, like Mr. Wallis, do not take traditionally liberal positions on abortion or homosexuality. What most say they share with the president is the conviction that faith is the foundation in the fight against economic inequality and social injustice.

“These are all centrist, social justice guys,” said the Rev. Eugene F. Rivers, a politically active pastor of Azusa Community Church in Boston, who knows all of them but is not part of the president’s prayer caucus. “Obama genuinely comes out of the social justice wing of the church. That’s real. The community organizing stuff is real.”

The pastors say Mr. Obama appears to rely on his faith for intellectual and spiritual succor.

Source:  NYTimes.com

Roman Catholic and Orthodox Jewish officials in New York are mounting an intense lobbying effort to block a bill before the State Legislature that would temporarily lift the statute of limitations for lawsuits alleging the sexual abuse of children.

State Senator Thomas K. Duane, who met on Wednesday with the New York Coalition to Protect Children, is the sponsor of a bill that would suspend the statute of limitations on abuse claims.

A perennial proposal that has been quashed in past years by Republicans who controlled the State Senate, the bill is now widely supported by the new Democratic majority in that chamber, and for the first time is given a good chance of passing.

If signed by Gov. David A. Paterson, a longtime supporter, the bill would at minimum revive hundreds of claims filed in recent years against Catholic priests and dioceses in New York, but dismissed because they were made after the current time limit, which is five years after the accuser turns 18. Similar legislation has passed in Delaware and in California, where a 2003 law led to claims that have cost the church an estimated $800 million to $1 billion in damages and settlements.

…

But while the Catholic Church is leading the opposition, in recent months a loose coalition of disparate groups has also joined the effort. They include leaders of the Hasidic and Sephardic Jewish institutions in Brooklyn, which could face equally costly abuse claims. The New York Civil Liberties Union and the criminal defense bar oppose lifting statutes of limitation as unfair to the accused, who must defend themselves against claims of transgressions decades old.

Source: NYTimes.com

One in 50 children is homeless in the United States every year, according to a report released Tuesday.

The report, by the National Center on Family Homelessness, analyzed data from 2005-06 and found that more than 1.5 million children were without a home.

“These numbers will grow as home foreclosures continue to rise,” Ellen Bassuk, president of the center, said in a statement.

The study ranked states on their performance in four areas: the extent of child homelessness, the risk for it, child well-being and the state’s policy and planning efforts.

The states that fared the poorest were Texas, Georgia, Arkansas, New Mexico and Louisiana.

Source: CNN.com

The only group that grew in every U.S. state since the 2001 survey was people saying they had “no” religion; the survey says this group is now 15 percent of the population. Silk said this group is likely responsible for the shrinking percentage of Christians in the United States.

Northern New England has surpassed the Pacific Northwest as the least religious section of the country; 34 percent of Vermont residents say they have “no religion.” The report said that the country has a “growing non-religious or irreligious minority.” Twenty-seven percent of those interviewed said they did not expect to have a religious funeral or service when they died, and 30 percent of people who had married said their service was not religious. Those questions weren’t asked in previous surveys.

The survey reflects a key question that demographers, sociologists and political scientists have been asking in recent years: Who makes up this growing group of evangelicals? Forty-four percent of America’s 77 million Christian adults say they are born again or evangelical. Meanwhile, 18 percent of Catholics also chose that label, as did 40 percent of mainline Christians.

“If people call themselves ‘evangelical,’ it doesn’t tell you as much as you think it tells you about what kind of church they go to,” Silk said. “It deepens the conundrum about who evangelicals are.”

Source: washingtonpost.com

The congressional showdown over Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius’ nomination to President Obama’s Cabinet may focus less on her qualifications than on the issue of abortion, analysts said.

Then-presidential candidate Barack Obama listens to Gov. Kathleen Sebelius during a January 2008 rally.

Obama on Monday nominated Sebelius to head the Department of Health and Human Services. Cabinet nominations require Senate confirmation, and anti-abortion groups already are making their views known.

Analysts suspected that Obama would face a battle over abortion if and when he makes a nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, but religious conservatives could use Sebelius as a warm-up for the seemingly inevitable fight.

Calling Sebelius an "enemy of the unborn," Catholic League President Bill Donohue said the Kansas governor’s nomination is particularly disturbing because the health and human services secretary is one of the few members of the administration who can directly affect abortion policy.

"Sebelius’ support for abortion is so far off the charts that she has been publicly criticized by the last three archbishops of Kansas City," Donohue said in a statement. Watch why filling the Cabinet post is urgent task »

The liberal group Catholics United has come to Sebelius’ defense, saying the Kansas governor has taken several steps to lower the abortion rate in her state. The group also has posted excerpts of a 2006 speech in which Sebelius said she opposed abortion.

"My Catholic faith teaches me that all life is sacred, and personally I believe abortion is wrong," she said then. "However, I disagree with the suggestion that criminalizing women and their doctors is an effective means of achieving the goal of reducing the number of abortions in our nation."

CNN.com

The congressional showdown over Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius’ nomination to President Obama’s Cabinet may focus less on her qualifications than on the issue of abortion, analysts said.

Then-presidential candidate Barack Obama listens to Gov. Kathleen Sebelius during a January 2008 rally.

Obama on Monday nominated Sebelius to head the Department of Health and Human Services. Cabinet nominations require Senate confirmation, and anti-abortion groups already are making their views known.

Analysts suspected that Obama would face a battle over abortion if and when he makes a nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, but religious conservatives could use Sebelius as a warm-up for the seemingly inevitable fight.

Calling Sebelius an "enemy of the unborn," Catholic League President Bill Donohue said the Kansas governor’s nomination is particularly disturbing because the health and human services secretary is one of the few members of the administration who can directly affect abortion policy.

"Sebelius’ support for abortion is so far off the charts that she has been publicly criticized by the last three archbishops of Kansas City," Donohue said in a statement. Watch why filling the Cabinet post is urgent task »

The liberal group Catholics United has come to Sebelius’ defense, saying the Kansas governor has taken several steps to lower the abortion rate in her state. The group also has posted excerpts of a 2006 speech in which Sebelius said she opposed abortion.

"My Catholic faith teaches me that all life is sacred, and personally I believe abortion is wrong," she said then. "However, I disagree with the suggestion that criminalizing women and their doctors is an effective means of achieving the goal of reducing the number of abortions in our nation."

CNN.com

The new lady lesson is out, esteemed reader, and here is how is starts:

A few lessons ago I mentioned school, so let me explain what is wrong with school, or college for that matter. Do not get me wrong, I am not saying education is a bad thing, on the contrary. Education is very important, in every way. But school is not the way to go, neither is college. And here is why:

Read the Whole Lesson here

Tags: how to be a lady

Yes indeed, people will come to hold the strongest of opinions about all manner of things without ever having taken the time to actually think.

Source:  The Guardian

The east of England may be the most godless region of the UK, according to a “belief map” published by a theology thinktank today. Almost half of adults there believe the theory of evolution makes God obsolete, and more than 80% disagree with creationism and intelligent design, which propose that humans were created by God in the past 10,000 years, and that life owes its complexity to divine intervention.

The map was drawn up by the thinktank Theos following a survey of 2,060 people across the country who were chosen to be representative of the adult population.

The survey, which was conducted to mark the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, found that nearly half of the British adult population could not name the country’s greatest naturalist as the author of On the Origin of Species, the 1859 book that introduced evolution through natural selection to a sceptical Victorian society.

The poll also revealed some extraordinary views on more recent writings, with 5% of adults thinking Darwin wrote A Brief History of Time, a bestseller on the science of spacetime, which was written by the Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking and is widely regarded as the most popular science book never to be completed by its readers.

A further 3% of those surveyed thought Darwin wrote The God Delusion, by the arch-atheist and Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins, while 1% thought Darwin was the author of The Naked Chef by Jamie Oliver.

Full Story

Technorati Tags: Atheism