Jonathan's blog

From a NY Times article of the same title by Neela Banerjee:

The Episcopal Church elected Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori of Nevada as its presiding bishop on Sunday, making her the first woman to lead a church in the worldwide Anglican Communion. Many Episcopalians gathered here for the church's triennial general convention cheered the largely unexpected choice of Bishop Jefferts Schori, 52, the lone woman and one of the youngest of the seven candidates for the job. Her election was a milestone for the Episcopal Church, which began ordaining women only in 1976. She takes on her new responsibilities at a particularly fraught moment in the history of the Episcopal Church, the American branch of the Anglican Communion, the world's third-largest church body, with 77 million members. She was elected to succeed Presiding Bishop Frank T. Griswold, who will retire in November when his nine-year term ends. At the last general convention, in 2003, the church consented to the election of an openly gay man, the Rev. V. Gene Robinson, as bishop of New Hampshire. The decision deeply offended some Episcopalians in the United States and many Anglican primates abroad, who saw it as blatant disregard of Scripture. Since then, some United States congregations have left the Episcopal Church, and primates overseas have threatened schism. Bishop Jefferts Schori supported Bishop Robinson's election in 2003, and the Episcopal Diocese of Nevada permits the blessing of same-sex unions. Moreover, that Bishop Jefferts Schori is a woman could further strain relations with three dioceses in the United States and many Anglican provinces that refuse to ordain women as priests and bishops, critics of the vote said Sunday.

From an abcnews.com article of the same title:

What Not to Do

• Take flight. Don't run away from the dog, because it triggers the dog's prey drive. Once that happens, the dog will want to turn and chase you.
• If the dog catches you and starts attacking, don't hit it. The more you fight back, the more the struggle feeds into the dog's defensive drives and the more he wants to kill that prey and take it home.

What to Do

• If you are approached by a vicious dog, relax and be as still as possible.
• Drop your head so you don't make eye contact, but maintain an upright position.
• Cover you ears and press your elbows to your sides. This way, if the dog bites you, your ears, eyes, rib cage and vital organs are protected.
• If the dog grabs your arm or your leg, try to remain motionless. If the dog thinks you're dead, it should let go of you.

How to Rescue a Child

• Grab an object and start hitting the dog so you can redirect it. You can also grab the dog's "scruff" - the area on the sides of the dog's neck. This should control the dog's head and keep it from swinging around to bite you.
• You can go one step further and grab the dog's Adam's apple and choke him.
• Do not pull the dog off the child. That can rip the skin right off the child.

When bark comes to bite, I really wonder how many folks who know these guidelines would put them into practice. They make sense in response to a dog's instincts, but people have instincts too…and they're contrary to these guidelines.

From a NY Times article of the same title by Dave Itzkoff:

…100,000…loyal fans…[attended] DukesFest, a two-day celebration of "The Dukes of Hazzard," the down-home comedy-adventure series that was broadcast on CBS from 1979 to 1985. The annual gathering (held this year on June 3 and 4) is an opportunity for viewers to mingle with the show's stars, trade memorabilia, dress in kitschy T-shirts or simply watch fireworks or eat pork products named for the show's corpulent villain, Boss Hogg. But among this crowd there is a smaller, more dedicated group for whom DukesFest is a kind of mystical calling, a sacred convocation for those who can find transcendence in an event as simple as a car leaping over a ditch. Their high priest is Ben Jones, the actor who played the character of Cooter Davenport, a garage mechanic, and went on to serve two terms representing Georgia's Fourth District in the United States House of Representatives. After moving to Rappahannock County, Va., Mr. Jones and his wife, Alma, opened a "Dukes"-theme general store called Cooter's Place in the summer of 1999, and staged outdoor festivals there, honoring the series. "The show had sort of flown under the radar for a long time," Mr. Jones said in a telephone interview. "It's timeless, except for the doofus haircuts. But a lot of people I know have doofus haircuts." Then "The Dukes of Hazzard" underwent a resurgence on cable television and DVD. Mr. Jones relocated his store to Gatlinburg, Tenn., and the DukesFest itself to the Bristol Motor Speedway, a racetrack in Bristol, Tenn. This summer, as he prepared to open a second Cooter's Place in Nashville, he brought DukesFest with him, as well as an official sponsorship from the cable channel CMT and all the surviving members of the "Dukes of Hazzard" cast: including John Schneider and Tom Wopat, who as Bo and Luke Duke were the show's hunky young stars, and Rick Hurst, who played the bumbling deputy Cletus.

What little boy in the 70's and 80's didn't love them Dukes (and Buck Rogers too). I did. If I remember correctly, it was a Friday night favorite. I haven't seen it, but I hear the movie was terrible. You can see a bunch more from DukesFest at Cooter's Place.

From an article with the same title by David Haldane of the LA Times:

At a small Catholic church south of Los Angeles, the pressing moral question comes to this: Does kneeling at the wrong time during worship make you a sinner? Kneeling "is clearly rebellion, grave disobedience and mortal sin," Father Martin Tran, pastor at St. Mary's by the Sea, in Huntington Beach, Calif., told his flock in a recent church bulletin. The Diocese of Orange backs Tran's anti-kneeling edict. While told by the pastor and the archdiocese to stand during certain parts of the liturgy, a third of the congregation still gets on its knees every Sunday. "Kneeling is an act of adoration," said Judith M. Clark, 68, one of at least 55 parishioners who have received letters from church leaders urging them to get off their knees or quit St. Mary's and the Diocese of Orange. "You almost automatically kneel because you're so used to it. Now the priest says we should stand, we … ignore him." The debate is being played out in at least a dozen U.S. parishes. Since at least the seventh century, Catholics have been kneeling following the Agnus Dei, the point during Mass when the priest holds up the chalice and consecrated bread and says, "Behold the lamb of God." But four years ago, the Vatican revised its instructions, allowing bishops to decide at some points in the Mass whether their flocks should get on their knees. The debate is part of the argument among Catholics between tradition and change. Traditionalists see it as the ultimate posture of submission to and adoration of God; modernists view kneeling as the vestige of a feudal past.

To kneel or not to kneel? Seems kind of silly. When church leaders typically see themselves as figures of authority to be obeyed and church members typically aren't willing to yield to authority in conflict with their own view, then I guess silliness like this is bound to ensue. Maybe church members need to learn submission and church leaders need to be examples of servants, not rigid authoritarians.

From a Christianity Today article of the same title by Brad Greenberg:

Daniel Berry was practicing his faith, but his employers felt he took it too far. They told him to keep his Bible tucked in a desk drawer, to take down a "Happy Birthday Jesus" sign, and to stop praying with clients. Berry didn't like the orders given by the Tehama County Department of Social Services, so he sued, claiming his First Amendment rights had been infringed. The Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled against him in May, further affirming the limitations on overt Christian behavior by government employees... Beginning in 2001, Berry hosted informal and unscheduled prayer meetings in a conference room, even after the county told him he could not use the site. They said he should use a break room instead. Later that year, he challenged a departmental rule and placed a Bible on his desk and hung a Jesus sign on his cubicle. He was seen praying with clients. Berry had never been prevented from sharing his faith with coworkers. But the county strictly prohibited religious conversations with clients, because they feared such dialogue could be perceived as government endorsement of religion... "Generally, an employee is not barred from giving a religious testimony-even to the general public," Derek Davis, director of the Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies at Baylor University, told CT. "If you invited the client to pray with you and the client said, 'Sure-why not?' that would be okay. If the client resisted, then you would need to back off." The case would have been different had Berry not been a government employee. The "cloud" of "separation of church and state sometimes shuts peoples' mouths when they don't have to [be] shut," said Os Hillman, director of the International Coalition of Workplace Ministries. "Yet there are clearly times you don't want to overstep your bounds." One of those is evangelizing on company time. Another is proselytizing a coworker who feels harassed. The best things Christians can do, Hillman said, are work hard, demonstrate integrity and love, and share how God is transforming their lives. "I particularly like what St. Francis of Assisi said, 'Preach the gospel always, and when necessary use words,'" Hillman said. "That is especially important in the workplace."