National Geographic goes to Mt. Athos.
If you knew God would grant you your prayer request, what would you ask?
I had no doubt about what to ask. I was sick, and it was killing me, but I specifically didn’t ask to get better. I said, “Lord you know that I will forget to follow you and depend on you . You know that I will not turn to you anymore as your child if I feel I can make it on my own. So you have to break my heart always, you have to keep me poor and humble, you have to keep me incapable of anything without you. You have to make it clear to me that I can do nothing without your grace, and that will never be clear to me if I think things are going well. You have to break my heart.”
From a handbook for those entering the priesthood.
A pair of Harvard researchers recently examined 40 years of data from dozens of countries, trying to sort out the economic impact of religious beliefs or practices. They found that religion has a measurable effect on developing economies - and the most powerful influence relates to how strongly people believe in hell.
The story from the Boston Globe.
From the Los Angeles Times:
Backed by some of the most powerful members of the Senate, a little-noticed provision in the healthcare overhaul bill would require insurers to consider covering Christian Science prayer treatments as medical expenses.
At First Things, Wesley Smith sounds the alarm:
There is no way that the government should pay directly for a religious practice. Indeed, can you imagine the screaming if the law required a private insurance company or the government to pay the Catholic Church when a priest annointed an ill person with oil as a healing Sacrament? How is this any different?
Gabriel Said Reynolds, an associate professor of theology at Notre Dame, suggests that Muslims need to read the Bible in order to understand the Koran!
I don’t know precisely where “All Saints” ranks on the list of most-popular names for Episcopal churches, but I suspect it’s near the top...
Fr. Dan Martins had some interesting thoughts about loving the saints at his blog.
What does a person who commits a hate crime look like? In England they get their picture in the paper.
Black Swan: an unpredictable event whose effect is greatly disproportionate to its cause.
Doug McGuff is an emergency room physicians and offers a dozen tips on avoiding the avoidable. The last entry on the list does sound right.