Franciscan Works--Liberia Mission

http://www.franciscanworks.org/

     Franciscan Works is dedicated to breaking the cycle of poverty for the poorest of poor children in developing countries through education rooted in Gospel values in the spirit of St. Francis of Assisi.
     We develop the individual potential of children living in poverty so that they can live as God intended, making full use of their talents and abilities for the common benefit, in communion with God, nature and all humankind.

 

Love is a Person!

 The Meaning of Life and Existence: by Father Dumitru Staniloae of the Romanian Orthodox Church.

I stumbled upon, or perhaps was lead to, the video of this wonderful man and his beautiful wisdom.

I don't think that I can do justice to his message by excerpting a few highlights; you'll be very glad that you watched it yourself!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQtx0zEiNlg

The American Anti-Cancer Institute

Truth . Leadership . Hope

The American Anti-Cancer Institute was founded in 2008 with a Cancer Paradigm based in the Truth about this disease as fully treatable with Natural Medicine. As such, we have taken a Leadership role in uniting the alternative medicine community and many others in our Mission, to ultimately give Americans and the world a lasting legacy of Hope fulfilled: the cure for cancer is here!

http://www.americanaci.org/  

Thank God!!!

Stoicheion and entertainment as god

Please see another brilliant sermon/lecture posted Greg Boyd.  He blends elemental spiritual forces, "The Hunger Games", and government statistics about modern American youth into a revealing look at our culture.  Amazing fact for parents and educators: last year American children spent 10.4 hours of the 16 hours they are awake viewing various electronic media and only 18 minutes reading any print material!

http://whchurch.org/blog/6247/stoicheion

#9 What Bill Gates Doesn't Know About GMOs

http://www.gmwatch.eu/latest-listing/1-news-items/13660-what-bill-gates-doesnt-know-about-gmos

This brief article is a highlight in and of itself!  Especially note:

      The U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food has reported that ecological farming can double food production with in 10 years. This is the kind of agriculture we should be investing in.


     We have enough food to go around now. We must finally recognize that hunger is a problem of poverty and access to resources, especially land, not agricultural yield.

     Finally, here in the U.S., kick the farm lobby out of Congress and the pesticide industry out of our federal regulatory agencies (EPA & USDA). Together, these two special interests have a choke hold on U.S. farm, aid and trade policy, and dominate our agricultural research agenda in ways that make it possible for a smart man like Bill Gates to believe and proselytize on behalf of an approach to agriculture that A, the rest of the world knows is defunct; and B, has failed—after 14 years of commercialization and billions of dollars in public research funding—to deliver on a single one of its promises to the public.

#8 Redefine Marriage and History Will Not Be Kind to You

http://www.ruthblog.org/2012/01/30/prepared-remarks-for-the-washington-state-legislature-hearings-on-the-definition-of-marriage/

Speech given by  Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse at the Washington state legislature hearings on redefining marriage.  Excellent logic and insight. The chaotic effects of "No-Fault Divorce" and the "Sexual Revolution" continue to snowball out of control in our culture, and now another destabilizing factor enters.  Some highlights include:

     I am here today to address those of you who have already made up your minds to redefine marriage.  History will not be kind to you.  Previous generations of social experimenters have caused unimaginable misery for millions of people.  Particular people advocated the policies that led to today’s 50% divorce rate and 40% out of wedlock childbearing rate. None of these people has ever been held accountable.
     Mountains of data show that children do need their mothers and their fathers, and that children care deeply about biological connections.It is ludicrous to believe that we would feel the full impact of such a change in a few years.  It will take at least a generation, a full thirty years or more, before the full effects of redefining marriage work themselves out throughout the social system.

How many generations will it take to reverse the damage, assuming our culture survives?

#7 God at War pt.2

     Gregory A. Boyd (Ph.D., Princeton Theological Seminary) was a professor of theology, is senior pastor at Woodland Hills Church (which he founded) in St. Paul, Mn., and is a brilliant author.  His book, God at War, The Bible and Spiritual Conflict, recovers the original Christian worldview.  In a nutshell:

        The New Testament is thoroughly conditioned by a warfare worldview.  In this view the whole of the cosmos is understood to be caught up in a fierce battle between two rival kingdoms.  This view entails that the earth has, quite literally, become a fierce war zone and a desecrated battlefield.

        Jesus entered this war zone to set up the rightful rule of God over against the illegitimate rule of Satan.  Jesus’ healings, miracles, exorcisms, resurrection, as well as most of his teaching, make sense only as various aspects of a unified ministry within the context of this worldview.  The cross and the resurrection were, above all else, the act by which God vanquished his archenemy. 

     According to Boyd, Christ’s victory concerns the whole cosmos before it centers on us.  Our salvation and liberation is part of an ages-long, but not eternal, war.  Satan is fatally wounded, yet he and his army live so the war rages on.  There are still important battles to be fought.  Fighting them is what life is all about.

     Mainstream Christianity prefers the “blueprint view” of life, in which everything that happens is willed by God for his mysterious purposes.  As comforting as this view is, the logical end to it is that nothing we do makes any difference.  Prayer makes no difference.  Our position in such a world is truly hopeless.  But the New Testament writers presented a world in which God’s will is often thwarted by evil cosmic forces.

     Boyd uses an image of Nazis torturing an innocent child.  Incredibly, many modern Christians prefer to see some secret providential design being fulfilled by means of the Nazis!  Boyd prefers instead to discern in the eyes of the Nazis something of an evil “twisting serpent” seeking once again to undo God’s creation.  In the New Testament worldview, the only reason a child is tortured is because free beings, human and angelic, can will such atrocities.

     Precisely because our present suffering is NOT God’s will—however much he can now use it for our ultimate good—we can have assurance that the cosmos will not always be this way.