Pope Accepts Resignation of Irish Bishop

Bishop John Magee handed in his resignation to Pope Benedcit XVI on Wednesday due to his failure to report child-molesting clergy under his authority to the police. The resignation was accepted by the Pope.

Along with his resignation, the 73 year-old Bishop issued an apology to victims of these pedophile priests. "To those whom I have failed in any way, or through any omission of mine have made suffer, I beg forgiveness and pardon."

The Bishop’s resignation marks another step in extensive defensive maneuevers the Vatican is presently involved in over accusations that they have been protecting child-abusers for too long. Just last week the Pope himself issues an unprecedented letter to Ireland which addressed the almost 20 years of cover-up scandals there.
Ireland, however, is not the only European country to be demanding answers from the Vatican.

Also, on Wednesday the German government announced a strong panel of experts to investigate the extent of pedophile activity in Catholic and other institutions for children. This could well open the door for abuse victims to pursue clergy and other church officials for civil damages and criminal liability, the Washington Post said.

(Read the full story at http://washingtonpost.com/faith Image portrays a man walking past the Papal Cross in Dublin's Phoenix Park.)

Nigeria Begin Prosecutions

Nigerian police spokesman, Mohammed Lerama, recently stated that authorities were planning to begin prosecuting around 200 suspects who allegedly had been involved in the slaughter of hundreds of people living in predominantly Christian villages in the Jos area. The two separate attacks were believed to have been carried out by Muslim extremists. Charges of terrorism and homicide will be laid.
The directory of Open Door’s Africa urged people to remember the daily fear that local Nigerian Christians were being forced to live under.

"I think it is also important to understand that the Nigerian Christians are not super human beings. We need to understand that those Christians in northern Nigeria face discrimination, humiliation and attacks on almost a daily basis," he stated. "They have built and rebuilt homes and churches so many times. They have gone to morgues to look for the bodies of their loved ones so often.”

The director went onto to say that local pastors were reporting that local people were becoming extremely reluctant to forgive these attacks, the Christian Post reports.

(Read the full story at www.christianpost.com)

Massive Church-Based Humanitarian Agency Initiated

Wednesday saw the formal unveiling of ACT Alliance, a merger of the disaster relief network ACT International and its partner organization ACT Development. ACT Alliance now acts as an umbrella body and coordinates all agencies related to the World Council of Churches in the areas of humanitarian emergencies and poverty reduction.

The general secretary of ACT Alliance, said that this new body provides the opportunity “to better link emergency humanitarian assistance and sustainable development.”

He went on to say that “When the emergency is over, and the funds run out, churches continue to be present; they are the organization at the end of the street or village, which remains when all others have gone. The ACT Alliance, with our faith to guide us and the continued support of all our partners and friends to sustain our work, can continue to bring relief to the needy, support to the oppressed and development to the impoverished."

In the aftermath of the 2004 Tsunami, church-based relief agencies were critiqued for the lack of teamwork which resulted in redundant works and wastage of resources. Thus, ACT is an attempt to redress this situation. The world wide fellowship of churches were much more effectively organized through ACT during the Haiti earthquake, and the combination of the two agencies is an attempt to even further improve communication and teamwork.

WCC General Secretary the Rev. Dr. Olav Fykse Tveit said on Wednesday that “the ACT Alliance is a genuine expression of the ecumenical movement, the call to be one so that the world can believe that God is a loving and caring God for all humankind.”
ACT Alliance is an umbrella covering for more than 100 organizations working in long-term development and humanitarian assistance, and employs about 30,000 staff and volunteers working in 125 countries the Christian Post said.

(Read the full story at http://christianpost.com)

Last Supper Food Portions Becoming ‘Super-Sized’!

The apostles are eating more and more! An interesting study done by scholars shows that artistic illustrations of the Last Supper depict the food portions growing ever larger over the course of history. Between the years 1000 and 2000 the food on the plates has increased by 70% and the bread by 23%.

While the Gospels tell of several “super-sizing” miracles that Christ was involved in (the fish and loaves miracle for example), this latest substantial increase of food can be linked more to artistic perceptions than to Christ himself. A team of scholars have studied 52 artist’s renditions of the Last Supper and published their findings online on Tuesday in the International Journal of Obesity.

Brian Wansink, director of the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab and author of "Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think " was quoted as saying “I think people assume that increased serving sizes, or 'portion distortion,' is a recent phenomenon, but this research indicates that it's a general trend for at least the last millennium."

To support their findings, Wansink and his brother Craig, a biblical scholar at Virginia Wesleyan College, studied 52 depictions of the Last Supper painted between the year 1000 and the year 2000. They used computers to compare the size of the disciple’s heads with the size of their plates, food and bread they found that food portions increased dramatically over the period of a millennium.

The Wansinks, are using this data to argue that portion growth may have a provenance far older than industrial farming and the economics of takeout food. Rather they propose that it is a natural result of “dramatic socio-historic increases in the production, availability, safety, abundance and affordability of food" over the millennium in question, said The Los Angeles Times.

(Read the full story at http://latimes.com/news)

Afghan Women Concerned That Hard-Fought Social Improvements Will Be Lost

The head-to-toe burqas that made women a faceless symbol of the Taliban's violently repressive rule are no longer required here. Yet many Afghan women say they still feel voiceless eight years into a war-torn democracy, and they point to government plans to forge peace with the Taliban as a prime example.

Gender activists say they have been pressing the ruling administration for a part in any deal-making with Taliban fighters and leaders, which is scheduled to be finalized at a summit in April. Instead, they said, they have been met with a silence that they see as a dispiriting reminder of the limits of progress Afghan women have made since 2001.

"We have not been approached by the government -- they never do," said Samira Hamidi, country director of the Afghan Women's Network, an umbrella group. "The belief is that women are not important,'' she said, describing a mind-set that she said "has not been changed in the past eight years."

The Taliban's repressive treatment of women helped galvanize international opposition in the 1990s, and by some measures democracy has completely changed Afghan women's lives. Their worry now is not about a Taliban takeover, Hamidi said, but that male leaders, behind closed doors and desperate for peace, might not compel Taliban leaders to accept, however grudgingly, that women's roles have altered.
Those concerns share roots with the misgivings voiced by many observers, including some U.S. officials, about Afghan efforts to forge a settlement with the Taliban, whose leaders promote an Islamist ideology that seems wholly at odds with rights the Afghan constitution guarantees.

In today's Afghanistan, females make up one-quarter of parliament, fill one-third of the nation's classrooms and even compete on "Afghan Idol."

But violence against them remains "endemic," according to the State Department. The percentage of female civil servants is steadily falling. Just one of 25 cabinet members is a woman, and female lawmakers say their opinions are often ignored.
(Read the full story at http://washingtonpost.com/faith - Image from www.rockpa.org)

Further Muslim-Christian Violence in Nigeria

Attackers killed at least 11 people Wednesday in a region of Nigeria that has been convulsed by violence between Muslims and Christians.

Muslim herdsmen, some dressed in military uniforms, attacked a predominantly Christian village at about 1 a.m. Wednesday near the city of Jos, close to where a machete-wielding Muslim group killed hundreds earlier this month, said Choji Gyang, special adviser on religious affairs to the governor of the Nigerian state of Plateau.

The dead included women and children, he said. The attackers, from the Fulani ethnic group, also injured at least four others and stole 120 cattle. Two people are still missing.

The violence has put much of oil-rich Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation, on edge, with rumors circulating of more attacks. Authorities in Lagos took the unusual step of sending a text message to residents to try to put them at ease.

"Please be informed that the story of Fulanis trooping into Lagos for the past three days to cause chaos is baseless," the message said. "All security agencies have investigated this rumor individually and collectively and found that there's no iota of truth in it. Be advised to go about your lawful business without fear.
"All agencies remain committed to keep our state and country safe. We are fully alert. Thank-you and pass this message onto others."

Thousands of people in Plateau state have been killed in similar outbreaks of violence in the last ten years, said Corinne Dufka, a senior West Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch.

Though the violence often pits Christians and Muslims against each other, it has more to do with disputes over access to natural resources than religion, according to John Onaiyekan, the archbishop of Abuja, Nigeria.

Former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo also has said that the violence is ignited more by ethnic, social, and economic problems than religion.
"If you have one group or a community that has land that's been encroached upon by another community or even by itinerant cattle farmers, then the people who lay claim to the land will fight back," he recently said.

"If there are job opportunities in an area, and persons believe they are indigenous to that area, and (are) not getting enough out of the jobs that are available, they will fight those who are getting the jobs."

(For the full story please go to http://edition.cnn.com - Image from CNN.com)

Another Sex Scandal Rocks the Catholic Church

Brazilian authorities are investigating three priests accused of sexually abusing altar boys in Rio de Janiero after a video allegedly showing one case of abuse was broadcast on television, police and church officials said Tuesday.

The case came to light after the SBT network aired a video purportedly showing an 82-year-old priest having sex with a 19-year-old altar boy who worked for him for four years. Other young men appeared on the report saying that they, too, had been abused by Monsignor Luiz Marques Barbosa.

Other priests under investigation are Monsignor Raimundo Gomes, 52, and Father Edilson Duarte, 43, for allegedly having sexual relations with boys and young men.
According to a church statement, the three priests are "supposedly involved in acts (yet to be proven) of sexual abuse." The statement did not say whether the men admit or deny guilt. None of the priests could be located to ask about the case, and the church would not provide contact details for them.

A church official in the Penedo archdiocese, in the northeastern state of Alagoas, said the three have been suspended. A police official said the men are free pending the investigation, which should last until about a month. Both the church official and the policeman spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss any details pertaining to the case.

A Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said officials there were aware of the case.

In its report last week, SBT showed footage of a man who looks like Barbosa having sex with the 19-year-old. It said the footage was secretly filmed in January 2009 by a 21-year-old man who charges Barbosa had abused him since age 12.
SBT said the video was sent anonymously to the network, and reporters went to the town of 200,000 people to investigate last month.

An SBT reporter visited Barbosa's house to conduct an interview and confront him with the allegations. Before raising the allegations of sexual abuse, the reporter asks if the priest had ever sinned.
"Who has never committed a sin?" Barbosa responds.

The priest is then asked if the region has problems with pedophilia.
"I think it is more (a problem) of homosexuality than pedophilia," Barbosa says.
Asked directly if he ever abused boys, Barbosa says he could only answer such a question "in confession." He then ends the interview, which was aired Thursday and posted on SBT's YouTube page.

Bishop Valerio Breda released a statement saying that in light of the "grave and lamentable facts made public on television," Barbosa and the two other priests had been suspended.

"We reproach, without restriction and with hearts broken by shame and sadness, the facts in the report which, despite their not having been proven, have outraged human and Christian conscience," Breda wrote.

He added that none of the alleged victims or their families had ever contacted the church regarding the allegations of abuse. Breda said the church was cooperating with police and would also conduct its own investigation.

(For the full story please go to http://www.google.com - Image from Google maps)

Link Established Between Real-Life Violence and Gaming

The debate has raged for years about whether more exposure to on-screen violence leads to more real-life violence and aggression. That debate has narrowed over the last decade to studies of exposure specifically to violent video games.
Psychologist Craig Anderson (the Center for the Study of Violence at Iowa State University) and a team of researchers recently released a report detailing a meta-analysis of studies exploring various aspects of video gaming and violence. The submitted draft of the report, published in the March Psychological Bulletin, is available online if you want to check out the details and method. You can also read a summary from U.S. News & World Report.

The basic conclusion of the meta-analysis is that increased exposure to violent video gaming does in fact lead to increased aggressive thinking, feeling, and behavior, as well as overall physiological arousal, and decline in “prosocial” (helping) behavior and empathy. This is true for both genders, and seems to be true for both short-term and long-term play. Interestingly enough, Japanese studies found similar results to U.S. studies.

The research team feels strongly that this is a conclusive study, authoratively answering the question about violent gaming and violent thinking, feeling, and acting. A larger and more complex question seems to be, what do we do about it? This is an issue that churches and more specifically, youth leaders and youth organizations should be looking to address.

Slaughter in Nigeria

The killers showed no mercy: They didn't spare women and children, or even a 4-day-old baby, from their machetes. On Monday, women wailed in the streets as a dump truck carried dozens of bodies past burned-out homes toward a mass grave.
Rubber-gloved workers pulled ever-smaller bodies from the dump truck and tossed them into the mass grave. A crowd began singing a hymn with the refrain, "Jesus said I am the way to heaven." As the grave filled, the grieving crowd sang, "Jesus, show me the way."

At least 200 people, most of them Christians, were slaughtered on Sunday, according to residents, aid groups and journalists. The local government gave a figure more than twice that amount but offered no casualty list or other information to substantiate it.

An Associated Press reporter counted 61 corpses, 32 of them children, being buried in the mass grave in the village of Dogo Nahawa on Monday. Other victims would be buried elsewhere. At a local morgue the bodies of children, including a diaper-clad toddler, were tangled together. One appeared to have been scalped. Others had severed hands and feet.

The horrific violence comes after sectarian killings in this region in January left more than 300 dead, most of them Muslim. Some victims were shoved into sewer pits and communal wells.

Sunday's bloodshed in three mostly Christian villages appeared to be reprisal attacks, Red Cross spokesman Robin Waubo said.

Nigeria is almost evenly split between Muslims in the north and the predominantly Christian south. The recent bloodshed has been happening in central Nigeria, in towns which lie along the country's religious fault line. It is Nigeria's "middle belt," where dozens of ethnic groups vie for control of fertile lands.

Rev. Pandang Yamsat, the president of a local Christian group, said he has urged his congregation not to respond violently to Muslims. However, he said he believes that Muslims in the area want to control the region and that any peace talks would only give Muslims "time to conquer territory with swords."

The Rev. Federico Lombardi, a Vatican spokesman, condemned the violence and said Monday that the conflict must be interpreted in the light of social, economic, ethnic and cultural factors rather than religious hatred.

The killings add to the tally of thousands who have already perished in Africa's most populous country in the last decade because of religious and political frictions.

(For the full article please go to http://washingtontimes.com)

World Vision Workers Attacked in Pakistan

A World Vision office in Pakistan was attacked by gunmen on Wednesday, leaving at least five staff members dead.

The international humanitarian organization said the attack was unprovoked.
Initial reports say the militants detonated grenades and opened fire on the office, which is located in the Mansehra District of Pakistan, north of the capital, Islamabad. The office received no threatening letters prior to the attack.
"World Vision today is mourning the brutal and senseless deaths of five members [of] our staff," the Christian organization said in a statement.

Seven additional employees have been hospitalized and one staff member is missing.
"Those who kill humanitarian workers must be reminded that they are not only killing their own country's residents, but also people seeking to improve the lives of victims of poverty and injustice," the statement on Wednesday further reads.
The staff consisted of local Pakistanis who were serving in relief and development work.

Up to 15 gunmen arrived in pick-up vehicles and began firing on the staff, according to UK's The Times. World Vision administration officer Mohammad Sajid said the militants took their mobile phones, "dragged people one by one and shifted to an adjacent room and shot and killed them."

World Vision established offices in the South Asian country, where Christians make up less than three percent of the population, in 1992 and was focused primarily on relief interventions. All of World Vision's operations in the country have been suspended indefinitely.

(For the full article please go to www.christianpost.com).

A 'New Kind of Christianity' Proposed by Brian McLaren

The Christian faith must be born again, says one prominent pastor, author and social activist.

And to be born again, Christians must be unlocked from "a prison" of long-held assumptions and have the freedom to ask honest questions, Brian McLaren indicates in his newest book, A New Kind of Christianity.
He's not advocating for a new set of beliefs, he says, but rather a "new way of believing."

The proposal doesn't seem like anything new for those familiar with McLaren, who presented ‘A New Kind of Christian’ nine years ago. But some say his latest book paints a more vivid picture of the emergent church pastor and his beliefs.
McLaren grew up in a conservative evangelical home and became a committed disciple in his teen years. He considered going into the Episcopal ministry but became an English teacher instead, determined that he could "do more good for the spiritual cause outside the institutional church than inside of it." Without having planned it, he later became a full-time pastor, leading a group of people that had been meeting at his home every week.

Today, after serving as a pastor for more than 30 years, he often sees picketers and leaflets labeling him as "dangerous," "controversial" and "unbiblical" when he visits churches around the world to speak. He wonders, "How did a mild-mannered guy like me get into so much trouble?"

He feels it may partly be because he's asking questions – theological ones that are "by and large answered" for most evangelical Christian leaders.

"Some people seem to believe that all of those [theological] interpretations are easy and clear, that their church or denomination has nailed them down or figured them out. And I just don’t think it’s that simple," McLaren said. "I think we’re in a constant struggle to understand the truths more deeply and we have to be involved in ongoing, unending repentance where we are willing to say the things that we felt were true maybe were only partially so, so we have more to learn. That to me is part of what being a disciple is."

(For the full article please go to http://www.christianpost.com).

Another U.S. Missionary Released in Haiti

Haitian authorities have released one of the last two U.S. Baptist missionaries jailed for trying to take orphans out of the country after the earthquake.

Charisa Coulter left her cell Monday accompanied staff of the U.S. Embassy.

The Idaho woman was arrested Jan. 29 with nine other Americans while trying to leave Haiti with 33 children without the proper documents. They say they were trying to help orphans after the earthquake.

Eight of the Americans had been already been released. Still in custody is their leader, Laura Silsby.

(For the full article please go to http://washingtontimes.com).

World Vision begins relief efforts after quake in Chile

World Vision began distributing hundreds of blankets and some water containers to Santiago's earthquake survivors over the weekend as it prepared to start an extensive response in the hardest hit areas south of the capital. Many of the communities where the aid group already works--including Lota City, Temuco, Concepcion and other areas in the Bio Bio region and the La Araucania region--were close to the devastating quake's epicenter.

Late Sunday, World Vision flew a team of six relief and logistics experts from Santiago to Concepcion to assess the severity of the damage and to verify the safety of staff and community members that have so far been cut off from communication or road access. The team will also open a second operations center in the south to coordinate with the agency's relief teams in Santiago.

The Christian humanitarian organization has prepositioned relief supplies in its Santiago warehouse, and plans to purchase additional high-priority supplies in country, including water tanks, water purification tablets, cooking items, hygiene kits, blankets and lanterns. These items will be rushed to communities in the Concepcion area as soon as air transport can be arranged. Meanwhile, the agency is working to bring in additional supplies from its regional warehouses, including one in La Paz, Bolivia.

In the five communities just outside Santiago where World Vision is responding, aid workers reported that many houses had collapsed completely, while others were still standing but too damaged for people to safely inhabit. There was no water or electricity service Sunday. Children were acting fearful of closed-in areas and hundreds of families were still sleeping on the streets, the relief teams reported. The start of the new school term has also been postponed because of expected structural damage to school buildings.

While the needs in areas south of the capital are expected to be far more critical, children and families in the Santiago region require food, first aid and hygiene kits, water, water containers, disposable diapers, plastic sheeting, candles, batteries, flashlights, blankets and sleeping bags, staff said. Survivors also need medical attention, damage evaluations of their homes and psychosocial support for children.

"We are extremely concerned about the emotional impact of so many aftershocks on children. Not only the physical needs, but the psychosocial needs of children in the quake zone will be a priority once the full extent of the needs are known and we can begin delivering much-needed supplies," said Tatiana Benavides, World Vision's national director in Chile.

World Vision has worked in Chile for 30 years and has more than 100 staff in the country, reaching about 100,000 children and adults with education, microfinance, job training, and sustainable development programs.

The public can help by visiting www.worldvision.org.

World Vision is a Christian humanitarian organization dedicated to working with children, families and their communities worldwide to reach their full potential by tackling the causes of poverty and injustice. World Vision serves all people, regardless of religion, race, ethnicity or gender.

(For the full story please go to http://christiannewswire.com)

Did ancient Canaanite labourers invent the alphabet?

The Alphabet may have been invented almost 4,000 years ago by Canaanite laborers. A startling new theory regarding the origins of the alphabet has emerged from research deep in the Egyptian desert. Hebrew University Egyptologist Orly Goldwasser has presented a new theory regarding one of the most significant inventions in human history in the current March/April issue of Biblical Archaeology Review (BAR).

Almost 4,000 years ago, laborers sent by the Egyptian Pharaoh toiled to extract highly prized turquoise from quarries in the Sinai desert at a site that is called Serabit el-Khadem today. During the course of these ancient mining expeditions, the laborers left behind numerous inscriptions that were not hieroglyphs but rather seemed to be crude imitations of the Egyptian’s written language.

Professor Goldwasser hypothesizes that many of these laborers were Canaanites, who drew upon the hieroglyphs that formed the pictorial language of their world in order to develop a proto-alphabet. She believes this was accomplished by assigning an acrophonic value to each pictograph of the Egyptian script, thus creating a script where each image represents a sound rather than a word. She further asserts that, due to this unique genesis of a written alphabet, our own modern, Western script contains the visual echoes of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.

(To read the full article, please visit the Biblical Archaeology Society’s Web site at www.biblicalarchaeology.org).

Church of England struggle over plans for women bishops

This month's Church of England General Synod saw conservative evangelicals issue a challenge over plans for women bishops.

Appointing female bishops would be a "mistake", said a letter signed by 50 prominent evangelical clergy and distributed by their campaign group, Reform.
They might have to encourage young men to undertake training for the priesthood outside the CofE, the signatories warned.

Perhaps they might undertake independent ministries themselves rather than swear obedience to a female bishop - and divert funds which they now contribute to the Church.

Their concerns have been overshadowed recently by the objections to the plans by the Church's Anglo-Catholics, and speculation on how many of these would take up the Pope's invitation to join the Roman Catholic Church.

Yet evangelicals - who place great stress on the authority of the Bible, and are notable for their spirited preaching and lively services with modern music and state-of-the-art electronics - include some of the biggest, most enthusiastic and generous congregations.

(For the full article please go to http://news.bbc.co.uk)

Study finds that living together doesn’t really work

The likelihood that a marriage would last for a decade or more decreased by six percentage points if the couple had cohabited first, the study found.

The study of men and women ages 15 to 44 was done by the National Center for Health Statistics using data from the National Survey of Family Growth conducted in 2002. The authors define cohabitation as people who live with a sexual partner of the opposite sex.

“From the perspective of many young adults, marrying without living together first seems quite foolish,” said Prof. Pamela J. Smock, a research professor at the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. “Just because some academic studies have shown that living together may increase the chance of divorce somewhat, young adults themselves don’t believe that.”

The authors found that the proportion of women in their late 30s who had ever cohabited had doubled in 15 years, to 61 percent.

Half of couples who cohabit marry within three years, the study found. If both partners are college graduates, the chances improve that they will marry and that their marriage will last at least 10 years.

“The figures suggest to me that cohabitation is still a pathway to marriage for many college graduates, while it may be an end in itself for many less educated women,” said Kelly A. Musick, a professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell.
Couples who marry after age 26 or have a baby eight months or more after marrying are also more likely to stay married for more than a decade.

“Cohabitation is increasingly becoming the first co-residential union formed among young adults,” the study said. “As a result of the growing prevalence of cohabitation, the number of children born to unmarried cohabiting parents has also increased.”

By the beginning of the last decade, a majority of births to unmarried women were to mothers who were living with the child’s father. Just two decades earlier, only a third of those births were to cohabiting couples.

The study found that, over all, 62 percent of women ages 25 to 44 were married and 8 percent were cohabiting. Among men, the comparable figures were 59 percent and 10 percent.

In general, one in five marriages will dissolve within five years. One in three will last less than 10 years. Those figures varied by race, ethnicity and sex. The likelihood of black men and women remaining married for 10 years or more was 50 percent. The probability for Hispanic men was the highest, 75 percent. Among women, the odds are 50-50 that their marriage will last less than 20 years.

The survey found that about 28 percent of men and women had cohabitated before their first marriage and that about 7 percent lived together and never married. About 23 percent of women and 18 percent of men married without having lived together.
(For the full article please go to http://www.nytimes.com)