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)

Churches and faith organizations unite to pray for an end to poverty

Thousands of people will join with one voice in praying for an end to poverty as they connect with God’s heart for justice.

From 1 to 7 March, churches and individual Christians worldwide will spend time with God and pray about issues of poverty and justice as part of the One Voice prayer campaign led by Tearfund, 24-7 Prayer and CompassionArt.

The ministries have developed prayer resources for the week, including material giving guidance on prayers for Haiti following the January 12 earthquake that left more than 200,000 people dead and another 1.5 million homeless and in need of aid.
Tearfund Chief Executive Matthew Frost said the response to its Haiti appeal had been incredible.

“All around the UK, churches have been praying for people affected by the earthquake and for the churches on the ground in Haiti who have been responding since day one to the urgent needs of so many people,” he said.

“It has reminded me of the privilege it is to be part of the global church at a time like this – we’re able to reach out to our brothers and sisters and lift them up in prayer as they seek to meet the needs of those around them.”

Churches will hear a message from former Delirious? frontman and CompassionArt founder Martin Smith in a short film guiding them on how they can pray and listen to God as they spend time considering his heart for justice.

Some churches are planning to open their doors 24 hours a day for the duration of the week to allow people to come and pray in creative prayer spaces. Other churches are planning to give time over in their scheduled services to reflecting on the needs of the global community.

“When we pray, we have a heart transplant with Jesus and we can’t help but become the answer to our prayers,” said Andrea Percy of 24-7 Prayer UK.

“We no longer see ‘the poor’: we see ‘people’. We respond as family. The child orphaned by Aids becomes my daughter; the widow, my mother. The man who has just lost his home in Haiti, my brother; the farmer who has no rain for his crops, my father.

“Let’s speak up for those who have no voice, for the rights of all the down-and-outers. In the words of Proverbs 31, speak out for justice and stand up for the poor and destitute.”

“Blasphemous” images of Jesus cause riots in India

Reactions to the "blasphemous" use of an image of Jesus in Indian school textbooks resulted in the damage of two churches and a number of businesses over the weekend in the northern Punjab state.

An image of Christ holding a can of what looks like Schlitz beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other has raised eyebrows across India and sparked unrest last Saturday in the Punjabi city of Batala. According to the Vatican's Fides news agency, the image printed in elementary school textbooks was labeled with the word "idol."

A group of Catholic sisters in the city of Shillong in northeastern India had seen the image in print and asked that the book not be used in schools, which the state government honored. However, according to Fides and other news sources, in other places fundamentalists opted to post copies of the representation in public places, some reaction was peaceful, other was not.

A protest of the image was organized on Feb. 20 involving all the Christian denominations in the area. Unfortunately, the demonstration degenerated to the point of a motorbike being burnt.

Hindu fundamentalist groups leaders reportedly mobilized their leaders, inciting the crowd and prompting them to retaliate. The mob set fire to a church belonging to the Churches of North India. The building was destroyed and its minister and his 15-year-old son were taken to the hospital with gunshot wounds.

Four Christian youth and four Hindus were taken into police custody for creating public disorder and have since been released pending further investigation into the matter by the local judiciary.

(Image from AP: Of interest is that the primary school textbook, which teaches cursive handwriting, used the picture of Jesus on the page for the letter 'I' - to represent Idol)

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