In our year of much travel… Kris and I on our way to Honolulu where I will be teaching “voyagers” the next weeks at Pacific Rim Christian University.

Bless her heart! By Peter Holley:

A vintage Apple I computer, one of only about 200 first-generation desktop computers built by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ron Wayne in 1976, can fetch six figures.

Assuming, that is, you know you have one in your possession.

A Silicon Valley recycling firm that specializes in computers, lab equipment, test equipment and semiconductors suspects a local woman was unaware that she had a valuable piece of tech history in her possession when she dropped off two boxes of old electronics that she’d gathered while cleaning out her garage in April.

“She said, ‘I want to get rid of this stuff and clean up my garage,’ ” Victor Gichun, vice president of Clean Bay Area, told the San Jose Mercury News. “I said, ‘Do you need a tax receipt?’ and she said, ‘No, I don’t need anything.’ ”

Gichun told the Mercury News that the woman said her husband had died several months earlier, prompting her to clean out her home. In hopes of helping her through a hard time, there’s something he’d like to give her, but he has no way of contacting the mystery donor.

Story worth telling:

I Went to Church with Bruce Jenner and Here’s what Caitlyn Taught Me About Jesus.

When I was a budding twenty-one year old I took a job at a church in Calabasas. It was a brand new church meeting in a movie theater, and as I relocated to Los Angeles for my first service I learned the Kardashian family were major supporters of the church from its infancy. At the time I had to Google their names to figure out who this celebrity family was. They had previously attended another church and met a very charismatic and prolific pastor there. He ended up leaving that church believing he wouldn’t go back to ministry.

It was Bruce Jenner that found this pastor three years later, was working at Starbucks.

Bruce searched this pastor out and told him that his wife, Kris, had been trying to find him and would love to talk with him. The Pastor kindly received the request, and upon meeting, Kris Jenner told the pastor that they wanted to start a new church in their hometown of Calabasas with him as the pastor.

If you’re surprised by this..so was I.

It’s a long story that doesn’t fully connect with the purpose of this post, and so I’ll keep it short. He accepted.

BW3, back by popular demand: counters to arguments against women in ministry:

Most of you who know me, know that I did my doctoral thesis on women in the NT with C.K. Barrett at the University of Durham in England. My first three published scholarly books were on this very subject. One of the reasons I did that thirty some years ago was because of the controversy that raged then over the issue of women in ministry, and more particularly women as pulpit ministers and senior pastors. Never mind that the Bible does not have categories like ‘senior pastor’ or ‘pulpit minister’, the NT has been used over and over again to justify the suppression of women in ministry— and as I was to discover through years of research and study, without Biblical justification. Now of course equally sincere Christians may disagree on this matter, but the disagreements should be on the basis of sound exegesis of Biblical texts, not emotions, rhetoric, mere church polity, dubious hermeneutics and the like.

So in this post I am going to deal with the usual objections to women in ministry, one by one. Some of these objections come out of a high church tradition, some tend to come from low church traditions, some are Catholic/Orthodox some are Protestant, but we will take on a sampling of them all without trying to be exhaustive or exhausting.

Doctoring — the old fashioned way — house calls!

May 26, 2015 11:29 am Sheri Porter – It’s Oct. 18, 1993, and Thomas Cornwell, M.D., a family physician not too many years out of residency, is on call at an urgent care clinic in Chicago. Unbeknownst to his colleagues, he’s also agreed to help launch a home-based primary care model in the Chicago area.

The clinic phone is ringing and, against all odds (and clinic protocol), Cornwell takes the call. After listening to the caller complain about abdominal pain, he tells her to go the ER. He still remembers her response: “Doesn’t anyone make house calls?”

Cornwell tells AAFP News he went to see the patient after he finished his shift. “She was my first patient; she averted a hospitalization.” Now, more than two decades later, Cornwell’s house call count has reached nearly 32,000 visits to more than 4,000 patients.

Defining Home-Based Primary Care

Cornwell describes house call medicine as “bringing primary care to a mostly elderly population with multiple chronic problems.”

The average age of his patients is 80, and one-third are older than 85. “About 8 percent of our patients are under the age of 65,” says Cornwell, and most of them suffer from neuromuscular diseases.

Pitiful.

Thomas Sowell:

Baltimore is now paying the price for irresponsible words and actions, not only by young thugs in the streets, but also by its mayor and the state prosecutor, both of whom threw the police to the wolves, in order to curry favor with local voters. Now murders in Baltimore in May have been more than double what they were in May last year, and higher than in any May in the past 15 years. Meanwhile, the number of arrests is down by more than 50 percent.

Various other communities across the country are experiencing very similar explosions of crime and reductions of arrests, in the wake of anti-police mob rampages from coast to coast that the media sanitize as “protests.”

None of this should be surprising. In her carefully researched 2010 book, Are Cops Racist? Heather Mac Donald pointed out that, after anti-police campaigns, cops tended to do less policing and criminals tended to commit more crimes.

Obesity growing in causes of cancer:

A middle-aged cancer epidemic is being blamed on Britain’s poor diet and overly generous portions.

Leading specialists convened on Friday to issue a stark warning that obesity will soon overtake smoking as the principal cause of cancer.

Doctors said Westerners had replaced one bad habit with another, with too many people eating their way towards an early death.

They said spiralling rates of obesity meant that cancer – once seen as a disease of old age – was now increasingly being diagnosed up to two decades earlier than in the past. Their figures suggest one in five cancer deaths in Britain is caused by excess weight.

Speaking at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) annual conference in Chicago, experts said “staggering” rates of obesity were responsible for the growth of 10 common cancers. Dr Clifford Hudis, a New York breast cancer specialist, said the trends meant that young people were increasingly presenting with diseases usually seen in old age. “Being lean doesn’t mean you won’t get these diseases, necessarily, but being obese might mean you get them earlier in life,” said the former ASCO president.

“So you might get colon cancer at 60 instead of 80.” The figures suggest that around 32,000 UK deaths from cancer a year are related to excess weight.

Arrivederci Assisi!

Good students:

BETHLEHEM, N.H. —The graduating class at Profile Junior-Senior High School in Bethlehem made a heartfelt decision to give the money raised for their senior class trip to the school’s principal, who was recently diagnosed with cancer.

Principal Courtney Vashaw said they work hard to teach the students about caring for others and being compassionate, but not in her wildest dreams did she think that lesson would directly affect her.

“We decided to not go on our senior class trip this year and donate all of our funds to your cause,” said Ian Baker, a senior.

The class was scheduled to leave for Rydin’ Hi Ranch in New York on Sunday and spend four days there.

The gift comes less than a week after Vashaw told them she had been diagnosed with a rare, aggressive form of cancer. After four years of hard work, the senior class gave her nearly $8,000 for medical care.

“It is very hard for me to accept help, and I have no idea what to say to you,” said Vashaw.

“She’s just very caring, very selfless, and we wanted to be selfless, too,” said Baker.

Patsy McGarry, on the Irish same-sex marriage vote:

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin is of course correct. The Catholic Church does indeed need a reality check in the wake of the same-sex marriage referendum.

As the unequivocal result of the referendum became clear he said: “I think really that the church needs to do a reality check, a reality check right across the board, to look at the things it’s doing well, to look at the areas where we really have to start and say, ‘Look, have we drifted away completely from young people’?”

It’s not just young people. The people who voted for this referendum included tens of thousands of practicing older Catholics in the cities, towns and countryside of Ireland. People who will continue to practice their faith but who no longer accept that their gay sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, grandchildren, even their gay parents, are “objectively disordered” with a tendency to evil, as their Church teaches.

CS Lewis vs. D Bonhoeffer as now evangelical saints, by Carl Trueman:

There are likely to be three things which have contributed to the phenomenon Mills describes. First, there is a subordination of doctrinal confession to aesthetics. Particularly in American evangelicalism, there is a tendency to treat doctrinal difference with chosen heroes as something to be ignored or wished away rather than addressed. Thus, C. S. Lewis and Dietrich Bonhoeffer have become American evangelicals as a result of posthumous virtual baptisms into the faith, the brash boldness of which would surely have made even Brigham Young blush.

Now, Lewis and Bonhoeffer both said nice things about Jesus. One wrote exceptionally well. The other died opposing Hitler. They were decent, admirable Christian fellows from whom we should all learn. But they were most definitely not conservative American evangelicals. That they have been made into such indicates how significant doctrinal differences have given way to a desire to recruit them to the chosen cause. It is a triumph of aesthetics and consumer taste over doctrinal confession.

Speaking of which (kinda), see this about the value of looking at green space and nature for our brains?

But the psychological benefits of green roofs to busy office workers may also be substantial, according to new research. In a study published in the journal Environmental Psychology, the University of Melbourne’s Kate Lee and a group of colleagues found that interrupting a tedious, attention-demanding task with a 40-second “microbreak” — in which one simply looks at a computerized image of a green roof — improved focus as well as subsequent performance on the task.

The research adds to a growing scientific literature on the health advantages— psychological and otherwise — of being exposed to views of nature in urban settings, for instance through the presence of parks or trees. Research in this area is so far along, in fact, that researchers are considering whether it might be possible to identify the right “dose” of nature that people need to receive in order to actually reap significant health benefits.

Other psychological benefits of nature views have also been captured in recent literature. In one study, research subjects who viewed a 12-minute nature documentary before playing a game that involved managing a fishery resource engaged in more sustainable behavior.

Back to Italy, and the problem of Africa’s migrants:

But Italy must do its part first. It can and should accept a reasonable share of migrants.

Above all it’s a moral issue: you cannot let migrants drown in the Mediterranean or send them back to the countries in crisis from where they’ve escaped, often risking their lives.

But there’s also a practical reason: migrant labor can help revamp Italy’s sluggish economy after a triple-dip recession and contribute to boosting the appeal of neglected territories.

This does not mean that Italy should be left to deal with the migrant emergency on its own. The request forwarded to Europe is indeed a reasonable one, and soon a European scheme of quotas will kick in, but first Italy needs to do its homework as we seem to have no sense of national solidarity….

Yet there could be an easier solution, once Europe makes a ruling on migrant quotas.

A good way for Italy to deal with the crisis would be to host its share of migrants in the thousands of ghost towns that dot the boot, a bit like many U.S. towns on the verge of dying out did with Latinos.

It’s hard to believe yet the peninsula has 6,000 ghost towns that have been partly or totally abandoned across time, while communities are shrinking in another 15,000 that have lost over 90% of their population.

These villages — many dating from pre-Roman times — have been abandoned due to a mix of factors: pirate sacks, natural disasters such as quakes and floods, war bombings, harsh conditions and emigration to larger cities or the U.S. in search of a better life.

Yes, Chris Collins’ contract is extended:

Chris Collins didn’t even raise a glass with wife Kim the night he agreed to a contract extension to remain at Northwestern.

“Maybe we gave each other a hug,” Collins told the Tribune. “I was never worried about it. I want to be here for the long haul and build a program.”

The extension, yet to be announced by the school, resulted from Collins’ end-of-season meeting with Jim Phillips, NU’s athletic director.

The Anglican Communion’s Church of Ireland issued this statement following the recent vote to legalize same-sex marriage in Ireland:

The archbishops and bishops of the Church of Ireland wish to affirm that the people of the Republic of Ireland, in deciding by referendum to alter the State’s legal definition of marriage, have of course acted fully within their rights.

The Church of Ireland, however, defines marriage as between a man and a woman, and the result of this referendum does not alter this.

The church has often existed, in history, with different views from those adopted by the state, and has sought to live with both conviction and good relationships with the civil authorities and communities in which it is set. Marriage services taking place in a Church of Ireland church, or conducted by a minister of the Church of Ireland may – in compliance with church teaching, liturgy and canon law – continue to celebrate only marriage between a man and a woman.

We would now sincerely urge a spirit of public generosity, both from those for whom the result of the referendum represents triumph, and from those for whom it signifies disaster.

Dave Chase and the healthcare tax — what is costing Americans:

It’s been reported that 80% of employer payroll increases have gone to pay healthcare costs over last 20+ years so employer costs have increased with little going in the pockets of workers (not to mention no meaningful improvement in overall healthoutcomes). Over the last 50 years, the cost of consumer goods and services have gone up eight-fold with one exception — healthcare. Healthcare costs have increased 274-fold.

The average American household would have ~$1,000,000 in their retirement account

I did some very rough, back-of-envelope calculations on what could be put into people’s retirement plans if there wasn’t healthcare’s rampant overtreatment and hyperinflation. I used historical rates of inflation, S&P growth and healthcare premiums. Over 30 years, if we didn’t pay the “healthcare hyperinflation tax” the average American household would have ~$1,000,000 in their retirement account (assuming growth in a S&P index fund and reinvestment of dividends). Instead, the statistics on retirement savings for the average American are horribly low. With the status quo we are stealing our future both financially as well as what we do in how we overtreat (and thus harm) people.

Many people also don’t know that the average couple will have $300,000 of healthcare expense not covered by Medicare. The point of the open source Health Rosetta project is to not sit idly by  (Disclosure: The Rosetta concept is an idea that I have conceived of and is in its early days. The objective is to openly share what is working). Proactive purchasers of health and wellness services at employers can address this today. No new legislation is needed. Having said that, local, state and federal governments should also leverage the proven insights/models outlined in the Health Rosetta. Some cities are also taking action that I’ll write about later.

Not only are there huge direct costs to the “tax” the healthcare system has placed on us. There are a number of indirect costs we are all facing.

Invitation to Christians for Biblical Equality

“Becoming New: Man and Woman Together in Christ”: Christians for Biblical Equality international conference in LA, July 24-26

CBE is pleased to announce that its 2015 international conference, “Becoming New: Man and Woman Together in Christ” will be held on July 24–26, 2015 at the Hilton Los Angeles Airport Hotel. The conference theme verse is 2 Cor. 5:17, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” (NIV).

Scholarships are available for individuals with financial need but deadline is approaching. http://www.cbeinternational.org/content/scholarships-discounts

Dr. Mimi Haddad, president of CBE, says that this year’s conference features “some of the most gifted group of speakers in CBE’s history,” with plenary speakers:

• Pastor Eugene Cho, founder of One Day’s Wages, “a grassroots movement of people, stories, and actions to alleviate extreme global poverty”; founder of the Q Café, a community café; and lead pastor of Quest Church in Seattle
• Pastor Ken Fong, senior pastor at EvergreenLA, the “first English-only multi-Asian American, multiethnic, multigenerational church” and executive director of the Asian American Initiative of Fuller Theological Seminary, where he is assistant professor of Asian American Church Studies
• Pastor Adelita Garza, church planter and lead pastor of Puente de Vida/Bridge of Life Church in Santa Paula, CA, and president of the Police Clergy Council and president of the Light of the City Ministry
• Professor John Stackhouse, the Samuel J. Mikolaski Chair of Religious Studies at Crandall University in Moncton, Canada, and author of 8 books, including Finally Feminist: A Pragmatic Christian Understanding of Gender
• Professor Anne Zaki, assistant professor of Practical Theology at the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Cairo, Egypt, and is the resource development specialist for the Middle East for the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship

Anyone interested in learning more about evangelical biblical equality is invited to attend, learn from dynamic, multi-ethnic and diverse aged speakers, and connect with others passionate about making room for the gifts of both women and men in the church.

CBE has invited a diverse group of speakers from our community: African American, Arab American, Asian American, Hispanic American, and international speakers, speakers under 30 and older than 60, speakers who are students and moms, tenured professors and writers, single and married. CBE especially wishes to invite persons of color and young people to attend this year’s conference.

Why should you come?

As plenary speaker Anne Zaki says, “I have not yet been ordained and the process has continued on for these past six and a half years since I first applied. The reason I am able to write the word “yet” here is partly due to the work of groups like CBE, who have offered me companionship in my understanding of Scripture, freedom to follow my call to pastoral ministry, and courage to make room for the full extent of women’s ministry in the Presbyterian Church in Egypt.”

John Stackhouse explains: “CBE has long been the primary resource for Christians interested in seriously argued, Biblically grounded discussion of gender. It has helped me immensely, and I am honoured to partner with CBE in its vital work.”

Other workshop speakers include:

• Gail and Kate Wallace, co-founders of The Junia Project
• Lisa L. Thompson, director of Anti-Trafficking for World Hope International
• W. Tali Hairston, director of the John M. Perkins Center at Seattle Pacific University, dedicated to reconciliation and global urban leadership and Christian community development
• Rev. Dr. Young Lee Hertig, an Asian-American women’s clergy leader and mentor, professor at Azusa Pacific, and executive director of the Institute for the Study of Asian American Christianity
• Austin Channing Brown, multicultural liaison at Calvin College (and speaker at the Why Christian? Conference organized by Rachel Held Evans and Nadia Bolz-Weber)
• Professors Karen Longman (Azusa Pacific University), Jeff Miller (Milligan College), Sandra Morgan (Vanguard University), Ron Pierce (Biola University), James Smith III (Bethel Seminary), Marianne Meye Thompson and John L. Thompson (Fuller Theological Seminary), Allen Yeh (Biola University)
• Dr. Mimi Haddad, president of CBE
• And more!

Info about the conference is here: http://www.cbeinternational.org/content/2015-los-angeles-conference

Link to scholarship info: http://www.cbeinternational.org/content/scholarships-discounts

Line up of speakers here: http://www.cbeinternational.org/content/speakers and

http://www.cbeinternational.org/content/workshops

(Written by Emily Zimbrick-Rogers, CBE research intern)

Our daughter, Laura, taught Jewel Loyd in 1st grade, and this is one wonderful story about Jewel, Notre Dame basketball star and now headed to the WNBA:

Image: Getty Images

News flash! Jewel was the #1 pick in the WNBA draft — she goes to Seattle. She will be joined by UConn’s Kaleena Mosqueda-Lewis.

Days later, my mom got the test results back. She sat me down. A stack of paperwork neatly organized into folders separated us. I stared at the pile. What’s going on? I thought.

She told me I had dyslexia….

But that one word hung in the air: disability.

What are my friends going to say? Is this going to change what they or my teachers think of me? How they treat me? At that age, you’re so invested in other people’s opinions of you. Think about the social implications of having a disorder that manifests in everyday tasks like reading or writing and also requires special treatment, yet it’s unseen. An invisible disability. I was afraid people would think I was stupid.

How could I — someone who genuinely enjoyed learning and who wanted to do well in school — have this? What would it mean for the rest of school? College? It seemed unfair.

Adolescence is hard enough without a learning disability. It affected almost every aspect of my life. I tried to hide it. I was ashamed. You can only go so long before your friends start to suspect something. I was part of a really close circle of guy friends — we literally grew up together. I’d already disclosed my disability to the school faculty. I was actually the first person at my school to share a diagnosis, thanks to my parents, so we’d begun trying different specialized learning plans….

And then it clicked: the work ethic I had in the gym, the emphasis on repetition and visualization, was something I could apply to my studies. I developed strategies for overcoming my disability.

My friend Bob Robinson is posting on missional and vocation. Some good stuff here to read.

Karen, to the millennials:

We took seriously the directive to  go unto the ends of the earth, preaching the good news. 

It’s not that we never questioned, never criticized, never doubted, never despaired.

Like you, we did all of that and more.

It’s just that through it all, it never occurred to us to give-up on church.

We always understood that we are the church. 

It’s failures are our failures.

It’s successes are our successes.

It’s health is our health.

It’s hope is our hope.

To abandon it would be to give up on one another.

To say to Jesus, there is no power in the blood.

The Baruch Brothers Choir, by Amy Guttman:

Nearly all of Serbia’s Jews were killed during the Holocaust, in what was one of the swiftest murder campaigns in all of Europe. The region was declared “Judenfrei” in 1942, after just 13 months of Nazi occupation. Yet the Serbian-Jewish Singing Society—one of the oldest Jewish choirs in the world, today known as the Baruch Brothers Choir—has prospered, despite having been silenced during World Wars I and II. Today, having survived genocide, Communism, the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, and a dwindling Jewish population, the group is larger than at any time in its history—even though less than 20 percent of its members are Jewish.

But that doesn’t seem to bother anyone—not the Ministry of Culture, which requests the choir’s presence at important commemorations; not the Jewish community; and not the singers. Synthesis and harmony have been the driving forces behind the choir since it was first established.

From the European Conservative, an interview question for Roger Scruton:

Given the constant threat of terrorism with which we now live, do you believe we are facing a cultural war? Is Samuel Huntington’s thesis that the world is divided into several civilisations based on religious ideals that can be fault lines for conflict still valid for the 21st century? 

There is certainly some kind of clash of civilisations occurring. However, Islam seems to have forgotten its civilisation, and it is rare now to meet a Muslim who has ever heard of enlightened Islamic scholars like Ibn Sinna, or Rumi, or Hafiz, or who is even aware that a great civilisation once existed, built upon the revelation of the Koran. Western civilisation, too, is losing the memory of its religious inheritance. I am reminded of Matthew Arnold’s “On Dover Beach” in which he expresses his fear for a future in which “ignorant armies clash by night”. So yes, there is a clash—not of two civilisations but of two competing forms of stupidity: one given to violence and the other to self-indulgence. [HT: CT]

Excellent article by Jonathan Merritt on how attitudes toward conversion therapy have changed:

Throughout the 1980s and 90s, the Christian right poured money and muscle into promoting the message that homosexuality was a curable disorder. It advocated conversion therapy, which promised to turn gay men and women straight. But last week, when President Obama announced his support for a national ban on such therapies, few voices on the Christian right spoke up in protest. The announcement confirmed the evaporation of support for these approaches among the communities that once embraced them. As Alan Chambers, who once ran America’s largest ex-gay ministry, told me, “sexual orientation doesn’t change.”  …

In recent years, however, conversion therapy has been much maligned if not completely discredited. Almost all major medical and public welfare organizations oppose it, and even conservative Christians—once counted among its strongest supporters—are changing their minds. New Jersey, California, and Washington, D.C., have already outlawed ex-gay therapy for minors. By all accounts, therapies attempting to cure gayness appear to be going the way of the buggy whip….

By the second decade of the 21st century, the scientific foundation of reparative therapy had eroded, every major medical association had repudiated it, the movement’s leaders were falling away, and viral horror stories from former participants were popping up across the web.

But the death-knell sounded in July of 2013 when Alan Chambers, president of Exodus International, America’s largest ex-gay Christian ministry apologized to the LGBT community and shuttered his organization. Chambers once claimed he knew “tens of thousands of people who have successfully changed their sexual orientation.” But last week, he told me “99.9 percent of people I met through Exodus’ ministries had not experienced a change in orientation.”

Steve Chalke, Andrew Marin, and the “conversation”:

Steve Chalke wants a conversation. But who should be able to take part in this conversation?

‘Everyone!’ declares Andrew Marin. The author of Love Is An Orientation has spent years building bridges between evangelicals and LGBT communities.

But Marin questioned whether progressive Christians (who are in favour of same sex relationships) were willing to let conservative Christians (who believe homosexuality is morally wrong) join in the conversation. Given that Marin’s audience appeared to be predominantly progressive, these were brave comments to make.

Despite being continually pressed, Marin refused to give his own opinion on the morality of same sex relationships. The 33 year old has managed to maintain this position of ambiguity for all of his life. The ‘bridge-builders’ unique stance has led to both criticism and praise from fellow evangelicals and LGBT groups.

Questions such as ‘Why can’t gay people be cured?’ and ‘What does it mean to promote inclusive youth work?’ were discussed during the day. There was also a debate about the phrase ‘love the sinner, hate the sin’. Most agreed the statement was unhelpful and theologically flawed. Many cannot separate their sexuality from their identity, so ‘hating the sin’ is heard and interpreted as ‘hating the person’.

Another key question was, ‘How can you embrace homosexuality and still call yourself a biblical Christian?’ Cameron Trimble – a lesbian vicar and CEO of The Centre for Progressive Renewal led this discussion. If anyone in the room believed homosexuality was morally wrong, they didn’t say so.

Trimble wants to ‘un-build’ the traditional position on sexuality. She says it ‘no longer works’. She even went as far to say ‘Mega churches will un-build what they have built’ and that this should be ‘celebrated’.

If you haven’t seen this site, it’s worth a good ponder: for those “living out.”

New secretary general in the Anglican Communion, with a subtle instance of racism (in bold), by Fredrick Nzwili:

(RNS) African Anglicans welcomed the appointment of a Nigerian bishop as the next secretary general of the 85 million-member Anglican Communion, even as others criticized the appointment because of his anti-gay comments.

Bishop Josiah Atkins Idowu-Fearon beat other applicants from Oceania, Asia, Europe and the Americas and will assume the mostly ambassador type post at a time when the worldwide communion remains estranged over homosexuality and same-sex marriages, especially in Africa.

“He is articulate and very well educated,” said Bishop Julius Kalu of Mombasa, Kenya, diocese. “His position on traditional Anglicanism is very firm. This is good for us.” [To call a black man “articulate” is a way of saying, unintentionally often enough, “surprise, surprise” or “your stereotype has been upended”. Just notice how often one connects the word “articulate” to “African American, African, or black.”]

Kalu said the appointment had come at the right time, when African Anglicans needed a bigger voice within the communion.

South Africa protests:

A 112-year-old statue of Queen Victoria has become the latest colonial or apartheid-era monument to be vandalised in South Africa, raising fears that a racially charged debate over the country’s heritage could spiral out of control.

Splashes of green paint over the likeness of the former British monarch, which stands outside the city library in Port Elizabeth, were discovered on Friday andcondemned by local officials as illegal and “absolutely disgraceful”.

The attacks began a month ago when a student at the University of Cape Townflung a bucket of excrement over a statue of the British colonialist Cecil John Rhodes, which had enjoyed pride of place on campus since 1934. This sparked a vocal “Rhodes must fall” campaign, involving marches and sit-ins, that led to the huge bronze being removed from its plinth on Thursday before ululating crowds, some of whom splashed it with red paint or held placards saying “more than a statue”.

By then the debate about how South Africa should confront symbols of its difficult past had spread far beyond the student union to national newspaper columns, television talkshows and mainstream political parties. Protesters spray-painted a statue of King George VI at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and tore down a bronze British soldier from his horse on a Boer war memorial in Port Elizabeth.

The radical Economic Freedom Fighters party, led by the firebrand Julius Malema, vigorously joined the movement. Its followers daubed paint over statues of the former South African leaders Paul Kruger and Louis Botha in Pretoria and Cape Town respectively.

Rachel Moss, feminism, fashion and poverty workers:

With plus-size models becoming the norm and Karl Lagerfeld using feminist placards in Chanel’s 2015 Spring show, on the surface, it seems the fashion industry is finally embracing feminism.

But are the women making the clothes we wear feeling the benefit?

According to campaign group Labour Behind The Label, there are approximately 24 million garment workers worldwide. Around 80% of those are women.

“Conditions for the women making our clothes are harsh,” Ilana Winterstein, a director at Labour Behind The Label tells HuffPost UK Lifestyle.

“Many face working excessive hours – often 14-16 hours per day – with forced overtime and no job security, for poverty wages and without trade union rights recognised.

“They suffer poor health, are victims of sexual and physical abuse and cannot afford to send their children to school.”

English majors, by Nick Anderson:

Like several disciplines in the humanities, English has faced hard questions in recent years. The Great Recession of 2008-09 led a growing number of students, urged by parents who want a “return” on their tuition investment, to pick majors they perceived as more likely to enhance their career prospects. This preoccupation with an economic rationale for going to college had been building for many years. But the economic downturn and its aftermath compounded job worries.

Numbers from College Park, home of the flagship public university of Maryland, tell a story that echoes in one way or another at schools across the country.

In fall 2009, there were 792 English majors among U-Md. undergraduates. That was nearly equal the total of computer science majors, 796. Five years later the computer science total had more than doubled, to 1,730. The total for English had fallen 39 percent, to 483.

English was hardly alone in decline. Down at least a quarter in that span were major totals for anthropology, art history, general biology and history.

At the University of Virginia, the English major count fell 18 percent from 2009 to 2013. History was down 31 percent; philosophy, 40 percent. Computer science was up 108 percent.