#Oscars PHOTO: Matthew McConaughey accepts the Oscar for best actor (REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson) pic.twitter.com/7h9efbNoLE
— ABS-CBN News Channel (@ANCALERTS) March 3, 2014A well-known snake-handling preacher from Middlesboro died after being bitten during a church service Saturday evening, according to police.
Jamie Coots was bitten on his right hand by a snake, according to a news release.
An ambulance crew and firefighters tried to talk Coots into going to the hospital, but he refused treatment, police said.
That is common among members of snake-handling churches, who believe in faith healing.
Coots, a third-generation snake handler, pastored a small church in Middlesboro.
He had been prominent among the small, close-knit circle of snake-handling churches in Eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, East Tennessee and Alabama for years, but he gained wider notice last year though a television program called “Snake Salvation” on the National Geographic Channel, which profiled Coots and his beliefs.
Paramedics were called to Coots’ church about 8:30 p.m. Saturday to check on a report someone had been bitten by a snake.
By the time they arrived, Coots had gone to his home nearby. The ambulance crew and firefighters went to his home, according to a news release from Middlesboro police.
The emergency responders told Coots about the danger of not going to the hospital, but he refused to go, police said.
The emergency crews left the house at 9:10 p.m. Authorities received a call less than an hour later indicating Coots had died, according to police. Coots was pronounced dead at his home...
Neocons put values at the center of their governing philosophy, but their social policy was neither morally laissez-faire like the libertarians nor explicitly religious like some social conservatives. Neocons mostly sought policies that would encourage self-discipline. “In almost every area of public concern, we are seeking to induce persons to act virtuously, whether as schoolchildren, applicants for public assistance, would-be lawbreakers, or voters and public officials,” James Q. Wilson wrote.Brooks reiterates a key point about neoconservatism: that its essence is a domestic policy movement, despite the rise of the foreign policy Vulcans during the George W. Bush administration.
How would they know if programs induced virtue? Empirically. “Neoconservatives, accordingly, place a lot of stock in applied social science research, especially the sort that evaluates old programs and tests new ones,” Wilson added.
Nobody would call George F. Will a neocon, but, in 1983, he published a superb book called “Statecraft as Soulcraft.” It championed the sort of governing conservatism that was common then and is impermissible now. “It is generally considered obvious that government should not, indeed cannot, legislate morality. But, in fact, it does so, frequently; it should do so more often,” Will wrote.
He was not calling for a theocracy. He was calling for “strong government conservatism,” for a limited but energetic government that could cultivate the best in persons by educating the passions. “American conservatives are caught in the web of their careless antigovernment rhetoric,” he concluded.
They stared at each other, the detective and the priest. Kelli McIlvain found interrogating him somewhat surreal. She had been raised Catholic and taught that a man in a black clerical shirt and white collar was nothing less than an emissary of God.Continue reading.
Father Donald Patrick Roemer was 5 feet 5, maybe 150 pounds. Hazel eyes. Blondish hair. A Ventura County Sheriff's Office report described him that night as "cooperative, seems stable," though McIlvain remembered how he repeatedly buried his head on the desk and wept.
To her surprise, his confession came easily. Yes, he said, he molested the 7-year-old boy.
McIlvain lit a cigarette. She hushed her voice, slowed her cadence to match his. Were there others, she asked. Yes, he said, according to court papers, and offered name after name.
"Where do I go from here?" he asked as midnight neared.
"Well," she said, "I'm going to have to arrest you."
What McIlvain uncovered in the weeks that followed seared the case into her memory, so much that she can recall its details more than three decades later, long after she retired: A number of people inside and outside the Catholic Church had been alerted to Roemer's misdeeds, or had strong suspicions of them, she learned.
They did nothing.
Experts call it the "bystander effect" — when people fail to help in potentially dire situations. Often they are more wary of falsely accusing someone than of their fears being confirmed. They question whether it's their responsibility to help, whether stepping in would do any good. If no one else is upset, they assume it's OK to walk away.
"We think our way out of situations we don't want to believe," said Pete Ditto, a UC Irvine professor who studies moral decision-making.
According to the 12,000 pages of church records that the Archdiocese of Los Angeles made public this year, the phenomenon appears to have played a key role in allowing clergy sex abuse to fester in case after case.
Although Catholic leaders shoulder much of the blame for the abuse scandal, the culture of silence extended to teachers, secretaries and others in the church's bottom rungs. In certain cases, it took years for someone to tip off the archdiocese's top officials to suspected molesters, let alone authorities.
Grayson was born without cochlear nerves, the “bridge” that carries auditory information from the inner ear to the brain. He’s now the among the first children in the U.S. to receive an auditory brainstem implant in a surgery done at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, N.C., led by UNC head and neck surgeon Dr. Craig Buchman.
The device is already being used in adults, but is now being tested in children at UNC as part of an FDA-approved trial. It’s similar to a cochlear implant, but instead of sending electrical stimulation to the cochlea, the electrodes are placed on the brainstem itself. Brain surgery is required to implant the device.
"Our hope is, because we're putting it into a young child, that their brain is plastic enough that they'll be able to take the information and run with it," Buchman told NBCNews.com.
Buchman says Grayson was a great candidate for the implant because other than his hearing, he's a healthy kid. Plus, Buchman adds, "he has great parents who were completely committed to the process -- the entire surgical process, the educational process. We really wanted to provide it to a child who had all the potential to do great."
And so far, Grayson really is doing great, his father says.
“Never one time did he show any fear about that new sensation,” says Clamp. He and his wife, Nicole, adopted Grayson in 2010; the couple also has a biological son, Ethan, who is 2. “It was a lot more excitement. And he’s really curious to begin with.” And he’s discovered a new love: music.
“He claps his hands, he bobs his head. At his daycare, they have a stereo, and he loves to run over and turn it on,” Clamp says.
Grayson is now working with a speech therapist, and has started babbling. He also tries to mimic the mouth movements of people when they’re talking to him. But he still has a "massive amount" of work ahead of him, Buchman cautions. "He needs intensive speech therapy -- in his mind, he has to convert this new signal into something he current knows as, basically, signs," Buchman says.
Druids, vegans and green activists should be given special treatment at work, according to ‘lunatic’ advice from the equalities watchdog.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) warns employers that they risk ‘potentially costly legal action’ unless they allow staff to follow their ‘religion or belief rights’ in the workplace.
This could include giving believers time off to go on pilgrimages, such as druids and pagans going to Stonehenge, while environmentalists should be free to lecture other staff about their car use.
The Turin Shroud has baffled scholars through the ages but in his new book, The Sign, Thomas de Wesselow reveals a new theory linking the cloth to the Resurrection.
Same-sex marriage is probably inevitable in America, whatever the Supreme Court decides. That’s because the public is clearly leaning that way. That the court is even being asked to impose a sweeping social change on the nation is illustrative of another lost battle — the idea that the Supreme Court is not a super-legislature and that nine robed lawyers ought to refrain from imposing their policy preferences on the whole nation.Continue reading. It's a thoughtful piece. And she hits it out of the park at the conclusion.
Even two liberal justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, have from time to time expressed caution about the Court’s imposing its will on matters better left up to the people and their elected representatives. It will be interesting to see whether those prudential considerations come into play in their decisions in these cases or whether the desire for a particular outcome overwhelms concerns about the Court’s proper role. Too few Americans recognize this for what it is — a loss of sovereignty.
Champions of same-sex marriage are carrying the day for a number of reasons. (1) The advocacy embedded in popular entertainment such as Modern Family and Brokeback Mountain has been funny, touching, and disarming. (2) Proponents of same-sex marriage appear to be asking for simple justice. (3) Americans would rather stick pins in their eyes than willingly hurt anyone’s feelings. (4) Proponents seem to be embracing the conservative value of marriage.
Beyond all of those factors, though, the most potent argument in the SSM quiver is the race analogy. During oral argument at the Supreme Court, advocates argued (as they have elsewhere) that impairing the right of homosexuals to marry is analogous to proscribing interracial marriage. If that’s true, it’s game, set, and match. If SSM is like interracial marriage, then the only possible motive for opposing it is bigotry.
Liberals slip on this argument like a comfortable sweater. It’s easier to impugn the good faith of your opponents than seriously to grapple with their arguments. Oppose forcing Catholic institutions to distribute free contraceptives? You hate women. Oppose changing the definition of marriage? You hate gays.
Re " A gay marriage backlash? Not likely," Opinion, March 24Well, that's not politically correct to say that. You'll be attacked as homophobic!
It is incredible to suggest that the effect of legalizing same-sex marriage is only "abstract and long term." A normal response to someone who says "I grew up without a mother" or "I grew up without a father" is to say, "I'm so sorry." Legalizing same-sex marriage would celebrate motherlessness and fatherlessness.
If the Supreme Court redefines marriage, we will tell ourselves and every child that women are replaceable and men don't matter. There is nothing more fundamentally equal than marriage as it always has been: You must have a man, and you must have a woman.
Gwendolyn Wyne
Los Angeles
WASHINGTON—Two days of arguments on same-sex marriage revealed a Supreme Court uneasy about making sweeping moves on gay rights and holding doubts about whether the cases belonged before the justices at all.Continue reading.
The arguments also brought to life more familiar fissures between the court's liberal and conservative wings. On Wednesday, liberal justices suggested that a 1996 federal law denying benefits to lawfully married same-sex couples was motivated by animus against gays, while Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative, challenged assertions that gays and lesbians need judicial protection from repressive majorities.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, seen as a pivotal vote, gave gay-marriage proponents some hope by suggesting the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act might infringe on states' rights to make their own marriage rules. That suggested at least five justices—Justice Kennedy plus the court's four liberals—might be ready to strike down the law.
But questions about whether the court could properly hear the case made it hard to predict any outcome.
Decisions are expected by late June on the Defense of Marriage Act case as well as the case the court heard Tuesday on California's 2008 voter initiative prohibiting same-sex marriage.
The arguments highlighted a point in common between the two cases. Normally, federal courts require two adverse parties before they can decide a case. Strikingly, however, both the federal and state governments agree with the plaintiffs that the challenged laws are unconstitutional, and have declined to defend them on appeal.
Other groups have stepped in to defend the laws banning gay marriage—the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives for the Defense of Marriage Act and the private citizens who officially sponsored Proposition 8.
But justices of different ideological stripes were wary of litigants without clear legal standing, even though advocates on both sides were eager for vindication in a roiling culture war.
"I can't think of another instance where that's happened," said Justice Stephen Breyer, a liberal, referring to the House's intervention in the federal marriage law case. "I'm afraid of opening that door."
With the issue of same-sex marriage argued before the Supreme Court and raging elsewhere in America, a question:What?
Is it possible to be a traditional Christian or Muslim or Orthodox Jew — and hold to one's faith on what constitutes marriage — and not be considered a bigot?
And is faith now a problem to be overcome, first marginalized by the state and then contained, so as not to get in the way of great changes to come?
The issue of same-sex unions is by nature contentious and divisive. It is not merely about equal protection under the law, but redefining the foundation of our culture, which is the family itself.
It's not my intention to add to the anger and the noise. If you've followed the news of the crowds outside the Supreme Court this week, and watched those vicious little boxes within boxes on cable TV, with angry people barking at each other, you'll get plenty of noise.
I'm not angry. Yet I am struggling. And I've been silent on the subject for some time, trying to figure it out.
I'm not opposed to same-sex unions. Americans have the right to equal protection under the law, and same-sex couples should be able to expect the same tax benefits and other considerations allowed to those of us who are now being called, in some quarters, "opposite-sex couples."
As far as I'm concerned, Americans have the right to do as they please as long as they don't infringe upon the rights of others. America is all about liberty and freedom.
But this all comes now during the season of Lent, a time of fasting and prayer, when Christians are compelled to confront the obligations of their faith.
And while I hear the new moral arguments, about equal rights and equal protection, I've read little about the religious freedom aspects and what the Supreme Court's ruling might mean for houses of traditional worship.
All I'm asking is that in the rush to establish new rights, that tolerance for religious freedom be considered as well.
"Why is this night different from all other nights?" Thus, at sunset Monday, will begin the ritual of questions during the Seder meal with which Jews start the celebration of Passover, or Pesach, which commemorates the deliverance of the Israelite slaves from bondage in Egypt. The youngest child at the table is expected to answer the questions, fulfilling the commandment, "And thou shalt tell thy son."Still more at that top link.
According to tradition, as related in the book of Exodus, the Israelites were made slaves in ancient Egypt. But Yahweh, the Hebrew God, instructed Moses to demand of the ruling Pharaoh that His people be released. Pharaoh refused, and Yahweh brought 10 plagues down upon Egypt. The final plague was the death of the firstborn son in every household. The Jews were instructed to sacrifice a lamb and smear its blood on the house's lintel or doorpost. Seeing the blood, the Angel of Death would pass over that house. After this final plague, Pharaoh relented and allowed the Jews to leave.
"Passover speaks to every generation because every generation sees dictators and tyrants aiming to destroy the dreams, hopes, religious beliefs and cultural identities of population subgroups within their borders," Rabbi Dov Fischer, of the Irvine-based Young Israel of Orange County, told us. "The Jewish people in Egypt, even in slavery, refused to be forcibly assimilated. Rather, the Jews retained their language, their Hebrew names and their forms of dress throughout their centuries of slavery."
Why do we eat only unleavened bread, or matzoh, on Pesach? To remember that when the Jews left Egypt there was not time to allow the bread to rise, so the dough was baked into hard crackers. Why do we eat bitter herbs? To remind us of the cruelty the Jews suffered. Why do we dip our foods? We dip bitter herbs into Charoset made of apples and nuts, which resemble clay used for bricks, to remind us how hard the slaves had to work. Parsley is dipped into saltwater, symbolizing that spring is here, and new life will grow. The saltwater reminds us of the tears of the Jewish slaves. Why do we lean on a pillow? To be comfortable and to remind us that once we were slaves, and now we are free.
Passover is typically celebrated for seven days in Israel and among Reform Jews, and for eight days among diaspora Conservative and Orthodox Jews. It recalls the birth of a Jewish nation, freed of Egyptian oppression and able to serve Yahweh, or God, alone. The first and last days are full festivals, marked by abstention from work, special prayer services and holiday meals. Jews eat only unleavened bread during the entire observance.
Passover commemorates the birth of a Jewish nation consecrated to serve Yahweh, not the Pharaoh. It is a time to be humble and to remember what it was like to be a slave. Most of all, it is a celebration of freedom, of the joys and opportunities available when we are not forced to serve others.
"As Americans, we oppose tyranny and dictatorships throughout the world, from Saddam Hussein in Iraq to Libya's Moammar Gadhafi in Libya to the Taliban in Afghanistan. We know that, if dictators and tyrants are not stopped, they eventually expand their sights and attack us, too," Fischer said. "We celebrate freedom, and we respect and cherish the many expressions of cultural identity and religious belief that have contributed to make America great."
VATICAN CITY—It took Jorge Mario Bergoglio four minutes to convince fellow cardinals he was their leader.More at the link.
Speaking in the Paul VI grand hall of the Vatican, the Argentine cardinal warned the Catholic Church against focusing too much on matters close to home—advice that came against the backdrop of a papacy that had been consumed by infighting among Vatican officials, a dwindling flock in Europe and secular trends in the West.
The 76-year-old Father Jorge, as he is known back home, said Roman Catholicism needed to shift its focus outward, to the world beyond Rome—rather than being "self-referential," he said. Its core mission was humility, dignity and justice. It should help the poor.
It was a week before the secret conclave to elect the new pontiff would begin. But the speech sowed the seeds of one of Catholicism's boldest moves—the election of a pope from the New World, a man likely to steer the church's focus toward social justice and the problems of the world's periphery, rather than on the intrigue and controversy of its central administration.
This account, based on interviews with four cardinals, lifts the curtain on the dynamic that led the church's highest officials to shun the European basin from which Catholicism has drawn most of its leaders. Just before his speech, at a dinner of English-speaking cardinals, the future pope's name had come up over a meal of soup and wine but hadn't generated a buzz. "The speech was decisive," said one voting European cardinal...
