The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) said making skirts part of a compulsory uniform could breach the rights of girls who feel uncomfortable with their gender.

In official guidelines published ahead of the Equality Bill, which comes into force this autumn, the watchdog says that “requiring pupils to wear gender-specific clothes is potentially unlawful”.

The EHRC, which can force public bodies to comply with equality law, said schools are obliged to be “proactive” in ensuring there is no discrimination against transsexual pupils.

The Equality Bill, championed by Harriet Harman, the Labour deputy leader, will force all public authorities by law to take into consideration the potential effects of their policies on minority groups.

A spokesman for the EHRC said its guidance was “all about giving schools information which will help them interpret the law.”

A government spokesperson said: “Schools decide their own uniform policy, the Equality Bill will not change this at all, it’s nonsense to suggest we’re banning skirts.

“However long standing Government guidance states that schools need to be careful that any blanket uniform policy does not discriminate against someone because of e.g. their religion, gender, or sexual orientation.”

Elspeth Insch, head teacher of King Edward VI Handsworth school in Birmingham, told The Sunday Times: “The message is: not in my school – we’re sticking with our skirts.”

February 19th, 2010 Posted in Faith |

Friday After Ash Wednesday – Feast of Janani Luwum, Archbishop and Martyr of Uganda, 1977 ( transferred from Ash Wednesday)

LITURGICAL THEME FOR THE DAY: - On the Fridays of Lent, it is customary (in the Church of the East and West) to abstain from meat as a sign of our common penance. It represents our efforts to abstain from - do without – so many other patterns that get in the way of our happiness and wholeness. Sacrifice and doing without is a worthy thought to ponder when one considers the life and witness of the saint remembered this week.

On this feast we recall the witness of Archbishop Luwum who exercised exceptional and courageous leadership when he opposed Idi Amins regime of tyranny, gross human rights violations and “islamisation” agenda in Uganda. The vibrant Anglican Church of Uganda under his leadership was on the verge of centennial celebrations of its birth through the seed of the blood of the Ugandan Martyrs. Thus Archbishop Luwum became the first martyr of the second century of Christianity in Uganda.

MEDITATION OF THE DAY: What is the implication of this Gospel passage in our lives today? This is an important question when we consider the life and witness of Archbishop Luwum. Are we individuals who are effected and affected by the changing demands of today’s world in relation to our faith and Christian life? IF we understand the way of the world we know the journey will be rocky and rough and we need to be strengthened by Word and Sacrament.

The bread of the Eucharist, made out of grains of wheat, is offered to us as food for the journey so that we have the strength to face what the world may throw our way. Who of us does not need spiritual renewal and nurture?

Archbishop Luwum’s witness reminds us that martyrdom always bear fruit; this is why the Scripture says «Those who love their life», paradoxically, «destroy it». How do we hear that passage in our place and time? Have we been doing what is right and just in relation to our Christian faith?

Christ died to bear, with his blood, fruit; we have to imitate Him to resurrect with Him and bear fruit with Him. Can we join those persecuted Christians who offer their lives silently for the welfare of their brothers and sisters? This is critical as we must learn this Lent that the grain that dies is a pathway to Life.

PRAYER OF THE DAY: God our Redeemer, whose Church was strengthened    by the blood of your martyr Janani Luwum: so bind us, in life and death, to Christ’s sacrifice
that our lives, broken and offered with his, may carry his death and proclaim his resurrection in the world; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

ANCIENT WISDOM/PRESENT GRACE: “Prodigal sons are forgiven and reconciled with their heavenly Father, could they do other than forgive one another? A fellowship of prodigal sons came into being — the church of Christ. Love begets love. A new power … was let loose upon our suffering world, the power to love those who have not deserved love, the unworthy, the unlovely and unlovable, a man’s enemies, and even his torturers. Christians, in imitation of the Savior, became, as it were, Christ’s to one another and to the world”. – Archbishop Luwum, 1977

February 18th, 2010 Posted in News |

PATRICK FAGAN

The culture of the traditional family is now in intense competition with a very different culture. The defining difference between the two is the sexual ideal each embraces.

The traditional family of Western civilization is based on lifelong monogamy. The competing culture is “polyamorous,” normally a serial polygamy, but also increasingly polymorphous in its different sexual expressions.I hope there is elegance in the simple distinction between the ideals that distinguish the two cultures: monogamy and polymorphous serial polygamy, or “polyamory” for short.

Between these two cultures lie the welfare state and its operational bureaucracy. By and large, the culture of polyamory embraces the behavioral bureaucracy, while the culture of monogamy has increasing disagreements with it. This is understandable and unavoidable when the differences between the two cultures are examined.

The culture of monogamy and the culture of polyamory differ profoundly in their assumptions on the way society functions. Here are some of the differences:

In the culture of monogamy, men not only are anchored, they are required to be so. In the culture of polyamory, women are the anchors, while men can drift (or be cast adrift) as desired, and they do so in very large numbers.

The constitutional state was the product of a monogamous
culture. It could never have emerged from a culture of
polyamory because it assumes responsible citizens.
The expanding social welfare state is the product of
the culture of polyamory, and it is increasingly hostile
to the culture of monogamy. It creates less responsible
citizens.

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MICHAEL NOVAK

What are we to say about a human condition in which “Nature red in tooth and claw” rears up on its massive hindquarters, and hurls a 30-foot wall of water against the lowlands of eleven of the poorest and most populous nations on earth, including some playgrounds of the rich of Europe and America, and crushes, chokes, and twists away the lives of going past 150,000 human beings?

Truly, the continuing presence of evil in the world—perhaps most acutely when this evil is manifested in unconscious Nature, out of its own laws and processes—is a great scandal to loving, believing Christians. It is truly hard for them to understand how a kind and gracious Providence can allow such terrible things to happen to human beings. To so many scores of thousands of human beings. On such a vast scale.In some ways, it is easier to understand how individual human beings can do horribly evil deeds. At least one can point to their free will. Struggling to find plausible reasons, one recalls one’s own irrationalities and sins, murders one has read of in the local papers, etc.

It is true that some evils are so unspeakable and unimaginable that they defy all attempted comparisons to anything in anyone’s previous experience—the Holocaust, for example. How can a good God possibly allow that horror to happen to (in a twofold sense) his own people? But even these we attribute to human agency, however monstrous. Whereas the dead that have suffered from a naked act of Nature seem somehow to have been stricken by God’s own unmediated action.

What can biblically informed believers reply to those who, contemplating the massive destruction and death in today’s Asia, blame their God (a God in Whom those who do the blaming do not believe)?

Confronted with this demand—confronted with it, actually, quite often in my lifetime—I think first of this: Since those who ask it do not believe in God, the question is not what it seems to be. The real point of the question is to get me to groan inwardly by agreeing that the one who thinks he is my superior is correct, after all. The real point is to get me to deny the reality of God.

The point is even a little more complex. My taunter does not want me to deny the reality of God on the ground that the assertion of that reality is absurd. Actually, my taunter holds that everything, at bottom, is absurd. My taunter really wants to show me that I am like him; and that I too am driven to join him in recognizing the absurd at the bottom of all things. He wants to prove that he has been smarter all along, and to watch me have to surrender as he has surrendered. He has given up his faith in reason all the way down, and he wants me to do the same.

My second thought is as follows. The Bible warns us often of the confrontation with the absurd that each of us who believes in the goodness of the Lord must face, and more than once in our lives. We see all the time in the Bible that the just are made to suffer, while the unjust live and laugh in plenty, heaping ridicule on the just. We read of the horrid, unfathomable afflictions that God piles up on his faithful servant, Job. Job refuses to say that in doing these things to him God is acting justly or kindly; Job knows his own pain, and he refuses to lie. He refuses to “prettify” God, or to cut God down to human standards. He knows that God is no sentimental liberal.

And if Job is the type of “the suffering servant,” whose sufferings cannot be explained by his own deeds, and whose sufferings are on the face of it horribly and inexcusably unjust, so also is the Son of God, Jesus Christ, the sinless One, who in forewarning his apostles of the sufferings he will endure on the cross alludes to Job more than once.

Who’s Judging Whom?

Stand before the cross. Look at the body of this suffering servant of God. Look, perhaps, with eyes opened by Mel Gibson’s all but unendurable The Passion. If this is what God did to His own Son— His own being, with Whom He is one—then what hope is there that we will be treated “nicely”? The God who does this is not “the God of niceness.” His scale of grandeur is far different from ours. One has no sense of Him whatever if one does not feel inner trembling and vast distance.

He is not a God made in our image. We are made as (very poor) images of Him—images chiefly in the sense that we experience insight and judgment, decision and love, and that we too have responsibilities.

This is the God who made the vastness of the Alps and the Rockies and the Andes; who knows the silence of jungles no human has yet penetrated; who made all the galaxies beyond our ken; who gave to Mozart and Beethoven and Shakespeare and Milton and Dante and legions of others great talents; who infused life into the eyes of every newborn, and love into the hearts of all lovers; and imagined, created, and expressed love for all the things that He made. He made all the powers of storms, and all the immense force of earthquakes, and the roiling and tumultuous churning of the oceans. He imagined all the beautiful melodies we have ever heard, and more that we have not.

God is God.

God is our Judge.

We are not His judge.

The question is not, “Does God measure up to our (liberal, compassionate, self-deceived) standards?” The question is, “Will we learn—in silence and in awe at the far-beyond-human power of nature—how great, on a far different scale from ours, is God’s love?”

It would be the greatest and most obscene of illusions for a man, any man, to imagine that he has greater love for a child mangled in the oily, dark waters of the recent tsunami than the Creator of that child has. It would be like Ivan Karamazov being unable to forgive God so long as one single child anywhere went to bed at night crying in loneliness and in pain. Who is Karamazov to think that his own love for that child—a purely abstract, speculative, hard-case, counterexample love—is greater than that of the child’s Creator?

The tapestry on which God weaves human existence is not the tapestry within the framework of time that we experience. As we do not comprehend the power of nature (especially nowadays, when we live so far removed from it, so protected from it), even more we do not begin to comprehend the love and goodness of God.

The truth is, the sight and smell of awful human death is sometimes more than we can take. Perhaps we should feel confidence in the power of God’s love, but we do not see it. All we feel is the night. Our darkness is as keen as that of the unbeliever and the nihilist.

Yet in that darkness, we the believers alone (not the unbeliever or the nihilist) feel betrayed by One whom we love. We alone feel anguish because we cannot understand.

But it is not as if we had not often before bumped into the limits of our understanding, and recognized nonetheless that there are undeniable glimmerings of powers and presences we know not of. And, like Job, we refuse to deny the power of the goodness and light which we do see, their power to go out into the night in which we cannot now see.

It does seem that the Creator is not always kind, not even just, within the bounded space that we experience. It does seem that the Creator acts with undeniable cruelty. In our time, we have seen unimaginable suffering. Like Job, we cannot deny what we see.

Neither can we deny the Light, which is what makes the absurd seem absurd. Only in contrast to Light is the absurd absurd. Otherwise it is only a brute matter of fact.

No less than the unbeliever or the nihilist does the devout Jew or Christian inhabit the night. But only the believers continue in the silence to utter the unseeing yes of our love. The yesthat Ivan Karamazov cannot say in the night Alyosha does say.

Science and the Demands of Virtue

FATHER GREGORY JENSEN

Contrary to the popular understanding, the natural sciences are not morally neutral. Not only do the findings of science have moral implications, the actual work of scientific research presupposes that the researcher himself is a man of virtue.

Not only do the findings of science have moral implications, the actual work of scientific research presupposes that the researcher himself is a man of virtue. When scientific research is divorced from, or worse opposed to, the life of virtue it is not simply the research or the researcher that suffers but the whole human family.Take for example, the scandal surrounding the conduct of researchers at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University in the UK. Whether or not the recently revealed emails and computer programs from undermine the theory of anthropological global warning (AGW), it is clear that current public policy debate is based at least in part on the research of scientists of questionable virtue who sacrificed not only honesty and fair play but potentially the well being of us all in the service of their own political agenda.

All of this came to mind recently when a friend sent me a talk on the environment (Through Creation to the Creator) by the Orthodox theologian Metropolitan Kallistos Ware. Ware argues that all creation is “a symbol pointing beyond itself, a sacrament that embodies some deep secret at the heart of the universe.” Unlike the Gnosticism that hold sways in many areas of life (including scientific research) the Christian Church argues that the secret of creation is both knowable and known. Creation, Ware says, points beyond itself to “the Second Person of the Trinity, the Wisdom and Providence of God” Who is Himself both “the source and end” of all created being. Insofar as the Christian tradition has an environmental teaching at all it is this: Jesus Christ is the “all-embracing and unifying” Principal of creation.

At its best natural science research is a means of exploring and deepening our appreciation and gratitude to God for “the variety and particularity of creation—what St Paul calls the ‘glory’ of each thing (1 Cor 15:41).” But appreciation and gratitude are not the fruit of technical competence but an ascetical effort. We must learn to “love the world for itself.” According to Ware, we do this not simply for what the natural world can do for us but “in terms of its own consistency and integrity.” And again, at its best scientific research has a positive role to play here. This is what makes Climategate so tragic; once again science is being twisted to serve selfish ends.

C.S. Lewis reminds us of the danger here when he observes that, “Each new power won by man is a power over man as well.” While our scientific advances have made us stronger in some ways, they have made us weaker in others. While not without copious benefits, science represents a real and substantial risk for both our relationship to creation and to ourselves. Giving in, Lewis points out, means that we no longer seek to “conform the soul to reality” through “knowledge, self-discipline and virtue.” As with magic in an earlier age, modern science tempts us to “subdue reality to the wishes of men.”

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Faith, Thought |

DAVID POPENOE

A discussion of the most common misinformation about marriage.

1. Marriage benefits men much more than women.

Contrary to earlier and widely publicized reports, recent research finds men and women to benefit about equally from marriage, although in different ways. Both men and women live longer, happier, healthier and wealthier lives when they are married. Husbands typically gain greater health benefits while wives gain greater financial advantages.¹

2. Having children typically brings a married couple closer together and increases marital happiness.

Many studies have shown that the arrival of the first baby commonly has the effect of pushing the mother and father farther apart, and bringing stress to the marriage. However, couples with children have a slightly lower rate of divorce than childless couples.²

3. The keys to long-term marital success are good luck and romantic love.

Rather than luck and love, the most common reasons couples give for their long-term marital success are commitment and companionship. They define their marriage as a creation that has taken hard work, dedication and commitment (to each other and to the institution of marriage). The happiest couples are friends who share lives and are compatible in interests and values.³

4. The more educated a woman becomes, the lower are her chances of getting married.

A recent study based on marriage rates in the mid-1990s concluded that today’s women college graduates are more likely to marry than their non-college peers, despite their older age at first marriage. This is a change from the past, when women with more education were less likely to marry.⁴

5. Couples who live together before marriage, and are thus able to test how well suited they are for each other, have more satisfying and longer-lasting marriages than couples who do not.

Many studies have found that those who live together before marriage have less satisfying marriages and a considerably higher chance of eventually breaking up. One reason is that people who cohabit may be more skittish of commitment and more likely to call it quits when problems arise. But in addition, the very act of living together may lead to attitudes that make happy marriages more difficult. The findings of one recent study, for example, suggest “there may be less motivation for cohabiting partners to develop their conflict resolution and support skills.” (One important exception: cohabiting couples who are already planning to marry each other in the near future have just as good a chance at staying together as couples who don’t live together before marriage).⁵

Read the whole article here……………..