Slow growth will have Washington seeking stimulus. This may be a better-than-expected jobs report, but the job growth is still very small. The economy needs to be adding hundreds of thousands of jobs every month to absorb new people entering the job market and put the unemployed back to work. So lawmakers may be looking for more stimulus. “There is a good chance that the Obama Administration will introduce a set of targeted economic stimulus programs,” [Sung Won] Sohn says. “Payroll tax relief to encourage new hiring for small businesses is a good possibility. State and local governments are laying off employees as revenue falls. Some assistance from Washington could stem job losses here.” Shortly after the release of the August jobs report Friday, President Obama encouraged lawmakers to pass a $55 billion bill that would provide additional loans to small businesses. Housing stimulus may also be coming–along with more unemployment benefit extensions, Sohn says.
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Every gallon of gasoline you pump would cost you 5.5 cents more.
You’d pay 19 cents more each month to run the water from your tap.
The medicines you take to treat your illnesses would cost an additional 88 cents a month.
Turning on the lights and the television would help run up an additional 79 cents a month on the electricity bill for the typical South Carolina household.
You would have to open your wallets for new taxes at the grocery store and get used to paying for sales taxes on more of the services you buy, such as home pest control treatment, pampering at the beauty salon and a storage unit to stash your stuff.
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To achieve the goal of speaking meaningfully today, Kasper reasons, the Church must engage in two related tasks: the first is internal to the Christian community (ad intra), while the second regards the Church’s external ministry to the world (ad extra). The Church’s internal task is to understand Jesus Christ and itself more deeply. Kasper argues that the Church encounters problems in proclamation because it does not understand its own beliefs clearly enough (ad intra) to express them convincingly (ad extra). To show the significance of its message in the 21st century, the Church must look inward to better comprehend its own tradition and commitments. On this point Kasper writes:
The present crisis facing Christianity in the West does not touch merely on some peripheral concerns; … We are dealing here primarily with a crisis of relevance. We hear daily that dogmatic teachings and, even more, the moral rules of the Church no longer reach a large segment of believers. They appear to offer answers to questions which are no longer being asked. Nonetheless, the crisis of relevance represents merely the superficial side of the problem. It has long since led to a much deeper identity crisis within the churches. The question is no longer how the Church will be able to reach the modern, secularized world; rather, the question is what constitutes Christianity as such. What can Christianity, must Christianity, say to the modern world? Does it have something of its own to say, something unmistakable? (“Nature, Grace and Culture: On the Meaning of Secularization,” Catholicism and Secularization in America: Essays on Nature, Grace and Culture, p. 32)
Therefore, to succeed in its mission, the Christian community must continue to look introspectively, to deepen its appreciation of the mystery which constitutes its own identity. In order to know how to address the modern world effectively it must have a clearer understanding of what it is trying to convey.
The second task the Church must face if it hopes to communicate its message convincingly is the nature of its ministry to the world
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“There are delicate, difficult issues between our two churches at the moment,” Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols, head of the 5.2 million Catholics in England and Wales, told Reuters.
But, Nichols said the offer came after groups of Anglicans repeatedly asked for a response to their request for special provision to enter into full communion with the Catholic Church.
“Sometimes people want to say ‘oh, this is the initiative of the pope who is going fishing for Anglicans’. That is not true. He is responding to requests that he has received, and those requests we have to handle sensitively on both sides.”
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Something has changed on many college campuses across America. As they seek to raise their profiles, universities are investing in once-obscure sports that do not come close to paying for themselves, even in the face of dire budget cuts. It’s still not clear whether it pays off, but winning in all sports is what matters now, and the message is driven home from the highest levels of the university.
“If we are going to compete in something, we want to win at it — whether it is in pediatrics or women’s gymnastics,” said J. Bernard Machen, the University of Florida president. “It is important to our supporters, both financial and among our community. It is part of our culture. We want people to know that Florida is a place for winners.”
Some university officials and even athletic directors worry about whether the emphasis on athletics is worth the significant sums that universities invest in them.
“We talk about football coaches’ salaries, we talk about basketball coaches’ salaries,” Gene Smith, Ohio State’s athletic director, told his colleagues last year at a conference on spending in college athletics. “The salaries in many of our Olympic sports have tripled since 1994.”
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By John Smeaton, SPUC
Here is some information adapted from 40 Days for Life about its campaign in the UK, 22 September to 31 October:
40 Days for Life is a pro-life initiative that began in the USA. 40 Days for Life consists of:
- 40 days of prayer and fasting
- 40 days of peaceful vigil
- 40 days of community outreach
To date:
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By George Weigel, Standpoint
[.....] The man who comes to Britain as the 264th successor of St Peter is many things. Britons who rely on media imagery to form their impressions of public personalities will find some of those things surprising. Those who expect to meet "God's Rottweiler" (as his theological enemies caricatured Cardinal Ratzinger decades ago) will find instead a shy, soft-spoken man of exquisite manners. Those determined to portray Pope Benedict as the central figure in a global criminal conspiracy of child-rapers and their abettors will, it may be hoped, discover the man who did more than anyone else in the Roman Curia to compel the Church to face what he once called the "filth" marring the priesthood. Those looking for a hidebound clerical enforcer will meet instead a man of deep faith, a gentle pastor who has met, wept with, and apologised to the abused victims of his brother priests and bishops.
Joseph Ratzinger is also a man of ideas: a world-class European intellectual with an intriguing analysis of contemporary Europe's present circumstances and bold proposals to make about Europe's future. During the Pope's visit to Britain, those who ignore those proposals because of their fixation on scandal are depriving themselves of an opportunity to think seriously about the moral and cultural condition of the West — and indulging that intellectual anorexia at a moment when the West's future seems anything but secure demographically, economically, fiscally, strategically or morally.
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by Charlie Butts, OneNewsNow
There appears to be a growing acceptance of children being conceived out of wedlock among the nation's youth.
In 2002, 25 percent of teenage males admitted to never having sex, the main reason for abstaining being the possibility of pregnancy. However, the latest figures show that number has dropped to 12 percent. Moreover, more male teenagers agree that it is okay for an unmarried female to have a child. That number rose from 50 percent to 64 percent in 2006-2008.
Jimmy Hester, co-founder of the True Love Waits program, speculates one of the reasons for this growing acceptance.
"A lot of celebrities…are modeling that kind of behavior, and our teenagers and young adults pay a lot of attention to those people; they are role models," he notes. "And so they're seeing that kind of behavior going on, and I think it's just becoming more acceptable for out-of-wedlock pregnancies to take place."
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By Charlie Butts, OneNewsNow
A Texas court has reversed a judge's decision to grant a divorce in a case that involves two men.
District Judge Tena Callahan of Dallas granted the divorce to the couple, but the Fifth Court of Appeals in Texas has reversed that and returned the case to the lower court with an order to dismiss it.
Kelly Shackelford of Liberty Institute, the firm that helped the state attorney general's office argue the case, points to Proposition 2, the constitutional amendment passed by 76 percent of Texas voters in 2005 that defines marriage as a union between one man and one woman.
"We can't have one judge deciding she doesn't like what millions of people vote and overturning that," Shackelford contends. "So it's important to restore the rule of law, but it's also important because it lays down the very precedents and the very arguments that are eventually going to be at play at the U.S. Supreme Court to defend marriage as between a man and a woman."
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