With the Winter Games set to close Sunday night, you can almost hear the voices of Canadian officials saying, “We told you everything would work out.”
The Canadian team finished with the most gold medals, a result that didn’t seem possible after the Games’ first week. And to cap it with a gold medal in men’s hockey was a dream result for the host nation.
The overtime victory, 3-2, over the United States was a fitting culmination of these Games, in which Canada stood atop the podium more often that any other nation in Winter Olympics history and in which the United States ruled the overall medal count with a record total.
They outplayed the Americans and deserved to win.
We go to overtime. What a great game.
On the final day of the recent Church of England General Synod meeting there was a rather worthy debate about how the claims of science are affecting belief in God. At no point did any of the speakers remark on the surely important fact that the public square these days is crowded with religions. Clearly, religious belief is not incompatible with science. However, people in a multicultural society, who respect the beliefs of all, must inevitably observe that all religions are similarly non-scientific in the way they furnish different, often incompatible explanations about the meaning of life, whereas science is systemically consistent. And this must account for the different ways that people treat scientific truths and what are claimed as religious truths.
Science is a method applied to whatever can be tested and observed. It makes no claims save in those terms. Human knowledge, and the science that extends it, is finite. But the boundaries of what is known continue to expand. As the Bible says – “No man has seen God” in a scientific sense. So God seems, in a way, to be diminishing in significance, becoming more remote and much less persuasive. Unavoidably, science now suggests to some – as it always has – that God is not an objective necessity. Wisdom is no church monopoly. Lucretius in De Rerum Natura doubted whether anything humans could do would have any effect on the gods, rather in the same way that one may be at a loss when one seeks a present for somebody much richer who has everything already. A being who cannot be seen or known cannot be tested scientifically.
In this fast-paced and noisy world, we all need to slow down a-t times for our physical, emo tional and spiritual health.
For centuries, Christian meditation has been used by people to draw closer to God and for many today it is also a way to step back from that busy world.
Phil Barnett of Winnipeg, the national coordinator of the Ca n-adian Christian Meditation So ciety, will be in Calgary next week to talk about Christian meditation for a Lenten focus called Hearing the Voice of God Within Us.
He will be at Christ Church (Anglican) to teach and talk about the ancient spiritual practice.
n 1946, a Gallup poll found that 67 percent of Canadians attended church at least once a week. By 1998, the number had fallen to 22 percent, by 2001 to 20 percent.
By contrast, 35 percent of Americans call themselves regular churchgoers.
“Canada looks more like the thoroughly secular countries of Europe than it does its closest neighbor,” said Mark Noll, a Notre Dame religion professor who taught at the University of British Columbia.
In a 2001 Canadian census, 42 percent of Vancouver residents said they had no religion.
“B.C. is Canada’s California, a resource-rich, mild-climate place to get away from the rest of Canada and enjoy yourself,” said John Stackhouse, a professor of religion and culture at Regent College here. “Vancouver is its heart and has one of the lowest church-attendance figures in North America – rivaling San Francisco’s.”
[Hat tip: T19]
A fascinating series of pictures with informative captions describing the scenes, from Popular Mechanics.
The church’s essential mission is to “proclaim the Kingdom of God”, the Right Rev Dr Kelvin Wright, the newly ordained Bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Dunedin, says.
Dr Wright, who previously spent 11 years as vicar of St John’s, Rosyn, was ordained the ninth bishop of the diocese in a ceremony attended by more than 400 people who almost filled St Paul’s Cathedral on Saturday afternoon.
Some travelled from various parts of the North Island to attend and one person came from the Middle East.
“We have to proclaim the Kingdom of God,” Dr Wright said after being formally ordained as bishop.
“All of us are loved by God and accepted by God.”
Four theologians began discussions in Geneva, Switzerland this week to define the guidelines of a new project promoted from within the Conference of European Churches. The initiative hopes to study how the different Churches understand unity.
According to a statement released by the Conference of European Churches (CEC), the project is investigating church unity as it relates to church identity at the theological, theoretical level as well as in church practices.
The four theologians taking part in the discussion are British Anglican Dr. Paul M. Collins from the University of Chichester, German Catholic Dr. Myriam Wijlens from University of Erfurt, Finnish Dr. Minna Hietamaki from the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland and Orthodox Dr. Viorel Ionita from the CEC’s Churches in Dialogue Commission.