Amen - an autobiography of a nun by Dr Sister Jesme

A book written by a former nun is threatening to embarrass the Catholic Church in Kerala.

is written by former nun Dr Sister Jesme and threatens to reveal what allegedly happens behind the closed doors of convents.

The book claims that harassment and sexual repression take place in convents.

........


Born C Meamy Raphael, Jesmi writes in her autobiography that she got her first rude shock when she was a Novitiate. ''At a retreat for novices, I noticed girls in my batch were unsettled about going to the confession chamber. I found that the priest there asked each girl if he could kiss them. I gathered courage and went in. He repeated the question. When I opposed, he quoted from the Bible which spoke of divine kisses,'' she writes.

Her second shock was from an ordained nun. ''I was sent to teach plus-two students in St Maria College. There, a new sister joined to teach Malayalam; she was a lesbian. When she tried to corner me, I had no way but to succumb to her wishes. She would come to my bed in the night and do lewd acts and I could not stop her,'' she writes.

In Bangalore for a refresher course in English, she writes, ''I was told to stay at the office of a priest respected for his strong moral side. But when I reached the station, he was waiting there and hugged me tight on arrival. Later in the day, he took me to Lalbagh and showed me cupid struck couples and tried to convince me about the need for physical love. He also narrated stories of illicit relations between priests and nun to me. Back in his room, he tried to fondle me and when I resisted, got up and asked angrily if I had seen a man. When I said no, he stripped himself, ejaculated and forced me to strip,'' Jesmi recounts.

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Church in India: Virakta Mutt in Deshanur, Belgaum has a Christian priest and Hindu Muslim devotees

In these troubled times of religious intolerance and rise of fundamentalism,, a village 25 km from Belgaum, stands out as a

beacon of hope. The church here has adapted itself to local culture so much so that it is called a ‘mutt’ — — and has both Christian and Hindu features.

The walls are adorned with teachings of Basavanna, Sarvajna, Akkamahadevi, Kabir Das, Tulsi Das, Sur Das, Purandaradasa, Kanakadasa and Meera. The church priest wears a saffron shawl; the devotees, comprising Hindus and Muslim, recite verses from the Bible, Gita and Koran.

“The essence is peaceful coexistence of all faiths,’’ says priest Fr Menino. The village has a population of around 11,000 and is dominated by Lingayats and Muslims. The priest is the lone Christian member in the village.

The priest worked closely with the villagers and started the first girls’ school, helped build roads, brought post office and electricity to the village. The church runs a primary school with 459 students and provides hostel accommodation to 46 poor students. Most villagers prefer to send their children to the church school.
Church in India: Virakta Mutt in Deshanur, Belgaum has a Christian priest and Hindu Muslim devotees Sphere: Related Content

Marriage rates fall to 21.6 per 1000 men and to 19.7 for 1000 women

The levels for men and women were the lowest since records were first kept in 1862.
High profile divorce cases, the escalating cost of weddings, and the failure of the Government to support the institution of marriage were among the factors blamed.
It is now likely that married couples will be in the minority by next year as people increasingly choose to live together out of wedlock.
Latest figures from the Office for National Statistics, for the year 2007 in England and Wales, showed that 21.6 men out of every 1,000 men got married, down from 23 the previous year. The rate for women was 19.7 per 1,000, down from 20.7 in 2006.
The levels for men and women were the lowest since records were first kept in 1862.
There were a total of 231,450 marriages in 2007, an annual fall of 3.3 per cent, and the lowest number since 1895 when the population was little more than half its present level.
The figures pre-date the current financial crisis which is likely to have exacerbated the downward trend in marriage as couples put off their weddings because of the cost.
Average costs for a wedding have more than doubled over the last decade to more than £21,000.
The Government has been accused of fuelling the breakdown of marriage by introducing changes to the tax and benefits system that left married couples up to £5,000-a-year worse off than people who stay single.


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Darwin’s theory of evolution was compatible with Christian faith: Vatican

The Vatican has admitted that Charles Darwin was on the right track when he claimed that Man descended from apes.

A leading official declared yesterday that Darwin’s theory of evolution was compatible with Christian faith, and could even be traced to St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas. “In fact, what we mean by evolution is the world as created by God,” said Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture. The Vatican also dealt the final blow to speculation that Pope Benedict XVI might be prepared to endorse the theory of Intelligent Design, whose advocates credit a “higher power” for the complexities of life.

Organisers of a papal-backed conference next month marking the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species said that at first it had even been proposed to ban Intelligent Design from the event, as “poor theology and poor science”. Intelligent Design would be discussed at the fringes of the conference at the Pontifical Gregorian University, but merely as a “cultural phenomenon”, rather than a scientific or theological issue, organisers said.



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Alzheimer's is brain diabetes

Health and Medicine: Alzheimer's 'is brain diabetes': BBC Report Sphere: Related Content

Father Gerhard Maria Wagner, who said Hurricane Katrina 'divine retribution,' was made Bishop

Church in the World: Father Gerhard Maria Wagner, who said Hurricane Katrina 'divine retribution,' was made Bishop Sphere: Related Content

New Book on Moltmann by Scott R. Paeth: Exodus Church and Civil Society

This book investigates the intersection of theology and social theory in the work of Jurgen Moltmann. In particular, it examines the way in which his concept of the 'Exodus Church' can illuminate the importance of the idea of civil society for a Christian public theology. The concept of civil society can aid in moving from the narrower category of 'political theology,' a term used frequently by Moltmann to emphasize the church's public commitment, to a broader understanding of theology's public task, which takes into account the plurality of ends and institutions within society. The idea of the Exodus Church enables deeper understanding of Christian ethical participation within a complex modern society.


Scott R. Paeth is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at DePaul University, USA.


Publisher: Ashgate (October 1, 2008), 250 pages

ISBN-10: 0754662012
ISBN-13: 978-0754662013

Theology Reader: New Book on Moltmann:Exodus Church and Civil Society Sphere: Related Content

Jimmy Carter's New Baptist Covenant message of racial reconciliation and cooperation on social issue

Dalits Marginalized:  Jimmy Carter's New Baptist Covenant message of racial reconciliation and cooperation on social issue Sphere: Related Content

February 12, the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin

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World: Barack Obama signs his first Law: Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act

World: Barack Obama signs his first Law: Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act Sphere: Related Content

Robert E. Seaver, Professor Emeritus, Union Theological Seminary, dies at 90

Church in the World: Robert E. Seaver, Professor Emeritus, Union Theological Seminary dies at 90 Sphere: Related Content

Roger Haight Ordered by Vatican to stop teaching and publishing for his Openness to Religions

For Fracis Clooney's Comments click here

Roger HaightAmerican Jesuit theologian Fr. Roger Haight, whose writing on Christ and non-Christian religions was censured by the Vatican in 2005 for causing “grave harm to the faithful,” has been ordered by Rome to stop teaching and publishing on theological subjects.

Sources told NCR that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s doctrinal agency, communicated the restrictions to the Jesuits in spring 2008. They apparently came amid back-and-forth discussions involving the Vatican, the Jesuit leadership in Rome, and the order’s New York province. Among other steps, Jesuit officials in America reportedly had consulted the late Jesuit Cardinal Avery Dulles in an effort to resolve the concerns.  Read it all 

FRANCIS X. CLOONEY, S.J. COMMENTS :

 I am sure you know about the case against his Jesus Symbol of God and the Notification several years back. Since then Fr Haight, moved from teaching at the (then) Weston Jesuit School of Theology, has continued his writing, and also taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York, a Protestant seminary. But now, he is barred from further theological writing and from teaching, even at Union. The reason, it seems, is that he is not willing to recant and disown what he wrote in Jesus Symbol of God.   More

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John Updike (1932-2009)

Updike's Middle-Class God

Like all great novelists, John Updike used fiction to explore, explain and expose truth. "One thing that's given me courage in writing," Updike once told an interviewer, "has been this belief that the truth, what is actual, must be faced and is somehow holy."

For Updike, who died Tuesday at age 76, that search for holy truth often involved the lives of small-town, middle-class Protestants. His people. Updike was the grandson of a Presbyterian minister. He was raised in the Lutheran church in Pennsylvania, but joined the Congregational church as an adult. In his later years, he became an Episcopalian and dated a Methodist chaplain.

The prolific author liked to joke about his lifelong "tour of Protestantism," and that he "never quite escaped the the Christian church," but it's clear that mainline Protestant theology formed the spiritual foundation of his work. "My subject is the American Protestant small town middle class," Updike told Jane Howard in a 1966 interview for Life magazine.

In a 2004 talk at the Center for Spiritual Inquiry in New York, Updike said his classic character, Harry Angstrom, was infuenced by his study of Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish Christian philosopher. Other characters such as Rev. Fritz Kruppenbach and Rev. Tom Marshfield were influenced by Updike's reading of theologians Karl Barth and Paul Tillich.  Read ita all here

Religion and Theology in Updike's  novels

At a talk on religion in his work Thursday evening (Nov. 18) at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in Manhattan, Updike told the audience of 300 that his Christian faith had “solidified in ways less important to me than when I was 30, when the existential predicament was realer to me than now. … I worked a lot of it through and arrived at a sort of safe harbor in my life.”

While much of his earlier work contains traces of Updike’s furious immersion in Christian theology, he said he looked more to the congregation of his hometown Massachusetts church as the rock of his faith today.

“When I haven’t been to church in a couple of Sundays I begin to hunger for it and need to be there,” he said, standing at a podium in front of the altar, against a backdrop of Byzantine-style mosaics and dressed in a gray suit befitting one of America’s elder statesmen of letters. “It’s not just the words, the sacraments. It’s the company of other people, who show up and pledge themselves to an invisible entity.”

As a young man studying at Oxford in the mid-1950s, Updike said he devoured new translations ofSoren Kierkegaard at Blackwell’s bookstore, discovering him “so positive and fierce and strikingly intelligent, like finding an older brother I didn’t know I had.” He pointed to his classic character Harry Angstrom, of the Rabbit tetralogy, as an example of the Danish philosopher’s influence. The Swiss neo-orthodox theologian Karl Barth informed another character in the first book of the series, the Lutheran minister Fritz Kruppenbach, who faces off with an Episcopal priest in a scene Updike chose to read. Upon going to Kruppenbach’s house to discuss Rabbit’s desertion of his family, Rev. Eccles is treated to a diatribe against meddling in others’ affairs. Kruppenbach sounds like a stand-in for Barth himself.  Read it all 

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Netaji died in Taihoku air crash in 1945: Alessandro Quaroni

Nation: Netaji died in Taihoku air crash in 1945: Alessandro Quaroni: "Following a public outcry against the government's view that Netaji died in the Taihoku air crash, it set up three enquiry commissions -- the Shah Nawaz Commission, the Khosla Commission and the Justice Manoj Kumar Mukherjee Commission -- to look into the matter.

While Shah Nawaz and Khosla agreed that Netaji was, indeed, killed in the Taihoku air crash, the Mukherjee Commission, however, concluded that Netaji was actually alive when the crash is said to have taken place.

Quaroni replied in the negative when asked whether his parents were in possession of any document indicating Netaji's death in the Taihoku crash." More Sphere: Related Content

Twitter Surpasses Digg: Almost 1000% Growth in One Year

The rise and rise of Twitter traffic in the UK
Twitter, the mobile phone-based micro-blogging service, rocketed nearly 1000% in use in the UK over the past year according to industry analysts HitWise.
For the first time, the site has seen more visits than "social bookmarking" site Digg, which allows users to share links to sites.
Twitter made headlines earlier in January, providing the first pictures of downed US Airways flight 1549.
The site may continue its meteoric rise as the new US President is a devotee.
The Twitter site has jumped from 2,953rd most popular in the UK in 2008 to 291st as of mid-January.


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World: Barack Obama inauguration, Text of speech

Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Barack Obama inauguration, Text of speech
America finally got its first black president on Tuesday,January 20, 2009, and the country's usually staid capital was engulfed in a contagious party spirit.
Two million people covered almost every square foot of Washington's two-mile grass runway from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial to watch the inauguration of Barack Obama – a restless sea of red, white and blue flags that barely stopped waving from freezing dawn to chilly dusk.
Tens of thousands more lined Pennsylvania Avenue, where an armoured black limousine later took the first black American president to his new home – a house built by slaves. Millions, possibly billions, watched on television around the world, but it was the extraordinary numbers who braved the numbing chill of a harsh Washington winter that really spoke best of the Obama appeal.
It didn't matter that the man the Mall crowds had come to see was, aside from the giant television screens, not even a speck in the distance, separated by a security operation so intense that a police sniper stood on every roof.
Nor did it really matter that, when asked, everyone trotted out precisely the same line about why they had come: "being present at a moment of history" might have been a cliché but that didn't mean it wasn't true. more


This is the full text of President Obama’s inaugural speech:

My fellow citizens: I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors. I thank President Bush for his service to our nation, as well as the generosity and co-operation he has shown throughout this transition.

Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath.


The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet, every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms. At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbearers, and true to our founding documents.

So it has been. So it must be with this generation of Americans.

That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land - a nagging fear that America’s decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights.

Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America - they will be met.

On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.

On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics. Continue to read it all here

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Niebuhr and Obama by Mark Tooley

Last year, Barack Obama cited Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) as one of his favorite philosophers. The choice contrasted with George W. Bush's famous citation in 2000 of Jesus Christ as his favorite philosopher. Citing a deceased theologian with a German name seems sophisticated, and Jimmy Carter likewise often pointed to Niebuhr, and justifiably so. Niebuhr was probably the 20th century's finest ethicist in the liberal Protestant tradition.

Despite lay fans like Obama and Carter, who are themselves liberal Protestants, Niebuhr is today rarely embraced by the modern Religious Left, which prefers utopianism to Niebuhr's school of Christian realism. Niebuhr would appreciate the irony, because he himself was once a sort of utopian who shared the pacifism and socialism of Social Gospel enthusiasts after World War I. The rise of Nazism jolted Niebuhr back to the reality of transcendent evil, and he steadfastly endorsed World War II, even while criticizing the Allied bombing of German cities and questioning the atomic attacks on Japan. Later, he supported Western resistance to Soviet communism, though he opposed the Vietnam War almost from its start.

Niebuhr always remained left of center politically, endorsing the New Deal and welfare state, and heartily endorsing civil rights. A Lutheran, he taught for 30 years at Union Seminary in New York, which was then America's flagship liberal seminary. Today, like most once distinguished liberal seminaries, Union is a shadow of its former influence. But in Niebuhr's day it hosted some of America's great theological minds, including Niebuhr's colleague and close friend, Paul Tillich. Read it all here

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Wo-Men: 'women commandos' to fight social evils in Raipur

Raipur, Jan 14 (ANI): A voluntary organisation has raised a special force of women in Raipur to fight the social evil and work for women's empowerment.

Called as , they are bracing and work for empowerment of women.

President of the voluntary organization, Samshad Begum is a known face of women's upliftment, with Stri Shakti Samman award to her credit. She has already brought together 163 villages and raised 2200 helping groups empowerment of women.

Certain criterions have been laid down to select every women commando. Because she has to work in the village and among the villagers. So the circumstances can be very demanding.

"Woman commando is a woman who works for her village, is independent, who has a wish to do something. We have selected such women. And these women will work for the progress of village, women and women empowerment so that women can be independent. They will also come forward against social evils such as child marriage, dowry and witch craft," said Samshad Begum.

The women commandos are prepared to fight against social evils such as dowry, child marriage, exploitation of women, gambling in the society
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Liberal Criminal Procedure Code comes into effect - lawyers and Police not happy

Under the new law, CrPC (Amendment) Act 2008, the police, instead of arresting the accused, will be obliged to issue him/her a "notice of appearance" for any offence punishable with imprisonment up to seven years. The person can be arrested only if he/she does not appear before the police in response to the notice.

Seven years or less is the maximum penalty for a host of offences, including attempt to commit culpable homicide, robbery, attempt to suicide, kidnapping, voluntarily causing grievous hurt, cheating, outraging a woman's modesty and death caused by negligence.

The radical change in the CrPC has, however, drawn flak from a number of Bar associations across the country. Lawyers -- who also observed strike in various courts after the bill was passed in Parliament -- argue that the amendment (in Section 41) doing away with mandatory arrest provisions would remove fear from the minds of criminals who would misuse the provisions under the garb of personal liberty. more

CrPC amendment Bill is seen as a setback by certain senior police officials who readily

admit they are ill prepared to implement it.

One senior officer went to the extent of saying: "Delhi is not ready to usher in such liberal and revolutionary changes." However, the top brass put up a brave front saying the amendments would be implemented in "letter and spirit".


Crime and Court: Liberal Criminal Procedure Code comees into effect - lawyers and Police not happy Sphere: Related Content

Orissa temple purified after low caste woman minister visit

Hindu priests in Orissa are under investigation for conducting a purification ritual soon after a minister belonging to a lower caste visited a famous temple, officials said on Friday.

Minutes after Pramila Mallick, a minister in Orissa, prayed at the temple this week, Hindu priests shut the doors and threw away holy offerings, washed the floors and changed the idol's clothes, one official said.

"Some priests opposed the minister's entry into the interior chamber of the temple," Upendra Mallik, a senior government official told Reuters. "We are investigating."

..

The minister said the purification ritual, at the Akhandalamani temple in Orissa's Bhadrak district, could have been conducted at the behest of her political rivals.  more from Reuters India

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