The Emperor Constantine did not found the Catholic Church

 Jimmy Akin refutes the claim made by some Christian Fundamentalists that the Emperor Constantine founded the Catholic Church.  He did however allow them to be "tolerated." He didn't make Catholicism the official religion of the empire.

Did the Emperor Constantine found the Catholic Church? | Catholic Answers

 http://shoebat.com/2013/09/21/constantine-create-catholic-church/

 http://www.churchhistory101.com/feedback/protestant-myths.php

Who were the Church Fathers? | Catholic Answers

Who were the Church Fathers? | Catholic Answers

Don't panic, all you Protestants and non-denominationalists.  We share most of these. And probably all their ideas if they died in good standing with the church

Stop demeaning the Trump supporters as ignorant and uneducated

I was watching the huge crowd of Trump supporters last night as he was being interviewed by O'Reilly. Don't underestimate him by demeaning his supporters (of which I'm not one). They were all ages, genders, ethnicities, incomes, education (it's not cheap to go to those expensive tourist towns to hang out at political events) and all thoroughly fed up with the antics of both parties in Washington. The Republicans don't keep their promises to return us to good values and the Constitution, and the Democrats keep their promises to run up the taxes, regulations and drive us away from the Constitution.

We don't have RA, but these are good tips

http://www.healthline.com/health/rheumatoid-arthritis/life-hacks

13 tips for anyone who is getting up in years, or feeling some stiffness.

New on my Nook--Eusebius

"If Herodotus is the father of history, then Eusebius of Caesarea (c. A.D. 260-339) is certainly the father of church history.  He was the first to undertake the task of tracing the rise of Christianity during its crucial first three centuries from Christ to Constantine.  Since no other ancient author tried to cover the same period, Eusebius is our principal primary source for earliest Christianity and his Church History is the cornerstone chronicle on which later historians would build."  Introduction, "Eusebius: The Church History," c. 1999, 2007, 2011 translation and commentary  by Paul L. Maier, Kregel Digital Editions, Grand Rapids, MI.

I've downloaded a "sample" which seems to be 72 pages.

I've had my Nook about 3 years, and haven't done much with it. I thought I'd put some titles on a list and hand this puppy over to my daughter, who loves this stuff. (She bought it for me for Mother's Days a few years ago.)

Review at Christianbook.com "Dr. Paul L. Maier's award-winning translation Josephus: The Essential Works, now has a companion volume in a brilliant, word-for-word translation of and commentary on Eusebius's great Church History. Beginning with Jesus of Nazareth and ending with Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor in the early part of the fourth century, Eusebius presents a panorama of apostles, church fathers, elders, bishops, heroes, heretics, confessors, and martyrs. Key features in this new translation include more than 150 full-color photographs, maps and illustrations, an informative introduction to Eusebius and his works, commentaries on the significant historical developments addressed in each book of The Church History, and four indexes listing persons, places, and subjects cited, as well as photographs and illustrative material. This flowing, contemporary English translation remains faithful to the original Greek text but liberates Eusebius from previous outdated and stilted works, creating a new standard primary resource for anyone, lay or professional, who is interested in the early history of Christianity.

Christianity Today:  "There is no book more important o understanding the early church than Eusebius's The Church History.  And there is no edition more readable and engaging than this one."

Bacon or lettuce on that?

Are they pulling my leg? ""Eating lettuce is over three times worse in greenhouse gas emissions than eating bacon," said Paul Fischbeck, professor of social and decisions sciences and engineering and public policy. "Lots of common vegetables require more resources per calorie than you would think. Eggplant, celery and cucumbers look particularly bad when compared to pork or chicken."

No more lettuce on my BLT!

From masters to heads to . . .

According to R.R. Reno (First Things, Jan. 2016) Princeton has agreed to rename "masters" of its residential colleges to "heads" to protect the crybullies from feeling unsafe. One alum recommends changing "heads" to "asses" so as not to marginalize that part of the body, and to more aptly describe their role.

Is anyone in charge here?

Yesterday I came across a slick brochure advertising IF:Gathering 2016, which seems to be an ecumenical live gathering with lots of high tech underground and over reach--blogging, twiitter, Pinterest, tumblr, etc.--supposedly reaching about 400,000 women for the last event as reported by Christianity Today and Huffington Post. The brochure made no mention of the ministry or resurrection of Jesus which always gives me pause in publicity for massive "Christian" events. Is that to be "seeker" friendly, or was it an oversight by the proof reader? No theology, Christology, ecclesiology, or any isms or ologies that I'm familiar with that point back to the New Testament church. Just lots of good vibes and emotion, plus some social justice links to well known Christian groups. "A fresh, deep, honest space for the next generation of women to wrestle with essential questions that plague their generation." I can find no "authority" or church leader higher than the woman (and her husband) who organized it. I'm feeling my age today--and the multitude of events I've seen come and go in the last 40 years. Thoughts? Have you attended one of these?

Where are the adults?

They need to start hiring adults to be teachers in this district. "During a world geography lesson on Friday about world religions, including Islam, teacher Cheryl LaPorte had students complete an assignment that involved practicing calligraphy and writing a Muslim statement of faith, also known as the shahada, which translates as: "There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah." Students were also reportedly shown copies of the Quran." Parents are unhappy; school board saw no problem. If it was a geography lesson, why not write the name of their city? Or their own name? Students also got to dress modestly with a scarf like Muslims. Patrick Madrid wondered what would happen if the assignment was to dress like a Carmelite nun (they still wear the black and white habit) and write "Jesus is Lord." I think someone would be fired, don't you?

Vanilla Lemon Chex Mix

Read this for the instructions; not difficult.  Great for a holiday party.  
http://mylitter.com/recipes/vanilla-lemon-chex-mix-recipe/ 

Ingredients

• 5 cups Rice Chex Cereal
• ¾ cup Vanilla Baking Chips
• 3 Tablespoons Butter
• 2 Tablespoons Lemon Juice, fresh
• 1 1/4 cup Powdered Sugar

After the Ball, the PR agenda for normalizing homosexuality

 It wasn't just the book "After the Ball" which normalized homosexuality in our culture. It was the other 99%.

"It should be obvious to anyone who has been paying attention over the course of the past 25 years that the strategies proposed by Kirk and Madsen have been all too successful at normalizing homosexuality—or, at least, the idea that a homosexual “orientation” is perfectly natural.  (Homosexual practice, on the other hand, has been kept discreetly under wraps.)  But as successful as this marketing of the gay brand has been, it could not have made much headway if Americans had not already been predisposed to it by the long development of what sociologist Philip Rieff called the “therapeutic culture,” a culture rooted in affluence, consumerism, and perpetual rebellion against the old communal culture and its system of moral demands.  In the therapeutic culture each individual is liberated to pursue his own desires, convinced that he is the self-created agent of those desires, or, as Stephen L. Gardner has so aptly put it, the “demi-god of his eros and ambitions.”  Within such a culture, sexual desire has gradually become detached from its place in the natural order, and sexual “identity” elevated to an almost sacramental status.  Facebook, surely a bellwether of our free fall into mass narcissism and incoherence, now offers some 56 gender alternatives to traditional male/female sex identities, and each of these implies one or more modes of sexual satisfaction.  Of course, most Americans are boorishly indifferent to this bewildering array of options.  Nonetheless, the unending Sexual Revolution has made deep inroads in Middle America.  Consider the sex-toy industry.  David Rosen at alternet.org estimates that global profits in sex accessories now approach $15 billion annually, much of which is generated by U.S. sales.  Who is buying all those naughty products?  Well, it seems that a whopping number of them are purchased by middle-class American women."

Jack Trotter, Conservatives and the Gay Agenda

The IRS is at it again!

 What could be worse than the IRS being in charge of your medical records?  How about crushing with a burden of paper work every organization you donate to? And not just demanding donor lists for conservative groups like they did to conservatives during the 2012 campaign.  This could also hurt you Democrats who have a heart for charity. The IRS has proposed a new regulation that would require 501(c)3 charitable organizations to collect social security numbers of donors who donate $250.  Mega death organizations like Planned Parenthood would have no problem with this, or the Clinton Foundation which has accepted millions from foreign donors while Hillary was Secretary of State.  But the little church around the corner?  Your local dog breed rescue group?

 https://www.501c3.org/irs-proposal-to-provide-social-security-numbers-of-donors-worries-charities/


“And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.” 1 Cor. 13:13

So easy even a librarian could do it

Glenn Beck resettles Iraqi Christians in Slovakia

As I’ve said before, I’m all for resettling Christian refugees from the Middle-east. I think I read somewhere that so far, 53 Christians have been admitted to the U.S. even though they are facing genocide—we’ve probably admitted more Muslim terrorists than that. However, how to support this? 

Last night Glenn Beck showed video of his organization (Mercury One) taking 149 Christians out of a refugee camp in Iraq (I think they’d been in the camp 2 years). They contacted 11 countries, including the USA, but only Slovakia would take them. Iraqi Christians are probably descended from the apostles or someone who knew them, as are other Orthodox Christians, so it shouldn’t be an impossible job. They had their last mass with their priest, said good-bye to friends and family, and flew off to a new country, new language, new customs. It was really heart wrenching. 

These were not peasants, they are educated people with careers and homes, now all ripped away. Iraq has been their people’s home for centuries. Their community had a good life in Iraq (as I recall from pre-war days, they were protected by Saddam Hussein who was a secular Muslim). ISIS was threatening to behead them right up to the end, in fact, the first flight was delayed due to intelligence they might be attacked. (Several times Beck mentioned that ISIS was killing the handicapped, although I haven’t seen that report elsewhere. He has a physically challenged daughter, so he’s always very sensitive to that.) It was like watching the frantic flights out of VietNam after U.S. renigged on the treaty agreements. 

Anyway, we had talked before about who could we trust with money to do this? Mennonites? Brethren? Lutheran? Any of the groups we’ve supported in the past? No, plus they all cooperate with World Council of Churches for world relief, which if you’ve ever read their documents is very pro-Muslim (I saw that even in the 1970s). Beck had tried to raise $10,000,000 to do this with listener/member donations, but instead raised $13,000,000. So we knew where to send our help. God bless people like Beck who take enormous risks (he was also Iraq with the camera crew and all the people it took to organize this).

Incidentally, he said a crew from 20/20 went along to film it, but I don’t think he really trusts the MSM to get the story right. We’ll see if it gets more than a few minutes on another news show. It has been reported on Fox and in some Christian on-line publications.

http://www.christianpost.com/news/glenn-beck-johnnie-moore-evacuate-iraqi-christian-refugee-slovakia-152273/#!

A cloud of euphemisms

"Forgive us for looking through the legacy smoke, but if climate change really does imperil the Earth, and we doubt it does, nothing coming out of a gaggle of governments and the United Nations will save it. What will help is human invention and the entrepreneurial spirit. To the extent the Paris accord increases political control over human and natural resources, it will make the world poorer and technological progress less likely.". . .
"As we have learned from the Iran nuclear deal and so much else, Mr. Obama is not into winning democratic consent for his policy dreams. Mr. Obama plans to use Paris as a stick to beat Republicans even as he ducks a vote in Congress. We doubt the Paris climate deal would get 40 Senate votes once Democrats in Ohio, Colorado or North Dakota were forced to debate the costs."

Wall St. Journal

Who are the "deniers" the left ridicules?

Calling me a “man-made climate change denier” is very different than believing that climate changes over time. And yes, I have read the reports on both sides (or 3 or 4 sides, because there aren’t just 2). It’s just a lie and insult to say that those of us who don’t believe the Wizard behind the curtain and the leftist hype don’t believe in a clean environment. It’s also a lie that the president is talking about pollution. These are two different issues. All these climate change folks in love with the latest cell phones need to look what they are doing to the land in Africa where the precious rare earth elements come from for that technology. The U.S. used to have them, but they were over mined, and now all the orders go to China. I’ll believe they are serious about dangers to climate when thousands of globalist power folks give up using jet planes to get to conferences in interesting places like Paris and Hawaii.

 

Yes, climate does go in cycles. But that is change, right? There was the “little ice age” from the 16th-19th century. That’s not huge as time goes, but if you were living then and trying to grow food, it was pretty desperate times in some parts of Europe. If a volcano explodes on an island and sends dirt and ash into the air, it can cool some areas of the globe for years. But I don’t call that “man made climate change.” If there are solar flares that last a few decades and heat things up, I don’t call it man made climate change even if it creates new deserts and dries up lakes with changing jet streams. http://www.space.com/19280-solar-activity-earth-climate.html

 

“Welcome to [Obama’s] leaps in logic that would span the Grand Canyon. Apparently excruciatingly slow, contradictory, and sometimes nearly imperceptible changes in the atmosphere’s temperature are capable of spawning ideologies like communism, fascism, and now Islamic jihadism, although the president won’t use that term. Never mind all those historical details about what actually caused these ideologies to rise—social upheavals like industrialization, philosophical disputes unleashed by the Enlightenment, and the crises inside Islam. The president has got it figured out.”

http://dailysignal.com/2015/12/07/obamas-insane-history-lessons-on-climate-change/

 

 

Meet the neighbors--by guest blogger Septimus Sextus

Went to a Holiday Party last night in my neighborhood and talked politics with some interesting folks. Was told by several that Bernie is the man because he was going to take on the corporations, was going to push for single payer, and was going to take the money we spend on war and spend it domestically. Also spent some time discussing specific issues with some folks.

To recap... These are amazingly pleasant people who are great parents and good neighbors. But when I said single payer means Medicaid for all they claimed to not know much about Medicaid. I told them they were lucky.

When they talked about the high price of college and their student loans I asked them if they saw a correlation between a government loan program, the education lobby, and the rising cost of higher education.
When we discussed energy policy and I mentioned ongoing changes in the coal industry to make it cleaner and the overwhelming need to not mothball coal plants until a workable alternative is actually in place, they mentioned renewables.

When I said renewables wouldn't power heavy industry they didn't follow the logic. When we discussed the need to transition to nuclear power as an alternative and reminded them of the French nuclear success story they focused on waste byproducts. When I said those are buried in the ground in a desert miles from anyplace somebody would want to live they didn't understand. 

And finally when I said you can't not have a military and you have to blow up the really bad guys they didn't understand why we couldn't just wash our hands of international entanglements. And when I said that's fine then don't be surprised if we go back to covert operations and propping up somewhat crazy despots to keep the really crazy people in check, they mentioned human rights. 

So yeah... Quite an evening. And their votes count the same as ours.

Getting ready for Christmas

The brown couch wearing its festive pillows, and a dark sheet to protect it from the cat's sneezes.

With my "new" red dress (bought it in March at the spring sales) with one of the few pieces of jewelry from my mother, her necklace.

Is it perception, the pew or the pastors?

"Less than 1 percent of senior pastors and discipleship pastors told Barna that “today’s churches are doing very well at discipling new and young believers.” Six in 10 said that churches are discipling “not too well.” 

But those in the pews disagree. More than 9 in 10 said that their church “definitely” (52%) or “probably” (40%) does “a good job of helping people grow spiritually.”"

And how about this one?  Ah, the problem with polls. . . I'm doing OK, but that guy is really bad off.

 “Pastors give their own church higher marks than churches overall, but few believe churches—their own or in general—are excelling in discipleship,” the report stated

 http://www.christianitytoday.com/gleanings/2015/december/pastors-pews-vastly-disagree-discipleship-barna-navigators.html

Practicing Christians (attend worship, Sunday School) report "some spiritual progress" in the last 12 months, but 43% of Non-practicing Christians also report "some spiritual progress" in the last 12 months!  Must be that golf course meditation really works.

A writing prompt from Tweetspeak Newsletter--Home

“If, many years from now someone were to live in your home, what would you want them to know about it? What does house and home mean to you? Talk about its comforts and your favorite spaces. What might be different? What will always remain the same? Write your answer in poetry.” December 12, 2015

Memories of Home
Norma J. Bruce
December 12, 2015

Home.  Where is that located?
Is it Kenbrook where memories
Are daily, brief and quiet.
Where we moved in January
And I was then hospitalized?

Home. What would it look like?
Is it Abington with memories
Of babies, birthdays and weddings?
What will the current owners risk
And remodel beyond recognition?

Home. When a horse was pastured?
Is it Hannah where memories
Push a porch swing with Polka-dot,
When boyfriends stopped by for dates,
And we went to movies and dances.

Home. Why not a whole village?
Is it Forreston whose memories
Of  friends hold  to this day
Why when some have moved or died,
And we are always children.

Home. Would it be war time?
Is it Alameda’s bay area memories
With trips to the zoo and playground.
Would I hear White Christmas in fog
And walk to kindergarten?