Here's a pretty funny take on the flap between bloggers and the Associated Press about its apparently untrue story that Iraqi Shiites dragged Iraqi Sunnis out of a mosque and burned them to death. If you're not familiar with this controversy see here.
Here's a pretty funny commercial that Beth Webb, a pastors wife, sent to me.
The latest message from Al Queda's # 2 guy, … well #1 if you only count the living, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is quite a shocker.
Here's a pretty powerful story about the transporting of the body of one soldier, 2Lt Scott Lundell , killed in combat in Afghanistan, back to his family in Utah.
Here's an interesting little blurb about when Jesus was born. As the author of this post points out most of of us who have given this question any thought have always assumed that December 25 must have been a pagan holiday coming so near the winter solstice. Well it turns out that December 25 was definitely not a Roman pagan holiday at least not till after Christians had begun celebrating that date as the birth of Christ. Why did the early Christians believe that Jesus was born on December 25? For a number of reasons set out in the blog entry but the most interesting one to me is this on especially since I mentioned Chrysostom in the service last Sunday:
We also find St. John Chrysostom (a patriarch of Constantinople who died in 407 A.D.) noted that Christians had celebrated December 25 from the Church's early days. Chrysostom reinforced his point with an argument that used Scripture, not pagan mythology, for corroboration:
Luke 1 says Zechariah was performing priestly duty in the Temple when an angel told his wife Elizabeth she would bear John the Baptist. During the sixth month of Elizabeth's pregnancy, Mary learned about her conception of Jesus and visited Elizabeth "with haste."
The 24 classes of Jewish priests served one week in the Temple, and Zechariah was in the eighth class. Rabbinical tradition fixed the class on duty when the Temple was destroyed in A.D. 70 and, calculating backward from that, Zechariah's class would have been serving Oct. 2-9 in 5 B.C. So Mary's conception visit six months later might have occurred the following March and Jesus' birth nine months afterward.
Read the whole thing here.
UPDATE: After posting this I kind of recalled posting something about it last year. I checked and sure enough, I posted a more indepth article about this same theory last year, here.
Here's an interesting article from the BBC about the discovery of what are believed to be the remains of the Apostle Paul. They were found, amazingly enough, under the altar of the Basilica of St. Paul in Rome. Whether or not these are actually Paul's remains is questionable but what's interesting to me about the article is the way the BBC, The British Broadcasting Corporation describes the Apostle Paul:
St Paul was an influential early Christian who travelled widely in the Mediterranean area in the 1st Century.
and
His letters to the early churches, found in the Bible's New Testament, are arguably some of the most influential on Christian thinking
Here's the most important Christian figure other than Jesus and the BBC has to explain to his readers who he is? England really is a post-Christian nation.