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Francis Cardinal George, Archbishop of Chicago, has been diagnosed with bladder cancer and will undergo surgery tomorrow.

Cardinal Francis George, spiritual leader of the nation's third largest diocese, has been diagnosed with bladder cancer and was scheduled to have his bladder removed Thursday, church officials said.

George, 69, is expected to remain hospitalized at least eight days after surgery, then recuperate at his Chicago residence for six to eight weeks, archdiocese spokeswoman Colleen Dolan said.

A full recovery is expected. Asked about the possibility of losing this battle with cancer and meeting God face-to-face, the Cardinal responded with an optimistic faith.

"The idea of meeting him is, while disquieting, is not something that I've become afraid of," he said. "I'm more afraid of the operation and the complications of life without a bladder than I am of death itself."

Indeed, the meeting of our Lord should come as a source of joy to a Christian. it is our sojourn here, as teh cardinal indicates, that is our source off worry and concern.

During Cardinal George's convalesence, the Archdiocese will be in good hand -- or perhaps I should say under the protective wings of a dbird of a different feather. The Archdiocesan Vicar general, Father John Canary, will administer the Archdiocese. Father Canary was the vice-rector of the seminary I attended, and is a good man. I wish him well.

Caring Father, send forth your healing Spirit upon your servant Francis, and speed him towards a full recovery. Grant that his doctors may do al in their power to remove the cancer and in the subsequent treatment. And strengthen Father John as he guides your church in the Chicago area during this time, that he may act with wisdom and prudence in accord with your will. And we ask this through Jesus Christ, your son. Amen.

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Probably not, because they are a part of the Letist coalition. Therefore, whatever these religious leftists do is fine.

With a faith-based agenda of their own, liberal and progressive clergy from various denominations are lobbying lawmakers, holding rallies and publicizing their positions. They want to end the Iraq war, ease global warming, combat poverty, raise the minimum wage, revamp immigration laws, and prevent "immoral" cuts in federal social programs.

Some, like the Rev. Robin Meyers of the United Church of Christ in Oklahoma, marry gay couples and seek to reduce abortions while rejecting calls by the right to outlaw them.

"I join the ranks of those who are angry because I have watched as the faith I love has been taken over by fundamentalists who claim to speak for Jesus but whose actions are anything but Christian," declared Meyers, who has written a new book, "Why the Christian Right is Wrong.

According to scholars, the religious left has become its most active since the 1960s when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other clergy -- black and white -- were key figures in the civil-rights and anti-Vietnam war movements.

Yeah, that's right -- the Left has always welcomed religious support. It's only when people of faith oppose tehm that the liberals insist that their involvement in the policy-making process is illegitimate. So much for the intellectual honesty on their part.

So the next time you hear a Leftist attacking "theo-cons" for violating "separation of Church and State", find out if he is willing to denounce Rev. Robin Meyers or Rev. Jim Wallis.

Or better yet, perhaps you can ask him about repealing a certain federal holiday that honors a certain Baptist minister-- in the name of separation of Church and State, of course.

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Parents, students, and some outside commentators are outraged that the song -- one which is well-known and well-loved -- would be prohibitted at the school concert.

A CHURCH school has barred children from singing John Lennon's Imagine - because the lyrics are "anti-religious".

Primary pupils were rehearsing the 1971 peace anthem, which asks people to imagine a world without religion, when head Geoff Williams vetoed the song following a teacher's complaint.

Mr Williams, who was backed by his governors, said: "We believe God is the foundation of all we do. It's not an appropriate song for our concert."

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Yesterday parents of disappointed children said the ban was "ridiculous". They were backed by secular organisations which accused the school of "fun-hating orthodoxy".

Pupils at St Leonard's C of E School, in Exeter, Devon, rehearsed Imagine for their annual concert, which is themed Songs for a Green Earth.

The song's lyrics include: "Imagine there's no heaven, it's easy if you try/ No hell below us, above us only sky...no thing to kill and die for and no religion too." It was replaced by a traditional ditty, The Building Song.

And frankly, I think it is the correct choice. Let me explain by analogy.

When I was in teh seminary, one of my professors dealt with liturgical music. He argued that while some secular music might be approrpiate during a service, some sends the wrong message and should not be permitted. He mentioned th old 1970s hit, "The First Time (Ever I Saw Your Face)" as an example of th latter. Couples want to use it at their weddings, because of the beautiful melody and the passionate lyrics of teh first verse. Unfortunately, the second verse is all about "Tthe first time ever I laid with you". Stop the presses! A song about the glorious feeling that accompanied the couple's first pre-marital intercourse doesn't belong in a church service. Don't do it.

And that leads us to "Imagine". I love the song. If I had an i-Pod, it would be one of the songs on it. But in a religious setting, it just does not belong, because it includes an explicit rejection of religion and religious faith. And after all, that is what sets religious education apart from non-religious education.

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When Muslim religious authorities turn against a jihadi group, it shows that perhaps the Islamic world is beginning to turn against terrorism.

One of Saudi Arabia's leading Wahhabi sheiks, Abdullah bin Jabreen has issued a strongly worded religious edict, or fatwa, declaring it unlawful to support, join or pray for Hezbollah, the Shiite militias lobbing missiles into northern Israel.

The day after Hezbollah abducted two Israeli soldiers on July 12, Sheik Hamid al-Ali issued an informal statement titled "The Sharia position on what is going on." In it, the Kuwaiti based cleric condemned the imperial ambitions of Iran regarding Hezbollah's cross border raid.

The surprising move demonstrates that Sunni Muslim fundamentalists in the Middle East are deeply divided over whether Moslems should support Hezbollah, Iran's Shiite proxies in the war raging in Lebanon.

Unfortunately, this position is not held unanimously.

While the Gulf's ascetic Wahhabi sects, who are closer to the ethnic fighting between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq, have opposed Hezbollah in its stand against Israel's forces, other Sunni fundamentalist groups, such as the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, have pledged their solidarity. On Friday, the brothers will host a rally in support of Hezbollah at Cairo's most influential mosque, Al-Azhar.

So while some Muslim nations and religious leaders have condemned Hezbollah, there is still a sizeable group that supports the terrorists.

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Chuck Colson shares this anecdote about the Spiritual Activism Conference which was held recently in Washington, DC. It illustrates the problem that the political Left in this country will always have trying to speak the language of faith – because there is a dearth of faith among the Religious Left.

This conflict is not about political or social divisions. It’s about authority—specifically, whether or not Christians are willing to acknowledge that the Bible is our authority.

Tony Campolo certainly recognized this. Though Tony and I disagree on lots of things, I really like Tony. He’s honest, and he loves the Bible. He tried to explain at this conference the necessity of following Scripture. But one participant retorted, “I thought this was a spiritual progressives’ conference. I don’t want to play the game of ‘the Bible says this or that,’ or that we get validation from something other than ourselves.”

And therein lies the problem. Rather than talk about God and the spiritual imperatives of his divinely revealed word, the quoted participant effectively stated (in the words of Toby Keith) “I want to talk about ME.” Dare I suggest that such a theological stance is not religious faith, but is instead spiritual narcissism.

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Chuck Colson shares this anecdote about the Spiritual Activism Conference which was held recently in Washington, DC. It illustrates the problem that the political Left in this country will always have trying to speak the language of faith – because there is a dearth of faith among the Religious Left.

This conflict is not about political or social divisions. It’s about authority—specifically, whether or not Christians are willing to acknowledge that the Bible is our authority.

Tony Campolo certainly recognized this. Though Tony and I disagree on lots of things, I really like Tony. He’s honest, and he loves the Bible. He tried to explain at this conference the necessity of following Scripture. But one participant retorted, “I thought this was a spiritual progressives’ conference. I don’t want to play the game of ‘the Bible says this or that,’ or that we get validation from something other than ourselves.”

And therein lies the problem. Rather than talk about God and the spiritual imperatives of his divinely revealed word, the quoted participant effectively stated (in the words of Toby Keith) “I want to talk about ME.” Dare I suggest that such a theological stance is not religious faith, but is instead spiritual narcissism.

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Let there be no mistake -- Islam is a religion built upon Jew-hatred. Israel must therefore act to protect herself from the jihadis who seek to destroy her.

And this Jew-hatred is implicit in the teachings of Islam. After all, the Islamic equivalent of the anti-Christ is held to be a Jew -- and the great apocalyptic battle in Islam is between Muslims and Jews.

Georges Vajda —in a seminal 1937 essay [1] (long before the establishment of the State of Israel)—provides an overall assessment of the portrayal of the Jews in the hadith collections (the putative words and deeds of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, as recorded by pious transmitters), complemented by Koranic verses, and observations from the earliest Muslim biographies [or “sira”] of Muhammad.

VajdaÂ’s research demonstrates how Muslim eschatology emphasizes the JewsÂ’ supreme hostility to Islam. Jews are described as adherents of the Dajjāl—the Muslim equivalent of the Anti-Christ—and as per another tradition, the Dajjāl is in fact Jewish. At his appearance, other traditions state that the Dajjāl will be accompanied by 70,000 Jews from Isfahan wrapped in their robes, and armed with polished sabers, their heads covered with a sort of veil. When the Dajjāl is defeated, his Jewish companions will be slaughtered— everything will deliver them up except for the so-called gharkad tree. Thus, according to a canonical hadith (Sahih Muslim, Book 40, Number 6985), if a Jew seeks refuge under a tree or a stone, these objects will be able to speak to tell a Muslim: “There is a Jew behind me; come and kill him!”

As Vajda observes,

Not only are the Jews vanquished in the eschatological war, but they will serve as ransom for the Muslims in the fires of hell. The sins of certain Muslims will weigh on them like mountains, but on the day of resurrection, these sins will be lifted and laid upon the Jews.

And let's not forget that the name of Hezbollah comes straight from the Koran -- and is applied to those who kill Jews in the name of Allah.

Let us consider the relationship of these Koranic teachings to the two dominant terrorist groups among the Palestinians -- those Israel is fighting today -- Hamas and Hezbollah.

Hizbollah and Hamas have constructed core ideologies based upon this Islamic theology of Jew hatred, which one can glean readily from their foundational documents, and subsequent pronouncements, made ad nauseum. Hamas further demonstrates openly its adherence to a central motif of Jew-hatred in Muslim eschatology—Article 7 of the Hamas Charter concludes with a verbatim reiteration of the apocalyptic hadith alluded to earlier:

“The Last Hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: `Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him’; but the tree Gharkad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews.” (Sahih Muslim, Book 40, Number 6985).

Both jihadist terror organizations believe they can now take advantage of their political gains in Lebanon (Hizbollah), and the Palestinian controlled areas of Gaza and the West Bank (Hamas), and succeed in their goal to destroy Israel—motivated by a primordial hatred of Jews, sanctioned in Muslim theology and eschatology.

Hizbollah’s name, “The Party of Allah” derives from Koran 5:56:

“And whoever takes Allah and His messenger and those who believe for a guardian, then surely the party of Allah are they that shall be triumphant.”

In a public statement issued February 15, 1986, Hizbollah conceived of itself as a “nation” linked to Muslims worldwide by “…a strong ideological and political bond, namely Islam.” Expressed in the political language of the Koran, Hizbollah’s ideology encompasses, triumphally (as per the slogan adorning the party emblem, “The Party of Allah is Sure to Triumph”) at least three major objectives: transforming Lebanon into a Shari’a state; destroying Israel; establishing regional, followed by international Islamic hegemony, i.e., bringing the region, then the world under Shari’a law.

In other words, this conflict is not about land -- it is about the extermination of Jews and the imposition of the barbaric ShariÂ’a law on an unwilling world. The destruction of the Jewish people therefore lies at the heart of the motivation of the terrorists, and virtually any move made against them is a valid defensive action on behalf of the state of Israel and the Jewish people. To oppose such defensive activity is therefore to actively cooperate in this attempted genocide, morlly no different than coopertion with the Nazi Final Solution.

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The special status of Hong Kong gives a platform to Cardinal Joseph Zen Zi-kiun, the archbishop of that city. Able to operate openly and with relatively little fear of arrest, he serves as teh visible leader of Chinese Catholics loyal to the Vatican in a nation where such Catholics are subject to serious persecution at th hands of the Red Chinese government and its puppet church.

MASS had scarcely ended on June 4 when a gaggle of young women flocked to the front of the cathedral. Groups of them took turns having their photos taken with the thin, silver-haired 74-year-old who so captured their fancy: Cardinal Joseph Zen Zi-kiun.

He smiled gently for the photos, then walked across an alley to an indoor basketball court with a concrete floor and rusty fans on the walls that barely stirred the warm, humid air. After a youth group had sung religious songs, and after a slide show depicting the Chinese military crackdown in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, he read a strongly worded message calling for residents of Hong Kong to remember their countrymen elsewhere in China.

"The young people who fought and died for democracy in Tiananmen Square were their brothers and sisters," he said in the speech. "After June 4, we can no longer fight selfishly just to win the most rights for Hong Kong."

With his charisma, erudition and dedication to human rights, Cardinal Zen has become a celebrity here, a man wielding considerable political influence as well as religious power. But his high profile and growing influence have antagonized senior officials in mainland China, particularly those who oversee the state-controlled church.

A man of learning in a non-Christian land with a culture of respect for scholars, Cardinal Zen is the sort of man who dictators fear -- a man of faith whose loyalty is to God and not Caesar. Prepare to be inspired by this profile.

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God can make use of the most evil of things.

Croatia's defense ministry has donated a World War II Nazi ship to a local Roman Catholic monastery, which will turn it into a sailing church, the Jutarnji List daily newspaper reported Tuesday.

The landing ship DTM-219 was used by Nazi Germany to transport tanks and infantry. It was given to communist Yugoslavia after 1945 as part of war compensation, it said.

The ship, currently anchored at a Croatian navy port, will be towed to the city of Sibenik, in the central Adriatic, where it will be adapted at a local shipyard.

It will be used as sailing church for the young, who will be able to sail the Adriatic, pray and meditate as part of church-sponsored religious cruises, the daily said.

Some 90 percent of Croatia's 4.4 million people are Roman Catholics. The country, which gained independence from Yugoslavia in 1991, hopes to join the European Union by the end of this decade.

May God bring people to him by this work, converting a weapon of war into a vessel of grace.

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Every year, I give my students a homework assignment on the first day of school. I tell them it cannot be tested or collected, but that it will benefit them immensely when they reach college and continue n into adulthood. It isn't, strictly speaking, even a part of my purview -- I teach history -- but it is one I believe will benefit my students in many different ways.

It is a simple reading assignment -- "Between today and graduation in three school years, read the complete King James Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare."

Before the strict separationsits get their panties in a knot, let me make it clear that my pointing them to the KJV is for the sake of cultural literacy, not religious conversion. Along with Shakespeare, the KJV is one of the great well-springs of Anglo-American culture, and has great influence on the development of English as spoken today. Perhaps the most worthwhile class I took in college was "The Bible as English Literature", for it opened new horizons to me in literature, art, music and historical studies.

The KJV even shapes American history, as is pointed out in this article.

In 1911 the English-speaking world paused to mark the 300th anniversary of the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible, with American political leaders foremost in the chorus of exaltation. To former president Theodore Roosevelt, this Bible translation was "the Magna Carta of the poor and the oppressed . . . the most democratic book in the world." Soon-to-be president Woodrow Wilson said much the same thing: "The Bible (with its individual value of the human soul) is undoubtedly the book that has made democracy and been the source of all progress."

Americans at the time mostly agreed with these sentiments, because the impact of the KJV was everywhere so obvious. It was obvious for business, with major firms like Harper & Brothers having risen to prominence on the back of its Bible publishing. It was obvious in the physical landscape and in many households because of the widespread use of Bible names for American places (95 variations on Salem) and the nation's children (John, James, Sarah, Rebecca). It was obvious in literature, as with the memorable opening of Herman Melville's Moby Dick: "Call me Ishmael." And it was obvious in politics, with no occasion more memorable than March 4, 1865, when four quotations from the KJV framed Abraham Lincoln's incomparable Second Inaugural Address: Genesis 3:19 ("wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces"); Matthew 18:7 ("woe unto the world because of offences!"); Matthew 7:1 ("judge not that we be not judged"); and Psalm 19:9 ("the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether").

I commend the article -- and the Book that it praises -- to your attention and encourage their study.

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The Church has always grown when watered by the blood of those martyred for the faith. Two more Christians gave their lives in the service of Christ in the Philippines last month.

While officiating at a wedding on June 3, Pastor Mocsin L. Hasim received a text message: “Pastor, you will die today.” The 47-year old pastor had been receiving death threats for months. He brushed it off. After the wedding, he and his 22-year-old daughter, Mercilyn, headed home by motorcycle.

Their bodies were later found near their motorcycle in an isolated area of Zamboanga Del Norte province in western Mindanao of the Philippines.

Pastor Hasim had been shot 19 times, mostly in the back. Mercilyn was shot five times.

There were no known witnesses to the gruesome killings, but police suspect that there were three gunmen, possibly new members of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), a Muslim rebel group with a long history of armed conflict against the national government. One of the pastor’s nieces noted, “Also, some Muslim extremists in the area were inviting him to embrace Islam once again, but he refused.”

Pastor Hasim had received death threats in the months leading up to the murder. During a gift-giving activity in one community, a Muslim approached him and told him to stop what he was doing, lest he be killed. Despite these threats, he remained unmoved and continued his activities, even starting a radio ministry. Mercilyn accompanied him during most of his work.

Please offer prayers for Pastor Hasim's widow, Evelyn, and for Mercilyn's brothers and sister. This family has sacrificed much in the last 10 years, and now they have given two of their number in the service of Christ. They continue to receive threats from the unGodly murderers of their family members.

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For the second time this year, a Catholic priest has been stabbed in Turkey. This time the victim survived, but the incident is still troubling.

A French missionary priest survived a knife attack on July 1, but Church leaders in Turkey are worried by a rising tide of anti-Christian violence in the months leading up to a visit by Pope Benedict XVI

Father Pierre Brunissen was badly wounded when he was stabbed twice by a man who was prompted taken into police custody. Authorities said that the priest's assailant appeared mentally unbalanced.

The AsiaNews service reports, however, that Father Brunissen had received a number of threats in recent weeks, and the parish church he served in the town of Samsun had been vandalized. The violence and intimidation had increased, AsiaNews said, after the murder of an Italian missionary, Father Andrea Santoro, in the Turkish town of Trabzon, in February. The young man charged with killing Father Santoro, who was also described as unbalanced, shouted an Islamic slogan after shooting the priest.

Given the threats made against the priest in recent weeks, I doubt the official explanation.

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