Random

• Next time I'm flying Cebu Pacific.




• Happy Thanksgiving to you -- but only if you're Canadian! ☺

• The Dutch Antilles is no more. The islands of Curacao and St Maarten have a constitutional status as autonomous countries within the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Bonaire, St Eustatius and Saba are now autonomous special municipalities of the kingdom. ~ BBC

• "College dropouts cost taxpayers billions." I'm all for college completion but calcualting the "social cost" of people who do not complete a college program doesn't add up. If someone does not complete a program they still learn something from what they do. It's just that the incentive for completion is not personally high enough. ~ KTAR

• Rejecting the cross:

...You hardly see a cross in evangelical churches in Latin America, and if you wear one as a pendant you can appear suspicious in some churches. This reveals more than a rejection of the Roman Catholic crucifix. It expresses an understanding of the death of Jesus as merely a symbol of God’s love and forgiveness, unrelated to his incarnation. The cross’s agony is ascribed only to the horror of spiritual separation from the Father. When the cross carries no sense of hideous pain or shame, its message only focuses on the benefits it offers: forgiveness, healing, deliverance, power, and glory. Should the minister of such ’good news’ even think of embracing suffering?... 

One of the expressions of evil in our fallen world is the hideous suffering we humans can inflict on others. Precisely for that reason it is imperative that we recover a central truth of Christianity: God defeats Satan, evil, and sin through suffering. Is that not the case in Job’s experience? Is that not the case in Jesus’ acceptance of the most shaming and cruel death of his day? He triumphed over the ultimate enemy precisely by surrendering to it. We, like his disciples, have bought into the notion that demonstrations of power are the way to deal with the evils that threaten us. Unfortunately, rather than following the example of the Servant King, we are prone to choose the way of worldly power... ~ Elizabeth Sendek

• The cost of groceries is on the rise again. ~ KTAR

• Barna Group: The most "unchurched" cities in the US are San Francisco; Portland, Maine; Portland, Ore.; Boston; Sacramento; and Seattle. ~ Christian Post

• "...UCLA and a few other universities, some are pushing aside French, Spanish and Chinese to try rarely offered indigenous Latin American languages such as Zapotec, Mixtec, Aymara and Quechua..." ~ LA Times

• Faith Popcorn: "Living in virtual intimacy with celebrities of all stripes, we start to believe we too possess the power of celebrity." ~ link

• The Russian army is full of hot air -- literally. ~ BBC