President-Elect Barack Hussein Obama

It is done. A dawning of a new day!!!!!! Barack Obama won!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Americans Line Up To Choose President

Long lines have formed as polls open in Eastern states as Barack Obama's bid to become the first black president faced the final test of his remarkable two-year journey Tuesday, while Republican John McCain pressed for an Election Day upset.

Barack Obama's Grandmother Transition

Barack Obama's grandmother, whose personality and bearing shaped much of the life of the Democratic presidential contender, has died, Obama announced Monday, one day before the election. Madelyn Payne Dunham was 86.

Obama announced the news from the campaign trail in Charlotte, N.C. The joint statement with his sister Maya Soetoro-Ng said Dunham died peacefully late Sunday night after a battle with cancer.

They said: "She was the cornerstone of our family, and a woman of extraordinary accomplishment, strength, and humility. She was the person who encouraged and allowed us to take chances."
Obama learned of her death Monday morning while he was campaigning in Jacksonville, Florida.

The Kairos of History

Let's put this in the right perspective.

He's the son of a Blackman from Kenya. The first child...of only two children...of a peripatetic white woman from Kansas. His father left him when he was 2 only years old, not to see him again at the age of 10....for the last time.

He was raised by White grandparents in Hawaii. Spent his early years in Indonesia...with his Mum and his Indonesian Step-Father.

Obtained a Bachelors Degree from Columbia, and earned a Law Degree from Harvard....where he became the first Black President of the Harvard Law Review.

Became a Community Organizer in the slum of Southside Chicago, a Law Professor, then a State Senator.

Just 4 years ago, out of the crucible of obscurity, he was chosen to give the keynote address at the Democratic Party National Convention.

Boy did he WOW the world or what with his "..there is no red America, or a blue America, but the United States of America.." speech?

He got elected, by a landslide, to represent the State of Illinois in US Senate.

After a bruising Democratic Party Presidential Primaries, he became the first Blackman to be elected as a presidential candidate for a major political party in the United States of America.

Then here we are, at this junction in time......time not as in "chronos", rather time as in "kairos"....and at this moment in history. The whole world now waits in earnest expectation for what God has in store for sons of men.

The lot is cast. Will America live up to the creed of its ideals?

2 More Days to D-Day

Will it happen? Will America turn the corner and the page on 400 years of mixed history? Is the United States ready to take a quantum leap and turn the page on years of heritage.

In two days America has a chance to prove to the world what it's really made of.

The Halloween

Halloween's origins date back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in).

The Celts, who lived 2,000 years ago in the area that is now Ireland, the United Kingdom, and northern France, celebrated their new year on November 1. This day marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year that was often associated with human death. Celts believed that on the night before the new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. On the night of October 31, they celebrated Samhain, when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth. In addition to causing trouble and damaging crops, Celts thought that the presence of the otherworldly spirits made it easier for the Druids, or Celtic priests, to make predictions about the future. For a people entirely dependent on the volatile natural world, these prophecies were an important source of comfort and direction during the long, dark winter.

To commemorate the event, Druids built huge sacred bonfires, where the people gathered to burn crops and animals as sacrifices to the Celtic deities.
During the celebration, the Celts wore costumes, typically consisting of animal heads and skins, and attempted to tell each other's fortunes. When the celebration was over, they re-lit their hearth fires, which they had extinguished earlier that evening, from the sacred bonfire to help protect them during the coming winter.

By A.D. 43, Romans had conquered the majority of Celtic territory. In the course of the four hundred years that they ruled the Celtic lands, two festivals of Roman origin were combined with the traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain.

The first was Feralia, a day in late October when the Romans traditionally commemorated the passing of the dead. The second was a day to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. The symbol of Pomona is the apple and the incorporation of this celebration into Samhain probably explains the tradition of "bobbing" for apples that is practiced today on Halloween.

By the 800s, the influence of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands. In the seventh century, Pope Boniface IV designated November 1 All Saints' Day, a time to honor saints and martyrs. It is widely believed today that the pope was attempting to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with a related, but church-sanctioned holiday. The celebration was also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse meaning All Saints' Day) and the night before it, the night of Samhain, began to be called All-hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween. Even later, in A.D. 1000, the church would make November 2 All Souls' Day, a day to honor the dead. It was celebrated similarly to Samhain, with big bonfires, parades, and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels, and devils. Together, the three celebrations, the eve of All Saints', All Saints', and All Souls', were called Hallowmas.

As European immigrants came to America, they brought their varied Halloween customs with them. Because of the rigid Protestant belief systems that characterized early New England, celebration of Halloween in colonial times was extremely limited there.

It was much more common in Maryland and the southern colonies. As the beliefs and customs of different European ethnic groups, as well as the American Indians, meshed, a distinctly American version of Halloween began to emerge. The first celebrations included "play parties," public events held to celebrate the harvest, where neighbors would share stories of the dead, tell each other's fortunes, dance, and sing. Colonial Halloween festivities also featured the telling of ghost stories and mischief-making of all kinds. By the middle of the nineteenth century, annual autumn festivities were common, but Halloween was not yet celebrated everywhere in the country.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, America was flooded with new immigrants. These new immigrants, especially the millions of Irish fleeing Ireland's potato famine of 1846, helped to popularize the celebration of Halloween nationally. Taking from Irish and English traditions, Americans began to dress up in costumes and go house to house asking for food or money, a practice that eventually became today's "trick-or-treat" tradition. Young women believed that, on Halloween, they could divine the name or appearance of their future husband by doing tricks with yarn, apple parings, or mirrors.
In the late 1800s, there was a move in America to mold Halloween into a holiday more about community and neighborly get-togethers, than about ghosts, pranks, and witchcraft.

At the turn of the century, Halloween parties for both children and adults became the most common way to celebrate the day. Parties focused on games, foods of the season, and festive costumes. Parents were encouraged by newspapers and community leaders to take anything "frightening" or "grotesque" out of Halloween celebrations. Because of their efforts, Halloween lost most of its superstitious and religious overtones by the beginning of the twentieth century.

By the 1920s and 1930s, Halloween had become a secular, but community-centered holiday, with parades and town-wide parties as the featured entertainment. Despite the best efforts of many schools and communities, vandalism began to plague Halloween celebrations in many communities during this time. By the 1950s, town leaders had successfully limited vandalism and Halloween had evolved into a holiday directed mainly at the young. Due to the high numbers of young children during the fifties baby boom, parties moved from town civic centers into the classroom or home, where they could be more easily accommodated. Between 1920 and 1950, the centuries-old practice of trick-or-treating was also revived. Trick-or-treating was a relatively inexpensive way for an entire community to share the Halloween celebration. In theory, families could also prevent tricks being played on them by providing the neighborhood children with small treats. A new American tradition was born, and it has continued to grow. Today, Americans spend an estimated $6.9 billion annually on Halloween, making it the country's second largest commercial holiday.

The American tradition of "trick-or-treating" probably dates back to the early All Souls' Day parades in England. During the festivities, poor citizens would beg for food and families would give them pastries called "soul cakes" in return for their promise to pray for the family's dead relatives.

The distribution of soul cakes was encouraged by the church as a way to replace the ancient practice of leaving food and wine for roaming spirits. The practice, which was referred to as "going a-souling" was eventually taken up by children who would visit the houses in their neighborhood and be given ale, food, and money.

The tradition of dressing in costume for Halloween has both European and Celtic roots. Hundreds of years ago, winter was an uncertain and frightening time. Food supplies often ran low and, for the many people afraid of the dark, the short days of winter were full of constant worry. On Halloween, when it was believed that ghosts came back to the earthly world, people thought that they would encounter ghosts if they left their homes. To avoid being recognized by these ghosts, people would wear masks when they left their homes after dark so that the ghosts would mistake them for fellow spirits. On Halloween, to keep ghosts away from their houses, people would place bowls of food outside their homes to appease the ghosts and prevent them from attempting to enter.

Halloween has always been a holiday filled with mystery, magic and superstition. It began as a Celtic end-of-summer festival during which people felt especially close to deceased relatives and friends. For these friendly spirits, they set places at the dinner table, left treats on doorsteps and along the side of the road and lit candles to help loved ones find their way back to the spirit world.

Today's Halloween ghosts are often depicted as more fearsome and malevolent, and our customs and superstitions are scarier too. We avoid crossing paths with black cats, afraid that they might bring us bad luck. This idea has its roots in the Middle Ages, when many people believed that witches avoided detection by turning themselves into cats. We try not to walk under ladders for the same reason. This superstition may have come from the ancient Egyptians, who believed that triangles were sacred; it also may have something to do with the fact that walking under a leaning ladder tends to be fairly unsafe. And around Halloween, especially, we try to avoid breaking mirrors, stepping on cracks in the road or spilling salt.

But what about the Halloween traditions and beliefs that today's trick-or-treaters have forgotten all about? Many of these obsolete rituals focused on the future instead of the past and the living instead of the dead. In particular, many had to do with helping young women identify their future husbands and reassuring them that they would someday--with luck, by next Halloween!--be married.

In 18th-century Ireland, a matchmaking cook might bury a ring in her mashed potatoes on Halloween night, hoping to bring true love to the diner who found it. In Scotland, fortune-tellers recommended that an eligible young woman name a hazelnut for each of her suitors and then toss the nuts into the fireplace. The nut that burned to ashes rather than popping or exploding, the story went, represented the girl's future husband. (In some versions of this legend, confusingly, the opposite was true: The nut that burned away symbolized a love that would not last.) Another tale had it that if a young woman ate a sugary concoction made out of walnuts, hazelnuts and nutmeg before bed on Halloween night, she would dream about her future husband. Young women tossed apple-peels over their shoulders, hoping that the peels would fall on the floor in the shape of their future husbands' initials; tried to learn about their futures by peering at egg yolks floating in a bowl of water; and stood in front of mirrors in darkened rooms, holding candles and looking over their shoulders for their husbands' faces.

Other rituals were more competitive. At some Halloween parties, the first guest to find a burr on a chestnut-hunt would be the first to marry; at others, the first successful apple-bobber would be the first down the aisle.

Of course, whether we're asking for romantic advice or trying to avoid seven years of bad luck, each one of these Halloween superstitions relies on the good will of the very same "spirits" whose presence the early Celts felt so keenly. Ours is not such a different holiday after all!

Foreign Accent Syndrome

Some patients who suffer brain injuries occasionally lose the ability to talk in their native accent - but now scientists may know why.

The condition, called "foreign accent syndrome", affects only a tiny number of patients.

It can mean that a native English speaker can end up sounding more like Spanish or French.

It can follow a stroke - or another kind of head injury, and while the problem often clears up on its own, it can be another highly upsetting blow for patients often struggling with other disabilities.

To add insult to injury, some doctors dismissed the problem as more likely to be psychiatric in origin than physical.

Now researchers at Oxford University have found that patients with "foreign accent syndrome" seem to share certain characteristics which might explain the problem.

A small number of them all had tiny areas of damage in various parts of the brain.

This might explain the combination of subtle changes to vocal features such as lengthening of syllables, altered pitch or mispronounced sounds which make a patient's pronunciation sound similar to a foreign accent.

Dr Jennfier Gurd, who led the research with phonetician Dr John Coleman, said: "The way we speak is an important part of our personality and influences the way people interact with us.

"It is understandably quite traumatic for patients to find that their accent has changed.

"Patients derive some comfort from knowing more about the causes of their rare condition and many are happy to help scientists to understand better the nature of the brain and its role in human accents."

Dr Coleman told BBC News Online: "There is a good likelihood in time you are going to improve and become more like you used to be."

Read article here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/2300395.stm

Good Marginal Thinking

By Brian McLaren

The heroes of church history began as reflective Christians who doubted what everyone else took for granted.

Your skin color can make you marginal in some settings. Your level of income or education can do it in others. Your worship style or theological persuasion or political party can put you at or beyond the fringe in still others. Being, thinking, looking, or acting different from the majority can push you to the margins.

I'd like to speak up on behalf of a group of people in our churches who feel different pretty often, and therefore feel marginalized pretty often. Dan Taylor, in The Myth of Certainty (IVP, 2000), calls them "reflective Christians." Less sympathetic people call them doubters.

As nearly all Protestants know, in the 16th century, the Roman Catholic Church was excited about issuing indulgences—ways of reducing people's time in purgatory through religious actions, especially giving money to the church.

Despite the church's enthusiasm for it, a number of people couldn't help but question the "indulgence program." They doubted what the institution held with such certainty.

Something about it didn't make sense to these reflective Christians. If they remained silent, they would feel dishonest and frustrated, but if they raised their questions, they would be seen with suspicion—not "team players," you know? Some, like Martin Luther, spoke up (in the form of 95 theses) and found that reflective Christians of his sort didn't have a future in the church at that time.

About a hundred years later, Galileo looked through a telescope one night and saw moons positioned like dancers orbiting Jupiter. He realized the church was wrong in upholding the traditional worldview it had inherited from Aristotle and Ptolemy.

Unfortunately, when he became a doubter of the party line, he discovered what Martin Luther did: reflective Christians weren't welcome in the church at that time.

A similar story could be told about John Wesley, who doubted what everyone "knew": sacred duties (like preaching) needed to occur in sacred spaces (like pulpits).

Or we could talk about reflective Christians like Phineas Bresee (founder of the Nazarenes) who doubted that poor people should be avoided by respectable Christians, or Menno Simons (leader among the Anabaptists) who doubted that Christians should kill other Christians in Christ's name, or Martin Luther King and Desmond Tutu who doubted that race should be a factor in fellowship, or Bill Hybels or Rick Warren or maybe you.

The heroes we study in church history began as reflective Christians who doubted what everyone else took for granted, and as a result, were in almost every case marginalized.

When communities habitually marginalize or exclude their most reflective members—who ask tough questions about things that are completely normative for the majority—of course those who are stigmatized are wounded.

But so is the community that excludes, because in so doing, it cuts off resources of growth and renewal. It builds resistance to exactly what it will soon need.

Which raises an urgent question: Who are the reflective Christians in your sphere who may feel they're already on thin ice at the margins, who may be close to being edged out completely?
What would it take to tell them they are wanted, needed, respected—that their differentness isn't a problem to be solved by pressuring them to conform, but that their questioning is a resource?

Here's a suggestion: listen to them. Try to understand their questions, frustrations, and fresh ideas. You don't need to agree with them. Just be attentive, give them space to be who they are, even if they think differently from the majority. At times you may need to stand between them and their most vocal critics, to defend them from the forces of boundary maintenance and exclusion.

These forces can be brutal for reflective Christians, but a kind heart and a listening ear can keep our reflective Christians within the community, even if at the margins, not edged out. If every community eventually needs renewal, and if renewal comes from the margins—as it nearly always appears to do—then by amputating our margins, we do what the chief priests and scribes did when a needed voice showed up at the margins of their community. Are we listening?


Find article here: http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2007/004/14.110.html

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today International/Leadership Journal

The Osteens as Spiritual Midgets

By Lisa Miller
Belief Watch, Washington.com

In her new book, "Love Your Life," Victoria Osteen tells the following story. When she and her husband, Joel, were courting, he came over to her house for dinner. She knew he was the son of a prominent Houston pastor and she, a nice Christian girl, was hoping they could talk about Scripture while she prepared the meal. "Joel began flipping through the pages, but before long, he put the Bible down," she wrote. Victoria was disappointed and complained, "I thought you'd be a spiritual giant."

"Joel said nothing and just grinned at me as we carried on with the evening." Later, he joked with friends that she'd called him a "spiritual midget."

With that story, Victoria unconsciously articulates the problem so many outsiders have with Joel and, by extension, with her.

Joel Osteen is one of the most popular pastors in the country, but both he and Victoria seem, from the outside at least, to be spiritual midgets. More than 40,000 people come to hear them preach each week in a sanctuary that used to be the home of the Houston Rockets. Millions more watch them on television. Joel's books are best sellers, and Victoria's new one, though arriving in stores this week, is already high on Amazon's spiritual book list. But the theology driving all this success is thin. Over and over, in sermons, books and television interviews, the Osteens repeat their most firmly held beliefs. If you pray to Jesus, you'll get what you want. In a conversation with NEWSWEEK, Victoria defines her Christian belief this way. Religion "is about appreciating what God's given us. He's given us this life, and he wants us to live it to the fullest." (I interviewed her early one morning when the stock market had already plunged 200 points, and she referred to a recent sermon of Joel's in which he said people were like palm trees: "We have a bounce back on the inside of us." That seemed an inane sort of comfort.)

Prosperity preachers are neither new nor unique in America, but the Osteens' version seems especially self-serving. Victoria's book betrays her interest in the kind of small gratifications that rarely extend to other people, let alone to the larger world. She recommends that women take "me time" every day, and indulge occasionally in a (fat-free!) ice cream. She writes repeatedly about her love for the gym. Her relationship advice is retrograde dross: submit to your man, or at least pretend you're submitting, and then do what you want anyway. "I know if I just wait long enough," she writes, "eventually my idea will become Joel's idea, and it will come to pass." When I asked her how she kept her two children interested in church, she answered that even though they were a broccoli and lean-meats household, she gave them donuts as a special treat on Sundays. All this is fine, in the pages of a women's magazine or a self-help book. But what has God got to do with it?

Perhaps this discomfort with the Osteens' message is what drove all the media attention over the summer. In August, Victoria was the defendant in a lawsuit alleging that she struck a Continental Airlines flight attendant after that flight attendant refused to mop up a spill on Victoria's first-class seat. (Osteen had already paid a $3,000 fine to the FAA.) Osteen was acquitted, and some members of the jury said they thought the suit was frivolous, but on the Internet, at least, the story played badly. Secular observers call her a "diva," and conservative Christian detractors call her (and her husband) "heretics." ("You know what?" Victoria says, "I don't read that stuff, I truly don't.") Victoria says she's happy and relieved the suit is behind her. And in fairness to her, the anecdote in her book concludes by saying that Joel was, in fact, the furthest thing from a spiritual midget. "He had read his Bible every day since he was a little boy and knew more about Scripture than I ever imagined," she wrote.

Find article here: http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/lisa_miller/2008/10/osteens_as_spiritual_midgets.html

Financial Crisis Suicides

By KELLI KENNEDY, Associated Press Writer

An out-of-work money manager in California loses a fortune and wipes out his family in a murder-suicide. A 90-year-old Ohio widow shoots herself in the chest as authorities arrive to evict her from the modest house she called home for 38 years.

In Massachusetts, a housewife who had hidden her family's mounting financial crisis from her husband sends a note to the mortgage company warning: "By the time you foreclose on my house, I'll be dead."

Then Carlene Balderrama shot herself to death, leaving an insurance policy and a suicide note on a table.

Across the country, authorities are becoming concerned that the nation's financial woes could turn increasingly violent, and they are urging people to get help. In some places, mental-health hot lines are jammed, counseling services are in high demand and domestic-violence shelters are full.

"I've had a number of people say that this is the thing most reminiscent of 9/11 that's happened here since then," said the Rev. Canon Ann Malonee, vicar at Trinity Church in the heart of New York's financial district. "It's that sense of having the rug pulled out from under them."

With nowhere else to turn, many people are calling suicide-prevention hot lines. The Samaritans of New York have seen calls rise more than 16 percent in the past year, many of them money-related. The Switchboard of Miami has recorded more than 500 foreclosure-related calls this year.

"A lot of people are telling us they are losing everything. They're losing their homes, they're going into foreclosure, they've lost their jobs," said Virginia Cervasio, executive director of a suicide resource enter in southwest Florida's Lee County.

But tragedies keep mounting:

• In Los Angeles last week, a former money manager fatally shot his wife, three sons and his mother-in-law before killing himself.

Karthik Rajaram, 45, left a suicide note saying he was in financial trouble and contemplated killing just himself. But he said he decided to kill his entire family because that was more honorable, police said.

Rajaram once worked for a major accounting firm and for Sony Pictures, and he had been part-owner of a financial holding company. But he had been out of work for several months, police said.

After the murder-suicide, police and mental-health officials in Los Angeles took the unusual step of urging people to seek help for themselves or loved ones if they feel overwhelmed by grim financial news. They said they were specifically afraid of the "copycat phenomenon."

"This is a perfect American family behind me that has absolutely been destroyed, apparently because of a man who just got stuck in a rabbit hole, if you will, of absolute despair," Deputy Police Chief Michel Moore said. "It is critical to step up and recognize we are in some pretty troubled times."

• In Tennessee, a woman fatally shot herself last week as sheriff's deputies went to evict her from her foreclosed home.

Pamela Ross, 57, and her husband were fighting foreclosure on their home when sheriff's deputies in Sevierville came to serve an eviction notice. They were across the street when they heard a gunshot and found Ross dead from a wound to the chest. The case was even more tragic because the couple had recently been granted an extra 10 days to appeal.

• In Akron, Ohio, the 90-year-old widow who shot herself on Oct. 1 is recovering. A congressman told Addie Polk's story on the House floor before lawmakers voted to approve a $700 billion financial rescue package. Mortgage finance company Fannie Mae dropped the foreclosure, forgave her mortgage and said she could remain in the home.

• In Ocala, Fla., Roland Gore shot his wife and dog in March and then set fire to the couple's home, which had been in foreclosure, before killing himself. His case was one of several in which people killed spouses or pets, destroyed property or attacked police before taking their own lives.

"The financial stress builds up to the point the person feels they can't go on, and the person believes their family is better off dead than left without a financial support," said Kristen Rand, legislative director of the Washington D.C.-based Violence Policy Center.

Dr. Edward Charlesworth, a clinical psychologist in Houston, said the current crisis is breeding a sense of chronic anxiety among people who feel helpless and panic-stricken, as well as angry that their government has let them down.

"They feel like in this great society that we live in we should have more protection for the individuals rather than just the corporation," he said.

It's not yet clear there is a statistical link between suicides and the financial downturn since there is generally a two-year lag in national suicide figures. But historically, suicides increase in times of economic hardship. And the current financial crisis is already being called the worst since the Great Depression.

Rising mortgage defaults and falling home values are at the heart of it. More than 4 million Americans were at least one month behind on their mortgages at the end of June, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

A record 500,000 had entered the foreclosure process. And that trend is expected to continue through next year, despite the current programs from the government and the lending industry to refinance delinquent homeowners into more affordable loans.

Counselors at Catholic Charities USA report seeing a "significant increase" in the need for housing counseling.

One counselor said half of her clients were on some form of antidepressant or anti-anxiety medication. The agency has seen a decrease in overall funding, but it has expanded foreclosure counseling and received nearly $2 million for such services in late 2007.

Adding to financially tense households is an air of secrecy. Experts said it's common for one spouse to blame the other for their financial mess or to hide it entirely, as Balderrama did.

After falling 3 1/2 years behind in payments, the Taunton, Mass., housewife had been intercepting letters from the mortgage company and shredding them before her husband saw them. She tried to refinance but was declined.

In July, on the day the house was to be auctioned, she faxed the note to the mortgage company. Then the 52-year-old walked outside, shot her three beloved cats and then herself with her husband's rifle.

Notes left on the table revealed months of planning. She'd picked out her funeral home, laid out the insurance policy and left a note saying, "pay off the house with the insurance money."

"She put in her suicide note that it got overwhelming for her," said her husband, John Balderrama. "Apparently she didn't have anyone to talk to. She didn't come to me. I don't know why. There's gotta be some help out there for people that are hurting, (something better) than to see somebody lose a life over a stupid house."

___

Associated Press Writers P. Solomon Banda in Denver, Joann Loviglio in Philadelphia, Juanita Cousins in Atlanta, Samantha Gross in New York and John Rogers in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

Read article here: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081014/ap_on_re_us/financial_crisis_violence