The last words of 443 executed prisoners in Texas

I’ve just been going through some of the offenses and last words of the 443 prisoners executed thus far by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Here you will be able see their photos, criminal records and an account of the depraved act that resulted in them being placed on death row. As mentioned, their last words are recorded too…



Perhaps all I will say is we live in a world gone really wrong… And if ever you have wanted to see the consequences of sinful and fallen man, then look no further than this


It would also appear (at least by their statements) that some are genuinely repentant, while still others, seem absolutely satisfied to die in their sins.  


You can visit the  Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s Executed Offenders list here.


The New York Times recently made the above the subject of an op-ed commentary, which you can read here.


Is this how far we have fallen? At times like these I realise anew, that this world is really not our home…


 

Persian Army found after 2500 years in Egypt?

Discovery Channel has more…

HT: Jordan Wilson.

Powwow in Acre

The Jerusalem Post has more:

The Antiquities Authority and the Israel Commission for UNESCO will hold a workshop on “Protecting Heritage Sites from Disaster” in Acre next week.

The three-day event starts on Sunday in the city’s Crusader fortress, and will focus on risk-preparedness at cultural heritage sites around the world.

Last year, UNESCO held its first workshop on the issue in Olympia, Greece.

“In this day and age, authorities from all over the world are trying to be ready for this kind of risk,” Raanan Kislev, head of the conservation department at the Antiquities Authority, told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday. “Cultural heritage sites will not be with us forever – there is a lot of danger and risk with things like earthquakes and climate changes.”

Professionals from 16 countries are coming for the conference, including speakers from Italy, Japan, Peru and India.

“The workshop is about reducing the risk to cultural heritage sites – in Israel and around the world,” Kislev said. “There are ways to stop the damage before it happens.”

Israel was chosen to host the event due to the country’s abundance of cultural heritage sites, Kislev said. Places such as Masada, Caesarea and Safed are exposed to many risks, from earthquakes to floods to vandalism, he continued.

Read the full article here.

 

The Restoration of Saint Anthony’s Monastery

The Monastery of Saint Anthony (or Deir Mar Antonios), is said to be the first ever Christian monastery. Built around 356 AD on the burial site of Saint Anthony, the today Orthodox Coptic monastery, has a long history and is found near an oasis deep in within the Red Sea mountains. Heritage Key has this great video that gives us a rare glimpse inside the art filled monastery and the restoration work taking place there. The monastery is self-sustaining.

Join coptic monk Father Maximous el-Antony on his quest to restore the ancient monastery of Saint Anthony in Egypt – and perhaps discover the body of the saint.

Read more here.

 

Rome Rescues Anglo-Catholics. Who will Rescue Anglican’s Evangelicals?

This is the question David W Virtue explores on Virtue Online:

By all accounts it was a brilliant move. The Vatican suddenly announced that a personal ordinariate would be made available to traditionalist Anglicans in the Anglican Communion, offering them a place of refuge and catching off guard the Archbishop of Canterbury. For the first time there is a sense in which Rome is recognizing that you can be Anglican and Roman Catholic.

It was a shrewd move that angered liberal Catholics like Hans Kung and threw into doubt the long standing history of Roman Catholic Anglican unity talks known as ARCIC. The ball game has changed forever. ARCIC may well be dead. At least that’s the view of Rochester Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali. He may well be right.

The Church of England’s toleration of gay clerics, ordained women and the future prospect of women bishops and The Episcopal Church’s further and further drift from the historic Christian Faith while preferring to engage the culture by merging with it brought a sharp response from the Pontiff. Pope Benedict XVI moved quickly to stem the hemorrhaging of both Anglican churches. Rather than tolerating the excesses of the culture, he engaged it by condemning those things he saw as fatally flawed from a faith-based perspective.

Even as The Episcopal Church applauded pansexuality, the Pope condemned it. Even as the Pope condemned abortion, Episcopal leaders applauded it. Even as women moved into ecclesiastical places of power, the Pope disapproved of it. The rift was a mile wide and growing deeper by the day. A wall of ice had descended between the two church super powers.

As Rowan Williams continued to dither, the Pope heard the cry of Anglo-Catholics around the world and finally acted. Reflecting on this, Bishop John Broadhurst, leader of Forward in Faith UK, said he was increasingly “horrified” that the Church of England was prepared to accommodate those who believed in the ordination of women bishops, but rejected any notion that traditionalists cannot have a Third Province – a jurisdiction of their own and an interdependent life within the Church of England.

Instead the Church of England has offered and honored the requests to consecrate women dashing its own ecumenical hopes as well as those of traditionalists in her bosom.

“This situation must not be used to damage the Church of England but I do believe we have a valid claim on our own heritage in history. The doctrinal standard demanded by Rome is the New Catechism which most of us use any way,” concluded Broadhurst.

Will hoards of disenchanted Anglo-Catholics now rush to accept Rome’s offer? The answer seems to be no. Few in England will become Roman Catholic, said the Bishop of Leicester, the Rt. Rev. Tim Stevens, to a BBC presenter. Is it significant or over-hyped? It has been said that as many as half a million Anglicans and 50 of their bishops world-wide could take advantage of this invitation. But the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams is playing the situation down. Whatever the outcome of this unprecedented move it will only become apparent in the fullness of time.

The bigger and unasked question is this: What lays hence for Evangelicals within the Church of England and those abroad?

To read the answer, click here.

 

ESV Study Bible: A Word from JI Packer

The Crossway blog has a word from JI Packer on the ESV Study Bible and its value in catechesis.

I was recruited after the ESV had been launched to be Theological Editor of the Study Bible. What that has meant is that I have read the text of every article that has been submitted. There are 1.1 million words in the Study Bible. I don’t know who else has read them all, but I know that I have. The editing was a matter of ensuring that everything stated was factually accurate and that the articles flowed well. I’m excited now about the Study Bible—I believe it’s the best thing of its kind that’s going.

The reason why I’m so enthusiastic about it is largely that it takes a wider view of its task than other study Bibles do. Other study Bibles provide you with information and that’s it. The ESV Study Bible goes a step further. It’s a study Bible which not only explains the texts and expounds them accurately, but it has in it a whole series of articles for the making and shaping of discipleship to Jesus Christ on the basis of the Bible. It can be, in a very significant sense, a single-volume resource for pastoral ministry, and indeed for personal life, because it’s doing the job which professional catechists have been doing ever since Christianity started—teaching people the truths that Christians live by and teaching them how to live by those truths.

The ministry of an adult catechist is something which the early church understood very well. Every church worth its salt had an adult catechist to instruct inquirers. The catechism ministry has fallen very much into disuse in our time. And it is my privilege, I think, first of all to appreciate its importance, and then myself to model it in the writing and the teaching that I do. And then, in this particular project, to contribute to other people entering into the ministry of the adult catechist, with many more people profiting from that ministry on paper. Because that is what the ESV Study Bible really is—a catechizing document. Catechists teach people the truths that Christians live by and teach them how to live by those truths. That is what the material in the ESV Study Bible, taken as a whole, actually does. That’s the benefit that the reader of the Study Bible will get from the articles on Christian doctrine, on Christian ethics, on Christian faith and life, and a Christian stance in relation to any number of errors and alternatives that our time has produced.

Read the rest on the blog here.

 

The Poverty and Justice Bible

There seems to be a Bible for everything these days… Social justice is the latest… The Bible uses a CEV text, is published by the American Bible Society and has more than 2,000 verses that highlight the subject in focus.

The Christian Post has more,

Published by the American Bible Society, the Poverty Bible is not a new translation – it uses the Contemporary English Version – but rather serves to help users more easily find verses on issues of poverty and justice. Verses on the issues are highlighted in bright orange.

“Nearly every page of the Bible includes a message about poverty or justice,” said R. Lamar Vest, president of American Bible Society, in a statement Monday. “The Poverty and Justice Bible acts as God’s megaphone revealing that, from Genesis to Revelation, concerns for justice are never far from the heart of God and the minds of biblical writers.”

The new Bible is the first of its kind in the United States and includes an integrated study guide that offers practical ideas for how readers can help alleviate poverty and injustice in their communities and beyond.

ABS noted that the Poverty Bible is especially relevant given the state of the economy in the United States and around the world. There are nearly 40 million Americans living in poverty, and the new poverty Bible helps people know what God has to say about the issue.

Read more here.

Check out the sample here with scribbled orange highlights.

The website is here, and on it, Rob Bell endorses as follows:

The real danger in our world may not be people failing to read the Bible — it may be what happens when people actually do read it — especially the over 2,000 verses on God’s heart for the poor and oppressed. Be warned…the following pages change everything.

Oh dear…

 

Archbishop Vincent Nichols on the Anglican Apostolic Constitution

The Catholic Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols in a rather candid interview on the new Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus.


Church Leader Look Alikes

This is really funny…

Were they separated at birth?

See the rest here.

 

King Tutankhamen tomb to be renovated

The much publicised renovations of King Tutankhamen tomb has been receiving wide coverage of late. The latest being, The Washington Times:

Egypt’s famous tomb of Tutankhamen will undergo a five-year project to clean and restore the wall paintings in the underground chambers of the boy king whose golden mask and artifacts have long awed the world.

The project to restore the country’s most famous tomb is the latest collaboration between Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities and the Los Angeles-based Getty Conservation Institute, which in the past restored nearby tombs and designed airtight cases to display Egypt’s mummies.

Since the small, four-roomed tomb and its famous golden burial mask were discovered in 1922 by British archaeologist Howard Carter, observers have noted strange brown spots marring the wall paintings.

“I always see the tomb of King Tut and wonder about those spots, which no scientist has been able to explain,” Zahi Hawass, the head of the antiquities council, said in a statement. “Now I am happy that the Getty will look at the tomb and preserve its beautiful scenes.”

Thousands of tourists visit the underground chambers in the Valley of the Kings every month, bringing heat and humidity, which damage the more than 3,000-year-old tomb.

Tutankhamen wasn’t Egypt’s most powerful or important king, but his staggering treasures, rumors of a mysterious curse that plagued Carter and his team – debunked by experts long ago – and several books and TV documentaries dedicated to him have added to his intrigue.

Archaeologists in recent years have tried to resolve lingering questions over how he died and his precise royal lineage. In 2005, scientists removed Tut’s mummy from his tomb and placed it into a portable CT scanner for 15 minutes to obtain a three-dimensional image. The scans were the first done on an Egyptian mummy.

The results ruled out that Tut was violently murdered – but stopped short of definitively concluding how he died around 1323 B.C…

The conservation plan will involve a two-year research period to determine the causes of deterioration, followed by three years of implementation. The antiquities council said it had yet to decide how long the tomb would be closed during that time…

The full news report was here.

His virtual tomb is here.

 

Heracleion Stele Text Unveiled

The partial text of a badly eroded stele found in the sunken Egyptian city of Heracleion has been published by the Oxford Centre for Maritime Archaeology. Science Fair has the short piece,

Scholars unveiled inscriptions discovered in a sunken Egyptian city on Monday.

The Oxford Centre for Maritime Archaeology released the monograph of a sunken stone stele discovered in the city of Heracleion dating to the reign of the Greek Pharaoh Ptolemy VIII before 116 B.C. The stele, inscribed in Greek and Hieroglyphs, details the religious rules governing the recovery of plundered items and temple asylum offered by priests to penitents.

Divers recovered the 19-foot-high stele from the seafloor of the Nile Delta, where Heracleion sank about 13 centuries ago. “The stele was discovered in numerous pieces in the seafloor and its surface had been badly eroded so that only a quarter of the document has survived,” according to the Oxford Centre.

 More studies on the stele are planned.

The brief report was here.

Lets hope there will be more soon…