Leith Community portal, edinburgh, eh16, Leith, Persevere

Barnabas Fund Response to the Yale Center for Faith and Culture Statement
(“Loving God and Neighbor Together“…)
January 24, 2008

Foreword

“A Common Word Between Us and You”: A Path to Progress?

Much ink has been spilled in recent years on the subject of interfaith dialogue, and particularly that between Christians, who nearly always are Western Protestant or Roman Catholic, and Muslims. The discussion peaked in recent months with the public letter (“A Common Word Between Us and You”) organized by the Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought, Jordan and signed by 138 Muslim clerics. The October 13, 2006 open letter was sent to Christian leaders throughout the world.

Little more than a month later, on November 18, 2007, Christian scholars and church leaders, largely from the United States, responded en masse via a full-page advertisement in the New York Times. The letter, titled “Loving God and Neighbor Together: A Christian Response to `A Common Word Between Us and You,`” was drafted by Evangelical Christians at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, and signed by more than 300 Christians leaders, a great majority of whom were Western Evangelicals.
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Australia will step up its civilian commitments of aid and expertise to help with the reconstruction of both Iraq and Afghanistan in the coming months as it winds back its military presence in Iraq, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Stephen Smith, said on Monday in the United States. for more click here

President George W Bush has admitted US economic growth is slowing, but in his final State of the Union address urged Americans to have long-term confidence.
The president acknowledged that the US was facing “uncertainty”. for more click here

Palestinian sources tell Ynet terrorists who were killed after infiltrating yeshiva were recently freed after serving two years in an Israeli prison for attempting to steal weapons from IDF base. Search for gunmen behind Shoafat shooting attack continues. for more click here

Scots who toasted Robert Burns, their national poet, over the weekend could also have raised a glass to mark last orders for Scottish & Newcastle, the UK’s biggest brewer.

“S&N is one of Scotland’s biggest and best firms, and we are saddened to see the loss of a FTSE 100-headquartered company from Scotland,” said David Londsdale, CBI Scotland’s assistant director. “Our preference is obviously for Scots firms being the ones who are launching the takeover bids.” for more click here

There’s a cynical old saying that the victors write the history. CBS’s “60 Minutes” demonstrated how that process works on Jan. 27 in airing Scott Pelley’s interview with the FBI agent who de-briefed former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. for more click here

The Shas party has decided it’s not waiting for an agreement to be concluded, and will quit the coalition as soon as Jerusalem talks begin. for more click here

Solemn ceremonies around Europe marked yesterday’s Holocaust Memorial Day. But 63 years after the liberation of Auschwitz on Jan. 27, 1945, one of the most perfidious forms of contemporary anti-Semitism is Holocaust inversion — the portrayal of Israelis and Jews as modern-day Nazis. The charge is that Israel supposedly behaves toward the Palestinians as Germany did to the Jews in World War II. for more click here

Yesterday was Holocaust Memorial Day in Britain. A lot of worthy things were said about the need to remember the Holocaust to ensure that such a thing never happens again — in a country which demonstrates every day that, by blaming the intended victims of a planned second Holocaust of the Jews and minimising or denying the threat posed by the Iranian deniers of the first, it is repeating the lesson of its own history in refusing to recognise what is happening and thus making it more likely that it will happen again. for more click here

How bad could the US recession get?

While the majority of commentators now believe that a US recession is only a matter of time, a lot of them are still hoping that it’ll be a matter of a quick ‘in and out’, a bit like the ‘mini-recession’ that followed the bursting of the tech bubble.

The country will suffer in the first half of 2008, but then the impact of Federal Reserve interest rate cuts will kick in, everything will pick up in the second half, and by Christmas we’ll be stuffing ourselves with turkey and flat-screen TVs again and wondering what all the fuss was about.

Now regular readers won’t be surprised to learn that we think it’ll take a lot more pain than that before the collapse of the credit bubble has fully unwound.

But you don’t just need to take our word for it…
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