The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells review – our terrifying future

The Guardian

Burning issue … Eagle Creek ablaze near Beacon Rock golf course in North Bonneville, Washington, in September 2017. Photograph: Kirsti McCluer/Reuters

Enough to induce a panic attack … a brutal portrait of climate change and our future lives on Earth. But we have the tools to avoid it

You already know it’s bad. You already know the weather has gone weird, the ice caps are melting, the insects are disappearing from the Earth. You already know that your children, and your children’s children, if they are reckless or brave enough to reproduce, face a vista of rising seas, vanishing coastal cities, storms, wildfires, biblical floods. As someone who reads the news and is sensitive to the general mood of the times, you have a general sense of what we’re looking at. But do you truly understand the scale of the tribulations we face? David Wallace-Wells, author of the distressingly titled The Uninhabitable Earth, is here to tell you that you do not. “It is,” as he puts it in the book’s first line, “worse, much worse, than you think.”

Losing my religion: after the Pell verdict, the conflict for Catholics

The Guardian

Brigid Delaney’s diary

Will we become a nation that drifted from the church? A nation that broke from it? Or a nation that stayed?

There are a few ways you can lose your religion – in a slow drift where the time between mass attendance and sacraments like confession gets longer and longer, until you can’t in good faith claim to be a member of the flock any more. And then there’s the frank event, where something happens and you realise you cannot continue supporting the institution that has inflicted so much pain.

 ‘The last years of the church’s trials has turned ambivalence into anger and disgust but also something more complicated.’ Photograph: Markus Schreiber/AP

For many that moment of breaking off happened with the George Pell verdicts and during the royal commission hearing testimony from survivors of clerical sexual abuse.

Auferstehung : Was, wenn Jesus wiederkommt?

Vor 2000 Jahren wandelte Jesus auf dieser Erde – und versprach: Ich kehre zurück. Was würde passieren?

Eine Vision

Von Christian Nürnberger

18. April 2019

Amoz Oz hat einmal erzählt: “In meiner Kindheit war Jerusalem ein total verrückter Ort.” Es habe Leute gegeben, die ins Land gekommen seien, um eine westliche, liberale, säkulare, moderne Demokratie zu gründen. Andere jedoch wollten die biblischen Königreiche von David und Salomon wiederherstellen. “Wieder andere wollten nur dasitzen und auf den Messias warten. Manche sahen sich selbst als Messias. Jeder war ein Erlöser. Jeder wollte irgendwen kreuzigen oder selbst gekreuzigt werden.”

 Es war also zu Amos Oz’ Kindheit in Jerusalem ungefähr wie vor 2000 Jahren, als Pharisäer, Sadduzäer, Essener, Hohepriester, Schriftgelehrte, Zeloten und Sikarier das nahe Ende erwarteten, miteinander stritten, einander bekämpften und sich am liebsten gegenseitig gekreuzigt hätten. Unter ihnen war damals auch Jesus, der tatsächlich am Kreuz endete, nach drei Tagen von den Toten auferstand, gen Himmel fuhr und versprach, wiederzukommen.

‘Few acts more horrific’: former US priest jailed for 30 years for child sexual abuse

The Guardian

Catholic priest Arthur Perrault convicted of ‘long-term’ abuse of altar boy in New Mexico in 1990s

 The former Catholic priest Arthur Perrault has been sentenced to 30 years in prison for sexually abusing an altar boy in the US in the 1990s. Photograph: AP

A former Roman Catholic priest who fled to Morocco before he was returned to the United States and convicted of sexually abusing an altar boy in New Mexico in the 1990s, has been sentenced to 30 years in prison.

The US district judge, Martha Vazquez, imposed the sentence on Arthur Perrault, 81, a onetime Air Force chaplain and colonel.

“There are few acts more horrific than the long-term sexual abuse of a child,” said the US attorney, John Anderson, in a statement. “At long last, today’s sentence holds Perrault accountable for his deplorable conduct.”

Harry Potter books removed from Catholic school ‘on exorcists’ advice’

The Guardian

Alison Flood

Mon 2 Sep 2019 

  Pastor at St Edward junior school in Nashville says JK Rowling’s use of ‘actual spells’ risks conjuring evil spirits

 ‘The curses and spells used in the books are actual curses and spells’ … the 2001 film of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Photograph: Alamy

A private Catholic school in Nashville has removed the Harry Potter books from its library, saying they include “actual curses and spells, which when read by a human being risk conjuring evil spirits”.

Local paper the Tennessean reported that the pastor at St Edward Catholic school, which teaches children of pre-kindergarten age through to 8th grade, had emailed parents about JK Rowling’s series to tell them that he had been in contact with “several” exorcists who had recommended removing the books from the library.

“These books present magic as both good and evil, which is not true, but in fact a clever deception,” Rev Dan Reehil wrote. “The curses and spells used in the books are actual curses and spells; which when read by a human being risk conjuring evil spirits into the presence of the person reading the text.”

Curses and spells included in the bestselling books, which were published between 1997 and 2007, include “avada kedavra”, the “killing” curse; “crucio”, the torture curse; and “imperio”, which allows the wizards to control others’ actions.

Rebecca Hammel, superintendent of schools for the Catholic diocese of Nashville, told the Tennessean that Reehil had sent the email after an inquiry from a parent. She added that “he’s well within his authority to act in that manner”, because “each pastor has canonical authority to make such decisions for his parish school”.

According to the paper, the books were on shelves until the end of the previous term, but the school has just opened a new library from which they were removed.

“I know that in the process they were going through and kind of weeding out some of the content in hopes of sprucing it up and improving the circulation,” said Hammel, adding that if parents deemed the stories “to be appropriate we would hope that they would just guide their sons and daughters to understand the content through the lens of our faith”.

She added: “We really don’t get into censorship in such selections other than making sure that what we put in our school libraries are age-appropriate materials for our classrooms.”

The Harry Potter books have drawn censure from Christians ever since the first in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, was released in 1997. In 1999, it was the most challenged book in the US, and the series topped the American Library Association’s list of the most frequently challenged books of 2000-2009.

Challengers asserted that the books “glorified magic and the occult, confusing children and leading them to attempt to emulate the spells and curses they read about”, said the ALA. In 2001, the pastor of Christ Community Church in Alamogordo, New Mexico oversaw a book burning of the Potter books, and a local library responded with a dedicated display, telling the public that “Harry is alive and well at their library”.

While he was still a cardinal in 2003, the future Pope Benedict XVI described the books as “subtle seductions which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort Christianity in the soul before it can grow properly”.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/02/harry-potter-books-removed-from-catholic-school-on-exorcists-advice