Those who sow in tears
will reap with songs of joy.
Those who go out weeping,
carrying seed to sow,
will return with songs of joy,
carrying sheaves with them.
PSALM 126:5-6
Viktor Yushchenko claimed victory today in the rerun of Ukraine's presidential election Yushchenko turns the tables
Eye on Politics & Law Lords: Our children are smarter than French kids
But dumber than Canadian kids
For many years, James Bau Graves has been thinking about culture and how our cultural values and choices are influenced by political and economic power. Arts by the people and for the people
We like Indian spices in our home-cooked meals. We're preoccupied with bottoms. Our children are smarter than French kids but dumber than Canadian kids. And almost everything about our lives is getting better.
Those are a few of the insights Australians received about themselves in 2004. It's time to pick through the avalanche of survey data released this year and assess what we learned.
The most exciting discovery was a fat report from the Bureau of Statistics called Measures of Social Progress 2004, which raised the possibility that every day in every way we're getting better and better.
Fr. Timothy V. Vaverek sends you tumbling back toward reality. Far from attaining a better life, consumerists experience alienation and fear. Always wanting more, their sense of accomplishment is ephemeral and they are strangers to contentment. Always in danger of losing what they have but do not own, a sense of urgency and futility are their constant companions.
• More healthy, more wealthy: a year of living easier [[Don't Lose Sight of the Real Scandal War on the Floor of UN; Politics: Top 100 links in the world Quiet, or I'll call democracy ]
• · The powerful impulse at the root of suburbanization is the simple desire of ordinary people everywhere to own a piece of land, however humble, where they and their families may live in relative comfort and peace. The suburban house is the idealization of every immigrant’s Dream—the vassal’s dream of his own castle
• · · James Carroll reminds us that the birth of Jesus represented a challenge to greed and empire The Politics Of Baby Jesus; Robert Conquest's The Dragons of Expectations
• · · · Perhaps the tragedy in Mosul should best be viewed in the perspective of history and not the passions of the moment, and in light of other wars that at times went badly and not as planned Nuts: Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death
• · · · · This week a US woman paid $50,000 for a kitten cloned from her dead pet. The process is risky and misguided The immoral in pursuit of the inimitable
• · · · · · Jesus was for "the least" of us; he was for the poor, sick, hungry and downtrodden. He was radically egalitarian, hanging out with prostitutes and beggars. He was the model of a bleeding-heart do-gooder. If only politicians would shut up about Christianity and instead work harder at living like the bloke who inspired it