A prayer for Sunday (a Coptic prayer)

Holy, holy, holy, O Lord of Sabaot,
heaven and earth are full of your glory and your majesty.
Have mercy on us, O God, the Father Almighty.
O holy Trinity, have mercy on us.
O Lord of hosts, be with us,
for we have no other helper in our tribulations and necessities but you.
Loose, remit and pardon, O God,
our transgressions that we have committed
voluntarily and involuntarily,
consciously and unconsciously,
secretly and openly.
O Lord, remit them for the sake of your holy Name,
by which we are called,
according to your mercy, O Lord,
and not according to our sins

Flotsam and jetsam (1/4)

• Wired Magazine has a fascinating article on the fight brewing over the new edition Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), “Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness.“

At stake in the fight between Frances and the APA is more than professional turf, more than careers and reputations, more than the $6.5 million in sales that the DSM averages each year. The book is the basis of psychiatrists’ authority to pronounce upon our mental health, to command health care dollars from insurance companies for treatment and from government agencies for research.

• Michael Hyatt explains why the iPad couldn’t kill the Kindle.

So how did Amazon do it? How did they compete with the Mighty Apple, when everyone was predicting they would be crushed by a more sophisticated machine? They used a four-prong strategy.

• iMonk discusses Luther’s A Treatise on Good Works.

Luther’s great insight was that obedience to God which springs from faith exhibits itself in the course of our ordinary, daily vocations.

• Matt Flannagan discusses original sin and the moral gap between everyone’s moral ideals and the universal reality of moral failure.

It seems then that this paradox is part of our moral experience. It is inevitable that we will sin. In an important sense we cannot but fail morally and yet we are responsible for our moral failure. On the face of it, there appears only two ways to address this. One is to deny we are responsible for our moral failures. The other is to claim that we can achieve moral perfection. But both claims seem to be obviously false and as such are implausible.

• Stuart reports on the targeting of Coptic Christians in Egypt in the wake of the recent bombing and resulting violence.

• Steve Duby reviews Graham  Cole’s God the Peacemaker: How Atonement Brings Shalom.

• And, here’s a list of 100 things we didn’t know last year.