Sister Alphonsa Is The First Indian Saint. Of The Roman Catholic Church
Excerpt from: http://www.weeklyblitz.net/index.php
By K. Venugopal

A saintly nun who lived in Kottayam five decades ago, is all set to become the first Indian saint of the Roman Catholic Church. Her name is Sister Alphonsa. (b 1910-d 1946) The Consistory of Cardinals will meet at the Vatican on March 1 to decide on the date of her canonization.

Gonsalo Garcia, born in Vasai near Mumbai to an Indian mother and Portuguese father in 1556, was declared a saint by the church in the 17th century. Sister Alphonsa is the first Indian saint.

Sister Alphonsa was born in Kudamalloor of Kottayam in 1910 and was a pious child. She was named Annakutty by her parents. She once fell into a pit of burning chaff and the resultant injuries disabled her for life. In fact, she was plagued by ill health throughout her short life.

She became a nun at the Poor Clares Convent at Bharananganam in 1927 and took the name Alphonsa when she got her veil a year later. In June 2007, Pope Benedict VI had signed a decree approving a miracle in which a handicapped boy of Kottayam had been cured of his deformity after praying at Sister Alphonsa’s tomb. This was a prelude to elevating her to sainthood.

Her kindness to all people and love for the poor gained her renown in the area. She was not healthy and a severe attack of pneumonia in 1939 weakened her terribly. However, she continued to pursue her chosen vocation with devotion and saintly forbearance.

The process of her beatification started in 1953 and, in 1984, Pope John Paul II declared that Sister Alphonsa was a heroic Christian. She was beatified in 1986.

EASTER THIS YEAR.........
Easter this year is: Sunday March 23, 2008
Forwarded by o.max@transroad.co.ke

As you may know, Easter is always the 1st Sunday after the 1st full moon after the Spring Equinox (which is March 20).

This dating of Easter is based on the lunar calendar that Hebrew people used to identify Passover, which is why it moves around on our Roman calendar.

Found out a couple of things you might be interested in!

Based on the above, Easter can actually be one day earlier (March 22) but that is pretty rare. This year is the earliest Easter any of us will ever see the rest of our lives! And only the most elderly of our population have ever seen it this early (95 years old or above!). And none of us have ever, or will ever, see it a day earlier!

Here are the facts:
The next time Easter will be this early (March 23) will be the year 2228 (220 years from now). The last time it was this early was 1913 (so if you're 95 or older, you are the only ones that were around for that!).

The next time it will be a day earlier, March 22, will be in the year 2285 (277 years from now). The last time it was on March 22 was 1818. So, no one alive today has or will ever see it any earlier than this year!

The Age of American Unreason

International Herald Tribune
Susan Jacoby: Bemoaning an America that values stupidity
By Patricia Cohen
Friday, February 15, 2008

NEW YORK: A popular video on YouTube shows Kellie Pickler, the platinum blonde from "American Idol," appearing on the Fox game show "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?" during celebrity week. Selected from a third-grade geography curriculum, the $25,000 question asked: "Budapest is the capital of what European country?"

Pickler threw up both hands and looked at the large blackboard perplexed. "I thought Europe was a country," she said. Playing it safe, she chose to copy the answer offered by one of the genuine fifth graders: Hungary. "Hungry?" she said, eyes widening in disbelief. "That's a country? I've heard of Turkey. But Hungry? I've never heard of it."

Such, uh, lack of global awareness is the kind of thing that drives Susan Jacoby, author of "The Age of American Unreason," up a wall. Jacoby is one of a number of writers with new books that bemoan the state of American culture.

Joining the circle of curmudgeons this season is Eric Wilson, whose "Against Happiness" warns that the "American obsession with happiness" could "well lead to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse, that could result in an extermination as horrible as those foreshadowed by global warming and environmental crisis and nuclear proliferation."

Then there is Lee Siegel's "Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob," which inveighs against the Internet for encouraging solipsism, debased discourse and arrant commercialization. Siegel, one might remember, was suspended by The New Republic for using a fake online persona in order to trash critics of his blog ("you couldn't tie Siegel's shoelaces") and to praise himself ("brave, brilliant").

Jacoby, whose book came out on Tuesday, doesn't zero in on a particular technology or emotion, but rather on what she feels is a generalized hostility to knowledge. She is well aware that some may tag her a crank. "I expect to get bashed," said Jacoby, 62, either as an older person who upbraids the young for plummeting standards and values, or as a secularist whose defense of scientific rationalism is a way to disparage religion.

Jacoby, however, is quick to point out that her indictment is not limited by age or ideology. Yes, she knows that eggheads, nerds, bookworms, longhairs, pointy heads, highbrows and know-it-alls have been mocked and dismissed throughout American history. And liberal and conservative writers, from Richard Hofstadter to Allan Bloom, have regularly analyzed the phenomenon and offered advice.

ROM Exhibit Light On Christianity
http://www.catholicregister.org/content/view/1572/852
Written by John Bentley Mays,

Westerners, especially Christians, owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Greece and Rome; but the deepest roots of our religion and culture lie in the crescent of land between Iran and the eastern Mediterranean. Agriculture was invented there. The first cities arose there, and from one of these urban civilizations, about 2,000 BC, Abraham emerged and fathered the Israelites. The Middle East was the setting of Israel’s wanderings, of the life of Jesus, of the beginnings of the church — and, a few centuries later, the rise of Islam and its sweeping conquest of the region.

No single display of historical artifacts could do justice to the immensely creative cultures of this small area. But the Royal Ontario Museum’s new Wirth Gallery of the Middle East, which opened in mid-February, offers the public an intriguing sampler of the ROM’s treasures from western Asia. Named after Toronto investment counsellor and ROM patron Alfred G. Wirth, the 376-square-metre gallery holds 1,000 objects made throughout the tenure of humankind in the Middle East. Possibly the earliest is a stone hand-axe, found on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, that could have been made as long ago as 1.65 million BC. One of the most recent artifacts is an elaborately decorated Torah case created in 1907 in Iraq.

These things, and all in between, are presented in themed groups, including “Arms and Armour,” a fascinating section on “Documents and Writing,” and, inevitably, “Ancient Spirituality and Religion.” In the last-named category, we meet the gods of the most ancient Middle Eastern people: the water-deity Enki, from the city of Ur (c. 2,200 BC), whose worship Abraham might have witnessed; and an earthenware sculpture (Syrian, 4,000-3,000 BC) of the mysterious Great Mother, whose cult seems to belong to the earliest glimmerings of religious faith in the region. (The step taken by Abraham from his old polytheistic culture, which was saturated with adoration of the Great Mother, to the new worship of one, highly masculine God is among the most revolutionary moves in the history of religion.)

Occasionally an artifact in this display recalls something we know from Holy Scripture. The splendid glazed brick wall-relief of a striding lion is an old ROM favourite, and here again stands out: It is one of many lions that once adorned a ceremonial hall in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar II, around 600 BC — a ruler who destroyed the Temple at Jerusalem and carried off many Israelites (including the prophet Daniel). Indeed, Daniel might have laid eyes on this very ceramic relief, when standing before the king and interpreting his strange dreams.

But by and large, the ROM’s display contains relatively few illustrations of ancient Jewish rituals and beliefs, and even fewer artifacts from the life of the Christian community — even from the centuries when Christianity was the dominant religion of the Middle East. In what appears to be a nod to the contemporary status-quo in the region, the holdings in the Wirth Gallery are heavily weighted instead toward Islamic culture and history. Many of these Islamic artifacts are breathtakingly beautiful — especially the ceramics and examples of the development of Arabic writing. Yet we miss Byzantium — one of many empires that lost its bid to control the Middle East over the centuries, but not to be ignored for that reason.

While I appreciate what’s in the Wirth Gallery and the way the information is laid out — though some maps would be very welcome — I can’t recommend a visit on one of those days when you want to spend time, alone and undisturbed, with some beauty of the past. Daniel Libeskind’s Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, where the Wirth Gallery is located, is pierced top to bottom by a large hole called the Spirit House. The ROM, for some reason, has seen fit to insert a non-stop sound installation into the Spirit House that blasts right into the Wirth Gallery. It’s deafening at the worst of times and very annoying at the best. Time was when the ROM was a place of contemplation. Alas, it’s one no longer.

John Bentley Mays
About the author:
John Bentley Mays is a Toronto author and journalist. His award-winning journalism has appeared in the Globe and Mail , National Post and Walrus magazine.

Lourdes, the JubileeYear

8th december 2007 - 8th december 2008.
A year rich in events and celebrations. And much much more...Read More

http://www.lourdes-france.org/index.php?goto_centre=ru&contexte=en&id=405



"In the Footsteps of Bernadette" is a journey offered to pilgrims. It is an invitation to walk in the footsteps of Bernadette Soubirous to discover hermessage of faith.

Read More ...
 

Machines 'to match man by 2029'
By Helen Briggs
BBC science reporter, Boston
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7248875.stm

Machines will achieve human-level artificial intelligence by 2029, a leading US inventor has predicted.

Humanity is on the brink of advances that will see tiny robots implanted in people's brains to make them more intelligent said engineer Ray Kurzweil.

He said machines and humans would eventually merge through devices implanted in the body to boost intelligence and health.

"It's really part of our civilisation," Mr Kurzweil said.

"But that's not going to be an alien invasion of intelligent machines to displace us."

Machines were already doing hundreds of things humans used to do, at human levels of intelligence or better, in many different areas, he said.

Man versus machine

"I've made the case that we will have both the hardware and the software to achieve human level artificial intelligence with the broad suppleness of human intelligence including our emotional intelligence by 2029," he said.

We'll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains... to make us smarter
Ray Kurzweil

"We're already a human machine civilisation, we use our technology to expand our physical and mental horizons and this will be a further extension of that."

Humans and machines would eventually merge, by means of devices embedded in people's bodies to keep them healthy and improve their intelligence, predicted Mr Kurzweil.

"We'll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons," he told BBC News.

The nanobots, he said, would "make us smarter, remember things better and automatically go into full emergent virtual reality environments through the nervous system".

Mr Kurzweil is one of 18 influential thinkers chosen to identify the great technological challenges facing humanity in the 21st century by the US National Academy of Engineering.