There can be no question that Dartmoor and its landscape has helped fire people’s beliefs and imagination. From the thick mists that suddenly appear and roll across the moor to the dark, bottomless mires and the craggy granite tors, each lends an air of mystery and magic, all ripe for associated legends and tales.
Today we have a wealth of tales all of which relate the various strange events which took place somewhere in the Dartmoor landscape. No matter whether it’s a deep bottomless pool or a sleepy moorland hamlet there will be a story to be told.
The really fascinating thing is that due to Dartmoor’s unspoilt landscape it is possible to visit many of the places which are connected with the various tales and see them as they were when their events unfolded.
Self-publishing is a great way to get your book into the world. But when you self-publish, you take on all the responsibilities that a traditional publisher usually would, including marketing the book, soliciting reviews, sending out review copies, and generating buzz. (And it’s best to start on these things before your book is published.) So, how do you do find the reviewers to help you get the word out?
the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools. So much for the new abolitionism.
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Today, evangelicals make up the backbone of the pro-life movement, but it hasn’t always been so. Both before and for several years after Roe, evangelicals were overwhelmingly indifferent to the subject, which they considered a “Catholic issue.” In 1968, for instance, a symposium sponsored by the Christian Medical Society and Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, refused to characterize abortion as sinful, citing “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility” as justifications for ending a pregnancy. In 1971, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, passed a resolution encouraging “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” The convention, hardly a redoubt of liberal values, reaffirmed that position in 1974, one year after Roe, and again in 1976.
News24's investigation into the owners of Mzansistorie.com and Allnews.co.za started earlier this year as part of a much broader investigation into the originators, enablers and funders of fake news websites in South Africa.
Ironically, it was the very fact that Ramatseba wanted to make money from his website that revealed his identity. It was also the same social media used by Ramatseba to distribute his fabrications that proved instrumental in identifying him.
Sideloading is getting an ebook into your e-reading device (or app) when you haven't bought it from that reader's own maker/sponsor (like Amazon for the Kindle family, Barnes & Noble for the Nook readers or Kobo for the Kobo readers).
Most big e-reader sponsors have automatic or semi-automatic ways to load the ebooks you buy from them to their own readers. You buy them and minutes later they magically turn up in your device.
But that's not how it goes when you buy an ebook from an independent provider like us (and thank you for doing that, if you have!) or from a company like Smashwords, or acquire a free ebook from an online source like Project Gutenberg. When that happens, you have to load the book to your device yourself: not uploading, or downloading, but sideloading.
The 74-page report, compiled by Human Rights Watch, the Centre for Environmental Rights (CER), groundWork, and Earthjustice, describes a system designed to "deter and penalise" mining opponents.
The authors conducted interviews with more than 100 activists, community leaders, environmental groups, lawyers representing activists, police and municipal officials, describing the targeting of community rights defenders in KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo, Northwest, and Eastern Cape between 2013 and 2018.
They report intimidation, violence, damage to property, the use of excessive force during peaceful protests, and arbitrary arrest for their activities in highlighting the negative impacts of mining projects on their communities.
"The attacks and harassment have created an atmosphere of fear for community members who mobilise to raise concerns about damage to their livelihoods from the serious environmental and health risks of mining and coal-fired power plants," write the authors.
"Women often play a leading role in voicing these concerns, making them potential targets for harassment and attacks."
But municipalities often impose barriers to protest on organisers that have no legal basis while government officials have failed to adequately investigate allegations of abuse.
The very nature of having a holiday, furthermore, was seen as problematic. Rather, the Puritans argued, singling out any day for a “holiday” implied that celebrants thought of other days as less holy.
Easter, too, was singled out as a dangerous time. A Scottish Presbyterian minister, Alexander Hislop, wrote a whole book about it: the 1853 pamphlet The Two Babylons: The Papal Worship Proved to Be the Worship of Nimrod and His Wife. Using questionable and vague sources, Hislop argued that the name of Easter derived from the pagan worship of the Germanic goddess Eostre, and through her the Babylonian goddess Ishtar. (This claim has persisted into the present day, and is often cited by those who want us to make Easter more fun and secular. Still, the evidence for the existence of Eostre in any mythological system — a single paragraph in the work of an English monk writing centuries later — let alone actual religious links between Eostre and Easter is scant at best.)
Late antique Egyptian Christianity has left a wonderfully rich, and sometimes beguilingly strange, literary and material heritage for us to appreciate and try to interpret. There are tales of holy men who could command man-eating crocodiles and pronounce curses, and of dramatic feats of ascetic renunciation in the desert. Papyrus fragments include oracles, spells and curses; the walls of monasteries still display the paintings of saints and the graffiti of pilgrims. The two books under review offer new and complementary approaches to understanding this heritage and the world it came from. Each is strongly influenced by theoretical approaches that stress the importance of material culture, but they both remain humane and indeed sympathetic.
Evolutionary psychology, like sociobiology or Marxism, has become associated with controversy. Why should it, and why has it? Yes, debates about evolution totter endlessly along, and psychology remains a discipline that sometimes seems orphaned by both humanities and the hard sciences. Why should combining psychology and evolution ignite a confabulation of loathing, fear, and scientific vitriol?
Rule One is “Stand up straight with your shoulders back”, to avoid seeming like a “loser lobster”, who shrinks from conflict and grows sad, sickly and loveless – and is prone to keep on losing, which is portrayed as a disaster.
Like any tool we use every day, our laptops accumulate dust, grime, oils from our skin and who knows what else. Yours is probably due for a cleaning, and here’s how to do it right.
Angels are a tricky subject to tackle, being so nebulous and fleetingly glimpsed. I take my hat off to Stanford for having a go. The book has changed my life, as I now think about angels all the time and keep spotting them in paintings, on book jackets and in the verses of hymns. I’ve never read a book with so many winged figures, sudden encounters between humans and strange visions, angel-adorned gates, haloes, gowns, bare feet and moments on mountains when someone sees something dazzling in a dream. If you concentrate, you’ll be taken on a thrilling journey through theological discussion, with a generous helping of art history thrown in.
Stanford opens the book enticingly, telling us how his Catholic mother, who had multiple sclerosis, used to leave her wheelchair outside shops in Liverpool in the 1970s. His father would worry it might be stolen, but she’d reply: ‘Oh Reg, cheer up. My guardian angel is looking after it.’
The word angel, used throughout the Bible, comes from the Greek word meaning messenger. The name reflects the nature of angels with regards to humans and God: i.e. they are messengers from God, sent to us. They are sometimes described as Bodiless Powers: bodiless meaning they are purely spirit, rather than material, and power meaning they have their own will and intellect, rather than being an aspect of God. This last part is important: angels are spirits, and “God is spirit” (John 4:24), but angels are still created beings in their own right.
A herbalist who told a 13-year-old diabetic boy's family to rub lavender oil into his spine instead of using insulin has been jailed in California after the boy died from complications relating to type-1 diabetes.
Timothy Morrow, 84, was sentenced on Monday for practicing medicine without a license, as well as one count of child abuse likely to produce great bodily injury or death, to which he entered a no contest plea.
According to conventional wisdom, religions are systems of belief. Religious people are “believers”. Christians believe that Jesus rose from the dead; Muslims believe that Mohammed was the final prophet; Jews believe that the creator of the universe has a special affection for the children of Israel. These beliefs of the religious are often taken to be unsupported by, or even inconsistent with, available evidence. Indeed, many understand “faith” as a matter of believing without any evidence at all.
However, this belief-orientated – or “doxastic” – conception of religion is not universally accepted. According to the historian of religion Karen Armstrong, the doxastic conception of religion is a relatively recent development, shaped by the Protestant Reformation and the scientific revolution of the sixteenth century. Armstrong goes so far as to argue that our modern doxastic conception of religion is largely the result of mistranslation. In terms of Christianity, one difficulty with translating the Greek of the New Testament into English is that the English word “faith”, unlike the Greek equivalent “pistis”, does not have a verb form. Hence what should really be the verb “to faith” comes out as “to believe”. When the Bible was first rendered in English in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this was not a bad translation. The word “bileven” in middle English meant to prize or to hold dear (related to the German “belieben”) and when the King James Bible was published, “believe” was close in meaning to the Greek pistis, which has connotations of engagement and commitment. As one piece of evidence for this, Armstrong offers a line from Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well (written shortly before the publication of the King James Bible) in which Bertram is urged to “believe not thy distain”; in other words, he is being told not to engage his contempt (in this case for the low-born Helena) and let it take root in his heart.
Zotero is great for genealogy for all of these reasons and more:
- It is free, with the stability and support of a university backing it up.
- Even if you are syncing to the Zotero cloud, you can do that for years on free storage, before you have to buy some. And when you do buy storage, it’s inexpensive and unlimited.
- It provides the structure missing from tools like OneNote and EverNote, but brings substantial flexibility, along with the structure.
- It can add most catalogued online source citations to your Zotero library with one click.
It can organize and provide one-click access to the thousands of documents, spreadsheets, photographs, and other files you have saved to your hard drive. In essence, it can draw all those files together into a uniform, organized system.- Zotero becomes your door to all you have collected.
It allows you to create a record once but to file it in as many folders as you want without taking up significant extra space. You make a change once, and it changes in every folder.
- You can find things rapidly, even if you only have vague memories of having long ago found a document that might be of use in solving a new genealogical problem.
It will sync to the cloud, allowing you to access your work at Zotero.org, wherever you have Wifi access.
What is the Orthodox doctrine of hell? I honestly do not know. I do know what many Orthodox have taught about hell during the past hundred years or so, and I know some�thing about what the Church Fathers taught about it during the first millennium of the Church’s history; but I cannot tell you what the Orthodox Church authoritatively and irreformably teaches about hell, beyond the fact that it is a horrifying possibility and therefore a destiny best avoided. As the Orthodox Church sings at the Saturday Vespers of the Sunday of the Last Judgment:
When the thrones are set in place and the books are opened, then God will take His place on the judgment-seat. What a fearful sight! As the angels stand in awe and the river of fire flows by: What shall we do, who are already condemned by our many sins, as we hear Christ call the righteous to His Father’s Kingdom, and send the wicked to eternal damnation? Who among us can bear that terrible verdict? Hasten to us, Lover of mankind and King of the universe: Grant us the grace of repentance before the end and have mercy on us!The hymns of the Sunday of the Last Judgment might seem to give the definitive word, yet they, like the Scriptures, need to be interpreted in light of Pascha and the totality of the Holy Tradition.
"Stigmata" came to me in a whoosh after percolating for almost 9 years following what might be called a religious experience towards Easter time. It's about my experience during a choir practise in Parksville BC in 1978, five months after Apartheid South Africa deliberately killed Bantu Steve Biko – the truly inspired and inspiring leader of the Black Consciousness Movement – whom I and so very many people loved.
