TIRED of HIGH GAS Prices? Read about ICE and the oil speculation market...
Hey, it's tough times -- I got stranded in Richmond, Virginia on Wed. with car problems. The tow truck driver was my age, used to be a musician and is a truck-driver, a profession having tough times now with the stinkin' HIGH PRICE OF GAS. The taxi cab driver, ditto -- times of declining income, and unnecessarily so. To learn more about our membership packages, visit HERE. I'd appreciate it your patronage!
Charlie
www.breedingtrust.com or
www.thepepcoach.com
How to Start an Internet Marketing Business & Save yourself Time, Money & Frustration
Judith, Jim and Tom (two of them are PhDs) had no experience about what or how to bring their business to the internet.
For years, they struggled and now have reached success and are willing to share what they learned with you: listen to this FREE teleseminar by clicking HERE: http://www.audioacrobat.com/play/Wxb0Krys
It's a gift that I think you'll appreciate!
Charlie Breeding
www.breedingtrust.com
FREE Teleseminar: Making Time - How to Improve your Time Management & Effectiveness
|
CLICK HERE NOW TO DOWNLOAD The Change Your Thinking Special Report for this Teleseminar!
We have a very special guest for you… Charlie Breeding, a veteran of over 25 years in the personal development field, joins me on this very special teleseminar that will help you Make Time!
Charlie helps high achievers – like you! – reach greater levels of success and achieve higher quality of life. (Full disclosure: Charlie is a classmate of mine from West Point. We were cadets together and then served as officers in the U.S. Army.) After leaving the Army, Charlie worked for Dale Carnegie Training, followed by two years with FranklinCovey Co. Charlie and I are going to share techniques on how you can better manage the precious time you have here on earth. (That's Charlie there, on the right.)
I'm hosting this FREE teleseminar not only to share this great information with you, but as a celebration of Charlie's new book Making Time: How To Improve Your Time Management Ability! Charlie reveals the secrets of Time Management that he teaches his high-paying clients.
No surprise... Charlie is a leading Motivation, Productivity & Life-Balance Expert. And on this call, we're going to review several of the action steps, secrets and ideas that you can learn from and apply to your own personal and professional life... right now!
On this 60-minute call with me and Charlie, you'll discover:
- the 4 Main Time Wasters In Your Life
(Once you know these, you can finally get control of the barriers that stop you from making time!)
- Charlie's 3 Strategies for Making Time (This will change your life... I promise!)
- the Best Way To Use A Calendar and Planner (This info is worth millions to the highest achievers)
- the Best Way To Beat Procrastinations (and accelerate your level of happiness and success)
- how you Can Benefit from Mastering Your Time
Remember... "You DO Deserve To Live A Great Life!"
Borack Hussein Obama for President? What this video ...
Virtuous Leadership
Virtuous Leadership!
A colleague of mine recently recommended a book, Virtuous Leadership that I just finished reading. I recommend it highly (Scepter Publishers) for the following reasons:
- I 'dog-eared' the book at 34 different places. A CEO of a software company riding on airline flight with me noticed, and asked me about the book: I replied that the amount of dog-eared pages to reference-later was a sign of the utility and relevance of the book to me.
Just look at the ethics crises we've experienced in white-collar crime, not to mention the denegration of families. If you're a father, you need to read the book. If you're a leader, it's a must read just like Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (Dr. Stephen Covey) or How to Win Friends & Influence People (Dale Carnegie).
The book is brief (170 pages), well-organized and full of useful, relevant example stories of people who demonstrated the virtues of leadership. You can purchase the book via my Amazon store or visiting the publisher, Scepter Publishers. Leaders are constantly learning, & I'd recommend this book to you.
Demographic Winter Coming: The Demise of the Family & Repercussions to the World
Visit their website and see a movie trailer at www.demographicwinter.com -- if you're a business owner and you think that you have difficulty finding talented people to work for you now, just wait ... because in the next 5-10-15 years, it's only going to get worse.
Reasons, in my opinion, for the demographic winter:
- Out of marriage sex
- People waiting longer to get married
- People having less children (in China, it's a one child society)
- People waiting longer to have children
- Since 1973, over 40 million babies have been aborted. How many scholars, political leaders, doctors, and teachers would've come with that 40 million loss?
- The viewpoint propaganda from the 1960's that there's a population explosion, and we need to give condoms and sex-education to ten year olds....
What's your opinion? Again, go to http://www.demographicwinter.com/index.html and watch the movie trailer.
Charlie Breeding
www.breedingtrust.com
www.thepepcoach.com
From Muslim to Catholic: Two Profiles in Courage
KARL KEATING’S E-LETTER
March 25, 2008
TOPIC: TWO PROFILES IN COURAGE
Dear Subscriber:
Samuel Johnson remarked that "when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."
Let me put that in a contemporary context: When a man knows he is the object of a fatwa, he likely will make sure that he remains in the state of grace.
So my thinking went as I read about Magdi Allam, who was baptized by Pope Benedict XVI on the vigil of Easter. Allam is a deputy editor of "Corriere della Sera" ("Evening Courier"), Italy’s largest-circulation newspaper, which is based in Milan and takes a center-right political stance.
Allam, 55, was born in Egypt and writes on Islam and on Arab politics and culture. He has been a supporter of Israel, has condemned Muslim fanatics, and has defended the Pope’s Regensburg speech.
After Allam criticized Palestinian suicide bombings in 2003, threats were made on his life, and the Italian government provided him with a police guard, which he still has. He will need it all the more now that he has renounced Islam and become a Catholic.
Allam had been a nominal Muslim. He did not perform the customary five-times-a-day prayers facing Mecca, and he did not undertake the Ramadan fast. He did accompany his devout mother on a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1991.
On Easter Sunday "Corriere della Sera" published Allam’s open letter to the editor. Addressed to Paolo Mieli, the letter is a moving proclamation of faith. Let me quote a few passages from it. The translation is my own.
Allam said, "Yesterday evening I converted to the Catholic Christian religion, renouncing my previous Islamic faith. I finally saw the light, through divine grace, the healthy and ripe fruit of a long gestation lived in suffering and in joy ...
"I am particularly grateful to His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, who has imparted to me the sacraments of initiation--baptism, confirmation, and Eucharist--in the Basilica of St. Peter in the course of the solemn celebration of the Easter vigil."
Then the new convert showed that he had no intention of playing down his adherence to his new faith. Referring to his baptismal name, he wrote: "I have assumed the most simple and explicit Christian name: ‘Christian.’ Since yesterday, therefore, my name is ‘Magdi Christian Allam.’"
He continued this way:
"For me [this is] the most beautiful day of my life. To acquire the gift of the Christian faith on the memorial of the Resurrection of Christ from the hand of the Holy Father is, for a believer, an incomparable privilege and an inestimable good. ...
"[This is the] authentic religion of Truth, of Life, and of Liberty. In my first Easter as a Christian I not only have discovered Jesus but have discovered for the first time the true and unique God, who is the God of Faith and Reason."
These lines are a strong challenge to Islam, which emphasizes the uniqueness of Allah--so unique, so isolated, that in Islam the dogmas of the Trinity and the Incarnation can’t be entertained in any way.
Allam is saying that the "true and unique God" is not to be found in Islam, which claims him but does not have him, and that the God of Islam is not really the God of faith and reason.
Later in his open letter Allam turned again explicitly to his newspaper’s editor and wrote, "Dear editor, you ask whether I fear for my life in the consciousness that my conversion to Christianity certainly will obtain for me a death sentence for apostasy. You are quite right."
Allam said that he will "face my fate with head high, with back straight, and with interior sureness of one who has the certainty of his faith."
Then he said that "His Holiness has sent an explicit and revolutionary message to a Church that until now has been too prudent in the conversation with Muslims, refraining from evangelizing in countries with an Islamic majority and being quiet about the reality of conversions in Christian countries. Out of fear. Fear of not being able to protect converts from condemnation to death for apostasy [from Islam] and fear of reprisals against Christian residents of Islamic countries.
"Well then, today Benedict XVI, with his testimony, says we need to overcome the fear and not be timorous in the affirmation of the truth of Jesus even among the Muslims. ...
"In Italy there are thousands of converts to Islam who serenely live their new faith. But there also are thousands of Muslim converts to Christianity who are impelled to conceal their new faith out of fear of being assassinated by Islamic extremists who hide among us."
Allam concluded his open letter by saying that he hopes the "historic gesture of the Pope and my testimony will bring out the conviction that the moment has arrived to leave the shadows of the catacombs and to affirm publicly our will to be fully what we are.
"If we cannot have here in Italy, in the cradle of Catholicism, our home, a guarantee of full religious liberty, how will we ever be able to be credible when we denounce the violation of such liberty elsewhere in the world?"
NOT EVERYONE WAS PLEASED
As you might expect, not everyone has applauded Allam’s conversion. Yahya Pallavicini, the vice president of the Islamic Religious Community in Italy, said that "there is no need, to demonstrate love for Jesus, to renounce the faith of the Prophet Mohammed."
Pallavicini said it was unfortunate that Allam was baptized in such a public manner; he thought it would have been better had it been done by "a priest in Viterbo," where Allam lives.
He went on to say that he did not understand how one could "renounce the tradition, the culture, and the truthfulness of the Islamic message," and he accused Allam of "apostasy."
The irony is that Pallavicini himself is an apostate: He was brought up as a Catholic!
THE OTHER COURAGEOUS MAN
I titled this E-Letter "Two Profiles in Courage" because not only has Allam done a courageous thing, putting himself even deeper into jeopardy, but so has the man who completed Allam’s reception into the Church: Pope Benedict XVI.
It would have been easy enough for the Pope to indicate that Allam should have been received into the Church by his parish priest--that, after all, is what is done almost universally. It could not have been an accident that Allam was one of only seven converts who were baptized in St. Peter’s by the Pope.
No, the Pope was sending a message, very much in line, I think, with what Allam wrote in his open letter. The message is that Muslims too ought to become Catholics and that Catholics ought to proclaim that truth, even at the risk of (or at the near certainty of) reprisals.
Islam is further removed from Catholicism than is Judaism; Judaism is further removed than is Protestantism. We have little trouble inviting Protestants to complete their faith by becoming Catholics. We invite Jews to do the same (as emphasized by the Pope’s recent revision of the prayer, used at Good Friday in the Tridentine Mass, that calls for prayers that Jews may convert).
The further away from Catholicism someone is, the more he needs it. It would be an act of uncharity to Muslims to leave them out of the picture. Allam thinks that Catholics have a duty to invite Muslims to become Catholics. Not only does the Pope think the same way, but he has put himself at risk in affirming this message.
That’s why we say, with joy, "Habemus papam!"
FOOTNOTE
Writing about the breaking story at GetReligion.org, contributor Mollie Ziegler sought to correct phrasing used by Reuter’s Philip Pullella in his report of Allam’s conversion.
She said that his opening paragraph "makes a common error that might not seem important but is. While baptism confers membership into a specific church body, people aren’t baptized a Lutheran, Presbyterian, or Catholic. They baptized into the Christian faith. ... On the radio and television, however, I and a few readers kept hearing about this ‘baptized a Catholic’ terminology. It takes a few more words, but it’s important to be precise when dealing with sacraments."
I agree it’s important, so I hope Ziegler will not mind if I correct her.
There is only one baptism, Scripture tells us. There also is only one Church established by Christ. That Church is the Catholic Church, which means that baptism is Catholic baptism, there being no other.
When a person is baptized, he actually is baptized into the Church that Christ founded, which means he is baptized into the Catholic Church--whether or not he understands that.
Thus, an infant baptized at a Methodist church is a Catholic, until, at some later point, he comes to understand himself to be a Methodist or something else.
An adult who is baptized at a Methodist church would cease to be a Catholic almost instantaneously, since he would understand himself to be, even during the ceremony, a Methodist.
However that may be, the fact is that baptism is a Catholic sacrament, as are all the other sacraments. Thus it is quite right for someone to say that Magdi Allam was baptized into the Catholic Church--because that is precisely what happened.
Until next time,
Karl
********************
If you have a comment about anything appearing in this E-Letter, please do not hit your Reply button. Instead, go to Catholic Answers' discussion forums at http://forums.catholic.com, where you may post your comment in the forum dedicated to the E-Letter. You will find a thread devoted to this issue of the E-Letter. Feel free to add your comment in the form of a reply to that thread.
********************
To subscribe to Karl Keating's E-Letter, send an e-mail to eletter@catholic.com and write "SUBSCRIBE" in the subject line or go to http://www.catholic.com/newsletters.asp.
To learn more about the Catholic faith and about Catholic Answers, visit us at http://www.catholic.com.
********************
The content of this E-Letter is copyright 2008 by Karl Keating.
My note: I disagree with Mr. Keating's examples about a Catholic who becomes baptized as a Methodist ... perhaps because I was a Methodist who became Catholic. To learn more about the Catholic faith, go to
https://www.lighthousecatholicmedia.com/p/cdclub/?cmd=refer;promo_code=1528
charlie
In God's Name: Dialogue for Christians with Muslims
Dialogue Between Muslims & Christians
Dialogue Between Christians & Muslims
As a personal mission of mine and in the spirit of "breeding" or generating Trust, I've been reading a book called, "Guidelines for Dialogue Between Christians and Muslims" by Maurice Borrmans, translated from the French by R. Marston Speight.
"Thus by their joint action Christians and Muslims have the opportunity to render a fresh witness to the reality of God Himself (sharing the first five books as one in the same), showing to all that in the midst of the human struggle for fulfillment there is possible an orientation toward the divine mystery.
We believers "vie with another in good works" by serving young people, children, the handicapped, and the sick and the dying, by denouncing war and all murderous experimentation, because they consider life to be a gift of God and because they believe in the living God who loves life and who desires to see life come to full fruition.
When they struggle against all forms of discrimination (sexual, racial, cultural, religious or national) and against the selfish appropriation of natural resources by individuals or collectivities so as to guarantee justice and equality of opportunity for everyone, they do so because they regard the riches of the earth as gifts from God and because they believe in a God who is free "to do what He wills" in love for all of mankind and in view of eliciting their free response to Him." Page 98, Areas of Cooperation
My comment: while the run-on sentences are rampant, the spirit of this intent is clearly communicated. It doesn't matter if you're Christian, Muslim, Jewish or Buddhist or Hindu -- at least Jews, Muslims and Christians believe in a monotheistic God, and have the exact same first, five books of the Bible and Koran ONE IN THE SAME. Let us focus on our similarities of faith beliefs, not our differences. Can I get an "amen" you all? charlie