Last Friday was  “Black Friday”, when the world goes crazy over shopping.  There was a lot of controversy in the days leading up to the event concerning stores opening not at 5 am, not ta 4 am, not even at midnight, but as early as 10 pm the evening of Thanksgiving.  This controversy was misguided.  The issue should not have been Black Friday “invading” Thanksgiving’s time slot, but Black Friday happening at all… As for me, my experience of Black Friday was different and unexpectedly blessed. What did I do on Black Friday?  I went to a funeral.  Read on…

I am an incurable news-addict, so I suppose it’s my own fault that I had heartburn before breakfast on Black Friday.  I woke up to a story from the Los Angeles Times that many of you probably saw in some form sometime during the weekend:

Matthew Lopez went to the Wal-Mart in Porter Ranch on Thursday night for the Black Friday sale but instead was caught in a pepper-spray attack by a woman who authorities said was “competitive shopping.” Read more »

by Lowell Bliss, guest contributor

Dancing at a Pakistani wedding is a safer celebration than gunfire. It's an analogy we can stand to learn in God's "what goes up, must come down" creation.

“What goes up, must come down,” is one of those multi-purpose aphorisms, functional on the natural level as well as the moral.   A physicist might use it to describe the Law of Gravity.  A preacher might recite it in a sermon on Galatians 6:7: “for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”

Last week, the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Lab reported that global carbon-dioxide emissions saw their biggest one-year rise, a 6 percent jump in 2010.  (The report is linked here.)  Tom Boden, director of the lab, calls it a “big jump.”  His colleague, Gregg Marland, a professor of geology at Appalachian State University, was a bit more descriptive: it’s a “monster” increase, Marland said.  Part of the monstrosity no doubt is how the study indicates that emissions are now growing faster than what the IPCC projected as a worst-case scenario in its 2007 report.  A worsened pace of carbon emissions will result in higher projected temperature averages (up now to 5.2° C by 2100, according to MIT models.)

What goes up—including CO₂ molecules—must come down, but in the case of carbon dioxide, it may take 100 years or so.  It is true that our planet’s oceans and vegetation act as carbon sinks, that is, they absorb CO₂ from the atmosphere, albeit at a rate slower than what industrial society and natural processes are emitting it.   A single molecule of CO₂ will float unmolested in the atmosphere for one hundred years.  Read more »