Study: Religious Schools Perform Better Than Public, Charter Schools

By Napp Nazworth, Christian Post, April 10, 2013
Private religious schools perform better than public schools, and public charter schools performed no better than regular public schools, according to a new study by William Jeynes, professor of education at California State University at Long Beach and senior fellow at the Witherspoon Institute at Princeton.

Jeynes spoke Monday with The Christian Post about the study. He found that religious, mostly Christian, school students were a full year ahead of students who attend public and charter schools.

The results of his research were recently published in vol. 87, issue 3 of the Peabody Journal of Education in an article titled, “A Meta-Analysis on the Effects and Contributions of Public, Public Charter, and Religious Schools on Student Outcomes,” and were presented last month in a speech for Notre Dame University faculty.

Jeynes used a research method called a “meta-analysis,” which utilizes very large data sets by combining the data from many different studies. Most of the studies used test scores to measure student performance, but there were some other measures, such as grade point average and teacher ratings, as well.

The research uses four different models to show how the outcomes might change using different control variables. Some might argue, for instance, that students at religious schools do better because their parents are more involved in their education, not because the schools are better. Jeynes, therefore, controlled for this “selection effect.” Religious schools still perform better, though, even when controlling for parental involvement.

When all the control variables are factored in, the study found that students at religious schools still have a seven to eight month advantage over students at public and charter schools.

Jeynes found that there were several reasons that religious schools do better. At religious schools, the students are encouraged to take difficult courses much more frequently and they have a “can do attitude,” Jeynes explained, epitomized by the saying, “God doesn’t make junk.” Religious schools place higher expectations upon their students and send the message that they have the ability to go to college.

Jeynes also found a greater reduction in the class and race based “achievement gaps.” Additionally, Jeynes found that the differences on behavioral measures were even greater than the academic differences. Students at religious schools were less likely, for instance, to get suspended, get into fights, do drugs, and get involved in bullying. These students also showed more respect for teachers.

Once difference that some, such as Jeynes, believe is an advantage for public schools is that public school teachers are more apt to demonstrate more flexibility with students expressing their own opinions.

Jeynes did not look at homeschooled students for this study, but has studied them in the past. His previous studies have shown that homeschooled students do even better than religious school students. Homeschooled students have several advantages over public and religious schools.

Students in general do better with high parental involvement and small class sizes. Homeschools, obviously, have the highest level of parental involvement and the smallest class sizes. Also, in a traditional school classroom, teachers may have to move on to a different topic before not all of their students have mastered the topic. In a homeschool, the parent/teacher can stick with a skill or topic until the student has mastered it, then move on. That is a “huge advantage,” Jeynes said.

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Getting a Brain Boost Through Exercise

By Gretchen Reynolds, NY Times, April 10, 2013
Two new experiments, one involving people and the other animals, suggest that regular exercise can substantially improve memory, although different types of exercise seem to affect the brain quite differently. The news may offer consolation for the growing numbers of us who are entering age groups most at risk for cognitive decline.

It was back in the 1990s that scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., first discovered that exercise bulks up the brain. In groundbreaking experiments, they showed that mice given access to running wheels produced far more cells in an area of the brain controlling memory creation than animals that didn’t run. The exercised animals then performed better on memory tests than their sedentary labmates.

For the human study, published in The Journal of Aging Research, scientists at the University of British Columbia recruited dozens of women ages 70 to 80 who had been found to have mild cognitive impairment, a condition that makes a person’s memory and thinking more muddled than would be expected at a given age.

Earlier, the same group of researchers had found that after weight training, older women with mild cognitive impairment improved their associative memory, or the ability to recall things in context—a stranger’s name and how you were introduced, for instance.

Now the scientists wanted to look at more essential types of memory, and at endurance exercise as well. So they randomly assigned their volunteers to six months of supervised exercise. Some of the women lifted weights twice a week. Others briskly walked. And some, as a control measure, skipped endurance exercise and instead stretched and toned.

At the start and end of the six months, the women completed a battery of tests designed to study their verbal and spatial memory. Verbal memory is, among other things, your ability to remember words, and spatial memory is your remembrance of where things once were placed in space. Both deteriorate with age, a loss that’s exaggerated in people with mild cognitive impairment.

And in this study, after six months, the women in the toning group scored worse on the memory tests than they had at the start of the study. Their cognitive impairment had grown.

But the women who had exercised, either by walking or weight training, performed better on almost all of the cognitive tests after six months than they had before.

There were, however, differences. While both exercise groups improved almost equally on tests of spatial memory, the women who had walked showed greater gains in verbal memory than the women who had lifted weights.

What these findings suggest, the authors conclude, is that endurance training and weight training may have different physiological effects within the brain and cause improvements in different types of memory.

That idea tallies nicely with the results of the other recent study of exercise and memory, in which lab rats either ran on wheels or, to the extent possible, lifted weights. Specifically, the researchers taped weights to the animals’ tails and had them repeatedly climb little ladders to simulate resistance training.

After six weeks, the animals in both exercise groups scored better on memory tests than they had before they trained. But it was what was going on in their bodies and brains that was revelatory. The scientists found that the runners’ brains showed increased levels of a protein known as BDNF, or brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which is known to support the health of existing neurons and coax the creation of new brain cells. The rat weight-trainers’ brains did not show increased levels of BDNF.

The tail trainers, however, did have significantly higher levels of another protein, insulinlike growth factor, in their brains and blood than the runners did. This substance, too, promotes cell division and growth and most likely helps fragile newborn neurons to survive.

What all of this new research suggests, says Teresa Liu-Ambrose, an associate professor in the Brain Research Center at the University of British Columbia who oversaw the experiments with older women, is that for the most robust brain health, it’s probably advisable to incorporate both aerobic and resistance training. It seems that each type of exercise “selectively targets different aspects of cognition,” she says, probably by sparking the release of different proteins in the body and brain.

But, she continues, no need to worry if you choose to concentrate solely on aerobic or resistance training, at least in terms of memory improvements. The differences in the effects of each type of exercise were subtle, she says, while the effects of exercise—any exercise—on overall cognitive function were profound.

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Six Keys to Being Excellent at Anything

By Tony Schwartz, HBR, August 24, 2010
I’ve been playing tennis for nearly five decades. I love the game and I hit the ball well, but I’m far from the player I wish I were.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot the past couple of weeks, because I’ve taken the opportunity, for the first time in many years, to play tennis nearly every day. My game has gotten progressively stronger. I’ve had a number of rapturous moments during which I’ve played like the player I long to be.

And almost certainly could be, even though I’m 58 years old. Until recently, I never believed that was possible. For most of my adult life, I’ve accepted the incredibly durable myth that some people are born with special talents and gifts, and that the potential to truly excel in any given pursuit is largely determined by our genetic inheritance.

During the past year, I’ve read no fewer than five books—and a raft of scientific research—which powerfully challenge that assumption. I’ve also written one, The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working, which lays out a guide, grounded in the science of high performance, to systematically building your capacity physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.

We’ve found, in our work with executives at dozens of organizations, that it’s possible to build any given skill or capacity in the same systematic way we do a muscle: push past your comfort zone, and then rest. Will Durant, commenting on Aristotle, pointed out that the philosopher had it exactly right 2000 years ago: “We are what we repeatedly do.” By relying on highly specific practices, we’ve seen our clients dramatically improve skills ranging from empathy, to focus, to creativity, to summoning positive emotions, to deeply relaxing.

Like everyone who studies performance, I’m indebted to the extraordinary Anders Ericsson, arguably the world’s leading researcher into high performance. For more than two decades, Ericsson has been making the case that it’s not inherited talent which determines how good we become at something, but rather how hard we’re willing to work—something he calls “deliberate practice.” Numerous researchers now agree that 10,000 hours of such practice is the minimum necessary to achieve expertise in any complex domain.

That notion is wonderfully empowering. It suggests we have remarkable capacity to influence our own outcomes. But that’s also daunting. One of Ericsson’s central findings is that practice is not only the most important ingredient in achieving excellence, but also the most difficult and the least intrinsically enjoyable.

If you want to be really good at something, it’s going to involve relentlessly pushing past your comfort zone, as well as frustration, struggle, setbacks and failures. That’s true as long as you want to continue to improve, or even maintain a high level of excellence. The reward is that being really good at something you’ve earned through your own hard work can be immensely satisfying.

Here, then, are the six keys to achieving excellence we’ve found are most effective for our clients:

1. Pursue what you love. Passion is an incredible motivator. It fuels focus, resilience, and perseverance.

2. Do the hardest work first. We all move instinctively toward pleasure and away from pain. Most great performers, Ericsson and others have found, delay gratification and take on the difficult work of practice in the mornings, before they do anything else. That’s when most of us have the most energy and the fewest distractions.

3. Practice intensely, without interruption for short periods of no longer than 90 minutes and then take a break. Ninety minutes appears to be the maximum amount of time that we can bring the highest level of focus to any given activity. The evidence is equally strong that great performers practice no more than 4½ hours a day.

4. Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses. The simpler and more precise the feedback, the more equipped you are to make adjustments. Too much feedback, too continuously can create cognitive overload, increase anxiety, and interfere with learning.

5. Take regular renewal breaks. Relaxing after intense effort not only provides an opportunity to rejuvenate, but also to metabolize and embed learning. It’s also during rest that the right hemisphere becomes more dominant, which can lead to creative breakthroughs.

6. Ritualize practice. Will and discipline are wildly overrated. As the researcher Roy Baumeister has found, none of us have very much of it. The best way to insure you’ll take on difficult tasks is to build rituals—specific, inviolable times at which you do them, so that over time you do them without having to squander energy thinking about them.

I have practiced tennis deliberately over the years, but never for the several hours a day required to achieve a truly high level of excellence. What’s changed is that I don’t berate myself any longer for falling short. I know exactly what it would take to get to that level.

I’ve got too many other higher priorities to give tennis that attention right now. But I find it incredibly exciting to know that I’m still capable of getting far better at tennis—or at anything else—and so are you.

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Start an orphanage in the Philippines at age 80? Of course!

By Gail Wood, CS Monitor, April 10, 2013
It was the last place Lois Prater’s children expected her to go—overseas to become a missionary.

At age 80, Ms. Prater, who had been a stay-at-home housewife all her married life, sold her Seattle-area home, her car, and other belongings to build an orphanage in the Philippines. She became the unlikely helping hand for hundreds of orphaned children over the years.

“She sold everything,” says Bonnie Swinney, one of Prater’s three daughters. “The only things she kept were the things she could use in the orphanage.”

In 1991, Prater, with her own money, bought 12 acres of land covered with mango and coconut trees near Orion, a small town in the Philippines. Three years later, the doors would open to King’s Garden Children’s Home, a 2,000-square-foot, white stucco building, giving orphaned children from infants to teens new hope.

“I can’t imagine at my age going over there now,” says Ms. Swinney, who is 73. “What she did was amazing.”

For 13 years, Prater lived in the Philippines, enduring both physical and financial hardships. She had to overcome a number of challenging physical ailments along the way. And there was the difficult task of living in a foreign country, far from her family. Yet she refused to come home.

Finally, with a new manager in place, Prater retired and returned home to live with her daughter near Seattle just before her 90th birthday. She died in January at age 100.

“I didn’t know anything about business, about building an orphanage,” Prater said several years ago when talking about her decision to open King’s Garden. “All along, I’ve just trusted in God, and He’s answered my prayers. I did what I could do, and God did the rest.”

Just a few years after King’s Garden Children’s Home opened, Prater invested in expansion. King’s Garden tripled in size and started a school. Over the years, an average of about 60 children at a time have lived at the orphanage.

Prater’s unlikely journey began six months after her husband, Galon Prater, died in 1988. While Lois Prater was watching a Christian TV program, Lora Lam, a missionary on the program, asked for people to join her on a three-week outreach trip to China. Prater, who had attended Bible school as a teenager and had earned her ministerial license, felt her childhood desire to become a missionary rising again.

“I said, ‘Lord, I’m too old to go now,’ ” Prater said.

But she went, making three trips, one to China and two to the Philippines, taking part in open-tent meetings. Inspired by her trip with Ms. Lam to China, Prater returned for a second trip several weeks later with 11 other women for a month-long stay in the Philippines. She later made a third visit to the Philippines alone and was speaking at a church when a poorly dressed man came up to her after the service and offered to sell his baby to her for 1,000 pesos, or about $40 at that time.

“That impacted my soul so deeply I knew I had to do something,” Prater said.

So, in 1990 she returned to the United States and sold her home for $65,000. She sold everything she had, determined to build an orphanage.

Prater admitted selling her home wasn’t easy.

“I struggled, but I knew that what I was trying to do was something much more important than hanging onto my faded couch,” Prater said.

At 89, Prater had a physical setback and was forced to step down as the orphanage’s director. She returned home, this time for good. But she made several short visits to her orphanage over the next few years.

The orphanage and school continues to do well today. Monica Jarvis assumed directorship of King’s Garden Children’s Home in 2005 and remains in that position with the support of the Assemblies of God World Missions.

“To think that my mom opened the orphanage at 80 and worked there until she was 89 absolutely blows me away,” says Swinney, who has adopted several children from King’s Garden Children’s Home. “My mom has the biggest heart.”

Each of the children brought to King’s Garden Children’s Home has a heartbreaking story. One of the first children, who had no name, was brought to Prater when he was just nine days old. Prater named him Albert. His alcoholic father was in jail and his mother moved into the jail with him because she had no other place to stay.

One-by-one, Prater took in each of that mother’s four children, keeping them out of jail.

Another child, who Prater named Tommy, was brought to King’s Garden Children’s Home by the police when he was just one year old. Tommy’s ear had been cut off by his father. Heidi, another child brought to Prater by the police, came to King’s Garden with stomach worms and head lice. Many of the children who come to King’s Garden are in need of medical treatment.

The mother and father of a girl named Jennifer died, and she moved into King’s Garden when she was 10. Her step brother brought her to the orphanage because she had no other place to live.

“I feel I’m not talented enough to do any of this,” Prater said while she was still overseeing King’s Garden. “But God enables me. My responsibility is to do what I can. He does the rest. My only regret is I didn’t start when I was younger.”

Prater’s story has been an inspiration to others, including her daughter, showing how it’s never too late to live a life of serving others.

“My mom was such an amazing person,” Swinney says. “She had tremendous faith in God.”

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The Cuban diet: eat less, exercise more--and preventable deaths are halved

Jeremy Laurance, The Independent, 10 April 2013
A country whose citizens collectively succeeded in losing weight and increasing their level of physical activity saw their health improve and death rates plunge.

In a unique natural experiment, researchers have observed how a nation that lost an average of 5kg per head over five years contributed to a halving of the death rate from diabetes and a one third reduction in deaths from heart disease.

The natural experiment occurred in Cuba which was plunged into crisis in the early 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Its experience demonstrates what could be achieved elsewhere if the same changes could be brought about, without an economic crisis.

Food and fuel were in short supply in Cuba from 1990 resulting in millions going hungry and having to abandon their vehicles and walk.

Cars and buses virtually disappeared from the roads as fuel supplies dried up, and farmers had to abandon motorised machines and work the fields manually. The Government issued one million bicycles to keep the population on the move.

Between 1990 and 1995, the average Cuban consumed fewer calories than they expended each day, leading to an average weight loss of 5kg.

Deaths from diabetes began to fall in 1996, five years after the start of the weight loss period, and remained low for six years. Deaths from heart disease and stroke which had been declining slowly since 1980 suddenly went into free fall from 1996.

By the late 1990s, however, Cuba was beginning to recover and as the economy grew so did waistlines. Levels of physical activity fell.

The consequences were seen in a surging prevalence of diabetes and rising rates of heart disease and stroke which, by the mid-2000s were back to their pre-crisis levels.

The international team of researchers from Spain, the US and Cuba, say that the “Cuban experience” from 1980 to 2010 demonstrates that within a relatively short period, modest weight loss in the whole population can have a profound effect.

Writing in the British Medical Journal, they say that although their findings are an extrapolation from one country’s experience, they nonetheless provide “a notable illustration of the potential health benefits of reversing the global obesity epidemic.”

The Cuban crisis was unusual in that it did not occur suddenly, as in a time of war, but developed slowly over a number of years, and was not accompanied by social breakdown. People continued to go to work and school and the Government maintained its strong tradition of public health and continued surveillance of medical trends.

In an accompanying editorial, Walter Willett, professor of nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health, says it is well known that changes in the food supply, such as the spread of fast food outlets, combined with reductions in physical activity, such as increased car use, leads to weight gain and the growth in diabetes and heart disease. But it is rare to see a reversal of the process.

Professor Willetts writes: “The current findings add powerful evidence that a reduction in overweight and obesity would have major population-wide benefits.”

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In Lebanon, a doctor offers comfort and healing to refugees from neighboring wars

By Simon Roughneen, CS Monitor, April 9, 2013
Beirut, Lebanon—It takes him a good 20 seconds to get his bearings, but, sitting up in his bed, Matti Tourrani smiles and says hello, muffled by a drowsy cough. His right leg is swollen—so much that it is now twice as thick as his left. “It’s not so painful; I’m more concerned about my knee,” says the elderly man.

Mr. Tourrani has traveled with his wife, Maysoun, from their small village near Mosul in northern Iraq for knee-replacement surgery, a procedure that would cost more than $23,000 and for which the family mortgaged their house.

Their part of Iraq is still violent: Last week a bomb killed two people just a mile from their home. “We’re used to it by now,” Maysoun says.

But the family is concerned that they might have traveled in vain. Before any knee surgery, the leg must heal more, says Irad Beldjebel, a doctor who works helping Beirut’s unknown thousands of refugees.

The Algerian-born Beldjebel spends his days not only treating refugees, but serves as an all-round counselor—a trusty shoulder to lean on for people who are often traumatized by the past, worried about the future, and unsure about the present. People such as the Tourranis, who are staying in a compound with other Iraqis, themselves long-time refugees in Lebanon.

Dr. Beldjebel is not only treating Tourrani, he is helping the family work through a deadline and a dilemma: whether or not to go ahead with the knee operation.

“Our visas will be out of date in 10 days,” Maysoun says. “Someone said we will have to pay $2,000 each to extend our stay,” she adds with a sigh.

Beldjebel tells her that the figure is suspiciously high. He suspects that the official in question is trying to extort vulnerable Iraqis—people who are in a bind and unaware of the Lebanese law. “We will check out the process fully for the visa issue,” says Beldjebel, trying to reassure the elderly couple.

It is all part of a typical day for the doctor, who has been in Lebanon for four years and now is the sole representative here of the St. Elizabeth College of Public Health and Social Work, based in Bratislava, Slovakia.

Lebanon currently hosts between 400,000 and 1 million Syrians, who have fled the brutal war there. Lebanon’s own 1975-1990 war was prompted partly by an influx of Palestinian refugees, around 400,000 of whom still stay in sometimes-violent camps around Lebanon.

Beldjebel has been “a tremendous help to those people he assists,” says Michel Kasdano, a retired Lebanese Army general who has worked with the Chaldean Catholic Church in Lebanon to provide assistance to Iraqi refugees.

There are around 8,000 Iraqi refugees in Lebanon—mostly Christians who fled after the 2003 US invasion and subsequent ethnic and sectarian blood-letting across the country.

Beldjebel’s history makes him perhaps uniquely attuned to assisting Christians in this region: He is a convert to Catholicism from Islam and as a consequence has not been able to travel home to Algeria to see his parents since 2009.

Sitting in a small, austere apartment above the Mar Elias church in East Beirut, near where the doctor often does his rounds, Nohoud Najib, an Iraqi Chaldean Catholic, is hoping to be resettled to a Western country. She’s in her second stint as a refugee, having fled to Lebanon in 2012.

“Before that, we were in Damascus[, Syria,] since 2009” she recalls. “But when the fighting got closer and the situation became too dangerous,” they had to move.

Prior to Damascus, they fled their home in Baghdad, Iraq, after threats of being kidnapped. “Our neighbor said our son’s name was on a list at a mosque nearby, and that it was no longer safe for us,” Ms. Najib says.

That was in 2007. She and her family spent the next two years in Dora, which was a mostly Christian area of Baghdad but has since seen many of the non-Muslim residents leave.

Now the worry is that Syria’s war could spread to Lebanon. Last week, Syria carried out airstrikes in northern Lebanon, saying that Sunni Muslim rebels were being sheltered there. The Syrian government is backed by Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Shia militia that is a powerful player in Lebanon’s complex sectarian politics.

“Fighting seems to follow us around,” Najib jokes. “We just want to go somewhere safe, and where my children can resume their education. We feel like we have been in limbo for years.”

Dr. Beldjebel has been a friend to the family since they arrived in Beirut, with handshakes and banter testifying to the warm relationship.

That type of relationship is one Beldjebel tries to cultivate with all the refugees he treats. His job is not just about diagnosing and prescribing, he says. “We are also here to listen to them. It’s a big part of our time,” he says. “They need to voice out their sufferings and the violence that they have been going through.”

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How To Live A Life Without Regret

Eric Barker, Barking Up The Wrong Tree, Apr. 9, 2013

Karl Pillemer of Cornell University interviewed nearly 1500 people age 70 to 100+ for his book “30 Lessons for Living: Tried and True Advice from the Wisest Americans.” He asked them what life lessons they would pass on.

Here’s the refrigerator list for regret reduction:

1. Always be honest. Avoid acts of dishonesty, both big and small. Most people suffer from serious regret later in life if they have been less than “fair and square.”

2. Say yes to opportunities. When offered a new opportunity or challenge, you are much less likely to regret saying yes and more likely to regret turning it down.

3. Travel more. Travel while you can, sacrificing other things if necessary to do so. Most people look back on their travel adventures (big and small) as highlights of their lives and regret not having traveled more.

4. Choose a mate with extreme care. The key is not to rush the decision, taking all the time needed to get to know the prospective partner and to determine your compatibility over the long term.

5. Say it now. People wind up saying the sad words “it might have been” by failing to express themselves before it’s too late.

And another important point—go easy on yourself regarding mistakes and bad choices you have made.

And what was the single most frequent piece of advice the older folks offered? Some version of The Golden Rule. In fact, it was probably mentioned more often than any other single piece of advice.

Why was this one mentioned the most and why was it so dominant—by far?

The version of the Golden Rule that most of the experts learned in Sunday school comes from the King James Version of the Bible and goes like this: “All things whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so to them.” But one reason why the Golden Rule comes up so frequently is that every religious tradition has a version of it.

Hinduism: “Knowing how painful it is to himself, a person should never do to others what he dislikes when done to him by others.”

Judaism: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor.”

And Islam: “None of you truly believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself.”

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A Letter to My Friends!

Dear Friend,

I had wanted to write a personal letter to you for some time as you have been on my heart. I remember our friendship from the past and our common experiences together. I had wanted to finish “My Story” and send you a copy, but how does time speed by. As a result I have decided to send you this letter. Actually, it is a reply to someone who wrote me asking for more information about the organization I am a member of. After writing it, I thought I could use it as a general letter to my old friends. I hope life has treated you kindly. We each have our own experiences which make us who we are and are becoming. I am sorry I am not able write to you personally but promise if you write, I will do.

Here is the letter I sent. It has some thoughts I wanted to share with you, also. Please take time to read it.

Thank you for your letter which I opened today. Thank you for your honesty and sincerity.

I am sorry to say that there is not a TFI office in your area for you to visit, in fact, there are very few TFI offices at this time. I can see two options for you to take at this moment. The first would be that you could start to frequent the new TFI website at http://portal.tfionline.com/. Here you will find as much spiritual feeding as you desire.

Our main goal as members of TFI is to help connect people to Jesus. Dear friend, if you have not prayed the prayer of salvation yet, I would like to invite you to right now. Jesus said he stands at the door of our heart and knocks. If anyone hears His voice and opens the door He will come in and have fellowship with him. (Revelations 3:20) Jesus is knocking at your heart´s door and wants to come in. Our body is of the flesh, but our essence is spiritual. God has created us with a spiritual void within our hearts which He alone can fill and satisfy. That longing that we experience where nothing in this life ultimately fulfills is that longing for God.

Jesus said on the cross, "I thirst." Humanity is thirsting for God, for their spirituality and the answer very simply is that Jesus is the answer. From the time of Adam and Eve in the Garden, man has been fooled into

thinking that eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil would make him wise and become as "gods." All of man´s eating from that tree has only brought us further and further from the simplicity which is in Christ.

God is love. God is a spirit. God is the spirit of love that longs to embrace every aspect of our lives. Jesus was the embodiment of the Spirit of God. He said, "I and the Father are one." He said, "I am the way, the truth and the life, no man comes to the Father, but by me." Dear friend, in all our trying to be good and righteous we fail. We cannot obtain unto God through our own fleshly efforts. We fall short and face our own lacks, impurities, selfishness, etc. We are separated from God and in our own strength cannot reach up to Him.

But God in His love and mercy has given us a way to salvation. God, the creator of the universe of time, space and matter, has stepped into the universe in the form of Jesus Christ, thus fulfilling over 300 prophecies in the Old Testament. Jesus walked among men performing many infallible miracles, the ultimate being His resurrection from the dead. His words and doctrines were not difficult and speak to the hearts of all men. He loves you Dear Friend, and wants to abide in your heart and live and work through you. One day, when you leave this earthly life He wants you to reunite with Him in His Heavenly realm.

You see, my friend, only God can give meaning to this meaningless world in which we live today. Peter said, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved."(Acts 16:31) Paul said it on this wise, "If you shall confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and shall believe in your heart, that God has raised Him from the dead, you shall be saved. For with the heart man believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord, shall be saved" (Romans 10: 9, 10&13)

God wants to live and dwell in us and with us and just requires that we willingly ask Him in. John says, "If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." (1 John 1:9)

Please prayer the following prayer with me, or something similar, if you have yet to experience the love of God in Jesus: "Dear Jesus, Please forgive me for the mistakes and sins I have made in my life. I have hurt others and have been selfish. I have been unable to keep myself holy. I have failed myself and others. Please wash away my sins with your blood from the cross. I now open up my heart and ask you to come in. Dwell in me and live in me. Fill me with your Holy Spirit that I might be come your follower, your disciple. I need you Jesus. Thank you. In Jesus’ name, I pray. Amen."

Dear Friend, if you have sincerely prayed this prayer, or one similar from your heart, Jesus has come into you as He said He would and will abide with you. He has already given you the gift of eternal life with Him in Heaven for eternity. The battle for your eternal soul is over and you are now Jesus´ forever. As Jesus said to Nicodemus, "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son, that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16) You now have that everlasting life. You now have Jesus in you.

Jesus went on to say to Nicodemus, "For God sent not His Son into the world to condemn it, but that the world through Him might be saved. He that believes on Him is not condemned: but he that believes not is condemned already.... And this is the condemnation that light is come into the world and men loved darkness, rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For everyone that does evil hates the light, neither comes to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. But he that does truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are made in God." (John 3:17-21) My friend, as a new born Christian you need to learn to abide in Christ. You need to learn to drink of the sincere milk of his word that you might grow thereby as Peter has said. (1 Peter 2:2)

Jesus said, " If any man loves me, he will keep my words: and my father will love him, and we will come unto him and make our abode with him." (John 14:23) As I said earlier you can find much feeding reading on the TFI website.

The second option, if you prefer to read on paper, is the formation course we have available in Portuguese. This formation course includes 7 booklets of approximately one hundred pages each. If you are interested in taking the course I could mail it to you one book at the time at a cost of 20 Euros per booklet including postage. If you are interested in receiving the certification for the course, after each book, I would ask you to write a 500-1000 word reaction answering some simple questions.

For those interested in a Bible course in English, I have available the 12 Foundation Stones Bible Study Course. The course booklet is 30 Euros plus postage. You would need to buy the supplementary booklets from http://www.auroraproduction.com/ which go for about $7. There about 13 optional books although all are not presently available. They also have beautiful music available. A monthly magazine called Activated in English can be subscribed at http://portal.tfionline.com/en/ or at http://www.activated.org/en/. If you prefer reading on line the above link has much feeding reading at Anchor and Director´s Corner and throughout the site free of charge.

The magazine Contato in Portuguese can be read on line on facebook at www.facebook.com/groups/187143591333710/ or type in “a famillia internacional” or order a paper copy from us at a cost of 20 Euros a year. At http://www.contato.org/ you can order additional books and cds for listening.



I hope this has been a help. If you have any other questions, please let me know. I am looking forward to hearing from you again. Yours sincerely, Dennis



PS: You could visit my website at http://fightforyourfaith.blogspot.pt/ or http://www.slideshare.net/DennisMolinski/newsfeed where I have articles in both English and Portuguese.

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The Atheist's Dilemma

Jordan Monge, Christianity Today, April 4, 2013
I don’t know when I first became a skeptic. It must have been around age 4, when my mother found me arguing with another child at a birthday party: “But how do you know what the Bible says is true?” By age 11, my atheism was so widely known in my middle school that a Christian boy threatened to come to my house and “shoot all the atheists.” My Christian friends in high school avoided talking to me about religion because they anticipated that I would tear down their poorly constructed arguments. And I did.

As I set off in 2008 to begin my freshman year studying government at Harvard (whose motto is Veritas, “Truth”), I could never have expected the change that awaited me.

It was a brisk November when I met John Joseph Porter. Our conversations initially revolved around conservative politics, but soon gravitated toward religion. He wrote an essay for the Ichthus, Harvard’s Christian journal, defending God’s existence. I critiqued it. On campus, we’d argue into the wee hours; when apart, we’d take our arguments to e-mail. Never before had I met a Christian who could respond to my most basic philosophical questions: How does one understand the Bible’s contradictions? Could an omnipotent God make a stone he could not lift? What about the Euthyphro dilemma: Is something good because God declared it so, or does God merely identify the good? To someone like me, with no Christian background, resorting to an answer like “It takes faith” could only be intellectual cowardice. Joseph didn’t do that.

And he did something else: He prodded me on how inconsistent I was as an atheist who nonetheless believed in right and wrong as objective, universal categories. Defenseless, I decided to take a seminar on meta-ethics. After all, atheists had been developing ethical systems for 200-some years. In what I now see as providential, my atheist professor assigned a paper by C. S. Lewis that resolved the Euthyphro dilemma, declaring, “God is not merely good, but goodness; goodness is not merely divine, but God.”

Joseph also pushed me on the origins of the universe. I had always believed in the Big Bang. But I was blissfully unaware that the man who first proposed it, Georges Lemaître, was a Catholic priest. And I’d happily ignored the rabbit trail of a problem of what caused the Big Bang, and what caused that cause, and so on.

By Valentine’s Day, I began to believe in God. There was no intellectual shame in being a deist, after all, as I joined the respectable ranks of Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers.

I wouldn’t stay a deist for long. A Catholic friend gave me J. Budziszewski’s book Ask Me Anything, which included the Christian teaching that “love is a commitment of the will to the true good of the other person.” This theme—of love as sacrifice for true good—struck me. The Cross no longer seemed a grotesque symbol of divine sadism, but a remarkable act of love. And Christianity began to look less strangely mythical and more cosmically beautiful.

At the same time, I had begun to read through the Bible and was confronted by my sin. I was painfully arrogant and prone to fits of rage. I was unforgiving and unwaveringly selfish. I passed sexual boundaries that I’d promised I wouldn’t. The fact that I had failed to adhere to my own ethical standards filled me with deep regret. Yet I could do nothing to right these wrongs. The Cross no longer looked merely like a symbol of love, but like the answer to an incurable need. When I read the Crucifixion scene in the Book of John for the first time, I wept.

But beauty and need do not make something true. I longed for the Bible to be true, but the intellectual evidence was still insufficient.

So I plunged headlong into apologetics, devouring debates and books from many perspectives. I read the Qur’an and Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion. I went through The Skeptic’s Annotated Bible and looked up Christian rebuttals to apparent contradictions. But nothing compared to the rich tradition of Christian intellect. I’d argued with my peers, but I’d never investigated the works of the masters: Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, Pascal, and Lewis. When I finally did, the only reasonable course of action was to believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

But my head and my heart suddenly switched places. Though I began to know the evidence for the Scriptures, my head full of answers, I began to feel distant from the story that had brought me to tears a month prior. When reading through the Passion narrative on retreat on Cape Cod in the spring, I remained utterly unmoved. I went out to pray.

I walked to a pond surrounded by trees and began praying by the water’s edge. I felt disconnected from God, from the friends I’d begun to hold dear, from my body itself. I begged God to make it all click, as a test for me to know that he was there. After an hour with no progress, I started to walk.

Following the pond to a stream, I began climbing through the surrounding thicket to see if I could reach the ocean a little ways down. I kept pausing, thinking, Do I want to go back? I left all my stuff behind. But each time, I renewed my steps, believing that I couldn’t quit until I’d made it to the end. I wouldn’t forgive myself if I just gave up and went back to where I’d started. I had some sense of direction of where I needed to go, but I didn’t know how to get there.

I climbed over branches and under bushes, sometimes going in the opposite direction for a while when the bramble grew too thick. I treaded lightly through marshes only to have the mud swallow my leg up to the knee. After pulling myself out, I started walking through the stream, since I figured I couldn’t get any dirtier, and the ground seemed to be most trustworthy along the middle of the river where the water had worn the path. So I followed it until the last light of day was waning.

I quickly realized that my journey through the briar patch was an apt metaphor. I’m trying to get somewhere, but I’m not sure how to get there. There’s no clear path, so I must proceed by trusting my instincts. I might even go off in the opposite direction for a little while. In the end, I may arrive right back where I started. But that’s okay too, because I’ll get there with a clearer head and everything will be waiting for me when I’m done. It won’t be easy. Sometimes I’ll get mired in the mud, or caught up in thorns. But I’ll make it through, though not without a few cuts.

If I wanted to continue forward in this investigation, I couldn’t let it be just an intellectual journey. Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31-32). I could know the truth only if I pursued obedience first.

I’d been waiting for my head and my heart to be in agreement. By the end of the church retreat, they weren’t completely in sync. Many days they still aren’t. But I realized that the unity could come later. If my heart had agreed at one point, and my head agreed now, then my heart would follow. I couldn’t let a malfunctioning heart delay the logical course of action, the obedience required by true faith.

I committed my life to Christ by being baptized on Easter Sunday, 2009.

This walk has proved to be quite a journey. I’ve struggled with depression. I would yell, scream, cry at this God whom I had begun to love but didn’t always like. But never once did I have to sacrifice my intellect for my faith, and he blessed me most keenly through my doubt. God revealed himself through Scripture, prayer, friendships, and the Christian tradition whenever I pursued him faithfully. I cannot say for certain where the journey ends, but I have committed to follow the way of Christ wherever it may lead. When confronted with the overwhelming body of evidence I encountered, when facing down the living God, it was the only rational course of action.

I came to Harvard seeking Veritas. Instead, he found me

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Jesse Ventura - Reptilian Conspiracy

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