Brian Brown, from the National Organization for Marriage, sends along the following:

At 10:00am next Wednesday, July 30th, pastors and church leaders from across California will join together with their colleagues in Florida and Arizona, forming a “Pastors Rapid Response Team” to protect marriage in three states which will see marriage amendments on the ballot this November.

The Rapid Response Team will encourage, equip and inform pastors about ways in which they can promote the marriage amendments in their own congregations. If you live in California, Florida, or Arizona (or know people in these states), please spread the word to your pastor, priest, or church leader!

The first of what will be monthly conference calls is to be simulcast (in both English and Spanish) at locations across California, Florida and Arizona. Already, more than 150 churches have volunteered to host the simulcast in California, plus 20 sites in Florida and currently 2 in Arizona. With simulcast sites across each state, the monthly simulcast events will bring together church leaders in each community, forging relationships across denominational lines, as we all work together to protect marriage.

What: Pastors Rapid Response Team Simulcast
When: Wednesday, July 30 at 10:00am PDT
Who: Pastors, priests, and other church leaders
Where: Simulcast locations throughout California, Florida, and Arizona.

Visit www.ProtectMarriageSD.com for the latest list of simulcast host locations, event information, schedules, and other marriage resources for church leaders.

Attendees are requested to register online for the event to ensure that sufficient materials are available at each host location. If your church would be interested in hosting an event, there is still time for that also. For more information about hosting the simulcast (either with online broadcast or via telephone hookup with Powerpoint presentation), contact Chris Clark at 619-415-5453 or marriagequestion1@skylinechurch.org.

The Rapid Response Team is an important opportunity for church leaders to stand together, making sure that they are informed and equipped to effectively mobilize their congregations in support of marriage this fall. Please ask your pastor or priest to register today!

Jody noted some amusing mistranslations last week (here and here). Well, there are a lot more where they came from. John Derbyshire provides the best of “Engrish.” (Note that according to our managing editor some of the spelling errors may offend our clientele.)

So that’s what happened to Anthony . . .

Readers of First Things will thoroughly enjoy Eric Cohen’s new book, In the Shadow of Progress, released this month from Encounter Books. Last week, Leon Kass introduced the book at an event put on by The New Atlantis at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC (audio available here). According to Kass, “it’s a wonderful book: wise, deep, and beautifully written,” and although “we cannot, we are warned, tell a book by its cover, . . . here the title and cover have been carefully selected to telegraph the message, [and] it behooves us to pay attention.”

The cover borrows its image from the frontispiece designed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau for his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences:

“the god Prometheus , descending on a cloud to bring fire and light to the exemplary men of genius while warning us ordinary mortals to stand clear of the dangerous gifts of knowledge and transformative power. . . . As Rousseau would later explain . . . the pictured Promethean god, simultaneously bringer of light to geniuses and prophet of shadowy danger to humankind, is none other than the Citizen of Geneva himself.”

But exceeding the insightful beauty of the cover, is what the book contains inside–as Kass describes it, “reasoned and sober speech, rather than the fiery and self-indulgent polemic of J.J. Rousseau,” you’ll find in this book thoughtful, well-written commentary on pertinent issues of modern technology and its burdens and blessings on humanity.

Get your copy here.

Yesterday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, in an opinion written by Judge (and famed law-and-religion scholar) Michael McConnell, issued its opinion in a case called Colorado Christian University v. Weaver.  (Click here for more:  http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/07/24/ccu).  In a nutshell, the decision and opinion are fantastic.  The court held that the Constitution does not permit Colorado to discriminate against “pervasively sectarian” religiously-affiliated schools by excluding otherwise-eligible students who attend such schools from state scholarship programs.  Along the way, the court read very narrowly the Supreme Court’s decision, a few years ago, in Locke v. Davey, which some have interpreted to allow governments to exclude religious schools from education-reform and –funding programs.  That decision, Judge McConnell wrote, “does not extend to the wholesale exclusion of religious institutions and their students from otherwise neutral and generally available public support.”

There’s a lot going on in the case, but the bottom line is:  Excellent.  I encourage everyone interested in education reform, church-state matters, and religious freedom generally to check it out.  (Link:    http://www.ca10.uscourts.gov/opinions/07/07-1247.pdf)

Here’s another reason to travel to Belgium, if the world’s best beer and chocolate weren’t enough to draw you there already: its beautiful, well-preserved beguinages.

If feminism means a desire for independence from patriarchal authority, the beguines — a Roman Catholic laic order that began in the 13th century and branched across northwest Europe — represented, perhaps, the world’s oldest women’s movement.

I can only speculate that these women of simplicity likely experienced more fulfillment than participants in the more infamous woman’s movement centuries later.