From The Toronto Globe and Mail 14 February, 2000:
Obituary: Charles Schulz - Cartoonist was the man behind Charlie Brown - Comic strip about lovable loser, beagle and friends was syndicated in more than 2,600 newspapers in 75 countries.
Observers comment that this "Comic Strip", which began on Oct. 2, 1950, contained many themes of Christian teachings, and probably reached more people in today's secular world than the work of many preachers. Schulz died the day before his final Peanuts comic strip was published. Writing in The Globe and Mail, on February 15 under the heading "God's cartoonist - Charles Schulz created a wildly successful comic strip - and a new theological vehicle many other have emulated", the columnist, Michael Valpy has explained most beautifully the various cartoon characters' theological equivalents with touching insight. In one passage he explains "No matter how hard they try, the children of Peanuts never solve their problems. They do not learn lessons from life. They are unable to produce any radical change for the better in themselves.
Witness Charlie Brown year after year, decade after decade, running to kick the football that Lucy pulls away from him at the last moment. Or Charlie on the baseball diamond, after 43 consecutive strike-outs, getting into a heated discussion on the travails of Job.
Witness his friend Linus - the seeker after false gods - waiting in vain each year for the Great Pumpkin to appear on Halloween.
Witness worldly, epicurean Snoopy. In the words of Arkansas Presbyterian clergyman Robert L. Short - whose Gospel According to Peanuts, published in 1965, has sold 10 million copies - Snoopy is the typical Christian, a flawed character who is nonetheless good. Witness the proud Lucy, who would rather die than ask forgiveness..."
COMMENT: He was a Sunday School teacher, and lay minister to remember.

From The Weekly Telegraph No. 447, of February 16-22, 2000:
No celebration for the UK's 200th birthday by Robert Hardman:
The United Kingdom will not be celebrating its own 200th birthday next year, the Government has decided. Nor will it mark the 200th anniversary of the creation of the Union flag on the same day.
Britain will, however, hold extensive celebrations to mark the centenary of the confederation of Australia, which also falls on that date.
The bicentenary of the 1801 Act of Union will be reached on Jan 1, 2001.
In response to a written parliamentary question asking what celebrations were planned for the bicentenary of the Act of Union, Baroness Scotland of Asthal, the junior Foreign Office minister, replied: "None."
The question was put by Lord Laird, an Ulster Unionist life peer. He said: "Most countries would use their bicentenary as an opportunity to do something, but the only answer I've had is a four-letter word." He added: "A country which forgets its history is doomed."
It was on Jan 1, 1801, that the Irish parliament was absorbed into the British Parliament to create the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The title was altered after Irish independence to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Lord Laird said he had expected at least some recognition of an important date such as an official stamp and a touring exhibition explaining how the UK came about.
"I suppose this is another example of Cool Britannia," he said. "Look at the events the Americans and the French organised for their bicentenaries."
A Downing Street spokesman said that any celebration was a matter for the Foreign Office. The Foreign Office refused to expand on Lady Scotland's one-word answer.
But ministers are planning extensive celebrations of Britain's Australian colonies becoming the Commonwealth of Australia, and more commemorations in July marking the centenary of the passage of the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act.
The Union flag has existed in its present form since the day the Act of Union came into effect. Flag experts from all over the world are coming to Britain to mark the occasion next year with a conference.
Officials from the Flag Institute, which researches and promotes vexillology (the study of flags), have written to the Prime Minister and Government departments several times, requesting some official recognition of the anniversary. They have been told that this is not possible.
COMMENT: More important: on Jan. 1, 1801, 2,520 years (i.e. - the Biblical "Seven times" punishment) from the deportation of the main body of Northern Israel by the Assyrians expired. Is that part of the "hang-up"?

From The Toronto Globe and Mail 28 February, 2000:
OBITUARY: IOANNA Mother of Bulgaria's exiled King Simeon II, has died. (...after a brief illness, in Estoril, Portugal where she lived alone.) She was 92. Ioanna, born Giovanna of Savoy, was the daughter of Italy's former king Vittorio Emanuele. She is survived by Simeon, 62, and a daughter, Marie-Louise.

From The Toronto Globe and Mail 1 March, 2000:
Did Romans reach Mexico? A short article under this heading explains: Anthropologist Roman Hristov of Southern Methodist University in Dallas believes a small black terra-cotta head unearthed near Mexico City in 1933 is a Roman artifact... estimated to have been fired 1800 years ago. Tests yield this date.

From The Weekly Telegraph No. 449, of March 1-7, 2000:
Under the heading "ARTS NEWS" we learn that a Buyer requested that a Pre-Raphaelite artist add clothing to a painting of an 18-year-old girl condemned to die by drowning. The Martyr of the Solway, painted by Sir John Everett Millais around 1871 commemorated the farmer's daughter, Margaret Wilson, a Free Church member who refused to recognise the established Church of Scotland. She was sentenced to death by a court at Wigtown in 1685 for rebellion in "refusing Prelacy and the oath of Abjuration". Chained to a stake in the Solway Firth, she is said to have sung Psalm 25 as she met her end. Just before she vanished beneath the waves, observers reported that her auburn hair floated like a halo on the water. Further information in the article concerned the painting and similar artistic works.

From The Toronto Globe and Mail 13 March, 2000:
Abortion rate reaches new high - Montreal. The number of abortions in Quebec has more than doubled in the past 20 years, giving it one of the highest rates in the world outside Eastern Europe. There were 41 abortions for ever 100 live births in the province in 1998, according to newly released figures from the Quebec Bureau of Statistics. There were 75,757 babies born in Quebec that year, compared to 31,329 pregnancies that were aborted. According to Statistics Canada, 70, 549 abortions were performed in hospitals and another 35,650 in abortion clinics in 1995, the most recent year for which national figures are available.

From The Weekly Telegraph No. 451, of March 15-21, 2000:
While this is not news you might have "missed", one particular summary article by Bruce Johnson in Rome has caught our eye. Headed "Pope seeks pardon for sins of the Church", it states: THE POPE, and members of his Curia have publicly asked for God's pardon for the Roman Catholic Church's "sins". The mea culpa, first mooted in 1994, was intended to heighten the Church's own awareness of its "historic wrongs" and give it an opportunity for renewal in the new millennium. In his homily in Vatican city, the Pope said that now was a "favourable occasion for the church to implore the divine pardon for the wrongs of all of its believers". "We ask forgiveness for the divisions among Christians, for the use of violence that some Christians used in the service of the truth and for the behaviour of mistrust and hostility sometimes used with regards to followers of other religions," he said. "At the same time that we confess our sins, we forgive those committed by others against us. Throughout the course of history, Christians have suffered numerous instances of vexation, arrogance and persecution because of their faith. "For the role that each one of us has had, with his behaviour, in these evils, contributing to a disfigurement of the face of the Church, we humbly ask forgiveness." During the three-hour ceremony, on the first Sunday of Lent, the Pope looked resolute. He was wheeled up the central nave of St Peter's on a platform. The procession began with a symbolic pause before Michelangelo's sculpture of the Pieta, which represented the maternal embrace of the sufferings of the world. Israel's Chief Rabbi, Israel Meir Lau, later described the service as "a severely warped view of history" and said he was "deeply frustrated" by the omission of the Holocaust. Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, spokesman for the Muslim Council of Great Britain, was "disappointed"; he said the mea culpa was "a step in the right direction" but Muslims had hoped for an explicit apology for the suffering and deaths of Muslims in the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition.

From The Toronto Globe and Mail 20 March, 2000:
"Out of sites" Nearly 48 per cent of shoppers who set out to buy a Bible leave the bookstore without buying one, often because they are overwhelmed by the hundreds of choices available, says Zondervan Publishing. It offers 400 Bibles, in six categories, at its online store, www.amazon.com/zondervan.
COMMENT: Too much of a good thing? When the AV was first translated and printed, it fostered, even among the unchurched, the development of a universal cultural basis and a religious common-ground in English-speaking lands. Widely memorised, and oft-repeated, its verses became a reliable storehouse of God's Word, quotable to a public familiar with its exalted tones and agreed verities. Today, translations can differ quite remarkably from one another in respect of one or more fundamental theological concepts, according to the inclinations of individual scholars, and consequent doubts are thereby cultivated in the minds of readers which undercut the certainty in its message. Perhaps the very abundance of available alternative translations, some of dubious reliability, has contributed to the malaise of the Laodicean Church in our time!

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