We are with Global Proclamation Congress-Come join in 2016 !!

Video: https://vimeo.com/127281918

What: The Global Proclamation Congress for Pastoral Trainers (GProCongress) connects, unites and strengthens pastoral trainers in order to better deliver training to the world's 2 million-plus undertrained pastors.

Who: The GProCongress, convened by RREACH, is for anyone involved in formal and non-formal pastoral training of any kind, anywhere. We expect attendance of up to 5,000 pastoral trainers working in 200 countries, including individuals, churches, organizations and institutions.

How: This specialized gathering will fulfill its purposes by providing opportunities to Build Community, Explore Opportunity, Discover Resources and Receive Encouragement. To carry momentum created by the GProCongress into the future, attendees will commit to training, on average, 25 pastors a year for the following four years (2016-2020).

Why: Pastoral health is systemically enhanced by better delivery of more pastoral training with coordinated follow-up. Healthy pastors lead healthier churches, and healthier churches are more able to reach their communities for Christ.

Anticipated Outcome: The measurable outcome is 100,000 connected, united, strengthened pastors and 20,000 more pastoral trainers ministering in 200 countries by 2020.

When: June 15-22, 2016 (follow-up: June 23, 2016-December 31, 2020)

Where: Bangkok, Thailand

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Stress Is Your Brain Trying to Avoid Something

Stress exists in every workplace, and all of us have probably tried a few trendy stress-management approaches. But rather than trying the latest fad, it may be more effective to understand how stress works and where it comes from, so that you can create your own methods for dealing with it.

Stress is an emotional response; like all emotional responses, it emerges from the functioning of the motivational system. Your motivational system engages goals and gives them energy so that you can pursue them. Simply put, when you succeed at your goals, you feel good, and when you don't succeed you feel bad.

Stress is a negative emotion, so the first thing we can see about stress is that it reflects a goal you are not currently achieving.

https://hbr.org/2015/08/stress-is-your-brain-trying-to-avoid-something

Do Supreme Court Decisions Move Markets?

Stock traders might want to start paying a bit more attention to the Supreme Court.

That's according to one research report published this week that says Supreme Court decisions moved the market value of publicly traded companies by a net $140 billion between 1999 and 2014.

But unlike economic data or other typical market-moving news, there is often an hours-long time lag in trading around Supreme Court decisions. The implication, according to the report, is that there might be arbitrage opportunities for savvy traders willing to sift through complex legal rulings.

"This is not a market that's particularly well understood, so it's taking a lot longer for traders to sort it out," said Daniel Katz, an associate professor at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law, who was a lead author on the report, which was produced by a four-person team including another law professor and a legal analytics consultant.

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2015/08/26/do-supreme-court-decisions-move-markets/?mod=WSJBlog

Killer facts: The scale of the global arms trade

• A definitive figure for the value of international conventional arms transfers is difficult to calculate with precision. In 2010, the total value, as recorded in national statistics, was approximately US $72 billion. Since then, it is estimated that it the arms trade has been approaching US $100 billion annually. [Source: Solutions, "The Arms Trade Treaty: Building a Path to Disarmament", 2013] 
• The annual authorized trade in small arms and light weapons exceeds US $8.5 billion. More than 1,000 companies from nearly 100 countries produce small arms and light weapons. [Source: Small Arms Survey]

http://blog.amnestyusa.org/justice/killer-facts-the-scale-of-the-global-arms-trade/

Chelsea Manning: “Why Speaking Out Is Worth the Risk”

Chelsea Manning is serving a 35-year prison sentence for leaking classified US government documents to the website WikiLeaks. From her prison cell in Kansas, Chelsea tells us why speaking out against injustice can be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Why did you decide to leak documents about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?

These documents were important because they relate to two connected counter-insurgency conflicts in real-time from the ground. Humanity has never had this complete and detailed a record of what modern warfare actually looks like. Once you realize that the co-ordinates represent a real place where people live; that the dates happened in our recent history; that the numbers are actually human lives – with all the love, hope, dreams, hatred, fear, and nightmares that come with them – then it's difficult to ever forget how important these documents are.

Chelsea Manning: "Why Speaking Out Is Worth the Risk"
http://blog.amnestyusa.org/us/chelsea-manning-why-speaking-out-is-worth-the-risk-2/

Alvin Plantinga's Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism

Plantinga's book is a semi-popular treatment of the conflicts, real or perceived, between science and religion, broadly construed. Because these disciplines are so broadly construed, the Christian who is interested in apparent conflicts between science and biblical Christianity will likely be somewhat disappointed in Plantinga's treatment. In the two chapters on "Evolution and Christian Belief," for example, one will find no engagement whatsoever with the biblical text; the discussion is restricted to the compatibility of theism with evolutionary biology. That is because Christian belief is taken to be what Lewis called "mere Christianity," which does not include any specific creation account. So while the Christian reader may be readily convinced of Plantinga's claim that no conflict exists between theism and evolutionary biology, he may still be left wondering how the biblical creation stories are to be properly interpreted and to what degree the evidence of evolutionary biology is compatible with that interpretation.

Read more: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/where-the-conflict-lies-science-religion-and-naturalism#ixzz3ji62vd8H

8 Creative Techniques to Cope with Painful Emotions

Many of us have a hard time coping with negative emotions. This makes sense. "Painful feelings like anxiety, sadness, anger and shame tap into the parts of our brain that are connected to survival," according to Joy Malek, M.S., a licensed marriage and family therapist. For instance, the anger we feel when we're hurt is the same as the flight, fight or freeze response we experience when our survival is seriously threatened, she said.

We also tend to learn very early that getting mad or crying is not OK, said Meredith Janson, MA, LPC, a therapist in private practice in Washington, D.C. who specializes in expressive arts therapy. "As a mother of a toddler myself, I see every day how children can easily become overwhelmed by their feelings of sadness, frustration and anger. There is a temptation to distract the child or to cheer them up in order to make all the 'fuss' stop."

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New Law School Courses Explore Nietzsche, Guns and Bible

A trip to a shooting range, a deep dive into Nietzsche and an exploration into what's ailing American cities. These are among the adventures that law school students can look forward to this fall.

The law school curricula is always evolving. There will always be courses on torts, property, civil procedure and other core subjects. But other offerings reflect the passions and problems of the day. Law Blog takes a look at some of the more unorthodox ones on the schedule this coming academic year.

• New York University's Barry Friedman is teaching a new course called "Democratic Policing" that looks at the "deep difficulties with policing in the United States" and the "failure of democratic processes and accountability."

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China Sees Red: Christian Protest Puts Hundreds of Crosses Back in Public

Several churches held a prayer service outside a government office yesterday, holding up crosses and banners that read, "Can't remove the cross in our hearts," reports the Union of Catholic Asian News.

The cross dispute is "destined to become one of the 'pain points' in the history of the [Chinese] church's development," wrote Lude Wang in a Pushi Institute for Social Scienceanalysis highlighted by ChinaSource.

"At its core, the Zhejiang Cross Dispute has revealed that in light of the backdrop of a new society, neither the church nor the state has sufficiently prepared to enter into a mature and constructive dialogue; nor have they shown a readiness to settle their differences and conflicts on the basis if the rule of law," she wrote. "How the church will coexist within a community holding different values to itself is an urgent question."

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