I only have wifi while I’m on the bus so it is easier to post updates of our Israel trip on Facebook.  Here’s the link to follow the photo updates: facebook.com/RevSteveWood

We landed safely in Tel Aviv this afternoon. Thank you for your prayers.

We had a free evening to acclimate so several of us walked down to Joppa. Saw the house of Simon the tanner (Acts 9-10).

We’re right on the Mediterranean Sea (pics on FB). A very nice place to land and recover.

Tomorrow we’re off to Caesarea and will be staying at a kibbutz on the Sea of Galilee.

I leave today with 50 folks from SAMP on a 13 day teaching tour of Israel.  I’d welcome your prayers – for safe travel, no illness or injury, no terrorist attacks, no bombing of Iran, etc.

As I can I’ll update the blog, though, Facebook might be easier.

Here’s our itinerary.

I now have in my possession a modern replica of the whisky that accompanied Earnest Shackleton on his journey to the South Pole having obtained one of the six bottles sent to Charleston.  I’ve been waiting for its release for a while.  And, I’m fairly curious to sample the product.  This past summer, the NYT wrote about the fascinating discovery of the whisky under Shackleton’s Antarctic hut in 2007:

Collectors in America will shortly be able to buy, nestled in a little crate made in China to look authentically Scottish, not a rarity, exactly, but a replica of one: whisky fabricated to resemble the whisky that the explorer Ernest Shackleton took with him to the Antarctic so long ago that people had forgotten all about it. In February 2007, workers trying to restore Shackleton’s hut there accidentally came across three cases of Scotch — “Rare old Highland malt whisky, blended and bottled by Chas. Mackinlay & Co.” — frozen in the permafrost. The labels on the whisky say it was intended for what Shackleton was planning to call the Endurance expedition but ended up being known as the Nimrod expedition of 1907, which was the earlier and lesser-known of his two great journeys but the more successful. He actually got to within about 100 miles of the South Pole, farther south than anyone had gone previously.

Read the rest (it’s a good article).

Here’s a review from The Whisky Exchange.

I’ll let you know how it tastes.

Would you like to see Galileo’s retraction of his theories?  The document excommunicating Martin Luther?

Now, you have the chance.  They are among the closely guarded documents that the Vatican has put on display to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the establishment of its archives at its current location in Rome.

This past Wednesday the RCC opened an exhibition of 100 documents – a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of documents in its archives – in Rome’s Capitoline Museums.  The exhibit is entitled “Lux in Arcana: The Vatican Secret Archives Reveals itself.”

According to the exhibition’s website, it is the first, and possibly the only time, the documents will be seen outside the Vatican walls

Britain’s Telegraph newspaper live-blogged the exhibit’s opening on its website on Wednesday.

Some of the documents on display include:

• A letter from an English nobleman to Pope Clement VII in 1530 that demands that King Henry VIII be allowed to divorce Catherine of Aragon in order to marry Anne Boleyn.
• An 1887 letter from a Native American chief written on a strip of bark that refers to the pope as the “Grand Master of Prayers.”
• The astronomer Galileo’s retraction of his theories of the galaxy after his trial on heresy charges in 1633.
• Documents from the trials of the Knights Templar.
• The excommunication decree of reform leader Martin Luther.
• The abdication deed of Queen Christina of Sweden. Rumored to be a hermaphrodite, she gave up her throne in 1654 to convert to Catholicism and move to Rome.

The Vatican archives are typically only seen by closely scrutinized researchers and scholars.

(h/t: Brian)

At Carnegie Hall, gospel singer Wintley Phipps delivers an amazing rendition of Amazing Grace. In his explanation of the song he says,

“A lot of people don’t realize that just about all Negro spirituals are written on the black notes of the piano. Probably the most famous on this slave scale was written by John Newton, who used to be the captain of a slave ship, and many believe he heard this melody that sounds very much like a West African sorrow chant. And it has a haunting, haunting plaintive quality to it that reaches past your arrogance, past your pride, and it speaks to that part of you that’s in bondage. And we feel it. We feel it. It’s just one of the most amazing melodies in all of human history.”

I love that kind of insight.  Mr. Phipps then delivers a stirring performance bringing the audience to its feet.

Enjoy.

From Reuters:

Among Catholic-Protestant splits on display during Pope Benedict’s visit to Germany is a disagreement over whether Martin Luther, the 16th century reformer who launched the split in western Christianity, has now been rehabilitated.

Pope Leo X cast Luther out of the Roman Catholic Church in 1521 with a vociferous decree branding him “the slave of a depraved mind” and calling his followers a “pernicious and heretical sect.” But his present-day successor, Benedict, spoke so positively of Luther’s deep faith during a visit to the monk’s old monastery in Erfurt on Friday that Germany’s top Protestant bishop announced Luther had effectively been rehabilitated.

“Luther has experienced a de facto rehabilitation today through this appreciation of his work,” Bishop Nikolaus Schneider, head of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), announced to journalists on Friday after talks with Benedict. “We heard this very clearly from the mouth of the pope,” he said. “What follows now formally is another question … but that’s not so important for me.”

Vatican spokesman Rev Federico Lombardi begged to differ on Saturday. “To say that would be exaggerated,” he told journalists in Freiburg, the last stop on the pope’s four-day tour of his homeland.

Read it all.

Nathan Finn offer this for your consideration:

Every semester, I teach a couple of church history survey courses at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. The first course, Church History: Patristic and Medieval, more or less covers the period from the end of the first century AD to the dawn of the sixteenth century. One of the topics I address is the crusades. Many students are very interested in the crusades. They hope that understanding the religious wars between Christians and Muslims will help us better navigate our own contemporary context, particularly the War on Terror and growing emphasis on evangelical missionary work in unevangelized Muslim nations.

Unfortunately, the crusades are white hot landmines on the battlefield of political correctness. Many on the cultural Left use the crusades as an argument for secularism, or at least the muffling of (conservative) religious voices in the public square. They strongly imply that America in particular and Western Culture in general are to blame for most of the ills around us. Some even insinuate that we deserve the scorn of Islamic terrorists, though to be clear, the Left believes that the terrorists take their scorn too far in resorting to violence. Not surprisingly, many leftwing Christians make similar arguments. Just read the reports of any national gathering of the mainline denomination of your choice over the past eight or ten years.

Read the rest.

From Phil Cooke:

In filmmaker Ken Burns’ remarkable series on the Civil War, historian Shelby Foote describes General Ulysses S. Grant as having “4am Courage.” He was describing how cool Grant was under fire, and even if awakened at four in the morning with a battlefield emergency, he wouldn’t be startled. He’d keep a cool head and make strong decisions. That kind of calm comes from FOCUS. Focus allows you to push out all the different and often conflicting opinions, voices, and hysterics that everyone around you is hearing, and concentrate on the single most important task of the moment.

When sudden bad news happens, are you shocked, startled, or freaked out? Or are you able to focus, look straight at the challenge, and make a good decision?

The truth is, “4 am courage” is something we need 24 hours of the day…