Yes, coffee is good for your health

College certainly ruined my life for good. That's when I started drinking lots of coffee. Cramming for exams, you know. It was a natural progression from there to my years as a newspaper reporter and a law student. It's even worse working in a law office. There'll always be deadlines to beat, which means many sleepless nights and more coffee, not to mention that cafes are a rage these days. Ah, all that talk about the bad things imbibing too much coffee does to you. And now, here comes this piece from the New York Times saying more or less that yes, coffee is in fact, good for your health. If that's any consolation, consider too that spending too much time in your favorite cafe (or coffee shop, as it is called in Manila), can also be bad for your pockets!

A chronicler of the Soviet gulag writes 30

He called Stalin “the man with a moustache” and paid dearly for it. But the man would struggle on through a series of imprisonments, intimidations, censures and personal crises over a span of many decades with an uncompromising integrity very few of his contemporaries could claim as their own. His courage gave the 20th century a voice of dissent yet unmatched – one that singularly confronted the horrors of Soviet Communism with a literary account that was at once haunting as it was eloquent. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 89, stood in the best Russian literary tradition that counts Turgenev, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy as some of its illustrious forbears.

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Will the Anglican center yet hold after this?

Having attended an Anglican Church in Amsterdam that was decidedly evangelical in orientation, I have developed a certain fondness for the Anglo-Catholic tradition. My brief but treasured encounter with Anglicanism has given me a fresh appreciation for ritual, tradition and liturgy that my broader evangelical upbringing sorely lacked. Perhaps I can say that in the Anglican community I discovered in Amsterdam, I saw that the fusion of evangelicalism (the stress on personal conversion and commitment to Christ) and Catholicism (the stress on continuity with tradition and creed) is in fact possible. The experience allowed me to view Roman Catholicism (the religion of my younger years) from a third perspective. Yet I have always wondered how evangelicals within an increasingly liberal church Communion as far as its North American brethren are concerned could choose to stay within its confines. Today, the Anglican Communion is struggling to keep the center from collapsing. It seems that it is only a matter of time before the dispute over issues of sexuality (read: ordination of homosexual bishops and the blessing of same-sex unions) rents the communion into an irreconcilable split.