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Featured Term selected at random:ILLUMINATING GRACE Actual grace conferred by God to enlighten the mind. Its main function is to enable a person to believe with certitude in God's revelations, and to better understand the mysteries of faith and of divine providence. It is thus fundamental in the spiritual life, since moral conduct and sanctity absolutely depend on the prior convictions of faith which reside in the intellect illuminated by God's grace. All items in this dictionary are from Fr. John Hardon's Modern Catholic Dictionary, © Eternal Life. Used with permission.

...The “Bible,” a single book with the whole of the Scriptures included, is indeed modern. It is a by-product of the printing press, fostered by the doctrines of Protestantism. For it is not until the advent of Protestant teaching that the concept of the Bible begins to evolve into what it has become today. The New Testament uses the word “scriptures” (literally, “the writings”) when it refers to the Old Testament, but it is a very loose term. There was no authoritative notion of a canon of the Old Testament. There were the Books of Moses and the Prophets (cf....

MY LATEST ENCOUNTER WITH NAZI-LIKE MUSLIM THUGS Exclusive: Pamela Geller says, 'Brooklyn College is not a safe environment for human beings' I spoke last Wednesday night at Brooklyn College, if you can still call it that. Every seat was filled – 80 percent by Muslim students. If this is the future, it is murder. The sneers, the jeers, the laughter – my discussion of the most savage jihad acts was met with huge peals of laughter. It wasn’t a talk; it was a vicious circus: lawless and shameful. From the moment I began to speak, the Muslim students were cackling...

In the latest sign of a changing housing market, homeownership rates are at a quarter-century low, while the rental-vacancy rate is close to the slimmest proportion in more than two decades, according to government data released Tuesday. The seasonally adjusted homeownership rate, which shows the share of occupied homes in which an owner lives, fell to 63.8% in the first quarter — the lowest proportion since the end of 1989, the U.S. Census Bureau said. Families with income both above and below the median have seen drops in homeownership rates over the past year. Weak income growth and difficult-to-get mortgages...

“Most of us are so used to running out to the supermarket or to Wal-Mart for whatever we need that we never even stop to consider what would happen if suddenly we were not able to do that. Already the U.S. economy is starting to stumble about like a drunken frat boy. All it would take for the entire U.S. to resemble New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina would be for a major war, a terror attack, a deadly pandemic or a massive natural disaster to strike at just the right time and push the teetering U.S. economy over the edge.”...

Houston police said if it wasn't for several brave customers, a police officer wouldn't have survived a brutal attack inside a Walmart. According to investigators, the Houston Community College police officer was working a second job as a security guard at a Walmart off South Post Oak Road in the Meyerland area. Around 2 a.m. Tuesday, a man wielding a large hunting knife walked up to the female guard and, without warning, attacked. "She was sitting there watching the registers, providing security, when he just walked in and attacked her," said Kese Smith, a public information officer with the Houston...

“The Evangelical voting bloc is a dead thing,” Iowa Republican activist Tom Stockebrand says, a glint of mischief in his eye. A top state party official nods in agreement. “If you didn’t see it tonight, it’s 2015 now. Those days are gone.” He’s speaking as attendees stream noisily out of a packed auditorium in Waukee, Iowa, at Point of Grace church, the site of this year’s Faith and Freedom Coalition summit in the state. It’s nearly 10:00 p.m., and for the past five hours around 1,000 conservative Evangelicals have sat on raised bleachers, listening to nine potential White House contenders...

Senate Sponsor Rubio, Marco [R-FL] [13] Cotton, Tom [R-AR] [11] Blunt, Roy [R-MO] [4] Risch, James E. [R-ID] [4] Sullivan, Dan [R-AK] Senate Cosponsor Kirk, Mark Steven [R-IL] [6] Toomey, Pat [R-PA] [4] Risch, James E. [R-ID] [3] Rubio, Marco [R-FL] [2]

After being fired upon, the ship issued a distress call, prompting the United States Navy to direct the destroyer, the Farragut, to the area. The Farragut, the defense official said, is now about 60 miles away. He said that so far there has been no communication between the United States Navy and Iran, but added that American aircraft are standing by to monitor the situation.

Contending that modern automobiles contain computer programs that entail trade secrets and are too complex to be touched by do-it-yourself car buffs, the General Motors Corporation is urging the government to make unauthorized auto repair illegal. It won’t take an Act of Congress to accomplish this objective. A mere reinterpretation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) would do the trick. GM spokesman Lee Hunsacker asserted that “letting just anyone look under the hood is archaic in our day and age. What if they mess something up? The victims of any subsequent crashes will sue us. We are the deep-pocket...

Live Presser.

Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake was under intense pressure Tuesday morning to defend her response to the violence that has ripped apart her city following the funeral of Freddie Gray, a young black man who died after being in police custody -- particularly Rawling-Blake's remarks in which she suggested those who "wished to destroy" need their space. With more than a dozen officers injured in clashes with rioters and looters, some -- including Maryland's governor -- are questioning whether Rawlings-Blake should have acted sooner and taken a tougher tone to prevent the demonstrations from getting out of control.

For all her recent efforts to prove her progressive credentials to Democratic primary voters and caucus participants, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has not made those on her party’s left entirely comfortable with her. And she never will. Because of that, a credible alternative would have the capacity to rally progressive Democrats behind a challenge to the former first lady, possibly even creating an entertaining skirmish or two. But Clinton has as much chance of convincing Democratic progressives she is truly one of them as Mitt Romney had of convincing tea party conservatives and evangelicals he shared their...

Why in the world has JP Morgan accumulated more than 55 million ounces of physical silver? Since early 2012, JP Morgan’s stockpile has grown from less than 5 million ounces of physical silver to more than 55 million ounces of physical silver. Clearly, someone over at JP Morgan is convinced that physical silver is a great investment. But in recent times, the price of silver has actually fallen quite a bit. As I write this, it is sitting at the ridiculously low price of $15.66 an ounce. So up to this point, JP Morgan’s investment in silver has definitely not...

California could serve as a model for overcoming barriers to expanding health coverage to uninsured Latino populations, according to an analysis by the Commonwealth Fund. The Commonwealth Fund cited California -- which has about 14 million Latino residents -- as a model for how to overcome such barriers. For example, the analysis noted that California: * Does not have a five-year delay before documented immigrants become eligible for coverage; and * Has invested in wide outreach efforts

The size and scope of the symbiotic relationship between the Clintons and their donors is striking. At least 181 companies, individuals, and foreign governments that have given to the Clinton Foundation also lobbied the State Department when Hillary Clinton ran the place, according to a Vox analysis of foundation records and federal lobbying disclosures. The following chart shows entities that donated to the foundation and lobbied the State Department during Hillary Clinton's tenure. The totals include funding from both the corporate and charitable arms of listed companies (the Gates and Walton foundations are named to illustrate that point). The chart...

I want nothing in this world more than to be a father. Yet I can’t bring myself to celebrate same-sex marriage. Gay marriage has gone from unthinkable to reality in the blink of an eye. A recent Washington Post/ABC News poll shows that support for gay marriage is now at 61 percent—the highest it’s ever been. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in the case that many court-watchers believe will deliver the final blow to those seeking to prevent the redefinition of marriage. By all measures, this fight is over. Gay marriage won. As a 30-year-old gay man,...

The Civil War was the first major test of whether the Constitution and Lincoln’s vision of a government, “of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” were true, noble and worthy aspirations of man in a new relationship with government or merely words that politicians said but really didn’t mean. The chasm between those who would continue and advance slavery and those who held dear the idea that all men are created equal became so great that the only possible resolution to the crisis was an armed conflict with blood running on our...

HARTSVILLE, Tenn. — Lynda Douglas thought she had a deal with Tennessee. She would adopt and love a tiny, unwanted, profoundly disabled girl named Charla. The private insurance companies that run Tennessee’s Medicaid program would cover Charla’s health care. Douglas doesn’t think the state and its contractors have held up their end. In recent years she says she has fought battle after battle to secure essential care to control Charla’s seizures, protect her from choking and tube-feed and medicate her multiple times a day. Washington regulators are about to initiate the biggest overhaul of Medicaid managed-care rules in a decade....

We've all had the experience of getting a song stuck in our head for an extended period of time. If you're really unfortunate, that song may be one by Christopher Cross or Air Supply. But sometimes, these "earworms," as they are dubbed, can lead to good things. That recently happened to one of us right here at BreakPoint. While reading a biography of the early 20th century evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, my colleague and friend Roberto Rivera found himself humming and singing the gospel song "It Is No Secret (What God Can Do)." He's not sure why the song popped...