Who could be comfortable connecting the National Security Agency (NSA) with God in the same sentence? But read on. The New York Times this week broke a new story with further astounding details concerning the NSA’s global surveillance program.

You knew it was cold when the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago kept its polar bear inside! And when every state in the union dipped below 32 degrees on Tuesday (including Hawaii).

Scientists think they’ve found the secret to our good and bad habits. It has to do with the pleasure-sensing chemical dopamine, coursing up and down our body’s internal highways. Dopamine “conditions the brain to want that reward again and again—reinforcing the connection each time—especially when it gets the right cue from your environment” (South Bend Tribune 1-4-11). For example, you enjoy munching on chips (no doubt a healthful kind). You usually do it before supper, while you’re watching the evening news.

(Spoiler alert: I’m against it.) It was practically a feeding frenzy this week, as Americans lined up across the nation to purchase their $2 Mega Millions lottery tickets before the Tuesday night drawing.

Twin holiday tragedies this past weekend have preoccupied both the news media and the nation. We’ve all seen the pictures. The Metro-North Railroad train, its locomotive and seven cars upended, splayed and flung beyond the tracks and nearly into the Harlem River. Four dead, 60 injured.  Just as tragic was the fiery crash of  actor Paul Walker, star of the “Fast and Furious” movie franchise. A security camera captured the Porsche Carrera GT’s explosion after slamming into a tree and concrete pole, killing both the actor and his friend and driver Roger Rodas.

Nathaniel Philbrick, in Mayflower, his acclaimed history of the Pilgrims, recounts how William Bradford, the intrepid leader of that courageous band of Puritans, years later described “that first morning in America.” Recalling with wonder their landing on the salty, windswept shores of Cape Cod Bay on November 15,

Can you believe it? Earth may boast (according to wiki.answers.com) 23,259,475,120 dialects, but researchers have discovered in a new study that when it comes to confusion, we all speak the same language! No kidding. It turns out that our English word, “Huh?”, is about as universal as it gets.

The scenes have been all too familiar—and tragically so. The photographs could have come out of the monster earthquake tsunami that leveled swaths of the east coast of Japan in 2011. Or the pictures could have been taken in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy that obliterated entire communities on our own eastern seaboard in 2012.

You could certainly draw that conclusion, given the findings released this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

For ninety days this summer this campus and congregation claimed God’s promise, “I will do a new thing. . . .