5 books you should read to know more about the Holy Spirit

The approach to Pentecost is a great time to reflect more on the gift of the Holy Spirit and the role it plays in our individual lives.

The amazing blessing available for every Christian is the gift of the Holy Spirit, but we can sometimes forget He's there, feel confused about His purpose, or limit His power.  

It's helpful to look to the words of our Lord Jesus Christ himself, who on the night He was to be executed explained to His disciples that He would send the Advocate to be with them.  He also explained exactly what this Advocate would do to help them.

In John 14:16-17 it says, "And I will ask the Father and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you for ever - the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him.  But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you." (NIV)

Then in John 14:26, we read: "But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you." (NIV).

Acts 2 describes the Holy Spirit coming down upon the believers in a powerful way on the day of Pentecost.  Here it is described as "tongues of fire" coming down to rest on each person.  The result is that each of them was filled with the Holy Spirit and "began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them".

Further down the chapter, Peter explains that the prophesy in Joel of God's Spirit enabling people to prophesy and see visions has now been fulfilled with the coming of Christ.

These few passages paint an amazing picture of the power of God's Holy Spirit and its empowering of His people.  And yet, the truth is, for many of us, the Holy Spirit can still feel like something of a mystery.  And for some believers, He can even arouse suspicion.

Yet the Holy Spirit is an essential part of the Trinity and so it's essential we get to know Him personally in our own walk of faith and experience Him for ourselves - and that means in our hearts, not just our heads.

If you don't know where to start, then here are some great books that will explain more about the nature of the Holy Spirit and the radical way in which He can transform your personal relationship with God.

'How to be Filled with the Holy Spirit' by A.W.Tozer
This book draws on sermons preached by Tozer at his church in Chicago and seeks to explain who the Holy Spirit is and how to be filled with Him. But it's much more than an explainer.  This book will challenge readers to reflect on how much they really desire to be filled by God's Holy Spirit.
Here's a taster: "He is indivisible from the Father and the Son, so that if you were to be suddenly transferred to heaven itself you wouldn't be any closer to God than you are now, for God is already here."

'The Mystery Of The Holy Spirit' by R.C.Sproul
This is another popular title and well respected in evangelical circles.  It's not only theologically sound, but Sproul manages to communicate the Person of the Holy Spirit in ways that can be easily grasped and applied by believers in their personal walk of faith.  His writing is also beautifully descriptive at points: "The Holy Spirit fills what is empty.  He conquers the void.  When His work is finished, the once lonely universe is teeming with a plethora of flora and fauna.  The barren wasteland becomes a pulsating arena of life."

'40 Days with the Holy Spirit' by R.T. Kendall
If you are looking for something that is very applicable to your Christian walk, give this book a try.  Similar to daily devotionals that you might use in your quiet times, this is divided into daily readings with space for journalling so that readers can take down their experiences of the Holy Spirit during their prayer times.  The emphasis of this book is a personal encounter with the Holy Spirit and it would suit anyone looking for a resource to enhance their prayer time.

'The God I Never Knew' By Robert Morris
In this book, Morris, the founder of Gateway Church in Texas - the home of worship artist Kari Jobe - seeks to remove the mystery of the Holy Spirit and clarify what He promises to do in the believer's life:
· Dwell within you
· Be your helper
· Guide you into all truth
· Comfort you
· Pray for you
· Show you things to come
· Never leave you

'Forgotten God: Reversing Our Tragic Neglect of the Holy Spirit' by Francis Chan
Another popular title and an Amazon #1 Best Seller with a 5 star rating, the 'Crazy Love' author pours his heart and soul into painting a picture of the Holy Spirit that is deeply personal - a Helper who intimately knows us and wants to help form us into witnesses for Christ.  As the title of the book suggests, Chan is writing from the perspective that the Holy Spirit has been neglected in the Church for far too long, with disastrous results, and the same may be said of our own personal faith lives.
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Protest after health care worker stabbed to death

Deputy police minister promises mobile station outside Gugulethu Community Health Centre at KTC Day Hospital

By Buziwe Nocuze
25 May 2017

Workers from the local clinic together with community members march to Gugulethu police station to hand over a memorandum. Photo: Buziwe Nocuze

Protesters gathered outside the Gugulethu Community Health Centre at KTC Day Hospital on Wednesday in response to the murder of a health worker. Workers from the clinic together with community members then marched to Gugulethu police station to hand over a memorandum.
The event was organised by the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC).

This comes after a porter, Andile Magama, died after he was stabbed on his way home outside the clinic.

Ncediswa Ngcobondwana, an activist with the TAC, told the crowd, “You know this is not the first time that something like this happened. Now, we are afraid, and we want help from the police and also from the community.”

“We are not feeling safe so we want the visibility of the police next to the clinic everyday. If that can happen, we believe incidents like these won’t happen again,” she said.

Resident Thembile Makana said, “How many people do we want to see dead before we report these criminals? Why are we hiding them while we can identify them? Let’s unite and fight these criminals.”

The memorandum was received by the Deputy Minister of Police Bongani Mkongi at Gugulethu police station who promised that by next week there would be a mobile station at the clinic.

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Published originally on GroundUp .

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Study: cannabis may reduce crack use

A medical cannabis grower.
Shivanshu Pandev/flickr, CC BY-SA

North America is in the midst of a drug overdose disaster. In British Columbia, Canada, where nearly 1,000 people died of overdose in 2016, officials have declared a public health emergency.

While over-prescription of painkillers and contamination of the illegal opioid supply by fentanyl, a potent synthetic analgesic, are at the heart of the problem, opioid users are not the only ones at risk. Public health officials in BC are warning that fentanyl has been detected in many drugs circulating on the illicit market, including crack cocaine.



The possibility of opioid overdose is an unusual new threat for people who use crack, which is a stimulant. Its consumption, either through smoking or injection, is not necessarily deadly.

If misused, though, crack can certainly cause health harms, including cuts and burns from unsafe pipes. Sharing pipes can also transmit infectious diseases such as HIV and hepatitis C. In the long run, frequent and heavy crack consumption may contribute to psychological and neurological complications.

Despite the estimated 14 to 21 million cocaine users worldwide, the majority of whom live in Brazil and the United States, scientists have yet to find an effective medical treatment for helping people who wish to decrease problematic use of the drug.

Cannabis-assisted treatment

Now Canadian scientists are working on an unconventional substitution for it.

Research done by the BC Centre on Substance Use in Vancouver shows that using cannabis may enable people to consume less crack. Could marijuana become to crack what methadone is to heroin – a legal, safe and effective substitute drug that reduces cravings and other negative impacts of problematic drug use?

Between 2012 and 2015, our team surveyed more than 100 crack cocaine users in the city’s Downtown Eastside and Downtown South neighbourhoods. These are poor areas where crack is common among people who use drugs. We found that people who intentionally used cannabis to control their crack use showed a marked decline in crack consumption, with the proportion of people reporting daily use dropping from 35% to less than 20%.

Data for this study, which was recently presented at the Harm Reduction Conference in Montreal, were drawn from three open and ongoing prospective cohorts of more than 2,000 people who consume drugs (not necessarily just stimulants). They were the Vancouver Injection Drug Users Study (VIDUS); the AIDS Care Cohort to Evaluate exposure to Survival Services (ACCESS); and the At-Risk Youth Study (ARYS).

We used harmonised procedures for recruitment, follow-up and data collection. Individuals in these cohorts were recruited through snowball sampling and extensive street outreach in the Downtown Eastside and Downtown South areas.

Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside has a history of innovative harm reduction responses to drug use.
Emma Kate Jackson/flickr, CC BY

First, we asked participants if they had substituted one drug for another in order to control or slow down their consumption. A total of 122 participants (49 from VIDUS, 51 from ACCESS, and 22 from ARYS) reported that they had done so at least once in the last six months. These were the subjects included in our analysis, contributing to a total of 620 interviews over three years.

When we analysed these participants’ crack use histories over time, a pattern emerged: significant increases in cannabis use during periods when they reported they were using it as a crack substitute, followed by decline in the frequency of crack use afterwards.

Self-medication

Our findings are in line with a smaller case-series study in Brazil that followed 25 treatment-seeking individuals with problematic crack use who reported using marijuana to reduce cocaine-related craving symptoms. Over a nine-month follow-up period in that study, conducted by Eliseu Labigalini Jr, 68% of participants had stopped using crack.

As in our study, in Brazil cannabis use peaked during the first three months of follow-up, with only occasional use of cannabis reported in the six months after that.

Qualitative studies in Jamaica and Brazil also indicate that crack users frequently self-medicate with cannabis to reduce cravings and other undesirable effects of crack.

Other research has shown that long-term cannabis dependence might increase cocaine cravings and risk of relapse. Rather than contradict findings from Canada, Brazil and Jamaica, these discrepancies suggest that patterns of cannabis use and dependence, and the timing of self-medication with cannabis, may play a role in individual outcomes.

Building on the finding from this preliminary study, the BC Centre on Substance Use is planning more research to confirm whether using cannabis might be an effective strategy for people seeking to reduce their use of crack or other stimulants, either as harm reduction or as treatment.

Canada’s recent move to legalise and regulate marijuana should facilitate this work. For decades, stigma and prohibition have blocked rigorous scientific evaluation of cannabis. Now these obstacles are beginning to disappear, enabling our team to better understand and unlock the therapeutic potential of cannabinoids.

M-J Milloy, is a Research Scientist with the BC Centre on Substance Use and Assistant Professor in the Division of AIDS, UBC Department of Medicine , University of British Columbia and M. Eugenia Socias, Postdoctoral Fellow and clinician-scientist with the BC Centre on Substance Use and UBC Faculty of Medicine, University of British Columbia

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Why Trump's White House leaks

Trump and Lavrov in the Oval Office on May 10, 2017. (Russian Foreign Ministry via AP)
Russian Foreign Ministry via AP

According to the Washington Post, President Donald Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and members of his delegation during a May 10 meeting in the Oval Office.

In a May 15 story, the Post reported that White House staffers tried to contain the damage by striking Trump’s allegedly inappropriate comments from internal memos.

So how did the Washington Post get the story?

The newspaper story cites “current and former U.S. officials” as sources. Later, the reporters offer more detail, describing one source as “a former senior U.S. counterterrorism official who also worked closely with members of the Trump national security team.”

Translation: The public learned of Trump’s apparent overstep because more than one member of the U.S. intelligence community was willing to leak the information.

Professor of the practice and faculty director of the master’s in applied intelligence at Georgetown University, I study, teach and write about homeland security and law enforcement intelligence. I’m curious about why intelligence officers disclose classified information and how that affects their work.

Why whispers start

Leakers and whistleblowers often are motivated by a lack of trust in their chain of command. They denounce wrongdoing and express their dissent through leaking information to the media or advocacy groups. In my view, one example of wrongdoing that is particularly salient today is political interference in intelligence activities.

Trust is undermined when the gathering or sharing of intelligence influences politics or is influenced by politics.

Bottom-up politicization happens when members of the intelligence agencies themselves target individuals or issues for political reasons. For instance, intelligence agencies may go after political opponents to maintain or increase the level of influence they enjoy with the government.

J. Edgar Hoover was renowned for using the resources of the FBI to interfere in politics and keep his job as the head of the FBI for 48 years.

Former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in 1961.
Library of Congress

Top-down politicization happens when policymakers – all the way up to the president – spin intelligence and investigations to support their political agenda. A famous case study is the 2002 national intelligence estimate on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Then-Vice President Dick Cheney reportedly pressured CIA analysts to quickly produce a report confirming the existence of WMD. Although the evidence was rather tepid, Cheney and George W. Bush used that intelligence to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Another famous example of top-down politicization comes from President Richard Nixon, who obstructed the special investigation in the Watergate scandal.

Plenty of bad blood

How does this relate to Trump’s most recent meeting with Lavrov?

This latest political drama happened in the midst of a high-profile investigation regarding possible collusion between the Trump campaign staff and the Russian government. And it comes just a week after the dismissal of FBI Director James Comey escalated the tension between the White House and intelligence agencies.

The firing of Comey rattled the FBI, spurring some agency employees to express anonymously their intention to wage a “concerted effort to respond over time in kind.”

But the bad blood goes back even further. In February, Trump accused the FBI of leaking information about the Russian investigation. And, in March, the president expressed his belief that Trump Tower was wiretapped by former President Obama with the help of the Department of Justice.

Hostility between Trump and the intelligence agencies has been heightened by a series of decisions by the White House.

First, on Jan. 31, 2017, Trump fired Sally Yates, acting attorney general, after she informed the White House several times that then National Security Advisor Michael Flynn had lied about his contacts with Russians.

Then, Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from any investigation related to the Russia meddling with the 2016 presidential elections because he omitted to disclose two meetings with the Russian ambassador.

In addition, Rep. Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, had to recuse himself from the investigation on Russian interference in the 2016 election because he was being investigated by the House Committee on Ethics for making unauthorized disclosures of classified information.

Finally, Comey was dismissed a few days after he requested more resources to accelerate the probe on Russia’s interference in the election.

These events undermine the perception of integrity of the investigative process – not just by the general public, but by intelligence officers and investigators. In this environment, it should be expected that more classified information will be disclosed and whistleblowers will come forward. And, there’s a real possibility of an intensified political tug of war in which leakers and whistleblowers deliberately undermine the White House while President Trump tries to do the same to the Russian investigation.



Frederic Lemieux, Professor of the Practice and Faculty Director of the Master's in Applied Intelligence, Georgetown University
 Read the original article.

Constitutional Court judges face much more than legal questions in Zuma case

South African President Jacob Zuma faces a vote of no confidence.
GCIS

South Africa has been treated to an overdose of legal arguments as its Constitutional Court grapples with whether or not a parliamentary vote of no confidence in President Jacob Zuma should be conducted by secret or open ballot.

The country’s opposition parties are trying to get Zuma removed. Their latest attempt was triggered by his irresponsible decision to sack Pravin Gordhan, the widely respected finance minister.

I sat and listened as lawyers for both parties argued their cases before the constitutional court judges. I’m a political scientist, not a lawyer. I therefore deserve the label “layman” and my understanding of what’s at stake should be understood within that framework.

I take this liberty because, while the matter is patently legal, its origin is political. This is obvious from the fact that some political parties and civil society groups have declared their wish that Zuma be removed from office. And, whatever the court decides, the reaction by interested parties and the public is bound to be political.

The case

Following numerous failed attempts at securing a vote of no confidence against the president in parliament, the United Democratic Movement (UDM) and others decided to approach the court. They hope to secure an order instructing the Speaker of the National Assembly to let parliamentarians cast their votes in secret.

The UDM took this route after the Speaker turned down its request for a secret ballot. The Speaker’s position is that she is neither obliged by the Constitution, nor permitted by parliamentary rules, to allow MPs to vote in secret.

In a nutshell, the UDM wants the Court to declare that the Speaker is constitutionally obliged to allow a vote of no confidence by secret ballot. Alternatively, it wants the court to say the Speaker is permitted by parliamentary rules to do so.

Understandably, lawyers for Zuma have opposed both sides of the UDM’s argument.

The trouble here is that the Constitution states categorically – in Part A of Schedule 3(6)(a) – that a President must be elected by secret ballot. But there is no equally explicit provision that says a vote of no confidence in the President must be decided by secret ballot. This has created a lacuna to be exploited by various parties.

Those calling for a secret ballot contend that the Constitution enjoins MPs to hold members of the Executive to account. Therefore, they argue, it goes without saying that a vote of no confidence – the highest form of holding a President to account– must be conducted in a way that ensures the highest form of protection from negative consequences.

The secret ballot, the UDM argues, would give MPs, especially those from the ANC, maximum protection against retribution by the President and the governing ANC if they chose to vote with the opposition.

This is what is termed “purposive” interpretation of the Constitution. It says that the purpose of the drafters of the Constitution was to ensure maximum accountability of members of the executive.

The UDM contends that any form of oversight by MPs that leaves room for possible punishment by members of the Executive would not be in keeping with the spirit of the Constitution.

A philosophical case

It would seem that the Constitutional Court is dealing less with a clear-cut matter of legal facts, but more with a philosophical (jurisprudential) question. The Court is being called on to infer the intention of the drafters of the Constitution, or to interpret the Constitution in way that would, unavoidably, reveal the judges’ philosophical inclination on a morally fraught matter.

The question is a moral one because fundamentally it’s about the conduct of a President who has been flagrantly injuring the interests of the country. While the justices of the Constitutional Court are men and women of law, they are learned and conscious enough to appreciate the contextual weight and social implications of their judgments.

Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng.
GCIS

This is not to drag judges out of the neutral province of law into the entangled web of politics. It is to sharpen the question they are confronted with, and to crystallise the philosophical call to be made. Confronted with the spectre of a rogue president, would the drafters of the Constitution have chosen to grant MPs the maximum protection, enabling them to decide whether or not to rescue their country?

If the judges can’t establish how the drafters of the Constitution would resolve this conundrum, they should put themselves in the shoes of a morally sound person who must choose between saving their country or letting it go up in smoke.

This, essentially, is the moral dilemma confronting the Court.

Do the judges craft a jurisprudential judgment that will protect their own country from a president who is on the rampage, or do they wash their hands and deliver a judgment cloaked in legal technicalities that would facilitate the ultimate ruin of the Republic?

What needs to happen

As the consciences of our judges continue to be haunted by the moral dilemma placed before them, it’s useful to recall the words of Harvard University law Professor Roberto Mangabeira Unger:

No amount of factual inquiry seems sufficient to prove the truth of a general conception of social order.

Indeed, South Africa’s judges are not dealing with facts about truth. They have been called on to resolve a conceptual question about the best social order for posterity in South Africa.

Prince Mashele, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for the Study of Governance Innovation, University of Pretoria

This article was originally published on The Conversation.