By Braden Campbell

Boston.com Staff | 12.21.14 | 7:45 AM

With 4:46 to go in the third quarter last Sunday, Patriots long-snapper Danny Aiken took the field with the rest of the kicking unit.

He lined up at Miamis 18-yard-line and snapped the ball to Ryan Allen, who deftly set it for Stephen Gostkowskis 35-yard field goal.

It wasnt until minutes later, when the announcement rang out over stadium PA, that Aiken knew what hed just been part of: The points were Gostkowskis 1,158th, 1,159th and 1,160thtwo more than Adam Vinatieri had scored in his illustrious career, and the most by anyone in team history.

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Gostkowski knew going in he was just a few points shy of breaking the record, but in that moment, he said, it was the furthest thing from his mind. Because to achieve the success he has, you have to learn to tune things out, whether those things are the roar of the crowd, an angry rusher, or history.

If you really just worry about what it takes to make a kick, and not worry about the scenarios and everything going on around it, the better off you are, he said. I think the less things I think about while Im out there, the better I fare.

Gostkowski would kick two more extra points that quarter and another field goal in the fourth, padding his team record to 1,165 points, and counting.

That game was the latest in whats been a brilliant season for the kicker. Hes 31 for 33 on field goals and a perfect 49 of 49 on extra points; at this point, Gostkowski is as close as it gets to automatic. But making it look so easy is really, really hard.

Read more:
Zen and the Art of Kicking Field Goals

JOHN GREIG, Sandy Jardine, Laura Tarbet.

As far as Ally McCoist is concerned, all three of those names should adorn the Hall of Fame wall on Ibroxs famous marble staircase.

The first two are club legends, synonymous with Rangers and the glory years of the past.

The other? An ordinary, working-class lady who spent 43 YEARS as the managers secretary serving the likes of Willie Waddell, Jock Wallace, Walter Smith and McCoist himself.

But Tarbets reward for her work at Ibrox was to be yet another innocent victim of the clubs brutal cost-cuts carried out by the current regime.

Whether her treatment was the final straw for McCoist before he tendered his resignation is up for debate. Undoubtedly, there were other reasons.

But as he eulogised about his former colleagues commitment to Rangers over the years its clear her exit was a contributory factor.

Greig, Tarbet and Jardine, who passed away in April, are no longer part of the furniture at Ibrox. And now McCoist has decided to go as well, whether its in 12 days, 12 weeks or the 12 months of his notice period.

Without divulging all of his reasons, the Rangers boss hinted that his sadness at losing key figures at the club played a part in his decision to quit.

He said: Its difficult to see people losing their jobs.If youve worked with someone for 20 years or so and they leave, its extremely sad. Im talking about very good people, great people.

Read the original here:
Rangers are losing too many people who are synonymous with the club, says Ally McCoist

With all the cultural decay going on around us, it is not surprising that we should see problems within the bosom of the institution called the Church.

The Church confronts an increasingly secular paradigm characterised by burgeoning hedonism, crass materialism and an obsession with power and status that breeds selfishness and exploitation.

In the 20th century, scientific and technological advances as well as trends in humanistic and social scientific thought, seriously diminished the spiritual parameters in western culture.

Long before, Emmanuel Kant had observed that the impact of liberal enlightenment on our spiritual life was such that if someone walked in while you were on your knees praying, you might be profoundly embarrassed.

Much is said about the failings of the Church by which is meant what the Reformation scholars called the Visible Church, organised religious organisations, always to be distinguished from the Invisible Church, the brotherhood of all believers and known only to Christ.

Someone once observed that the Church is a hospital for sick Christians and we are reminded that Christ came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. Thus it might be fitting if the Church is full of persons in want of spiritual healing, and who among us are not.

The historic visible church has never been immune to schism, heresy, and moral pollution reflecting the sinful nature of mankind, for it may have been St Augustine who voiced that nothing straight has ever been created out of the crooked timber of humanity.

It is not difficult to be cynical about organised religion considering the plethora of denominations springing up all over the place each claiming to have some monopoly on truth and each pastor, apostle, and prophet, most with their qualifying doctorates of divinity, assuming to hear the voice of the one true God. Scandals over the past two decades in almost all sects, not least the Catholic paedophilia scourge, has weakened faith in many of the proclaimers of Christs Gospel.

However, he himself said that many would come in his name, hirelings whose own the sheep are not. When Pope Francis ascended the papacy and began his reforms, a friend in Argentina advised him to be careful because the friend warned: The Borgias are still in the Vatican, a reference to the infamous family a scion of which (Rodrigo Borgia) became Pope Alexander VI (1492-1503).

As with all mythologies (mythology used purely to mean a theoretical construct), Christian claims to ideological purity and certitude has historically led to gross intolerance and obscurantism of dogma.

More:
THE BIG PICTURE: The Church of Christ