The contrast between then and now was placed in sharp relief this week as Anglicans gathered to discuss the significance of the 1963 Congress and the future of the church. A crowd of 150 or so, respectable by 2013 standards, turned up at Wycliffe College on the campus of the University of Toronto to hear a list of speakers that included several prominent bishops from Africa. “We’re interested in [the Congress of 1963] as a symbol of how different our world is now,” said George Sumner, principal of Wycliffe College. He chuckles at the thought: “Fifteen thousand people and the front page of The Globe is not our world any more.”

As Dr. Sumner left campus with a journalist in tow this week, his route highlighted the influence the church once held. He left the Anglican college where he works only to see another, Trinity College, across the road. He cut through Queen’s Park Circle, named for Her Majesty, Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church, and headed across the city to Church Street, named when there was only one church in town and it was Anglican.

He stopped at St. Paul’s Church on Bloor Street where he introduced a speaker who holds one of the church’s grandest titles. The Most Reverend Dr. Mouneer Anis, Bishop of Egypt, North Africa and the Horn of Africa, President Bishop of the Church in Jerusalem and the Middle East, is a smiling, compact man with greying hair and the hurried gait of a former physician.

Read it all from the globe and Mail.

West Bromwich Albion dealt Manchester United’s hopes of automatic Champions League qualification a serious blow with a smash-and-grab 1-0 victory at Old Trafford on Saturday.

West Brom took a 64th-minute lead when Chris Brunt’s free-kick cannoned into the net off team-mate Jonas Olsson and goalkeeper Boaz Myhill preserved their advantage by saving a Robin van Persie penalty.

It meant that United fell to a third consecutive Premier League defeat for the first time since December 2001, following previous losses at Chelsea and Everton.

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Matthew B. Crawford burst upon the scene in 2009 with a compact, powerful book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work (Penguin), a macho denunciation of the contemporary world of cubicle life and an ode to the joys of mechanical dexterity and productivity. Having grown up for a time in a California commune, and having filed off (some of) his rough edges while earning a Ph.D. in political philosophy at the University of Chicago, he found his deepest satisfactions in solving engine problems for motorcycle riders, those who took up what he called the “kingly sport that is like war made beautiful.” He doesn’t sound like somebody who has much acquaintance with war, but no matter. When his customers rode off, he knew ”” and they knew ”” that the problem had been solved.

Now, in his new book, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Crawford expands on his notion of knowing and problem-solving to offer a critique of contemporary manipulated attention and self-formation. Shop Class contrasted skill-based, craft-oriented knowledge and the satisfaction it brings with the kind of understanding he acquired studying physics as an undergraduate at the University of California at Santa Barbara or philosophy at Chicago. The certainties of physics might establish an intellectual foundation, and philosophical ambiguities may delight, but not much compares to the roar of a bike.

In both books, Crawford writes in the tradition that defends crafts and guilds while denouncing the evils of mechanization and alienation, free trade and modernization. You can find conservatives and radicals in this tradition, and Crawford has expressed delight at having been called both a Marxist and a neocon. In Shop Class he went for grit, and it mostly worked. He talked “craft,” but it was noisy, scruffy craft with tough old masters and eager, reverential apprentices getting grimy while sharing dirty jokes. Kelefa Sanneh, in The New Yorker, ungenerously but not inaccurately called the book “in large part a treatise on the joys and frustrations of manliness in a postmanly age.”

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[Easter]…is the proclamation of a war already won. The war is at an end ”“ even though here and there troops are still shooting, because they have not heard anything yet about the capitulation. The game is won, even though the player can still play a few further moves. Actually he is already mated. The clock has run down, even though the pendulum still swings a few times this way and that. It is in this interim space that we are living: the old is past, behold it has all become new. The Easter message tells us that our enemies, sin, the curse and death, are beaten. Ultimately they can no longer start mischief. They still behave as though the game were not decided, the battle not fought; we must still reckon with them, but fundamentally we must cease to fear them anymore. If you have heard the Easter message, you can no longer run around with a tragic face and lead the humourless existence of a man who has no hope. One thing still holds, and only this one thing is really serious, that Jesus is the Victor. A seriousness that would look back past this, like Lot’s wife, is not Christian seriousness. It may be burning behind ”“ and truly it is burning ”“ but we have to look, not at it, but at the other fact, that we are invited and summoned to take seriously the victory of God’s glory in this man Jesus and to be joyful in Him. Then we may live in thankfulness and not in fear.

–Karl Barth Dogmatics in Outline (New York: Harper and Row, 1959), p. 123

“The compelling evidence for me is the unanimous testimony of all the apostles and even a former persecutor like St. Paul,” said Brant Pitre, assistant professor of theology at Our Lady of Holy Cross College in New Orleans. “There was no debate in the first century over whether Jesus was resurrected or not.”

Scholars say that the witnesses to Christ’s resurrection are compelling for a variety of reasons.
“People will seldom die even for what they know to be true. Twelve men don’t give up their lives for a lie,” said Ray, who recently returned from France, where he was filming his “Footprints of God” series at the amphitheater in Lyon, the site of a persecution in A.D. 177. “The martyrs of Lyon underwent two days of torture and all they would say is, ”˜I am a Christian.’ They knew the resurrection was true and didn’t question it.”

Barber also highlighted the diversity of sources and how they include different details as well as passages that do not paint the disciples in the best light.

“In the Road to Emmaus story, they write that they didn’t recognize him,” said Barber. “Our Biblical accounts are our best evidence.”

Several of the scholars pointed to 1 Corinthians, where Paul states that Christ appeared to 500 people.

“Some want to shy away from the Gospels because they say they were written later,” explained Barber. “If you want to believe that they were written later, then why wouldn’t the Gospels have made use of this piece of evidence from 1 Corinthians?” asked Barber.

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Marci Hamilton, professor of public law at Yeshiva University, was the attorney for the city that opposed the church expansion. She’s become a leading critic of RFRA, and argues that the law was unconstitutional from the start. Now, she says, state lawmakers have turned the law into a tool for intentional discrimination.

“The original federal RFRA was misguided and a leap from prior First Amendment doctrine,” she wrote on her blog about the Indiana law, “but it was nothing like this new iteration in the conservative states.”

Lawmakers tinkering with the RFRA language in recent years have turned it into a political minefield, says J. Brent Walker, executive director for the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, which has supported RFRA laws since the 1990s. The 1993 version protected believers against the government. Some newer state versions also protect corporations, and can be used in civil lawsuits between individuals.

Walker says now it’s time to take a break, since RFRA’s reputation has taken such a hit.

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From there:

Noted blogger and conservative Anglican theologian The Rev. Canon Kendall S. Harmon, who runs the highly-trafficked weblog TitusOneNine, announced today that he is giving up blogging. Dr. Harmon, an Oxford-educated theologian, explained the sudden change as an inevitable move that was long overdue.

“No matter how you look at it, the Anglican blogosphere has been an abject failure,” Harmon said in a telephone interview from his home in Summerville, South Carolina. “What has it done? Has it exposed the spiritual depravity of the Episcopal Church’s leadership? No. Has it been a key source of information for tens of thousands of Anglicans in America, who up to now depended entirely on the mainstream media and diocesan newsletters? Please! Has it brought together orthodox Episcopalians from all over the country, and helped position them for a renewal of Anglicanism in North America? Yeah”¦” he huffed, “Right.”

Some of Harmon’s colleagues were stunned at his announcement. “I just saw him at a Starbucks in Plano a few days ago,” said The Rev. Canon David Roseberry. “He had his laptop open and his cel phone to his ear. After I got my skinny venti mocha latte, I shouted his name several times. At one point I banged on the counter really loud to get his attention. He didn’t even look up. I know he heard me, because he raised his hand and made some gesture, like he was waving toward the door. But he was fixated on the screen, pounding the keyboard like a man possessed. He was truly in his element.”
Harmon has been aggressively dieting since the summer of 2006, and some experts speculate that the reduced caloric intake may be affecting his judgement, perhaps loosening his grip on reality. “Come to think of it, the frantic calls between the hours of midnight and 3:00 a.m. have increased dramatically,” says Bishop Martyn Minns of Virginia. “But on the other hand, look at him – he’s positively svelte. One might even say ”˜aerodynamic.’”

Tenuous connection to reality or not, Harmon says he is excited about combining exercise with his diet. “Now that I won’t be spending nine, ten, eleven hours a day parked in front of a computer working on this stupid blog, I can spend more time on my pilates.” Neighbors even claim they have been awakened in pre-dawn hours by the sound of Tae-Bo tapes, coming from Harmon’s residence.

“He used to be such a nice boy,” said Mrs. Mildred Kratz, an across-the-street neighbor of Harmon’s. “Always blogging. I’d see him in the yard and say, ”˜Now Kendall, you need to get back in there and blog. That blog’s not going to write itself!’ And we’d just laugh and laugh. Nowadays, the only time I see him is when he walks down the driveway to get the mail, and even then, he doesn’t speak”¦ just makes a big point to flex his glutes as he walks back inside.”

But how are men to call upon him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without a preacher? And how can men preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach good news!” 16 But they have not all obeyed the gospel; for Isaiah says, “Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?” So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes by the preaching of Christ. But I ask, have they not heard? Indeed they have; for “Their voice has gone out to all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world.” Again I ask, did Israel not understand? First Moses says, “I will make you jealous of those who are not a nation; with a foolish nation I will make you angry.” Then Isaiah is so bold as to say, “I have been found by those who did not seek me; I have shown myself to those who did not ask for me.” But of Israel he says, “All day long I have held out my hands to a disobedient and contrary people.”

–Romans 10:14-21

In the Obama administration, there are people who know that the Iranians are anti-Semitic, but they don’t know what to do with that fact and put this mental derangement on a distant shelf. They negotiate with the Iranian leaders, as if anti-Semitism was some odd quirk, instead of what it is, a core element of their mental architecture.

There are others who see anti-Semitism as another form of bigotry. But these are different evils. Most bigotry is an assertion of inferiority and speaks the language of oppression. Anti-Semitism is an assertion of impurity and speaks the language of extermination. Anti-Semitism’s logical endpoint is violence.

Groups fighting anti-Semitism sponsor educational campaigns and do a lot of consciousness-raising. I doubt these things do anything to reduce active anti-Semitism. But they can help non-anti-Semites understand the different forms of the cancer in our midst. That’s a start.

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He turns rivers into a desert, springs of water into thirsty ground, a fruitful land into a salty waste, because of the wickedness of its inhabitants. He turns a desert into pools of water, a parched land into springs of water. And there he lets the hungry dwell, and they establish a city to live in; they sow fields, and plant vineyards, and get a fruitful yield. By his blessing they multiply greatly; and he does not let their cattle decrease. When they are diminished and brought low through oppression, trouble, and sorrow, he pours contempt upon princes and makes them wander in trackless wastes; but he raises up the needy out of affliction, and makes their families like flocks. The upright see it and are glad; and all wickedness stops its mouth. Whoever is wise, let him give heed to these things; let men consider the steadfast love of the LORD.

–Psalm 107:33-43

It’s a good thing so many films, books and television shows are fixated on life after death, Baylor University scholar Greg Garrett said. Because we need them.

“For many of us, if we don’t tell these stories about the afterlife then there’s a lot about this life that doesn’t make sense,” says Garrett, a professor of English who teaches courses in fiction and screenwriting at Baylor.

Garrett boasts a doctorate in English from Oklahoma State University, a master of divinity from the Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas, numerous short stories and books ”” including critically acclaimed novels ”” and various scholarly articles.

But Garrett has been enjoying the limelight lately because he has combined all those skills and interests with another set of specialties: Christian spirituality, homiletics theology, film and popular culture.

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Bless our God, O peoples, let the sound of his praise be heard, who has kept us among the living, and has not let our feet slip.

–Psalm 66: 8-9

A local church sought my advice a few years ago in reversing their decline in attendance. All their questions were programmatic””What kind of music does your church play? What do you wear on Sundays? How do you present announcements? Do you serve coffee and donuts?

All they seemed to be looking for was the right tweak in methodology that would attract people.

While methods can make a difference, programmatic changes alone are not going to turn a church around. When a church is in decline, the problem has a much deeper root. So I told that church that what needs to be addressed is not a program, a method, or a ministry, but the church’s soil.

The soil is the church’s culture””the complex blend of norms, beliefs, attitudes, traditions, and (yes) practices that define a congregation.

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Nigerian troops discovered a Boko Haram bomb factory this week after they seized a northern town from the extremists, the military said.

The factory was tucked inside a fertilizer company in Buni Yadi town in Yobe state, according to officials.

Islamist fighters took over the town in August, one of many seized in the troubled northeast. Troops have battled the militants for months to regain control, and said they recaptured it last week.

Militants planted explosive devices along the highway on their way out, which delayed the soldiers’ advance. Four soldiers were killed during the operation.

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“Better communicated” is a masterpiece of understatement. Not telling your elders that you’re performing a same-sex marriage? And saying that the Presbyterians, Lutherans and Episcopal Church have seen “small but significant” losses? The Episcopalians have been in statistical free-fall even before the 2003 ordination of their first gay bishop. During a 50-year time span, they’ve lost half of their members (from 3.6 million in 1966 to 1.8 million today), as a chunk of the denomination ”“ including whole dioceses ”“ have walked away to form a new Anglican branch. After the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America voted to allow gay clergy in 2009, the denomination had to immediately cut 7.7 million in staff salaries because of budget cuts due to departing members. Presbyterians only voted to bless gay unions last June, so it’s a bit soon to tell who’s leaving and who’s staying, but some of their most historic churches are saying good-bye.

There is very little actual reporting in this piece representing those who oppose Mitchell’s actions. There’s three sources who agree with Mitchell, plus a list of churches and authors who also agree with him. We get a reaction from one departing elder, which is better than a similar story in The Tennessean that had no opposing voices, but how about something from the Southern Baptist Convention, which is based in Nashville? Russell Moore, president of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, has spoken out a lot about this issue and is pretty media-accessible.

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(From Bulls Island SC) [Selimah Harmon photo]

The first female bishop in the Church of England has been installed at Chester Cathedral.

The Rt Rev Libby Lane, 48, preached her first sermon in a service attended by hundreds of people.

She was consecrated as the eighth Bishop of Stockport at York Minster in January.

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O Lord God, keep ever in our remembrance the life and death of our Saviour Jesus Christ. Make the thought of his love powerful to win us from evil. As he toiled and sorrowed and suffered for us, in fighting against sin, so may we endure constantly and labour diligently, as his soldiers and servants, looking ever unto him and counting it all joy to be partakers with him in his conflict, his cross, and his victory; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord.

On November 11, 1953, psychology professor B.F. Skinner sat in a fourth-grade math class, perturbed. It was Parents Day at his daughter Deborah’s school. The lesson seemed grossly inefficient: students proceeded through the material in lock-step, at the same pace; their graded assignments were returned to them sluggishly.

A leading proponent of what he called “radical behaviorism,” Skinner had devoted his career to studying feedback. He denied the existence of free will and dismissed inner mental states as explanations for outward action. Instead, he focused on the environment and the organism’s response. He had trained rats to push levers and pigeons to play Ping-Pong. A signed photo of Ivan Pavlov presided over his study in Cambridge. Turning his attention to a particular subset of the human animal””the schoolchild””Skinner invented his Teaching Machine.

Roughly the size and shape of a typewriter, the machine allowed a student to progress independently through a curriculum, answering test items and getting instant feedback with a few pulls of a lever. “The student quickly learns to be right. His work is pleasurable. He does not have to force himself to study,” Skinner claimed. “A classroom in which machines are being used is usually the scene of intense concentration.” With hardly any hindrance from peers or teachers, thousands of students could receive knowledge directly from a single textbook writer. He told The Harvard Crimson, “There is no reason why the school room should be any less mechanized than the kitchen.”

Sixty years later, Skinner’s reductionist ideas about teaching and learning continue to haunt public education””especially as it’s once again being called upon to embrace technology.

Read it all from Harvard Magazine.

The Church of England was accused of double standards on Monday (Feb. 23) for offering jobs in cathedrals at lower wages than those it has called on other British employers to pay their workers.

Under the banner headline “Wages of Sin,” the Sun reported that it had found several advertisements for jobs in cathedrals that offered pay well below the “living wage” of 7.85 pounds ($12) an hour, endorsed by the Church and senior politicians.

Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, said the Church recognized that no employer could ramp up wages overnight, and was working hard to get to a point where it was paying all of its workers the living wage.

“It’s embarrassing. We’d prefer to be there. We’re getting there as quickly as we can,” Welby, the spiritual head of the 80-million strong Anglican communion, told the BBC.

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You’ve probably heard it said that people don’t quit jobs, they quit bad bosses.It’s a common leadership maxim””often issued as a word of warning to those stepping into leadership: a bad leader can ruin even the best of jobs.

But is the opposite also true? Can a good boss lead to less turnover? And what are the qualities that employees think make for a good leader””or a bad one?

In a study among Americans in the workplace, done in partnership with Leadercast, Barna Group found that two in five people work for someone they consider a “bad” leader. When asked to attribute positive and negative characteristics to their supervisors, these 40% of workers assign at least four of the six negative attributes to their boss. Another two in five workers (40%) say their leader displays one to three of those negative attributes, classifying that leader as “average.” In contrast, only one in five workers (19%) assigns only positive attributes to their leaders, qualifying them as “good” bosses.

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Nato forces must prepare for a large-scale conventional assault by Russia on an eastern European member state designed to catch the alliance off guard and snatch territory, the deputy supreme commander of the military alliance has warned.

Openly raising the prospect of a conventional armed conflict with Russia on European soil, the remarks by Sir Adrian Bradshaw, second-in-command of Nato’s forces in Europe, are some of the most strident yet from the alliance.

The warning comes as relations with the Kremlin worsen just days into a second fragile ceasefire aimed at curbing the bloodshed in eastern Ukraine between Kiev’s forces and Russian-backed separatists.

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The doors to the Nave of Canterbury Cathedral are quite big, but you would be forgiven for thinking you would never see anything as big as a crane inside the home of the Anglican Faith.

But, for today and tomorrow, that is the case, as cathedral staff prepare for necessary improvements to the building’s roof.

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O Thou in whom all things live, who commandest us to seek thee, and art ever ready to be found: To know thee is life, to serve thee is freedom, to praise thee is our souls’ joy. We bless thee and adore thee, we worship thee and magnify thee, we give thanks to thee for thy great glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

–Saint Augustine

O Almighty God, we pray thee, sow the seed of thy Word in our hearts, and send down upon us thy heavenly grace; that we may bring forth the fruits of the Spirit, and at the great day of harvest may be gathered by thy holy angels into thy garner; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

–Canterbury Convocation (1862)

See with what large letters I am writing to you with my own hand. It is those who want to make a good showing in the flesh that would compel you to be circumcised, and only in order that they may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ. For even those who receive circumcision do not themselves keep the law, but they desire to have you circumcised that they may glory in your flesh. But far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. For neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation. Peace and mercy be upon all who walk by this rule, upon the Israel of God.

Henceforth let no man trouble me; for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus.

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brethren. Amen.

–Galatians 6:11-18

Mightier than the thunders of many waters, mightier than the waves of the sea, the LORD on high is mighty! Thy decrees are very sure; holiness befits thy house, O LORD, for evermore.

–Psalm 93:4-5

[The Rev. Tom] Pfizenmaier says much of the tension can be attributed to the denomination’s evolving views on the role of Jesus and Scripture.

“For us salvation is found in Christ, and in the progressive side, it’s kinda, well, no, you can find salvation in a lot of different places, a lot of different ways,” Pfizenmaier said. “It’s fine to have that opinion, but it isn’t the historical Christian position.”

The Presbyterian Lay Committee promotes conservative positions in the denomination. Its president, Carmen Fowler LaBerge, says clashes about sexuality, such as disagreements about whether to allow same-sex marriage, expose a growing divide over fundamental aspects of the faith. Drifting from the position that the Bible is the only authoritative word of God and that Jesus is the only way to salvation feels like a betrayal to some.

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Life is edging back to normal after the deadliest Ebola outbreak in history.

At the height of the epidemic, Liberians met horrific deaths inside the blue-painted walls of the Nathaniel V. Massaquoi Elementary School, as classrooms became Ebola holding centers and the education of a nation’s children, shuttered in their homes for safety, was abruptly suspended.

Now, parents are streaming into the schoolyard once again, not to visit their stricken loved ones, but with their restless children in tow, to register for the start of classes in a delayed and shortened academic year.

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