O God our Father, who art the source of strength to all thy saints, and who didst bring the holy martyrs of Japan through the suffering of the cross to the joys of life eternal: Grant that we, being encouraged by their example, may hold fast the faith that we profess, even unto death; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

Hear my cry, O God, listen to my prayer; from the end of the earth I call to thee, when my heart is faint. Lead thou me to the rock that is higher than I; for thou art my refuge, a strong tower against the enemy. Let me dwell in thy tent for ever! Oh to be safe under the shelter of thy wings!

–Psalm 61:1-4

The Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University publishes a very informative electronic newsletter about religious developments all over the world. On January 12, 2013, the newsletter carried a story originally published in the Buffalo News, about Joelle Silver, a high school science teacher in a community in upstate New York called Cheektowaga. This melodiously named place, now a suburb of Buffalo, is located in the general vicinity of the so-called Burnt-Over District, which in the nineteenth century was a hotbed of Protestant revivals and other charismatic movements (the Mormons originated in the same neighborhood). Silver (a photo shows her to be an attractive young woman) is a committed Evangelical Christian, thus more or less in continuity with the regional religious history (although the town now has a large Polish community unlikely to be strongly Protestant).

It so happens that Cheektowaga, or at least its high school, also contains a militantly secularist teenager. This individual (no name given in the story) took umbrage at Silver’s displaying a variety of religious objects in the classroom, including posters with religious messages and a “prayer request box” belonging to a students’ Bible study group. The offended student alerted the Freedom from Religion Foundation, a militantly secularist organization operating out of Madison, Wisconsin. In response to its intervention the school ordered Silver to remove her religious materials from the classroom.

Silver sued the school authorities in U.S. district court for violating her constitutional right to the free exercise of religion.

Read it all.

Holy God, we offer thanks for the vision of Samuel Shoemaker, priest and co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous; and we pray that we may follow his example to help others find salvation through knowledge and love of Jesus Christ our Savior; who with thee and the Holy Spirit livest and reignest, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Thus Abraham “believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” So you see that it is men of faith who are the sons of Abraham. And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, “In you shall all the nations be blessed.” So then, those who are men of faith are blessed with Abraham who had faith.

–Galatians 3:6-9

Here is one:

The Tithe as the Standard of Funding

The Reverends Robert Fain, Ted Clarkson, Gavin Dunbar and Cynthia Taylor propose the following resolution to the 192nd Convention. Their copy of the resolution with its full accompanying explanation is online here: The Tithe as the Standard of Funding PDF.

Resolved, that this 192nd Convention of The Episcopal Diocese of Georgia request that the Special Task Force on Church Structural Reform, created by the 77th General Convention of the Episcopal Church to present a plan to the next General Convention in 2015 for “reforming the Church’s structures, governance and administration”, include as one of its recommendations a proposal the the 78th General Convention of the Episcopal Church adopt the tithe as the standard of giving and as the funding formula for diocesan support of the budget of the Episcopal Church and,

be it further Resolved, that this resolution together with its accompanying Explanation, be forwarded to The Executive Council for it information.

Read them all.

The Archbishops of Canterbury and York have recognised the Orders of the Free Church of England under the Overseas and Other Clergy (Ministry and Ordination) Measure 1967. The Measure gives the Archbishops authority to determine whether the Orders of any Church are ‘recognised and accepted’ by the Church of England.

The recognition of the Orders of the Free Church of England follows approximately three years of contact between the bishops of the Free Church of England, the Council for Christian Unity and the Faith and Order Commission, which recommended that the Orders of the Free Church of England be recognised. That recommendation was subsequently endorsed by the Standing Committee of the House of Bishops.

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Two really tight first sets and then Djokovic seems to have gained the momentum.

Update: Djokovic wins, making it his third in a row for this event, he is the first to do this since Roy Emerson.

Almighty God, the giver of strength and joy: Change, we beseech thee, our bondage into liberty, and the poverty of our nature into the riches of thy grace; that by the transformation of our lives thy glory may be revealed; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Lincoln and King were in my view products of Puritanism more than evangelicalism. For each, God was a mystery. But this mysterious God had entered into a covenant with us, so it was up to us to uphold our end of the bargain. In so doing, our goal was never to make heaven on earth but to strive toward a less imperfect union and a more beloved community.

In his essay on “Civil Religion in America,” sociologist Robert Bellah argues that “civil religion is not the worship of the American nation but an understanding of the American experience in the light of ultimate and universal reality.” It does not assert that God is on our side. Instead it prays that we might act in such a way that we might be worthy of his approval. In their most famous speeches, Lincoln and King labored toward just that sort of understanding. May it be so for President Obama as well.

Read it all.

On Dec. 6, Notre Dame officials said, Manti Te’o received an alarming phone call: his dead girlfriend, whose loss had inspired him during what had become a triumphant year for the Fighting Irish, might still be alive. Either that or Te’o, a gifted linebacker with a reputation for trusting others, had been the victim of a hoax, and the woman he thought he had come to know online and through long, emotional phone calls had never really existed….

[The] sequence of events in December was one of many being pored over Thursday ”” by journalists and bloggers, students at Notre Dame and an American public trying to figure out the truth at the heart of one of the most bizarre of sports stories.

Was Te’o a sympathetic victim of a cruel fraud, or a calculating participant in a phony story that had been milked to aid his bid for the Heisman Trophy?

Read it all.

I have no desire to bury people in this discussion, but it is important to engage with it. If you have not yet you need to look at the full text of the judgment itself here. There are a lot of links which can be found here and there.Law and Religion UK is worth following in terms of discussion and links also. I am interested in what further material blog readers have found edifying in terms of something to think either with or against on this matter. If you can tell us why you found it of value, so much the better–KSH.

”˜It’s Opportunity For Mutual Assistance’

([THE] RT. REV. JOSEPH N. MUSA, Bishop of Idah)

THE work we do is such that only God rewards our labour. But God always raises up people to support the work. We have discovered, often, that many Bishops do not take the issue of rewarding workers very seriously. Our first priority should be satisfying our congregation, and Priests are our immediate congregation. Inability to meet the need of workers would invariably affect the work.

Of course, there are dioceses that are not very viable. Apart from receiving assistance from other dioceses that are buoyant, there are some lay workers who are ready to offer services at no cost. Engaging such would reduce overhead cost.

A significance of the retreat is that when we come together like this, dioceses are able to help one another out of problems.

Read it all.

ABERNETHY: Do you all find people saying, perhaps not with the right words, but a feeling that underneath all these particular issues there’s just something wrong? There’s something wrong in this country?

ECKSTROM: I think there’s a wide sense that we’ve somehow gotten off track. You know, after the shootings in Connecticut Mike Huckabee said it was because we removed God from schools. Other people thought that was ridiculous. But there’s a, you know, you can look at Congress, and why can’t we get anything done? But the bottom line is we can”˜t get anything done. We can’t make big decisions anymore, at least it seems that way, and so the debate is not necessarily if we’re on track, but how do we get back? How do we fix it? And that’s I think where the debate is.

DIONNE: You know, whenever we get into pessimistic moods I always think of my favorite Churchill line that Americans always do the right thing after first exhausting all of the other possibilities. And we’ve been through a rough time.

Read or watch it all and note the section on Anglicanism.

In the end, [ John] Frankenheimer’s film [about Geroge Wallace] not only distorts history, it even fails to take advantage of the strengths of the book on which the film was based, Marshall Frady’s 1968 biography, Wallace. Frady had little insightful to say about the major political events of the era, but the South Carolina-born writer helped his readers understand just how this proud and insecure southerner wrestled with contradictory emotions: shame and pride, kindness and cruelty, generosity and greed. Above all, he brilliantly evoked the demons that carried his subject from a small southern town to a critical role in reshaping American politics. Instead of Frady’s insights into Wallace’s character, however, we are too often treated to self-conscious musings about Wallace’s motivation and wooden agitprop political speeches by Jim Folsom, the political conscience of the film.

To those who care about the integrity of the historical past, the ultimate flaw lies in the form of the docudrama itself as it has evolved over the past 20 years. Robert Penn Warren, the author of All the King’s Men–arguably the greatest novel ever written about southern politics–was clearly inspired by the story of Huey Long. As a novelist, however, he believed that he could best illuminate the historical drama and tragedy of Long’s rise and fall by freeing himself from the factual constraints of one man’s story, using his imagination to take the bits and pieces of actual history and remolding them with the imagination of the artist into a more universal tale of ambition and retribution.
The novelist and the historian had equally important roles to play in understanding our past, said Warren, but they traveled on separate roads toward the truth. The mass audience of the commercial docudrama (not to mention its financial rewards) is a tantalizing lure, but it has become–with rare exceptions–a soap opera substitute for real engagement with the past. When asked to become a part of such productions, the greatest contribution historians can make is to take the advice of a former First Lady: “Just say no.”

I’ve taken the pledge.

Read it all.

Wow.

In my view the game was lost by the Broncos secondary–KSH.

A simple analogy helped us overcome this hurdle. “Imagine that you are the pastor of a church, and you’ve been sharing ministry with your congregation for many years,” we explained. “Over those years you have grown to know and love the people, and they have grown to know and love you””even though there have been some serious conflicts along the way. But now it has become apparent to you that your vision for ministry is becoming very different from the congregation’s. They feel passionately called by God to move in one direction. You feel passionately called in another. Your values, perhaps even your core theological beliefs, are in conflict. What can you do?” This, of course, is a situation that most pastors and elders can readily relate to.

Continuing, we said, “On the one hand, you can stay and try to persuade the congregation to go the direction you believe God wants them to go, while at the same time they try to persuade you to go in their direction. There may be multiple votes about specific programs, and endless politicking. Meanwhile, not much of any ministry gets done. On the other hand, you can passively submit to the congregation’s vision for ministry. It keeps the peace, but inside you are miserable because you are living in conflict with your own core values. Passion wanes.”
Then, stating the obvious, we offered: “But there is a third alternative. Even though you love the congregation and the congregation loves you, there may come a time when God calls you to use your gifts in another part of Christ’s body. Parting may be painful, but if you and the church have a healthy relationship, you can acknowledge your differing calls and bless each other as you separate to pursue your God-given visions.” We explained that we loved the people of our presbytery, but we felt great passion and excitement as we believed God was calling us to pursue a new path in our journey with Christ.

Read it all.

The Diocese of South Carolina and its incorporated parishes have filed a preemptive lawsuit against the Episcopal Church (USA), an unincorporated religious denomination composed of other member dioceses, whose leadership has been busily engaged in trying to steal away the Diocese’s secular identity.

(What a strange opening paragraph for a church law blogger. In what other field or area of human interest under the sun could such a description apply to what is going on? And the fact that these are all Christians we are talking about in ECUSA’s leadership makes this development even more paradoxical.)

ECUSA has been asking for such a response for over four months now. No sooner had the Presiding Bishop announced last October that she had restricted Bishop Mark Lawrence from functioning in his episcopal office in South Carolina than the Diocese — having anticipated such an attempt against its Bishop — responded that ECUSA’s move had triggered a series of resolutions which automatically declared the Diocese no longer a member of the national Church organization.

Read it all.

2012 proved to be a very busy year for students of law and religion in the UK ”“ busier, indeed, than we might have expected.

Same-sex marriage

The dominant issue was same-sex marriage, both in England and Wales and in Scotland ”“ a proposal which provoked a reactions ranging from a warm welcome from the Unitarians and the Quakers to bitter opposition by the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, who lambasted the proposal both in his Christmas sermon and in an interview with the BBC, in which he complained that

“There was no announcement in any party manifesto, no Green Paper, no statement in the Queen’s Speech. And yet here we are on the verge of primary legislation. From a democratic point of view it’s a shambles. George Orwell would be proud of that manoeuvre. I think the process is shambolic.”

Ministers also managed to upset the Church in Wales by including it in the “quadruple lock” proposals without, it appeared, having consulted it first….

Read it all.

‘Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever the earth and the world were made: and from age even unto age Thou art’ (v. 2). Thou therefore who art for ever, and before we were, and before the world was, hast become our refuge ever since we turned to Thee. … But he very rightly does not say, Thou wast from ages, and unto ages Thou shalt be: but puts the verb in the present, intimating that the substance of God is altogether immutable. It is not, He was, and Shall be, but only Is. Whence the expression, I Am that I Am; and, I Am ‘hath sent me unto you;’ (Exod. iii. 14.) and, ‘Thou shalt change them, and they shall be changed: but Thou art the same, and Thy years shall not fail.’ (Ps. cii. 26, 27.) Behold then the eternity that is our refuge, that we may fly thither from the mutability of time, there to remain for evermore.

–Saint Augustine, from his Exposition on the Book of Psalms, Psalm XC (my emphasis).

Q. Sometimes when couples marry they sign a prenuptial agreement. What is the Catholic Church’s official position on prenuptial agreements?

W.M., via e-mail

I am interested in what you think the answer is first–then you can take a look.

The title of this book may lead you to believe that this was going to be a “how-to” in utilizing Facebook, Twitter, and other social media outlets. However, it is really isn’t much about using social networks. What it is a strong reminder of how we as the church should be responding to those in this world. Facebook reports as of September 2012 1 billion users, never before have we’ve been so connected. Yet the author points out what people really want is relationship.

With excellent examples and imagery Mr. Sweet drives home that the media isn’t that important. What is important is developing relationships with people, demonstrating God’s love in tangible ways.

Read it all.

Read it all.

A new pacemaker has been built inside a heart by converting beating muscle into cells which can organise the organ’s rhythm, US researchers report.

The heartbeat is controlled by electrical signals and if these go awry the consequences can be fatal.

Scientists injected a genetically-modified virus into guinea pigs to turn part of their heart into a new, working pacemaker.

Read it all.

14 December 2012

“I will lift up my eyes to the hills– where does my help come from?
My help comes from the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth.”
(Psalm 121:1-2)

My dear Brothers and Sisters,

Advent greetings in the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ!

I cannot tell you how much I am heavy-hearted because of what is going on in my beloved country Egypt. Many Egyptians were expecting that after the 25 January Revolution in 2011 there would be no exclusion for any citizen or groups because of their political or religious stance. Sadly, we are still groaning for this equality…

Read it all

On Wednesday, November 28, Pope Benedict XVI extended his weekly audience to Archbishop Robert Duncan and Bishop Ray Sutton of the Anglican Church in North America. The picture above was taken at the end of the session when Archbishop Duncan and Bishop Sutton were invited to join the Pope’s own Archbishops and Bishops to bring personal greetings. In 2003, Benedict XVI, then Cardinal Ratzinger, sent greetings to the very first Plano, TX gathering of orthodox Episcopal (now Anglican) bishops, clergy and laity in North America. This momentous conference, hosted by the AAC and Christ Church Plano, helped launch the Anglican Communion Network, the precursor to the Anglican Church in North America.

Is it a coincidence that during ACC-15 in Auckland, NZ, it was reported that the Anglican-Roman Catholic dialogue (ARCIC) now focuses more on exchanges of scholarly papers and less on high-level, face-to-face discussions? Is it a coincidence that Archbishop David Moxon of New Zealand has been appointed to replace the current director of the Anglican Centre in Rome? Is the Anglican Communion Office doing damage control in light of The Episcopal Church’s violations of Anglican– and indeed biblical and catholic– teaching on human sexuality and Holy Orders? Could the appointment of Archbishop Moxon be damage control for Canterbury’s persistent unwillingness to discipline TEC-even at the expense of Anglican Communion faith and order?

Read it all.

[The] Rev. Nancy Talbot feels like one of the more blessed female clergy. When the North Vancouver minister looks out on the pews on any given Sunday, she feels fortunate her small congregation is slowly growing and that at least men make up roughly three in 10 of those at worship.

The gender imbalance could be far worse. The minister at Mount Seymour United Church is painfully aware men have been quietly, but in huge numbers, streaming away from many of North America’s Christian churches.

“I don’t think many of us have answers to why it’s happening,” says Talbot, who has led Mount Seymour United for eight years while raising two boys in a same-sex relationship with her partner, Brenda.

Read it all.

The common desire that Frank [Griswold] and I share is for a strong Anglican Communion, living the faith and sharing it with all.

The reality is however uncomfortable for Anglicans. At the institutional level we have never been as divided as we are today. We look across the world and the evidence of fragmentation is for all to see. We see it in this great land of America with the proliferation of Anglican congregations; we see it internationally with the GAFCON churches and the sharp divisions between the strong provinces of Africa and the structures of the ACC; we see it in England the uneasy stand off between Reformed and traditional catholic congregations and the institutional church. In recent days we have had news that the diocese of South Carolina is ”˜disaffiliating’ from The Episcopal Church over moves to depose its Bishop, Mark Lawrence.

Now, we should state upfront that both Frank Griswold as the former Presiding bishop and myself as the former Archbishop of Canterbury have had key roles that have partly led us to the present predicament. For myself, there has been much criticism in TEC and elsewhere that the Lambeth Conference of 1998 witnessed the overwhelming consensus of bishops in affirming the traditional view of sexuality. For Frank, five years later the Province of the Episcopal Church of the United States affirmed the legitimacy of same sex relationships in the ministry of the Church. Both events have been questioned severely. Lambeth 98 has been censured for creating the crisis and the events leading up to the ordination of bishop Gene Robinson has also come under severe criticism- particularly why TEC went ahead against the wishes of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Primates Meeting Both events have been discussed ”˜ad nauseum’ and there is no point in going over old ground.

Nevertheless, there are two fundamental questions that have not been satisfactorily dealt with. The first concerns the role of the scriptures in the Church. Where there is deep disagreement concerning interpretation of scripture not only within Provinces but especially between Provinces how does a Communion handle differences that affect our relationships? Where there is no Magisterium to referee disputes, and where our much vaunted Instruments of unity seem unequal to the task, how do the Primates exercise their leadership on behalf of the Communion? To put it more bluntly: where to so many people in the Communion the bible’s teaching on homosexual is so univocal, what justification is there for rejecting it? Indeed, we have to recognize that for many Anglicans around the world what they see as the rejection of scripture by some western churches does indeed separate Christians.

Read it all.

Not even the most determined supporter of the proposal to recognise gay marriage can have been impressed by the way the Government has managed the issue. Like the outcome or not, it is impossible to disagree with the comment of the Archbishops of Westminster and Southwark that the public consultation exercise was “shambolic”.

Even after the consultation had taken place, the Government was amending its own proposals concerning the exemptions to be granted to religious institutions ”“ moving the goalposts, as it were, after the penalty kick had been taken. It is hardly surprising that even those who no longer want marriage confined to heterosexuals were alarmed to discover that the Government was now proposing to enshrine that discrimination, where religious bodies were concerned, in statute law.

Intended as concessions to mollify religious objections, these proposals amount to the reassertion of full parliamentary control in this respect over the worship and doctrine of the Church of England and the (Anglican) Church in Wales, for safeguards granted by Parliament today may be withdrawn by Parliament tomorrow.

Read it all.

The Scottish Government yesterday published draft legislation that could see gay marriage introduced in Scotland in 2014.

But Church leaders fear the new laws do not include enough “protections” for religious bodies and individuals and are calling for “more safeguards”.

The Church of Scotland and Roman Catholic Church, like other religions, will have to “opt in” if they want to carry out same-sex ceremonies under the SNP plans. Scottish ministers insist no part of the religious community would be forced to hold same-sex weddings in churches.

Read it all.