Self proclaimed know-it-all A.J. Jacobs talks with Scott Simon about lost facts and heroes from the American Revolution.

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— What’s your favorite 4th of July memory?
— For what are you most thankful as an American?
— What are you praying for our country today?

(Written for the majority American readership; others please feel free to chime in; heaven knows we need your prayers–KSH)

Commentator John McDonough recalls the last great reunion of Civil War veterans from the North and South. It took place July 3-5, 1938, on the 75th anniversary of Gettysburg ”” at Gettysburg, Pa. At the time, the whole country was almost painfully aware that the last living links to a decisive event were about to slip away.

Listen to it all from NPR.

Long, too long America,
Traveling roads all even and peaceful you learn’d from joys and
prosperity only,
But now, ah now, to learn from crises of anguish, advancing,
grappling with direst fate and recoiling not,
And now to conceive and show to the world what your children
en-masse really are,
(For who except myself has yet conceiv’d what your children en-masse
really are?)

–Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

Read it carefully and read it all.

The Wedding Report says two years ago, clergy performed 70 percent of all weddings. Last year, it was down to 62 percent.

The Rev. James Wind, president of the Alban Institute, a research firm focusing on religion, says he’s afraid couples may be losing out on what organized religion can offer a bride and groom.

“When we do a wedding ceremony, there’s a set of values that has been carried along for centuries in these religious communities that are resources for making this very important relationship, a bedrock relationship in our society, for making this work,” Wind says.

There is also concern over whether having friends perform weddings is legal. Many ministries offer instant ordinations. With the Internet it takes fewer than five minutes ”” and in some cases, no money ”” to become a minister. Fill out a few boxes with information, click submit and you too can be declared ordained.

Read or listen to it all.

I know you understand. Posts will be catch as catch can.

Germany reached the World Cup quarterfinals Sunday by beating England 4-1 in a match that will be remembered for the goal not awarded to Frank Lampard.

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Arggh. It was a good game.

A U.S. Senate bill to extend aid to states, unemployment benefits and a host of tax provisions appears likely to fail today, potentially blowing an $850 million hole in Gov. Ed Rendell’s budget.

At a Washington news conference this afternoon, Senate Democratic leaders said they do not have assurances that their latest version of the American Jobs and Closing Tax Loopholes Act will garner the needed 60 votes for cloture today. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said if the vote fails, he will move onto another bill rather than continue to revise a measure Senate leaders have tinkered with for weeks.

The House of Representatives passed a version of the bill that did not include the state aid sought by Mr. Rendell and other governors, an extension of Medicaid reimbursements that originated in the stimulus bill. If the Senate passes nothing at all, it would throw Pennsylvania’s budget into additional turmoil.

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Into thy hands, O Lord, we commend ourselves this day. Let thy presence be with us to its close. Strengthen us to remember that in whatsoever good work we do we are serving thee. Give us a diligent and watchful spirit, that we may seek in all things to know thy will, and knowing it, gladly to perform it, to the honour and glory of thy name; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

–Gelasian Sacramentary

Congratulations to Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico and South Korea for being able to move on to the knock-out stage.

How did Yakubu Ayegbeni miss for Nigeria 2 feet in front of the South Korean net? My oh my.

Brian Rauber grew up in church, slacked off during college, then stopped going to church altogether.

He stayed away for 10 years.

Caridad Cruz was active as a youth in a conservative congregation, but she stopped, too, and avoided church for eight years.

Even during those years away from church, they considered themselves Christians.

Rauber, 35, and Cruz, 26, are examples of people in a recent Barna Group survey that found that three out of five U.S. adults who don’t attend church are self-described Christians.

A total of 28 percent of the U.S. adult population said they had not attended church in the past six months.

Read the whole article from McClatchy from the local paper’s Faith and Values section.

Keep your eyes open. Continue to be human ”“ that is to recognise how many ways there are of asking intelligent questions. Remember that Wisdom’s house is built with many and diverse pillars. To remember this is to guard ourselves against one of the persistent temptations of science and indeed of all scholarship, the temptation””expressed once again in the words of Joseph Margolis””of thinking that the human is dispensable: When the conclusions have been reached and the formulae settled, the human, the unfinished, the time-bound is somehow brushed aside.

The early exuberance of the Royal Society””and exuberance is not I think an unfair word for it””the voracious appetite for the trivial and the metaphysical together, is a very good reminder of the origins of science in the human ”“ human curiosity, yes, and the human willingness to be surprised and to begin again. Which perhaps gives a bit of context to that text with which I began: ‘Whoever finds me finds life’. Searching for and finding wisdom is a process of moving into life, a self-aware life, a self-questioning life, above all a life that is a growing in mind and emotion. Curious that when we speak of finding or discovering life these days we very often mean one of two things at least. We talk of finding life elsewhere in the galaxy or indeed the universe. We talk of finding and forming life in the laboratory. Great and controversial enterprises; and yet to find life for ourselves and our immediate neighbours and our human society is not simply a matter of uncovering mysteries at which we wonder, not simply a matter of finding new means of control. It is surely above all a finding joy in the sheer process of finding, recognising that our unfinished business as human beings is one of the things that gives us fulfilment as human beings. An extraordinary, but a life-giving paradox ”“ joy and fulfilment in not having finished, not having drawn a line, but recognising that another question looms on the horizon; not to have found once and for all the single set of questions whose answer will finish our seeking, but to be gratefully, humbly, and sometimes just a bit jealously, aware that next door another set of questions is in operation bringing a new kind of joy and fulfilment in the unfinished-ness of our business.

Science needs to remain human in that sense, to be self-aware of itself as human science, aware of incompleteness, aware of the joy of non-fulfilment.

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Meanwhile my father drifted into what nurses call “the dwindles”: not sick enough to qualify for hospice care, but sick enough to never get better. He fell repeatedly at night and my mother could not pick him up. Finally, he was weak enough to qualify for palliative care, and a team of nurses and social workers visited the house. His chest grew wheezy. My mother did not request antibiotics. In mid-April 2008, he was taken by ambulance to Middlesex Hospital’s hospice wing, suffering from pneumonia.

Pneumonia was once called “the old man’s friend” for its promise of an easy death. That’s not what I saw when I flew in. On morphine, unreachable, his eyes shut, my beloved father was breathing as hard and regularly as a machine.

My mother sat holding his hand, weeping and begging for forgiveness for her impatience. She sat by him in agony. She beseeched his doctors and nurses to increase his morphine dose and to turn off the pacemaker. It was a weekend, and the doctor on call at Rogan’s cardiology practice refused authorization, saying that my father “might die immediately.” And so came five days of hard labor. My mother and I stayed by him in shifts, while his breathing became increasingly ragged and his feet slowly started to turn blue. I began drafting an appeal to the hospital ethics committee. My brothers flew in.

On a Tuesday afternoon, with my mother at his side, my father stopped breathing. A hospice nurse hung a blue light on the outside of his hospital door. Inside his chest, his pacemaker was still quietly pulsing.

After his memorial service in the Wesleyan University chapel, I carried a box from the crematory into the woods of an old convent where he and I often walked. It was late April, overcast and cold. By the side of a stream, I opened the box, scooped out a handful of ashes and threw them into the swirling water. There were some curious spiraled metal wires, perhaps the leads of his pacemaker, mixed with the white dust and pieces of bone….

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[BOB] FAW: Other parents who have adopted troubled children from Eastern Europe have taken more drastic measures. Dr. Ronald Federici runs a clinic for families wrestling with difficult adoptions.

DR. RONALD FEDERICI (Developmental Neuropsychologist): I’ve picked up children at the baggage carousel at airports. I’ve had them left in my office, in my office””they drove off. I’ve seen some horrific situations where parents, good people, totally lost it and wound up in prison for murdering their child. The amount of child abuse cases have been enormous.

FAW: When a Tennessee mother packed off her adopted son on a plane back to Russia with only a note, many people were outraged. But others who have walked in that mother’s shoes, were more understanding.

JULIE HARSHAW: My first reaction was that I could empathize with her, knowing that she must have been going through probably a lot of the same things that we go through, and certainly don’t condone how it was done.

FAW: You could understand?

JULIE HARSHAW: I could understand, and unfortunately, people like to judge you before they know what you’re going through.

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Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac took over a foreclosed home roughly every 90 seconds during the first three months of the year. They owned 163,828 houses at the end of March, a virtual city with more houses than Seattle. The mortgage finance companies, created by Congress to help Americans buy homes, have become two of the nation’s largest landlords.

Bill Bridwell, a real estate agent in the desert south of Phoenix, is among the thousands of agents hired nationwide by the companies to sell those foreclosures, recouping some of the money that borrowers failed to repay. In a good week, he sells 20 homes and Fannie sends another 20 listings his way.

“We’re all working for the government now,” said Mr. Bridwell on a recent sun-baked morning, steering a Hummer through subdivisions laid out like circuit boards on the desert floor.

For all the focus on the historic federal rescue of the banking industry, it is the government’s decision to seize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in September 2008 that is likely to cost taxpayers the most money.

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His career famously came to an end last month when FBI agents arrived at his home on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and found Starr hiding in a closet. His $7.5 million condominium, which he shared with his fourth wife, Diane Passage, a pole dancer, featured floor-to-ceiling windows, a granite lap pool, and a 1,500-square-foot garden, all allegedly financed with plundered cash. Ten days after his arrest, a grand jury indicted Starr for cheating 11 clients””Jim Wiatt, the former head of the William Morris Agency, and Uma Thurman among them””out of $59 million. Starr allegedly pocketed half that amount, while the other half was placed in investments in which he or his friends had a secret interest. Starr has denied wrongdoing and is being held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan.

The Securities & Exchange Commission brought its own civil fraud lawsuit against Starr and Passage, seeking the return of tens of millions of dollars. The two haven’t yet responded to the SEC. A judge last week extended the freeze on the couple’s assets at a hearing attended by Passage, who looked uncharacteristically demure in a pink Vivienne Westwood cardigan and a black skirt. She declined all reporters’ questions except for one from Bloomberg Businessweek, about her age: “Thirty-four,” she said. “You can take a couple of years off that if you want to.”

The disintegration of Starr & Co., which once managed more than $700 million for about 175 wealthy individuals, exposes an uncomfortable truth about the elite crowd he preyed on””that these wealthy, supposedly sophisticated people could be such easy marks for fraud. The numbers involved are not on the scale of Bernie Madoff, but Starr shared Madoff’s ability to create an aura of exclusivity around himself that appealed to the elite””which was augmented by Starr’s attendance at prestigious business gatherings, such as Allen & Co. President Herbert Allen’s annual media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho.

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…this [B.P. and U.S. Government] conflict is really a family squabble. It takes place amid a much larger conflict, and in this larger conflict both BP and the U.S. government are on the same team.

The larger conflict began with the end of the cold war. That ideological dispute settled the argument over whether capitalism was the best economic system. But it did not settle the argument over whether democratic capitalism was the best political-social-economic system. Instead, it left the world divided into two general camps.

On the one side are those who believe in democratic capitalism ”” ranging from the United States to Denmark to Japan. People in this camp generally believe that businesses are there to create wealth and raise living standards while governments are there to regulate when necessary and enforce a level playing field. Both government officials like President Obama and the private sector workers like the BP executives fall neatly into this camp.

On the other side are those that reject democratic capitalism, believing it leads to chaos, bubbles, exploitations and crashes. Instead, they embrace state capitalism. People in this camp run Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela and many other countries.

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The Supreme Court of Virginia just ruled in favor of the Episcopal Church of the Diocese of Virginia, but the ongoing debate over which religious group owns church property could last for years to come.

The property tug-of-war is far different from the common real estate fights that Henry Burt, secretary of the diocese, dealt with during his days as a lawyer at a big firm.

“This dispute would be a lot simpler if we were arguing over ownership of an office building in Rosslyn or on K Street,” said Burt. Those types of property battles between two parties, he explains, typically involve money and can get resolved fairly quickly.

“What we have here are not simply property issues,” he said. “This is not about property or money — it’s about sacred space. Places where generations of Episcopalians have gotten married, baptized and buried loved ones. We have an obligation and duty to protect that legacy.”

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Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man, if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life? Or what shall a man give in return for his life? For the Son of man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay every man for what he has done.

–Matthew 16:24-27

Anglican Planet: If our General Synod were to vote to endorse the local option for SSBs, would that be regarded as a breach of the moratoria by the wider Anglican Communion?

The way in which you handle requests from the Communion in the Anglican Church of Canada is a matter for the Anglican Church of Canada. At the end of the day, it’s the Instruments of Communion that make the decisions and it’s up to us who serve those Instruments to implement those decisions.

Anglican Planet: Wouldn’t that come formally under their [Canadian] Synod?

That probably would influence the answer that Archbishop Hiltz might give me that I asked him on the second page [of my memorandum.]

Neil Adams, Anglican Journal: Archbishop Hiltz and Primate Jefferts Schori are concerned that the word “formally” could mean that there are churches like the Church of England were SSBs occur but informally, and that a double standard exists.

The Communion at the international level receives from churches what those churches communicate to the wider world. We don’t dive down into the detailed life of a particular church, parish or diocese. I don’t go checking. We take what the senior authorized bodies of each church decide on issues that are relevant to the wider Anglican Communion. What a synod has said “formally” means probably by resolution. That would be my interpretation.
Neil Adams, Anglican Journal: Archbishop Hiltz and Primate Jefferts Schori are concerned that the word “formally” could mean that there are churches like the Church of England were SSBs occur but informally, and that a double standard exists.

The Communion at the international level receives from churches what those churches communicate to the wider world. We don’t dive down into the detailed life of a particular church, parish or diocese. I don’t go checking. We take what the senior authorized bodies of each church decide on issues that are relevant to the wider Anglican Communion. What a synod has said “formally” means probably by resolution. That would be my interpretation.

Read it all.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such there is no law. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.

–Galatians 5:22-24

South Carolina voters sent a message to their elected officials Tuesday: Experience counts ”“ against you.

As with primaries in other states, incumbents faced a tough year.

The results also show that a poor economy and an unhappy electorate have rendered conventional wisdom wrong and that Democrats head into November’s general election with their most viable chance at capturing the Governor’s Mansion and other offices in more than a decade.

I bet you are not surprised about such “wisdom;” I wasn’t either. Read it all-KSH.

The next time you read an account of an abuse scandal affecting priests, note the time frame in which the acts allegedly occurred. Almost certainly, it will date from long ago, probably 30 years or more. Why is that? Typically, an individual sues a church over abuse that he suffered in his childhood, and in the Catholic context, he might well find written evidence to confirm his charges of misconduct long ago. He is, after all, dealing with an institution that prizes its collective memory and preserves records dating back centuries. The victim can not only find embarrassing information about Father John Doe, but his lawyers also then can force a diocese to disclose ever more information about ancient charges against other priests, which can lead into other jurisdictions. One case thus becomes the basis for a whole network of interlocking investigations. Perhaps it’s good that such older abuse cases are still coming to light, but the long passage of time makes it very unlikely that the charges can be investigated in a fair or reliable way.

Nor does the plaintiff in a civil case have to meet the high standards of a criminal case, of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. He just has to convince a jury that his allegations are more probably true than not. Most civil cases involving priestly abuse go forward on the basis of evidence that would not stand up in a criminal court. Often, dioceses settle dubious cases to avoid expensive legal proceedings, but such closure can be a mixed blessing. Whatever the merits of the particular case, critics take the fact of settling to suggest that the church is paying blood money to conceal its crimes. That’s not just a church problem. Celebrities and corporations face the same problem, that the public does not understand the workings of litigation.

As the resulting Catholic horror stories accumulate, so many media organizations develop a ready-made format for reporting them, a familiar mythology of specifically Catholic malpractice. Saying that does not mean charging any particular news outlet with deliberate religious prejudice: Some go to great lengths to be fair to accused clergy. But when we approach the issue as a specifically Catholic one, we inevitably cast the church as villain, to the exclusion ofother interpretations. The more firmly the public accepts the image of the sinister priest, the harder it becomes to find juries who will disbelieve abuse allegations. The more cases are reported, the more people come forward to publicize their own complaints. Most plaintiffs are reporting genuine victimization, but some are not.

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Hear my cry, O God, listen to my prayer; 2 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; 3 for thou art my refuge, a strong tower against the enemy

Last Thursday I sent letters to members of the Inter Anglican ecumenical dialogues who are from the Episcopal Church informing them that their membership of these dialogues has been discontinued. In doing so I want to emphasise again as I did in those letters the exceptional service of each and every person to that important work and to acknowledge without exception the enormous contribution each person has made.

I have also written to the person from the Episcopal Church who is a member of the Inter Anglican Standing Commission on Unity Faith and Order (IASCUFO), withdrawing that person’s membership and inviting her to serve as a Consultant to that body.

I have written to the Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada to ask whether its General Synod or House of Bishops has formally adopted policies that breach the second moratorium in the Windsor Report, authorising public rites of same-sex blessing.

At the same time I have written to the Primate of the Southern Cone, whose interventions in other provinces are referred to in the Windsor Continuation Group Report asking him for clarification as to the current state of his interventions into other provinces.

These are the actions which flow immediately from the Archbishop’s Pentecost Letter.

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My little children, with whom I am again in travail until Christ be formed in you!

–Galatians 4:19

O God, who art seeking in every age for loyal spirits ready to obey the heavenly vision: Grant that our ears may be open to thy voice, that when thou dost call us, we may answer gladly and readily, Here am I, send me; for the glory of Jesus Christ our Lord.

An increasing number of commercial property owners are finding themselves in a hopeless situation, facing declining rents, increasing vacancies and a loan coming due.

The daunting situation of being caught between a demanding lender and a business with numbers that just do not work any more is expected to become far more common in this market in coming years, local real estate experts say.

And most lenders will be far less open than they were on residential mortgages to negotiating a short sale to help commercial owners deal with their upside-down loans.

Read it all.