The Rt Rev Justin Welby, Bishop of Durham, called for the Church to stand up for the world’s poor, when he addressed the Anglican Alliance for Development at Bishopthorpe, York, in a keynote speech called ‘Good News for the Poor – at home and in the wider world’ on Monday 30th April.

During his keynote address, Bishop Justin said: “The question that faces the church both domestically and internationally, is that of what is human flourishing, good news, amidst the deep poverty that still grips many parts of the world and the utter spiritual bankruptcy and increasing material poverty in slump hit Britain?

“Our good news must be unique, because the radicality of the gospel calls us to a sense of what we are doing and saying utterly different from all other groups. The language of our good news is not GDP, output and so forth, though they are part of the means, it is human flourishing in a context of love. The tools of our good news is the unique ones of reconciliation and peace, with its fellow travellers of generosity, community and self-giving love.

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There are now more than 3,000 talks going back to the 1960s when noted Anglican evangelical leader John Stott was still rector.

The archive is constantly being added to with all Sunday and midweek talks are available as routine on the website as well as via podcast.

However, a lack of “tags” ”” words added to files to allow visitors to search the archive”“means specific sermons are hard for visitors to find.

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More significant was the view that the election of the Archbishop of Canterbury was a matter for England alone. It will be the leaders of the FoCA who decide whether or not to accept him as part of the Fellowship: no-one is acceptable (i.e. godly and Anglican) merely by virtue of their office.

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Therefore there will be no schism in the sense of one organization separating itself out from another on a certain day, followed immediately by either or both bodies setting up new structures and legal identities.
Instead there will be a steady continued tearing of the fabric as distinct ecclesial units (parishes, dioceses and provinces as well as individuals) align themselves explicitly with the FoCA. The legalities will depend on the law of each country (property and pensions being governed by secular law) and on the ecclesiastical structure of each Church.

I anticipate that the FoCA churches will thrive, purposeful and enthusiastic for at least the medium-term foreseeable future. It will thus be self-legitimating.

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Village-based volunteers are to be trained in malaria prevention with support from the Anglican mission and development agency USPG (www.uspg.org.uk). It is a good news story for World Malaria Day (25 April).

The USPG-funded training will be implemented in Namibia and Angola through the health departments of the national Anglican Churches.

David Evans, USPG’s Director for Community Engagement, explained: ”˜The church is ideal for delivering health programmes because it can connect people and organisations at so many levels ”“ from international health organisations and government health bodies right through to local rural churches.’

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If Spain’s crisis deepens Europe’s recession, it could tip the entire world economy into a stubborn slump. The ramifications would be enormous, including: reduced odds of Barack Obama’s reelection, assuming a weaker U.S. recovery; less political cohesion and more social unrest in Europe (even now, the European Union’s unemployment rate is 10.2 percent); and growing pressures in many countries for economic nationalism and protectionism.

Spain is suffering a hangover from what economist Desmond Lachman of the American Enterprise Institute calls “the mother of all housing booms.”

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A new revelation of young American soldiers caught on camera while defiling insurgents’ remains in Afghanistan has intensified questions within the military community about whether fundamental discipline is breaking down given the nature and length of the war.
The photographs, published by The Los Angeles Times on Wednesday, show more than a dozen soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division’s Fourth Brigade Combat Team, along with some Afghan security forces, posing with the severed hands and legs of Taliban attackers in Zabul Province in 2010. They seemed likely to further bruise an American-Afghan relationship that has been battered by crisis after crisis over the past year, even as the two governments are in the midst of negotiations over a long-term strategic agreement.

The images also add to a troubling list of cases ”” including Marines videotaped urinating on Taliban bodies, the burning of Korans, and the massacre of villagers attributed to a lone Army sergeant ”” that have cast American soldiers in the harshest possible light before the Afghan public.

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The Charter of Rights and Freedoms was signed 30 years ago Tuesday. Since then, not only has it become a national bedrock, but the Charter has replaced the American Bill of Rights as the constitutional document most emulated by other nations.

“Could it be that Canada has surpassed or even supplanted the United States as a leading global exporter of constitutional law? The data suggest that the answer may be yes.” So conclude two U.S. law professors whose analysis of the declining influence of the American constitution on other nations will be published in New York University Law Review in June.

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We ought to leave “happiness” to novelists and philosophers ”” and rescue it from the economists and psychologists who think it can be distilled into a “science” and translated into pro-happiness policies. Fat chance. Government can often mitigate sources of unhappiness (starvation, unemployment, disease), but happiness is more than the absence of misery. If we could manufacture happiness, we could repeal the “human condition.”

Somehow this has escaped the social scientists who want to make happiness the goal of government. They argue that economic output (gross domestic product) doesn’t measure everything that’s important in life ”” family, friends or religion, for example. True, but it doesn’t follow that “happiness” can be targeted as an alternative. No matter….

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For many years now, we’ve heard sombre warnings that the white countries’ easy dominance of the world would be eclipsed by the developing nations.

One day, we were told, the fast-growing economies of the poor countries would be bigger than those of the more sclerotic rich countries.

The Australian Treasury has now calculated this is no longer a looming prospect but that, on a key measure, it has already happened. The Treasury estimates the developing countries’ collective gross domestic product overtook that of the rich world last month.

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Recently, the human-rights activist, former Dutch politician, and Somali exile Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote about a global war on Christians in Muslim countries. She discussed at length the appalling phenomenon of violent intolerance towards Christian communities, and cast blame on the international community and prominent NGOs for failing to address this problem….

As bad as anti-Christian violence and intimidation is, indifference to the plight of Christian groups under threat is widespread among governments, the media, and even ordinary citizens. A smattering of Christian NGOs works to publicize the issue, but mainstream human-rights organizations have largely neglected to highlight cases of explicit anti-Christian attacks and persecution.

There is an obvious reticence by international bodies even to acknowledge the problem. But according to the Pew Forum, at least 10 percent of the world’s Christians ”• 200 million people in 133 countries ”• live in societies as a minority group.

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Hearkening back to Cold War anxieties, growing signs of spying on U.S. universities are alarming national security officials. As schools become more global in their locations and student populations, their culture of openness and international collaboration makes them increasingly vulnerable to theft of research conducted for the government and industry.

“We have intelligence and cases indicating that U.S. universities are indeed a target of foreign intelligence services,” Frank Figliuzzi, Federal Bureau of Investigation assistant director for counterintelligence, said in a February interview in the bureau’s Washington headquarters.

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As our Eureka science magazine notes today, we waste 100 million tonnes of food a year. To throw away so much at a time when 925 million people are classed as hungry, and a further one billion are thought to be suffering from malnutrition, is as senselessly profligate as running a bath without inserting the bath plug. But eliminating the waste will never be enough to fill the world’s bellies.

Yes, selective breeding is starting to boost crop yields and improve food security in sub-Saharan Africa, just as it has been so successfully doing across Asia and the Americas over the past four decades. But without increased use of genetically modified crop varieties it seems inconceivable that food production will ever be abundant enough to keep pace with population growth.

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Frederic and Anne-Laure Pascal are devout Roman Catholics who built their lives around their religion. When she lost her job last year, the young couple decided on an unlikely expression of their religious commitment: a worldwide “interfaith pilgrimage” to places where peace has won out over dueling dogmas.

Since October, the French couple has visited 11 nations from Iraq to Malaysia in an odyssey to find people of all creeds who have dedicated their lives to overcoming religious intolerance in some of the world’s most divided and war-torn corners.

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The average wage, calculated by the International Labour Organization, is published here for the first time. It’s a rough figure based on data from 72 countries, omitting some of the world’s poorest nations. All figures are adjusted to reflect variations in the cost of living from one country to another….

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Books on the decline of America are coming thick and fast. The latest, Time to Start Thinking: America and the Spectre of Descent, by The Financial Times’s chief US commentator Edward Luce, is published this week….In summary, he concludes that global economic dominance, having quit Europe around the end of last century, moved west to the United States and now, after another hundred years, is relocating to Asia. Nothing can be done about this, he says. It is just the way it is. China and India (and he throws in Indonesia for good measure) are simply too big and too industrious not to fight it out for the soon-to-be vacated Number One slot.
But ”“ and this is where it gets interesting ”“ Luce is frustrated by the way in which the US, outside of rhetoric, is capitulating to the inevitable, giving up almost without a fight. Were its leaders to defy history, he suggests, they would quickly regain the world’s respect and write a new and valuable interpretation of the American dream.

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Emergent Anglican women scholars from the majority world and indigenous women studying theology gathered on March 26 at the International Study Centre at Canterbury Cathedral for a week-long program of mentoring and strategising with the leaders of the Global Anglican Theological Academy (GATA).

GATA was one of the outcomes of the meeting of Anglican women theological educators organized by the office of Theological Education in the Anglican Communion (TEAC) in Canterbury, England, in 2009. Supported by TEAC, the GATA initiative takes seriously the fourth mark of mission endorsed by the Anglican Consultative Council – the transformation of unjust structures, and in particular, those that function within our own Church household.

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Bearded, kindly and theologically subtle, the archbishop has spent the last 10 years trying to bring an academic’s finesse to issues where finesse often just looks like evasion ”” the spread of Islam in a de-Christianizing Europe, the divides within the Anglican Communion over homosexuality and women’s ordination, the rise of a combative New Atheism.

The result has been a depressing public ineffectuality for a man charged with leading the world’s third-largest Christian body. Whether he was talking vaguely about “interactive pluralism” as a way of avoiding tackling issues like forced marriages and honor killings in Muslim immigrant communities, answering “pass” to a journalist’s pointed question about his own views on sexually active gay clergy, or offering unreciprocated olive branches to proselytizing atheists, Williams rarely missed an opportunity to soft-pedal around an important debate.

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President Obama’s 2013 budget would add $3.5 trillion to annual deficits through 2022, according to a new estimate from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

It also would raise the deficit next year by $365 billion, according to the nonpartisan office.

The CBO estimate is in sharp contrast to White House claims last month that the Obama budget would reduce deficits by $3.2 trillion over the next decade.Ӭ

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Some 300 church leaders from various parts worldwide will be gathering in Manila from 22 to 27 March for a pre-assembly of the World Council of Churches’ (WCC) Commission on World Mission and Evangelism.

Hosted by the National Council of Churches in the Philippines (NCCP), the gathering is expected to update the WCC’s mission and evangelism statement, which was written in 1982. “The Philippines can help take a look at mission and evangelism from the side of the oppressed and not only from the traditional understanding of conversion,” National Council of Churches in the Philippines general secretary Fr. Rex Reyes told ENInews.

“We can help take a fresh look at what it means to be a church in a context such as we have.” The WCC’s mission and evangelism statement, Reyes noted, was written at a time when globalization, for example, was not a big issue.

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Judges have convicted a Congolese warlord of snatching children from the street and turning them into killers.

The ruling is the International Criminal Court’s first judgment 10 years after it was established in The Hague as the world’s first permanent war crimes tribunal.

Thomas Lubanga did not react as presiding Judge Adrian Fulford read out the verdicts Wednesday. He now faces a maximum sentence of life imprisonment….

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As Nicholas Eberstadt and Apoorva Shah of the American Enterprise Institute point out, over the past three decades, the Arab world has undergone a little noticed demographic implosion. Arab adults are having many fewer kids.

The speed of the change is breathtaking. A woman in Oman today has 5.6 fewer babies than a woman in Oman 30 years ago. Morocco, Syria and Saudi Arabia have seen fertility-rate declines of nearly 60 percent, and in Iran it’s more than 70 percent. These are among the fastest declines in recorded history.

The Iranian regime is aware of how the rapidly aging population and the lack of young people entering the work force could lead to long-term decline. But there’s not much they have been able to do about it. Maybe Iranians are pessimistic about the future. Maybe Iranian parents just want smaller families….

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The US, Japan and the European Union have filed a case against China at the World Trade Organization, challenging its restrictions on rare earth exports.

US President Barack Obama accused China of breaking agreed trade rules as he announced the case at the White House.

Beijing has set quotas for exports of rare earths, which are critical to the manufacture of high-tech products from hybrid cars to flat-screen TVs.

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The Vatican on Friday sought to explain its presence for the first time on a U.S. list of countries that are a potential hub for money laundering, saying it was only natural to be included given its recent efforts to conform to international standards.

The U.S. State Department this week released its International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, which identified the Holy See as one of 68 countries or jurisdictions “of concern” for money laundering or other financial crimes….

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Ever since their mad dash out of Egypt bound for the Promised Land, Jews have been on the move ”” and they continue to be, far more than any other religious group, according to a new study.

One in four of the world’s Jews has migrated from one country to another, compared to 5% of Christians and 4% of Muslims who have left their native lands.

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The agency’s 2011 long-term budget outlook showed that federal debt would begin to hurt the economy once it reaches about 77% of GDP. CBO’s January budget and economic outlook estimated that it will hit that level in 2013 under its high-debt scenario that is based largely on current policy.

“CBO expects that the large government deficits during the recession and afterward will raise the cost of capital in the future . . . constraining investment,” the nonpartisan scorekeeper wrote in its January budget and economic outlook.

Initially, the impact would be minimal, but it would grow over time as debt levels increase.

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