Dr. Van De Water assumed active charge of the Parish on the date fixed, January 1st, 1888….We had called a young and able Rector to take charge of us, and “the people had a mind to work” with right good will.

It may be interesting to give some approximate figures of the Parish as they were recorded at the opening of the year 1888.

Number of families – 475
Number of Communicants – 1,000
Sunday scholars – 1,050
Debt on the Church, at 5 per cent – $43,500

Read it all.

The Congressional Budget Office projects that over the next decade Social Security’s annual cash deficit will rise by nearly $100 billion, reaching $155 billion a year. The cost of servicing the extra public debt tied to cashing in $1 trillion worth of Social Security’s intragovernmental IOUs over the 10 years would add $40 billion to the deficit in 2022 alone, an IBD analysis finds.

Overall, Social Security would account for nearly $200 billion in annual deficits or nearly 20% of the $1 trillion-plus deficit that would occur under current policies, including fiscal-cliff tax hikes.

Then, over the following decade, the retirement program’s impact on deficits would really balloon.

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“Monks are just a joke,” sighs Father Stephen. “In the modern mind, it’s just fat friars in brown habits with white cords around their waists.” There’s some truth in the words of this slim Benedictine, who is sporting a white habit and brown leather belt. We don’t notice the jeans peeping out from underneath until he points them out, but they are the kind of trivial curiosity some secular visitors focus on when they come to the Subiaco Benedictine monastery of Prinknash Abbey, deep in the rolling green countryside of Gloucestershire. Yet in recent years, the comedy element has begun to subside and the outside world has started taking monasticism seriously again.

Organised religion has lost its central place in most European countries, but it has not necessarily been replaced by atheism. The confused majority is “spiritual but not religious”, hungry for alternatives to the perceived materialism of modern life. “The more we’re distracted by stuff,” suggests Father Stephen, “the more we’re also attracted by what we’re missing.”

Read it all [or if that link causes difficulty, please try there].

[Tony] Campolo said he has noted a shift over the decades away from a faith composed primarily of beliefs about Jesus toward taking Christ’s teachings both literally and seriously.

“I grew up at a time when the church was organized around the theologies of the Apostle Paul,” Campolo said. “Every Bible study I ever went to growing up was on Paul. We studied Ephesians and Philippians and Romans, and we went through Paul verse by verse.”

“Being solid theologically was of crucial significance,” he continued. “It still is. The shift that has taken place, however, is a shift away from the Pauline epistles to the Gospels.”

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There is a split in American pews over gun control. In the weeks since the mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, many Christians are wrestling with gun control, an issue they once held as a sacred, untouchable right.

For years gun control was championed by Catholic and mainline Protestant churches, but now many evangelicals are joining the growing choir of Americans asking what can be done.

“Maybe the most interesting meeting we had was with the interfaith group,” Vice President Joe Biden told reporters after meeting with a wide range of interest groups on guns. Biden was tasked by President Barack Obama to head up a task force to provide recommendations to reduce gun violence….

Read it all.

I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

A new year was just beginning — an extraordinary year, in which so much would change.

Half a century ago, on Jan. 14, 1963, George Wallace took the podium to give his inaugural address as governor of Alabama. His words framed a fiery rejoinder to a civil rights movement gathering strength.

“I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny,” he thundered, “and I say, segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”

Fifty years later, the words still have the power to shock. In college classes like “The Sixties in History and Memory,” today’s students recoil.

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A medieval ceremony has begun the process of the Rt Revd Justin Welby becoming the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The College of Canons of Canterbury Cathedral has unanimously elected Bishop Justin Welby as the 105th Archbishop of Canterbury.

The 35-strong College of Canons, made up of senior clergy and lay people from the Diocese of Canterbury, met at Canterbury Cathedral’s 14th-century Chapter House to take part in the formality, which dates back more than 1000 years.

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Steroid-tainted stars Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Sammy Sosa were denied entry to baseball’s Hall of Fame, with voters failing to elect any candidates for only the second time in four decades.

Bonds received just 36.2 percent of the vote, Clemens 37.6 and Sosa 12.5 in totals announced Wednesday by the Hall and the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. They were appearing on the ballot for the first time and have up to 14 more years to make it to Cooperstown.

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Most adolescents who plan or attempt suicide have already received at least some mental health treatment, raising questions about the effectiveness of current approaches to helping troubled youths, according to the largest in-depth analysis to date of suicidal behaviors in American teenagers.

The study, in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, found that 55 percent of suicidal teenagers had received some therapy before they thought about suicide, planned it or tried to kill themselves, contradicting the widely held belief that suicide is due in part to a lack of access to treatment.

The findings, based on interviews with a nationwide sample of more than 6,000 teenagers and at least one parent of each, linked suicidal behavior to complex combinations of mood disorders like depression and behavior problems like attention-deficit and eating disorders, as well as alcohol and drug abuse.

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The book’s religious sensibility is thoroughly Gnostic, in a number of ways. It is, for one thing, simply saturated in imagery and concepts drawn from the Gnostic systems of late antiquity, and its narrative form””its incontinent mythopoeia, its rococo excesses, its figural syzygies and archons and aeons (or whatever one might call them)””has all the occult grotesquerie of authentic Gnostic myth. More to the point, its entire spiritual logic is one of “gnosis”: a saving wisdom vouchsafed through an entirely private revelation; a direct communication from a mysterious source that is also one’s own deepest ground, but from which one has become estranged; a truth attained not through the mediation of nature or culture, and certainly not through the moral “law,” but solely in the apocalyptic secrecy of the illuminated soul.

And yet, it is also almost wholly devoid of the special pathos that is the most enchanting, sympathetic, and human aspect of ancient Gnosticism: the desperate longing for escape, for final liberation, for a return to the God beyond. Jung’s scripture is, in the end, a gospel not of salvation, but of therapy””not of deliverance, but of conciliation””and in this sense it truly is a liber novus, a newer new testament, a “sacred” book of a kind that only our age could have produced.

Read it all.

On this first Sunday of 2013…we think it’s worth remembering where we are and where we’ve come from….

The fact that traveling from New York to California is now over a hundred times faster than it was 150 years ago is worth reflecting on. Between the invention of the wheel and that of the wheelbarrow, thousands of years passed; but between da Vinci’s drawings of flying machines and the Wright brothers’ first flight, only four centuries had gone by.

It’s in the nature of technological progress to accelerate, and the rate of acceleration has picked up in recent centuries. In 1900, automobiles weren’t yet being mass-produced, nor had the Wright brothers achieved flight yet. The century wasn’t seven decades in when car ownership reached a quarter-billion people worldwide, and men were traveling safely to and from the moon.

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After a decade of being overshadowed by the unfolding events in the Episcopal Church of the United States of America, the Church of England returned to the center of the Anglican news world. While the communion’s 38 provinces dealt with issues of local importance, the issues underlying Archbishop Rowan Williams’ resignation, the coalition government’s push for same-sex marriage, the General Synod vote on women bishops, the collapse of the Anglican Covenant, and the Chichester abuse report were played out across the Anglican Communion in 2012.

As important as these issues appeared as they were debated and discussed, the underlying questions about the nature of the Church and the nature of mankind, sounded by Dr. Rowan Williams, Pope Benedict XVI and leaders of the church in the developing word and within the Church of England, drove debate within the church in 2012.

However a few hardy Anglican perennials surfaced last year also. Episcopal corruption remained a significant concern for the Church of South India (CSI) and the Church of North India (CNI). Lay activists tell The Church of England Newspaper that only “8 or 9” of the CSI’s 21 current bishops were untainted by corruption charges.

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Fans of “Les Misérables” on film or stage may be surprised to know that not everyone in France was of good cheer when Victor Hugo published the book in 1862. The anticlerical set was especially offended by the pivotal role of the Bishop of Digne, who helped determine the course of the novel by resuscitating the soul of Jean Valjean.

As Hugo worked on the novel, his son Charles, then in his 20s, objected to the reverential treatment of the bishop. He argued to his father that the portrayal gave undeserved respect to a corrupt clergy, bestowing credibility on a Roman Catholic Church opposed to the democratic ideals that he and his father held. Charles instead proposed that the catalyst for Jean Valjean’s transformation be a lawyer or doctor or anyone else from a secular profession.

The pushback didn’t work. Not only did Hugo hold his ground, but he amplified the importance of Charles-François Bienvenue Myriel, affectionately known in the novel as Monseigneur Bienvenue (Bishop Welcome). The book’s first hundred pages or so are a detailed chronicle of Myriel’s exemplary life, showing that his intervention on behalf of Jean Valjean was part of a long track record and not a singular aberration.

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The police were not among [Elder] Loizos’ supporters. They said they received thousands of complaints about his “Elder Pastitsios” Facebook page… [that] criticized Elder Paisios as xenophobic and close-minded. [It also mocked the monk’s name ”” Paisios became Pastitsios, like the Greek pasta dish].

Last September, they arrested him and charged him with blasphemy, which carries up to six months in prison.

Many Greeks saw his case as a theocratic stifling of free speech. It was the first of two blasphemy arrests in recent months.

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…what has to be explained is not the west’s looming relative decline but its temporary pre-eminence. Of a world population approaching 7bn, the US and western Europe together account for a mere 770m. Their gross domestic product per head ”“ a very approximate guide to living standards ”“ is three times the world average. Such discrepancies can hardly be expected to last in an increasingly globalised planet. In 1500, just after Christopher Columbus’s voyages of discovery, China and India were both estimated to have had a total GDP considerably higher than western Europe’s and GDP per head only slightly lower. Earlier still, in about 1000, living standards were fairly uniform ”“ and low ”“ throughout the world but the estimates show China slightly in the lead.

The reversal towards an earlier norm has already started. Emerging and developing countries now account, for the first time in the modern era, for about half of total world output. Historians have offered endless explanations for the west’s temporary surge: religions that put more emphasis on the individual and his activities in this life; an intellectual climate more favourable to scientific thought; property rights that safeguarded acquisitions of wealth; less autocratic forms of government. The list is endless and doubtless all these elements played a part. In the late 18th century the government of England’s George III sent a trade mission to China, only to be rebuffed by the Chinese emperor who declared that his country had everything it required and did not need western trinkets.

But such attitudes could hardly be expected to last, faced with the evidence of an increasing western lead. What the west initiated the others would follow; and eventually began to initiate on their own.

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As with the holiday, so with the culture at large. The increasingly post-Christian culture of America and Europe are nevertheless more deeply rooted in Christianity than is usually recognized by its opponents (and some of its adherents). It’s at least theoretically possible that this culture will eventually get Christianity out of its system, out of the roots of its consciousness, and negligible as a cultural force, reduced to the private practices of an eccentric few. This would take several generations, and I don’t think it will happen, but it certainly could. And if it did, the resulting culture would, like Christmas, lose the hope and the humanism which had been its legacy from Christianity. As with Christmas, if the heart were to stop beating, the body would die.

We have seen the prospects for that new culture already, in the totalitarian nightmares of communism and fascism, in the wasteland of pleasure-and-power-seeking which is offered as the good life by much of the entertainment and advertising produced by capitalism, in the drab materialist collectivism of “Imagine” and the absurd materialist egoism of Atlas Shrugged.

Perhaps it’s not even too much to say that if Christmas were to die, the remains of Christian culture would die, too, and with it that softness toward the individual human person””imperfect, of course, and slow to develop””that has characterized it. As long as the mad mixture of the very earthly and the very heavenly which is Christmas””the poor and vulnerable newborn baby among the animals on the one hand, choirs of angels on the other””remains at the heart of the holiday, and the holiday remains very much alive in the culture, the natural coldness and brutality of the human race is always challenged from within the culture itself. Should that challenge be removed, no one would be more surprised by the result than those who worked to remove it. They might not live to see that result, but if their souls were not lost altogether, part of their purgatory might be the knowledge of what they had done to their descendants.

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It was a cruel, cruel year ”” a year that kept raising our hopes, only to squash them flatter than a dead possum on the interstate.

Example: This year the “reality” show Jersey Shore, which for six hideous seasons has been a compelling argument in favor of a major earth-asteroid collision, finally got canceled, and we dared to wonder if maybe, just maybe, we, as a society, were becoming slightly less stupid.

But then, WHAP, we were slapped in our national face by the cold hard frozen mackerel of reality in the form of the hugely popular new “reality” show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, which, in terms of intellectual content, makes Jersey Shore look like Hamlet.

Read it all.

Here are the first two:

(1) Christian colleges and for-profit businesses sue over the Obama administration’s narrow religious exemption to its insurance
requirements for birth control, including emergency contraceptives

(2) The Supreme Court sides with a Lutheran Church”“Missouri Synod school against a former teacher, saying the government can’t get involved in ministerial
employment.

Read them all.

This week, an ancient and largely inaccessible treasure was opened to everyone. Now, anyone with access to a computer can look at the oldest Bible known to humankind.

Thousands of high-resolution images of the Dead Sea Scrolls were posted online this week in a partnership between Google and the Israel Antiquities Authority. The online archive, dating back to the first century B.C., includes portions of the Ten Commandments and the Book of Genesis.

“Most of these fragments are not on display anywhere,” says Risa Levitt Kohn, a professor of Hebrew Bible and Judaism at San Diego State University.

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On Tuesday, Egyptians officially began life under a mostly democratic constitution, nearly two years after the Tahrir Square revolution. But this remarkable feat for the Middle East was hardly a model in how opposing sides in a democracy should listen to each other. In fact, the US State Department issued a stern warning to President Mohamed Morsi about “the urgent need to bridge divisions, build trust, and broaden support for the political process.”

Many of the steps on the way to the Constitution ”“ whose bright spot includes regular elections ”“ ignored the interests of Egypt’s various minorities, from liberal secularists to Coptic Christians. The dominant Muslim Brotherhood, whose party has won three national votes, fell for the notion that the majority should always get what it wants ”“ a mistake that has been the undoing of many democracies.

“Democracy requires much more than simple majority rule,” said a US State Department spokesman, Patrick Ventrell.

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The first Hindu elected to the House of Representatives, Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, will take the oath of office in a few weeks ”“ and she has chosen to place her hand on the Bhagavad Gita, a sacred text of her tradition.

Meanwhile, the woman she replaces in Congress, Mazie Hirono, will be sworn in as the first Buddhist elected to the U.S. Senate.

Welcome to the new religious America.

Religious diversity, of course, has long been part of the American landscape. But in 2012, religious minorities became newly visible and vocal in a society historically dominated by the symbols, values and leaders of the Protestant faith….

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Whether or not there is a deal, the weeks since the election have produced a stark display of political gridlock. “The government is not working,” said Steve Bell, senior director of the Bipartisan Policy Center, who was a senior budget adviser to Senate Republicans for many years. “There is no doubt that the policy-making apparatus in this town has collapsed.”

Following the tea-party wave in the 2010 election, the 112th Congress looks set to be the least productive in recent history. By the end of November, the House had passed 146 bills over the previous two years, by far the smallest number for any Congress since 1948. The Senate passed fewer bills in 2012 than in any year since at least 1992.

Rather than smoothing over differences, the November election appears to have hardened them. “We came out of the election with both sides thinking they won and had an equal mandate,” said Ross Baker, a professor at Rutgers University who is now interviewing lawmakers on Capitol Hill for a book on bipartisanship. “One problem is we don’t have a common narrative to guide us.”

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I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

A Berliner and longtime member of St. Mary’s church choir, Christian Beier attempts to explain the mystique and tradition behind this piece of music….

“It makes Christmas Christmas,” he adds with a chuckle.

But as gorgeous as the music is for Beier, the core of this yearly event is something deeper.

“It is getting into some dialogue with God. It is being moved by whatever is around us,” he says.

Read or listen to it all (audio for this highly encouraged).

Washington went on to express his gratitude for the support of “my countrymen” and the “army in general.” This reference to his soldiers ignited feelings so intense, he had to grip the speech with both hands to keep it steady. He continued: “I consider it an indispensable duty to close this last solemn act of my official life by commending the interests of our dearest country to the protection of Almighty God and those who have the superintendence of them [Congress] to his holy keeping.”

For a long moment, Washington could not say another word. Tears streamed down his cheeks. The words touched a vein of religious faith in his inmost soul, born of battlefield experiences that had convinced him of the existence of a caring God who had protected him and his country again and again during the war. Without this faith he might never have been able to endure the frustrations and rage he had experienced in the previous eight months.
Washington then drew from his coat a parchment copy of his appointment as commander in chief. “Having now finished the work assigned me, I retire from the great theater of action and bidding farewell to this august body under whom I have long acted, I here offer my commission and take leave of all the employments of public life.” Stepping forward, he handed the document to Mifflin.

This was — is — the most important moment in American history.

The man who could have dispersed this feckless Congress and obtained for himself and his soldiers rewards worthy of their courage was renouncing absolute power. By this visible, incontrovertible act, Washington did more to affirm America’s government of the people than a thousand declarations by legislatures and treatises by philosophers.

Thomas Jefferson, author of the greatest of these declarations, witnessed this drama as a delegate from Virginia. Intuitively, he understood its historic dimension. “The moderation. . . . of a single character,” he later wrote, “probably prevented this revolution from being closed, as most others have been, by a subversion of that liberty it was intended to establish.”

Read it all.

One of my friends sent me this this week, and it moved me to tears. Please do take the time to watch it all (in the ten minute range)–KSH.

Curators at the Museum of London have discovered what they believe to be the first ever recordings of a family Christmas.

They were made 110 years ago by the Wall family who lived in New Southgate in North London.

There are 24 clear recordings on wax cylinders which were made using a phonograph machine between 1902 and 1917.

Read it all and check out that audio.

Christmas is an official government holiday in the United States, one that coincides with a smaller and informal but well-known tradition: debating whether or not there is a “war on Christmas.” In this thinking, American Christians are obligated to ”stand up and fight against this secular progressivism that wants to diminish the Christmas holiday,” as prominent Fox News host Bill O’Reilly recently argued. “We have to start to fight back against these people.” This is often portrayed as a global fight; O’Reilly, in one of his books, suggested that the “war on Christmas” is part of an effort to “mold [the U.S.] in the image of Western Europe.”

This movement to defend one of Christianity’s most important holiday can sometimes seem to begin from the assumption that Christianity itself is on the defensive in the world, a besieged minority or at least under threat of being made one.

A very different picture emerges from a just-out Pew report, “The Global Religious Landscape.” There are a number of fascinating trends and details in the study, but it’s worth examining what it indicates about the place of Christianity in the world. And, based on this data, the world’s largest religion seems to be doing just fine.

Read it all and follow the link to the full Pew report.

In assessing the greatness of Lionel Messi, Arsene Wenger, usually the world’s most insightful soccer manager, once said a trite thing: “When you look at the numbers, you have to kneel down and say they are fantastic.”

Wenger was referencing the 2010-11 season, in which Messi scored 53 goals in all competitions.

On Saturday, in his last game before the Christmas break, Messi scored his 91st goal of 2012. So Messi not only crushed the 40-year-old calendar-year scoring record held by German Gerd Muller (85), he reversed over it a few times.

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The idea of Protestant civil religion sounds strange in a country that prides itself on secularism and religious tolerance. However, America’s religious free market has never been entirely free. The founding fathers prized freedom of conscience, but they did not intend to purge society of Protestant influence (they had deep suspicions of Catholicism). Most believed that churches helped to restrain the excesses of mob democracy. Since then, theology has shaped American laws regarding marriage, public oaths and the bounds of free speech. For most of our history, the loudest defenders of the separation of church and state were not rogue atheists, but Protestants worried about Catholics seeking financing for parochial schools or scheming their way into public office to take orders only from mitered masters in Rome.

Activists on both the left and the right tend to forget this irony of the First Amendment: it has been as much a weapon of religious oppression as a safeguard for liberty. In the 19th and early 20th century, when public school teachers read from a Protestant translation of the Bible in class, many Americans saw benign reinforcement of American values. If Catholic parents complained, officials told them that their Roman dogma was their own private concern. The underlying logic here was not religious neutrality.

The Protestant bias of the American public sphere has mellowed over time, but it still depends on “Christian secularism,” said Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, a political scientist at Northwestern University.

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Chinese leaders issued an order last year quietly directing universities to root out foreigners suspected of plotting against the Communist Party by converting students to Christianity.

The 16-page notice ”” obtained this month by a U.S.-based Christian group ”” uses language from the cold war era to depict a conspiracy by “overseas hostile forces” to infiltrate Chinese campuses under the guise of academic exchanges while their real intent is to use religion in “westernizing and dividing China.”

The document suggests that despite small signs of religious tolerance in recent decades,China’s ruling officials retain strong suspicion of religion as a tool of the West and a threat to the party’s authoritarian rule. And with the country’s top leadership in transition and looking to consolidate power, Chinese religious leaders worry that the stance is unlikely to change in the near future.

Read it all and note there is a link to the 16 page document itself for those interested.