Whenever I plan a Maundy Thursday service, I get annoyed with the lectionary. Why isn’t the second reading 1 John 4? I get that Paul’s account of the words of institution for the Lord’s Supper in 1 Corinthians is assigned to cover for the lack of an account in John’s Gospel. Still, the day is named for the New Commandment. Jesus, gearing up for the most terrifying experience he and his disciples will ever know, commands them to love one another. It’d be nice if 1 John’s gloss””that such love casts out fear””also made the cut.

This fairly arbitrary objection may be mine alone. But lots of us worship planners have pet frustrations with the Revised Common Lectionary (1992). My Facebook newsfeed””a place much like the wider world, if half the population went to seminary””attests to these regularly.

Why pair these readings? Why skip those verses? How will we survive an entire month on Jesus the long-winded bread of life? Does Christ’s appearance to Thomas really need to come up every Low Sunday (leaving young associate ministers””preaching while the senior pastor takes the week off””with thick files of sermons on doubt or woundedness or bodily resurrection)?

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U.S. and Afghan politicians are in the middle of a heated debate over whether a small American and NATO force will remain in Afghanistan at the end of next year.

But what’s a political and strategic question at the negotiating table is an emotional question at bases around Afghanistan, where soldiers watch the discussions with one eye on their sacrifices over the past 12 years and the other on the American withdrawal from Vietnam four decades ago.

In short, they don’t want to go home without the win.

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In 1996 Richard Kinder was the president of Enron and the heir-apparent to Ken Lay, the energy firm’s boss. It was not to be. He was passed over for the top job, apparently judged too conservative to take the helm of America’s most innovative company. His next move, with a partner, was to buy some pipelines and a coal terminal from his former employer. Buying things that rust? It was all very old economy.

Sixteen years later the man who bested Mr Kinder to become Enron’s chief executive is in jail and that company is a byword for misleading accounting. By contrast Kinder Morgan is worth $109 billion, Mr Kinder’s personal stake approaches $9 billion and in the past year alone he has received distributions of $376m. That success is partly due to America’s energy boom and Mr Kinder’s talents; but it is also due to his shrewd use of a distinctive corporate structure….

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It’s not just a fling or a phase for them. It’s an identity. They want to show that polyamory can be a viable alternative to monogamy, even for middle-class, suburban families with children, jobs and house notes.

“We’re not trying to say that monogamy is bad,” said Billy Holder, a 36-year-old carpenter who works at a university in Atlanta. “We’re trying to promote the fact that everyone has a right to develop a relationship structure that works for them.”

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George Horner, 90, is the oldest musician to make his debut in Boston’s Symphony Hall. During the Holocaust, he played music to lift the spirits of other prisoners, and shared some of those arrangements during a concert organized by the Terezin Music Foundation. NBC’s Stephanie Gosk reports.

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[I was listening to the speaker on 60 minutes and he said the following}…

:“I have ”“ one teacher I remember was an elderly Jesuit at Xavier (high school in New York City) from Boston. He had a Boston accent. Father Tom Matthews, and he taught me a lesson that I’ve recounted in some of my speeches. He taught me what I refer to as the Shakespeare principle.

The class was reading one of the Shakespeare plays, ”˜Hamlet’ or whatever, and one of my classmates or whatever, sort of smart aleck kid, John Antonelli, as I recall. It’s ridiculous I would remember his name. But [John] made some really smart aleck sophomoric criticism of the play, and Father Matthews looked down at him and he said, with his Boston accent, ”˜Mister, when you read Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s not on trial. You are.’”

And so it was for me and Flannery O’Connor. As I read her work, Flannery O’Connor was not on trial. I was. Sheepishly, I have to admit that I had similarly grossly misjudged the great G.K. Chesterton in the past (see my previous post “Finding My Way to Orthodoxy” http://acatholicthinker.wordpress.com/2012/11/22/finding-my-way-to-orthodoxy/). The work of Flannery O’Connor could be harsh, violent and discomfiting. And yet it is also thick with truth, grace and redemption. To the superficial reader, a yarn filled with unattractive figures on ill-fated endeavors may be all that is perceived. But to those willing to consider her work more deeply, powerful themes of deeply religious truths become apparent. Perhaps the greatest and most pervasive of these truths in Flannery’s stories is the pain, suffering and “meanness” that often accompanies the beautiful grace of God.

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In the past three years, a quintet of engaging religion news sites has cropped up across the country. Why? By the end of the past decade, it was clear that newspaper editors were cutting costs wherever they could and the religion beat was often the first to go. Numerous cities were without any non-sectarian religion coverage whatsoever as religion reporters were either laid off (which is what happened to me) or transferred to other beats (Jeffrey Weiss for the Dallas Morning News is a key example). One writer who was laid off from her Connecticut paper was Tracy Simmons. She dreamed up her own religion news web site for the Hartford area called creedible.com and did quite well, eventually winning an award in 2011 for best religion news section. She was a pioneer in independent religion news sites.

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2–At its root Social Security is, and always has been, an inter-generational transfer of wealth….

4–…since 2010 Social Security’s cash expenses have exceeded its cash receipts; negative cash flow last year was about $55 billion, according to the latest report from the system’s trustees. While credited interest is still more than enough to cover the deficit, that will only be true until 2020. After that, Social Security will begin redeeming its hoard of Treasuries for cash to continue paying benefits ”” as was the plan all along.

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Public trust in the government, already quite low, has edged even lower in a survey conducted just before the Oct. 16 agreement to end the government shutdown and raise the debt ceiling.

Trust in Government Again Near All-Time LowJust 19% say that they trust the government in Washington to do what is right just about always or most of the time, down seven points since January. The current measure matches the level reached in August 2011, following the last battle over the debt ceiling. Explore a Pew Research interactive on Public Trust in Government: 1958-2013.

The share of the public saying they are angry at the federal government, which equaled an all-time high in late September (26%), has ticked up to 30%. Another 55% say they are frustrated with the government. Just 12% say they are basically content with the federal government.

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This is a fun list if you want to guess which you would pick and then check it out.

Next week, Prince George of Cambridge is to be christened into the Church of England in a 45-minute ceremony at the Chapel Royal of St James’s Palace. As well as the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge: The Queen, Duke of Edinburgh, Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall and members of the Middleton family will be present.

Although godparents have yet to be announced, many have speculated over who the honour could be afforded to. Princess Beatrice, Prince Harry, Pippa Middleton and also some of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s friends from university have been picked out by analysts.

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It’s a familiar sight at the Catholic Center, the archdiocesan headquarters on First Avenue in Manhattan where I work. Dozens of new arrivals to our country line up early in the morning, waiting for our office to open. They know that here they will get the help they need to become citizens, learn English and civics, reunite with their families, and navigate the complex legal immigration system. Our telephone counselors answer 25,000 calls from immigrants each year in 17 different languages.

It isn’t, however, confined to our office. We’ve all seen the men””almost 120,000 of them nationally on any given day””queuing up on the side of the road on hundreds of street corners throughout the U.S., hoping to be hired for the day. In places like Yonkers, N.Y., volunteers from Catholic Charities offer these day laborers coffee and sandwiches and even some employment advice.

The Catholic Church is doing the same things in Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Houston, Newark and Miami. More than 150 Catholic immigration programs across the nation assist immigrants in becoming Americans. Helping the newcomer to our land feel at home is part of our mission, as Christ reminds us in Matthew 25 that “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” Historian Henry Steele Commager wrote that: “The Church was one of the most effective of all agencies for democracy and Americanization.”

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The Brotherhood was toppled in Egypt in a July military coup, and former president Mohammad Morsi will go on trial in November. The coup is also threatening the 6-year-old rule of its Palestinian branch, Hamas, in neighboring Gaza, because the Egyptian military has closed smuggling tunnels under the Gaza-Egypt border, depriving Hamas of millions of dollars in foreign donations and customs revenue. In several Gulf Arab states, the movement has been targeted in a crackdown, and Tunisia’s Brotherhood-dominated government faces a backlash.

“They fail to make the transition from a closed organization into an open and broad-based transparent government,” Fawaz A. Gerges, director of the Middle East Center of the London School of Economics, said of the Brotherhood. “They behaved, while in government, exactly as they behave internally.”

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…while Hauerwas (following Kaye) argues that the particularity of Jesus of Nazareth becomes universalised across the globe in particular and local ways, the new challenge confronting Christians is that these different particular expressions of Christianity now sit right next to each other, thanks to a virtual 24-hour news cycle. As Anthony Giddens observes, the intensification of modern trans-national relationships is such that “local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away.” Social relations are being “lifted out” out their local contexts and restructured across time and space. Thus a bishop is consecrated in New Hampshire, and immediately an Archbishop in Nigeria responds. An Episcopal election is contested in Tanzania, and bloggers across the globe instantly construct conspiracy theories. When Justin Welby announces that he won’t be attending GAFCON II because he must baptise a new heir to the throne, it quickly becomes an object of scrutiny in Florida.

This reality suggests that the calls to return to a focus on the local parish by Hauerwas and Jensen require considerable modification. When Jensen warns against Christians “talking only to each other and becoming increasingly incomprehensible to those on the outside,” we should imagine this issue not simply as being limited to the Diocese of Sydney and its local community, but recognise that it applies to a much more expansive community “on the outside.” Similarly, when Hauerwas suggests that Christians need to “learn to be where we are,” the image that should come to mind is not of some small country village, but the global village.

If the Anglican Communion is to manage – as Hauerwas (following Kaye) puts it – “to maintain catholicity without Leviathan,” it will only do so after coming to terms with the compression of space and time that has been produced by contemporary patterns of communication and travel.

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In his church office, pastor Chuck Smith kept a crown made of thorns and a jar full of candy. The thorns were from the Holy Land. The candy was for his grandkids. The image suggested his special appeal as a preacher: A harsh, old-school Christianity delivered with grandfatherly sweetness.

Smith, the founder of the Jesus People and the Calvary Chapel movement, and one of the most influential figures in modern American Christianity, died Thursday morning at his home in Newport Beach after a two-year battle with lung cancer, church officials said. He was 86.

“He was definitely a pioneer,” said Donald E. Miller, a professor of religion at USC. “He had a transformative impact on Protestantism.”

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Rising industrialization and urbanization in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries helped push the graveyard out of town, and these shifts coincided with the rise of a new reserve, in which displays of strong emotion, such as grief, were unseemly.

But during the 1950s, the landscape changed. In 1955, Geoffrey Gorer’s fascinating essay “The Pornography of Death,” argued that proscriptions around death had replaced the Victorian taboo against sex. In 1959, psychologist Herman Feifel came out with The Meaning of Death, a collection of essays often credited with singlehandedly establishing death, dying, and bereavement as legitimate areas for study. Yet neither Feifel nor Gorer made their way to American dinner tables. It was [Jessica] Mitford who got ordinary people talking. The American Way of Death made its way into soap operas, newspaper cartoons, and even the cover of Good Housekeeping. (An extract appeared in a 1964 issue alongside such articles as “Coming, a New Kind of Refrigerator” and “How Well Can Carpets Take It?”) Her take-charge, do-it-yourself message helped liberate Americans from the rigid rules and roles they were eager to cast off, as they were beginning to do in so many other areas of life.

That doesn’t mean The American Way of Death encouraged Americans to rethink their cultural relationship with death, exactly. The book is a narrowly conceived exposé, a screed against expensive funerals and the men who sell them, not an analysis of how or why funerals got that way. It’s interesting to contrast Mitford’s book with the seminal death texts of the past, such as the two in the fifteenth century that were both called The Art of Dying, or the Tibetan and Egyptian books of the dead. Those works helped individuals prepare for death by prescribing a series of attitudes and rituals designed to ensure a good death and a better afterlife. Such rituals helped people grapple with death’s great challenge to the self; they made death mean. By contrast, Mitford’s book is a Consumer Reports of death. Instead of prayers and meditations, she offers tips on the best way to get a cheap casket (just keep asking the salesman; it’s often out in the garage).

Films about being adrift seem to suit the national mood: “All Is Lost” is one of a spate of movies this season, including “Gravity,” about Americans unmoored.

–From a profile article on Robert Redford in this week’s New York Times

It is the first time that a royal christening has been marked with coins.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s son will be christened on 23 October, just over three months after his birth.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Reverend Justin Welby, will perform the christening at the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace.

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Who played whom and what was the final score?

No peeking, googling, phoning a friend, etc.

Archbishop Josiah Idowu-Fearon, bishop of the diocese of Kaduna in Nigeria, said he believes there are extreme conservatives and liberals within the Communion, but a majority of about 70 per cent of Anglicans are in the middle and want the Communion to hold together.

Idowu-Fearon, in speaking about the Communion’s instruments of unity””the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference, the Primates’ Meeting and the Anglican Consultative Council””offered suggestions for making them more effective, including creating a commission to decide whether the Lambeth Conference should be designed for talk or decision-making; giving the Archbishop of Canterbury direct oversight of the Anglican Consultative Council; and the idea that each primate could come to the Primates’ Meeting, accompanied and advised by both a liberal and a conservative on controversial issues.

“I think, as Anglicans, it is about time we stopped running away from the fact that we are two groups””the liberal and the conservatives,” Idowu-Fearon said. The primates might not agree, but there is an opportunity for building understanding, he said, adding that recommendations from the Primates’ Meeting could then be taken to the Anglican Consultative Council, like a synod. “If this Communion has a mission, which is to unite the church, we must learn to accommodate one another,” he said. “The conservatives have been very arrogant, the liberals have been very despotic, and I believe we both need to ask the world for forgiveness”¦”

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Watch and listen to it all.

The drama program ”” at Harry S. Truman High School ”” opened this year with one more deficit: its galvanizing teacher, Lou Volpe, retired in June after more than 40 years showing students in an economically slumped, culturally narrow community how to strive for excellence, grapple with challenging ideas, empathize with people different from themselves and enlarge their notions of who they might become. And he brought their theatrical achievements glowing national attention. Under Volpe’s direction, Truman students presented pilot high school versions of “Les Misérables,” “Rent” and “Spring Awakening” ”” premieres that would determine whether these shows would become available to high schools generally. (All three triumphed.)

Being available, however, hasn’t made all the plays Volpe directed popular ­choices at other schools. Part of his success ”” pedagogical and theatrical ”” Sokolove suggests, comes from his “edgy” repertory. Not for the sake of sensation, but to engage kids in urgent contemporary social debate, he often selects works that raise the eyebrows, and even occasional ire, of local conservatives who object to frank representations of adolescent sexuality (hetero and homo), addiction, rebellion ”” the usual flash points in the old culture wars. Of the 25,000-plus high school theater programs in the country, fewer than 150 have produced “Rent.” At Truman, 300 kids ”” about one in five students there ”” auditioned for it. As one student tells Sokolove, confronting issues that make people uncomfortable is “one of the big reasons to do theater, right?…”

Sokolove, [once a Harry S. Truman High School student himself] landed in a literature class Volpe taught at the time. “Everyone in life needs to have had at least one brilliant, inspiring teacher,” he states. In Volpe, he found one. Read it all (emphasis mine).

When you accumulate books there is always that one which you’ve meant to read for the longest time. For whatever reason, call it grace or luck, you pick it up one day and spend the rest of the week (month, year) kicking yourself for not reading it earlier.

I’m presently kicking myself for not picking up Albert Borgmann’s Crossing the Posmodern Divide before Monday….

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…Stations of the Book Writing Cross:

cycling through my ritualized insistence that I’ll never ever ever write another book. Years ago, I’d cling to this delusion for at least a year after a book was published. My manuscript for The Social Media Gospel was submitted to Liturgical Press on January 2, 2013 and by January 7, I was ruminating about the next book.

rearranging book shelves to reflect emerging realities. Books I’ve used during the previous book’s writing process are either moved to a distant shelf, shipped to friends who might want them, or schlepped to The Book Thing. I then re-populate the bookshelves in my sight line with whatever I’m diving into.

going to sleep and waking up with words, phrases, sentences demanding attention….

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‘When I say I’m a church recorder, people often look blank,” says Adrian Parker. “Others,” he adds with a chuckle, “seem to think I’m some sort of senior judge.”

It is a confusing moniker. When I first heard it, it conjured up an image of recorder players lining up alongside the choir in the church stalls. “I suppose there are worse titles,” concedes another of their number, Matt Smith, “but at least it intrigues people and that gets them asking more about what we do.”

Parker and Smith are both church recorders in the King’s Lynn area of north Norfolk. What they actually do is volunteer one morning a week to go along to a local historic church (of which Norfolk boasts more than its fair share) and compile for posterity a complete inventory in words and pictures of its fabric and internal furnishings.

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I write to you at a time when the question of the values that underpin society are under active discussion in Quebec in response to the proposed Charter of Quebec Values. The churches of Synode Montréal & Ottawa Conference are in my prayers, as are all the people in Quebec in all their diversity.

The debate about the charter offers our church the opportunity to clearly express its values and beliefs””to state publicly our commitment to creating inclusive and respectful communities with our neighbours of all faiths and of no faith. Therefore, I am grateful to Synode Montréal &Ottawa Conference for its open letter to Quebec Premier Pauline Marois and to Montreal Presbytery for its news release on the matter. I am aware that Quebec-Sherbrooke Presbytery and the Consistoire Laurentien are also discussing responses.

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More than two months after the now-banned Muslim Brotherhood was driven from power and the country’s army chief, Gen. Abdel Fattah Sisi, surged to the fore, Egypt remains deeply divided about the role of religion in public life. Whether in fiery mosque sermons, slow-moving constitutional deliberations or triumphal military statements, the banner of heaven is being waved by all sides.

“Religion is being more or less used the same way by the military as it was by the Brotherhood,” said Ahmad El Azabawy, a former political science professor who is now an independent analyst. “Just with more subtlety, because now, of course, people are just coming out of a bitter experience with an Islamic regime.”

Religious minorities make up about 15% of the population, and Islam is the state religion. It pervades daily existence in Egypt as surely as the muezzin’s call echoing through dusty streets.

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Ben Phillips explained to me that when he became the principal of a strong Christian school following his years in Memphis public schools, “I wanted more minority students. I think a big part of the problem is that they were closed out by price.” So far, the response of conservative Christians has been to advocate for taxpayer-funded tuition vouchers. That project, however, has been fraught with difficulty both because of perceived church-state issues (a modest legal problem) and the resistance of public school supporters””worried about budgets already””to allow any resources to go to the private school system, which they perceive, correctly, to stand in judgment of their own efforts (a much bigger political problem).

Assuming a continuing deadlock over the issue of school choice, the best answer may be for conservative Christians to find other ways to create greater access to their institutions for those from whom they are suspected of fleeing. It is a burden of history not easily shrugged off, even by generations who did not make the world in which they live. We inherit debts other than the kind governments incur on their balance sheets. But the racial unification of the American church might best begin in the Christian schoolhouse before it takes hold in the Sunday services. It is a home mission (as the Baptists might call it) awaiting a champion and a movement. ”ƒ

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The dawn chorus always used to be accompanied by the distinctive chink of bottles being collected from doorsteps.

Now most of us buy our milk from supermarkets, so deliveries are fast becoming a thing of the past.

The number of glass bottles of milk delivered annually has fallen from 40 million in the early 90s to just two million today.
Going to church

Only 15% of us go to church more than once a month. In 1968 around 1.8 million people attended, but by 2007 that figure had almost halved.

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The good news is that so far, all we have is political posturing. History suggest that nothing happens until at least 12 hours after our September 30th midnight deadline. No one gets serious about any sort of deal before noon on October 1. At that point, political pressure on the House Republicans ”” from constituents, from Business leaders, and from elder statesmen ”” will start in earnest. A few days later, it can become more intense. We see the same sort of patterns with the debt ceiling limit as well (that’s schedule to hit at midnight October 17).

As NBC’s Pete Williams have reported, we have had 17 prior government shutdowns over the past 40 years, including 21 days in 1995 (table below). So while this feels like its new and unusual, it is actually more commonplace than most of us believe.

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