Twenty-five years ago, as the U.S. faced an economic crisis and a fierce debate over cutting taxes for the wealthy and limiting benefits for the poor, Catholic bishops issued a landmark statement on social justice that became the touchstone for religious opposition to “trickle down” economics.

This week, as America faces even worse economic circumstances and engages in the same fierce debate over budget priorities, the bishops gathered here for their annual meeting focused on a handful of internal matters and geared up for fights against gay marriage and abortion.

The bishops did not take note of the document’s anniversary””or its core teachings. That shift has dismayed those who believe that this is a moment for the hierarchy to announce the church’s views on the economy with the same vigor that it promotes other causes.

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There can be little doubt that capitalism is a productive way to order economic life. But we need to remember, as the protestors have reminded us, that that is all that it is — an economic system based on the entirely reasonable propositions that capital has value, and that supply and demand are the most efficient way to set prices. Capitalism is of no help at all in determining what is morally good — that is something that must instead be determined by the community’s wider values.

And there should be no question that when an economic system fails to reflect those communal values, it should be modified and governed until it does. To say, as some do, that any attempt to control or guide our economic system is neither wise nor possible is to admit that an economic system has decisive control of our lives. For a Christian, such an admission would be nothing less than to yield to idolatry. (Though I do not claim deep knowledge of other religious traditions, I suspect that this is true for them as well.) God alone is the One, and the only One, to whom we can concede such ultimate authority. For the non-theist to make the argument that the laws of economics are immutable is to concede that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves. That is the same argument that those in the grip of various kinds of addiction make: “I am not in control, my addiction made me do it.”

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As stores up the ante with earlier holiday hours that creep into Thanksgiving night, Black Friday is turning into Black Thursday, and some shoppers and employees aren’t happy about it.

ӢToys R Us said Monday it will open at 9 p.m. on Thanksgiving, an hour earlier than last year.
”¢Walmart will open at 10 p.m., two hours ahead of last year’s midnight opening.
”¢Other stores — including Target, Macy’s, Best Buy and Kohl’s — will open at midnight.

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As Barack Obama battled Hillary Rodham Clinton over health care during the Democratic presidential primaries of 2008, he was adamant about one thing: Americans, he insisted, should not be required to buy health insurance.

“If things were that easy,” Mr. Obama told the talk show host Ellen DeGeneres in February of that year, “I could mandate everybody to buy a house, and that would solve the problem of homelessness. It doesn’t.”

Now President Obama may wish he had stuck to those words. On Monday, the Supreme Court agreed to take up a constitutional challenge to his landmark health care bill, and a decision could come in the midst of Mr. Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign.

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My husband and my marriage are not prizes, lottery tickets or possessions. I did not win or purchase him in the marketplace of courtship. She did not lose in the marketplace of life. I didn’t bargain with marriage for my career; she didn’t trade in anything. We use these metaphors all the time as if they don’t have power, yet we forget that we are talking about are humans. “Dating and mating” is only a marketplace if we consent to being commodities.

To think outside the marketplace is tricky in our society….

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The Most Rev David Chillingworth, Bishop of St Andrews, Dunkeld & Dunblane and Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church and the Very Rev Dr John Armes, Rector of St John’s Episcopal Church, Princes Street and Dean of Edinburgh met yesterday with members of Occupy Edinburgh in St Andrews Square.

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I am the first to admit that I am a bit cynical about shopping in general and malls in particular. For the most part, I simply don’t like buying stuff, and I have no knack for it, even when purchasing gifts. I have had to work my way up from giving well-intentioned presents of fluorescent lightbulbs, which went over about as well as if I had wrapped up a toilet plunger for my wife.

I marvel, then, as the Christmas shopping season begins, at how our culture has managed to make such an ideal out of emptying our bank accounts and filling our homes””and eventually a landfill””with things we mostly do not need. As Colin Beavan, the author of No Impact Man, points out in his reflections on his family’s year-long experiment in radical urban environmentalism, the consumption habit not only wrecks the planet and enslaves many of its poorer citizens but also, like a drug addiction, is not even very satisfying or meaningful. And at least for a few farm kids I know, it is not nearly as much fun as playing on hay bales or tossing tomatoes. I wonder if in our endless purchasing, what we have actually bought is a bill of goods.

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Virtually nothing is more sacred to Germans than their constitution, which is known as the Basic Law. It was originally planned as a stopgap measure, but it has seen the Federal Republic of Germany through the past 62 years. During the Cold War, political parties may have squabbled over conservative Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s political commitment to Western Europe and the United States — and they had their differences over left-leaning Chancellor Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik policy of normalizing relations with communist Eastern Europe, particularly with East Germany — but they immediately and unanimously praised the Basic Law. “We have one of the best constitutions in the world,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel once said.

Now, it looks as if Merkel herself may order an overhaul of the German constitution. At the party conference of the chancellor’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) which commenced on Monday morning, Nov. 14, it is expected to approve a plan that could change the face of Europe — and perhaps make it necessary for the Germans to rewrite their constitution.

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Employer’s name? “God.” His address? “Heaven.” In more self-confident days, that is how Anglicans used to answer pesky bureaucrats demanding particulars of a clergyman’s employment. But for better or worse, the old idea that “religious workers”””to use more modern language””belong in a legal and metaphysical category all of their own is being chipped away.

London’s High Court ruled this week that the Roman Catholic church””in this case, the diocese of Portsmouth””could be held responsible for the actions of a priest, now dead, who is alleged to have abused a young girl at a children’s home. This was because the church had put the priest in a position where he could perpetrate abuse, creating a relationship similar to employment. The decision will make it easier for victims of clerical crimes to demand compensation, and it could eventually oblige the church authorities to compensate abuse victims on the large scale seen in other countries.

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Under… [an income-contigent program]proposal, loans would be offered at a single interest rate for all borrowers; payments would be automatically withheld from the borrowers’ paychecks by their employers and would be managed by the IRS, just as income taxes are collected. As in the president’s proposal, 10% of a borrower’s earnings would go toward their student loans. The more they earn, the faster they would repay their debt. Such a system would not only help graduates manage their student loans, it would save the government money because it would drastically reduce delinquencies and be far easier and less expensive to administer….

income-contingent loans would be universal and automatic. Everyone who took out a student loan would be put into the program and, because their loans would be tied to their Social Security numbers, the repayments would come out of their paychecks, just as their income, Social Security and Medicaid taxes are withheld.

Australia and Britain have had great success with their income-contingent loan programs. In Britain, more than 98% of loans are repaid.

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In a top-secret lab in an undisclosed Bay Area location where robots run free, the future is being imagined.

It’s a place where your refrigerator could be connected to the Internet, so it could order groceries when they ran low. Your dinner plate could post to a social network what you’re eating. Your robot could go to the office while you stay home in your pajamas. And you could, perhaps, take an elevator to outer space.

These are just a few of the dreams being chased at Google X, the clandestine lab where Google is tackling a list of 100 shoot-for-the-stars ideas. In interviews, a dozen people discussed the list; some work at the lab or elsewhere at Google, and some have been briefed on the project. But none would speak for attribution because Google is so secretive about the effort that many employees do not even know the lab exists.

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The European debt crisis is raising the odds of a U.S. recession, with economic contraction more likely than not by early 2012, according to research from the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank.

While it is difficult to gauge the odds precisely, an analysis of leading U.S. economic indicators suggests a rising chance of a recession through the end of the year and into early next year, researchers at the regional Fed bank wrote on Monday. The risk of recession recedes after the second half of 2012, they found.

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Facial recognition technology is a staple of sci-fi thrillers like “Minority Report.”

But of bars in Chicago?

SceneTap, a new app for smart phones, uses cameras with facial detection software to scout bar scenes. Without identifying specific bar patrons, it posts information like the average age of a crowd and the ratio of men to women, helping bar-hoppers decide where to go. More than 50 bars in Chicago participate.

As SceneTap suggests, techniques like facial detection, which perceives human faces but does not identify specific individuals, and facial recognition, which does identify individuals, are poised to become the next big thing for personalized marketing and smart phones. That is great news for companies that want to tailor services to customers, and not so great news for people who cherish their privacy. The spread of such technology ”” essentially, the democratization of surveillance ”” may herald the end of anonymity.

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According to one of my students at Yale, where I taught English in the last decade, a colleague of mine would tell his students that they belonged to a “post-emotional” generation. No anger, no edge, no ego.

What is this about? A rejection of culture-war strife? A principled desire to live more lightly on the planet? A matter of how they were raised ”” everybody’s special and everybody’s point of view is valid and everybody’s feelings should be taken care of?

Perhaps a bit of each, but mainly, I think, something else….

Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business. Every artistic or moral aspiration ”” music, food, good works, what have you ”” is expressed in those terms.

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But when a Christian tattoos a Bible verse or a faith-phrase upon her body, she makes her body into a text. She reverses the incarnation of Christ; in her de-incarnation she is making the body, what is prone to messiness and effluvia and decay, into a true and eternal Word. They are turning themselves into the Bible, or a part thereof.

There’s something laudable in this: stating that these truths are the ultimate and unchanging truths of who I am. Yet I also wonder if they represent a running away from our carnality, a running away from the things that Christ affirmed in the incarnation. I wonder too whether tattoos like these ”” and all tattoos ”” might sometimes work like frosting upon a store window ”” presenting a surface that seeks not to externalize but to conceal what lies within. Does the person who stamps “God’s Son” upon his skin really believe it?

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First it was Athens. Then Rome. Could Paris be next?

While Italy has replaced Greece as the focus of anxiety amid Europe’s worsening debt crisis, investors are increasingly concerned about the outlook for France, whose banks are among the world’s biggest and are closely linked with their counterparts in the United States.

One crucial gauge of investor sentiment, the difference between what France pays to borrow versus what Germany pays, has doubled since the beginning of October, and last week reached its widest point since the formation of the euro currency zone in 1999. Meanwhile, speculation that France could soon lose the sterling triple-A rating on its sovereign debt intensified after Standard & Poor’s mistakenly told clients on Thursday that it was downgrading France’s debt.

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Mr [Mario] Monti’s candidature was announced after President Giorgio Napolitano spent the day in 17 meetings with senior politicians.

Speaking to reporters shortly afterwards, Mr Monti said Italy should be an “element of strength and not weakness” within the EU.

“We will aim at solving the financial situation, resume the path of growth. [We want to build] a future of dignity and hope for our children.”

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A euro-zone central banker confesses that he has lately been thinking about historical catastrophes such as the first world war and wondering how the world blundered into them. “From the middle of a crisis”, he says ominously, “you can see how easy it is to make mistakes.”

Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) was supposed to banish the competitive devaluations that threatened the single market in the early 1990s. It promised to bind a unified Germany into the EU and pave the way for some sort of political union in Europe. Today that dream has not vanished altogether, but the single market is under threat once more. Europe’s nations are at loggerheads, Germany is in a state of outrage, and the link between the euro and the nation state is more fraught than ever. EMU truly is, writes David Marsh, author of a history of the euro, “Europe’s Melancholy Union”.

“The 2008 crisis shows that the dominant economies were not as dominant as they thought,” says Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the French former head of the IMF. “If Europe fails, it will suffer from low growth, economic domination and cultural domination.” Can Europe turn back from the abyss? Only if the core countries will support the rest as they submit themselves to radical political, social and economic reform. Nobody should be under any illusions about how difficult that will be.

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“We’ve entered a make-or-break scenario,” said Thomas Klau, a German who heads the Paris office of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “The present situation with Italy now is sustainable for days, perhaps weeks, but not months. This new chapter either writes the endgame of the euro zone, or it precedes a much bigger leap into political and economic integration than all those made so far.”

With each bout of uncertainty, speculative attacks come closer to the core of the European Union. Greece teeters, Italy wobbles and France begins to tremble. The precariousness of the situation was on full view Thursday when a leading ratings agency, Standard & Poor’s, mistakenly suggested on its Web site that it had downgraded France’s prized AAA rating, prompting a sell-off in French government bonds….

And it may get worse, with a recession looming. Unless, of course, the crisis has concentrated minds sufficiently, especially in Berlin. One of the first and most effective ways to combat the crisis and the potential downturn, experts say, would be to enable the European Central Bank, or E.C.B., to act as a lender of last resort, or to at least let it print some more money, to try a little inflation as a recipe for growth and debt reduction.

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The percentage of American adults who get their health insurance from an employer continues to decline, falling to 44.5% in the third quarter of this year. This percentage has been steadily declining since Gallup and Healthways started tracking Americans’ health insurance sources in 2008.

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Since work brings man to experience his role as a participant in God’s creative plan, a lack of work — or precarious employment situations — can lead to identity crises, says Benedict XVI.

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[The plenty with which we are surrounded] today is tinged with bewilderment. Drug abuse and violence are rife. Mental illness seems to have become more common, not simply better recognised, over the last generation or so. Rates of self-harm among teenage girls are also high and seem to be increasing. Personal debt has hit a record high.

So what has gone wrong? What has caused the loss of paradise? David Cameron said two years ago: “Research by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, in The Spirit Level, has shown that among the richest countries, it’s the more unequal ones that do worse according to almost every quality of life indicator.”

The Prime Minister was right to draw attention to this book. Its essential message, backed up by sound social science research, is that inequality damages community life and the relationships that hold us together. It shows that many social problems are more common in societies with larger income differences. Sadly, Britain is among the more unequal of the rich countries.

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Business Secretary Vince Cable has said he sympathises with the feelings of protesters outside St Paul’s Cathedral.

He told BBC’s Politics Show that the anti-capitalist demo reflected feelings about those who had prospered in the economic crisis, as many more suffered.

Mr Cable added that legislation could be introduced to curb executive pay.

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For the second time in two years, European debt troubles threaten to slow the momentum of the fragile recovery in the United States.

Although American financial institutions have taken steps to protect themselves from Europe’s long-simmering problems, the likely slowdown in Europe could damage consumer and business confidence in America and strengthen the dollar, making United States exports less competitive.

“Financial contagion can lead to the very rapid global spread of recession,” said Chris Varvares, senior managing director for Macroeconomic Advisers, a forecasting company. “If trouble intensifies and spills over to equities and other U.S. risk assets, we could see a soft patch.”

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There are Christians, too, eager to be seen as Christians. They face a special challenge. They want to make the church visible, so they wear clerical collars or other religious garb, like the albs, or white robes, that lay Christians may also wear.

But they know that many, especially on the political left, are wary of Christians, suspicious that these men and women in strange garments are seeking converts. When liberal activists hear “Christian,” they often think “conservative.” Many would thrill to see an imam marching next to them but shudder at a priest.

So committed Christians have different answers to the question, “How Christian should we seem?” Marisa Egerstrom, an Episcopalian who studies religion at Harvard, recognized Occupy Wall Street as a sign of the times, “a continuation of the Arab Spring.” On Sept. 17, she brought a group of 10 Boston-area Christians, including Roman Catholics and Lutherans, to Zuccotti Park in New York.

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One objection that I often hear from evangelicals is that while aid is good, it is not the government’s job. Yes, individuals and churches play a vital role in aid and development. But governments play a unique and vital role that private organizations cannot. The poverty-focused programs in the foreign-aid budget are facing cuts of between $1.2 billion and $3.2 billion from 2010 levels. In comparison, the largest American Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, has a budget of $308 million for its missionary and aid organization.

We cannot let others suffer simply because times are tough in the U.S. All Americans must understand the urgency of the human need and the effectiveness of our government’s aid programs.

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A Louisiana appeals court has opened the legal door for Episcopal churches in the state to quit the national Church and keep their properties.

On 14 September 2011 the First Circuit Court of Appeal in Baton Rouge upheld a lower court decision allowing a Presbyterian congregation to leave its presbytery and keep its property ”“ even though the Presbyterian Church’s constitutional documents claimed an interest in the property.

Relying upon the US Supreme Court’s decision in Jones v Wolfe, the appeals court in the case of Carrollton Presbyterian Church v the Presbytery of Southern Louisiana rejected the argument put forward by the presbytery that the addition of a trust clause in a denomination’s constitution was sufficient to create a valid and enforceable trust on property.

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The Prime Minister said on Tues­day that people should “not be able to erect tents all over the place”, as the Occupy protest outside St Paul’s Cathedral continued into its fourth week. There are now an estimated 2000 Occupy protests around the world, including several in the UK.

During an appearance before the House of Commons liaison com­mit­tee, David Cameron said that protest “is certainly a right that people have. But I have got this rather quaint view ”” you shouldn’t be able to erect tents all over the place.

“I think protesting is something you, on the whole, should do on two feet, rather than lying down ”” in some cases in a fairly comatose state.”

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