Christians have a duty “to follow the example of Jesus, who, throughout the Bible, focuses his love and care on the most vulnerable and marginalised people in society”, the Bishop of Chelmsford, Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani, has said.

She was writing in The Daily Telegraph on Monday in response to comments from senior political figures — including two former Home Secretaries, Suella Braverman and Dame Priti Patel — who have questioned the involvement of churches and members of the clergy in the asylum process.

The subject came to the fore after it was reported that the suspect in last week’s alkali attack in Clapham, south-west London, submitted that he had converted to Christianity before his asylum claim was approved (News, 2 February). The suspect, Abdul Shokoor Ezedi, is an Afghan national who is believed to have arrived illegally in the UK in 2016 and to have received support from church communities for his application to settle in the country.

Read it all (registration or subscription).

Bishop challenges former Home Secretaries’ talk of churches’ ‘facilitating’ bogus asylum claims https://t.co/TMxbAqT8IE

— Simon Sarmiento (@simonsarmiento) February 6, 2024

What the families want is atonement. When something goes wrong, there is a need, buried deep within the human psyche, or even deep within the structure of the universe, for atonement — for someone to pay a price for what has happened.

And this is what the families need: some kind of atonement for what has been done wrong. They long for some sign of remorse, repentance even, on behalf of those who bear responsibility. Yet it does not come. The serried ranks of smart suits remain silent — maybe understandably so in this setting, but, without that sign, the pain continues.

There is deep anger about the fire brigade’s advice — families were told to stay in their flats until the firefighters put out the fire — without which, it seems, many of those who died would still be alive today. There is equally deep anger about the cladding draped around the building a few years before, which was dangerously flammable. It was the combination of these two factors which led to the deaths of their loved ones.

Read it all.

Who will atone for the wrongs of Grenfell?

More than six years since the tragedy, no one has yet admitted responsibility, writes @gtomlinhttps://t.co/1V4lJDUI46

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) February 2, 2024

The global footprint of criminal groups from China¹ has expanded along with China’s economic and geopolitical presence around the world. North America’s fentanyl crisis thrust China-linked criminal networks and their expanding international connections, such as with the Sinaloa Cartel, to U.S. policy forefront.

However, the scope of organized crime from China extends far beyond global drug trafficking and money laundering. Internationally, Chinese criminal groups engage in poaching and wildlife trafficking, cybercrime, and elaborate fraud and scams, also featuring people trafficking and enslavement. Long experienced in illegally bringing people to the United States and Canada, criminal networks from China have intensified activities at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Chinese fishing vessels, often illegally devastating protected marine areas and other countries’ exclusive economic zones, can facilitate drug trafficking and serve as the Chinese government’s maritime militia proxies in extraterritorial claims and military confrontations. They can also augment Chinese espionage around the world.

Read it all.

China-linked criminal networks in 2024 are likely to expand their geographic reach and deep role in various illegal economies.

Read more from @VFelbabBrown @Diana_Paz99 & Vibha Bajji:https://t.co/dNlE3qnpUg

— Brookings Foreign Policy (@BrookingsFP) February 2, 2024

This month, the Hartford Institute for Religion Research released a foundational report about the health of America’s churches and the leaders that serve them in the post-COVID-19 moment. The survey’s title, “I’m Exhausted All the Time,” will resonate with anyone who, like me, is leading a house of worship these days. But I wish the news were even that good.

The report, from Hartford’s Exploring the Pandemic Impact on Congregations project, documents the growing number of American clergy who are burned out and have considered leaving either their current congregation — 44% — or the profession itself — more than half (53%). The latter figure represents an increase of 16% since 2021. The percentage of those considering leaving their current congregations, meanwhile, has more than doubled.

This isn’t the time for U.S. congregations to be facing the type of leadership transition of this magnitude. Less than half of participants in the study reported that their churches had rebounded to pre-pandemic levels of attendance or giving. Congregations are also less willing to embrace change than they were pre-pandemic, according to study participants, reversing several years of pandemic gains that saw congregations embrace change in order to survive.

Read it all.

OPINION: "What makes the present moment so difficult is that, in addition to the strain of recovering from the pandemic, congregations are also contending with a larger crisis that has been approaching for decades."https://t.co/S5IwdoXnt3

— Religion News Service (@RNS) January 28, 2024

The Bishop of Newcastle, Dr Helen-Ann Hartley, is standing down as one of the co-chairs of the Living in Love and Faith (LLF) process. She has expressed “serious concerns” about the recent appointment of a new interim theological adviser to the House of Bishops.

In a statement published online on Thursday morning, Dr Hartley said: “It has become clear to me in the last 48 hours that there are serious concerns relating to the recent process of appointing an interim theological adviser to the House of Bishops.”

Dr Hartley and the Bishop of Leicester, the Rt Revd Martyn Snow, were appointed last November to co-chair the LLF process, and last week wrote an article for the Church Times setting out their hope for a “reset” of the process…

Read it all.

The @BishopNewcastle said that "there are serious concerns relating to the recent process of appointing an interim theological adviser", and that this had a "critically negative impact" on the work she and @SnowMartyn were doing as LLF co-chairs.https://t.co/qdnUoywfGT

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) February 1, 2024

In this issue of The Century, theologian Katherine Schmidt writes about the role of the humanities in a world where AI is becoming increasingly powerful, generative, and autonomous. As corporations and policymakers grapple with the blurring lines between human agency and computer-generated agency, Schmidt argues that “ethical theory and ethics education” are vital. Further, she points out that theologians and philosophers are “uniquely qualified” to weigh in on the conversation, since they are skilled at addressing basic questions about truth, meaning, and agency.

Madry’s characterization of a bad actor in the AI world as someone who asks, “How can I be most ingenious in my evilness?” supports Schmidt’s argument. It’s one thing to have a team of technology experts devoted to squelching the plans of folks who deliberately deploy their evilness in ingenious ways. It’s another thing for the developers and disseminators of AI technology to consider the questions behind Madry’s hypothetical question. What exactly is “evilness”? Who gets to define it? Where does it come from? How intrinsic is it to human nature? Is it even possible to recognize it in ourselves? Can it spread from one person to another or multiply within a group of people? How can it be measured, and who does that measuring? To what extent might it be foiled by human effort?

Read it all.

“It’s not unreasonable to believe that AI experts will be better equipped to prevent catastrophes if they’ve spent some time considering theological questions—whether about evil, creation, incarnation, or agency.”

– the Christian Century editorshttps://t.co/R4r9LuWUB4

— theChristianCentury (@ChristianCent) January 26, 2024

Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb said the US deficit is swelling to a point that it would take a miracle to reverse the damage.

“So long as you have Congress keep extending the debt limit and doing deals because they’re afraid of the consequences of doing the right thing, that’s the political structure of the political system, eventually you’re going to have a debt spiral,” he said Monday night at an event for Universa Investments, the hedge fund firm he advises. “And a debt spiral is like a death spiral.”

Taleb defined the ballooning debt load as a “white swan,” a risk that’s more probable than a surprise “black swan” event. While he didn’t identify specific outcomes in markets, he did say white swans include both the US deficit and an economy that’s far more vulnerable to shocks than in prior years.

The reason for that, he said, is that the world is far more interconnected due to globalization, with issues in one region able to ricochet around the world.

Read it all.

Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb says as long as you have a government continually extending the debt limit and doing deals because they're afraid of the consequences of doing the right thing, then eventually you're going to have a debt spiral. https://t.co/pQFrtVNqus

— Ben Woodward, CFA (@BennettWoodman) January 31, 2024

Speaking at Mere Anglicanism, a conference sponsored by a diocese that ordains women to the priesthood, priest and conservative firebrand Calvin Robinson described women’s ordination as a “tool of entryism” for critical theories about race and sex. Organizers of the conference, sponsored by the Anglican Church in North America’s Diocese of South Carolina, had asked Robinson to address the topic “Critical Theory: Antithetical to the Gospel?”

In response to Robinson’s address, organizers removed him from a panel on the conference’s final day….

Mere Anglicanism’s director, the Rev. Jeffrey Miller, and Bishop Chip Edgar of the Anglican Diocese of South Carolina, met with Robinson after his presentation. He compared the meeting to being called into a school headmaster’s office.

Miller disputed Robinson’s account. “For the concluding panel discussion of the 2024 Mere Anglicanism Conference, Father Calvin Robinson was pulled from participating not because of his views on women’s ordination, but because he failed to address in his plenary presentation the topic that was assigned to him,” said the Rev. Jeffrey Miller, director of the conference, in a post-conference statement. “Father Robinson was not asked to leave the conference, but remained through its conclusion and was paid his full honorarium.”

In a pastoral letter issued soon after the conference, Edgar described Robinson’s remarks as “inexcusably provocative, and completely lacking in charity and pastoral consideration of the people in attendance — especially the many women clergy both of our diocese and others who attended.”

Read it all.

Latest #News: #ACNA leadership gathering devoted to “discipling, training, and educating lay and clergy leaders for the renewal of biblical and orthodox Anglicanism.”https://t.co/FTJUeLMu1g

— The Living Church (@Livng_Church) January 30, 2024

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

Sir Stephen has been Labour MP for East Ham in London since 1994, having first come to the area as part of a Christian mission to the East End while a university student…

He is on record as opposing legislation to introduce assisted dying, saying in a Westminster Hall debate in July 2022: “If we were to legalise assisted dying, we would impose an awful moral dilemma on every conscientious frail person nearing the end of their life. . . If ending their life early were legally permissible, many who do not want to end their life would feel under great, probably irresistible, pressure to do so. There is no way to stop that happening.”

On the Labour List site, he writes that “the radical individualism of some Conservatives” can prompt support for the legalisation of assisted suicide, “even at the risk of dire societal outcomes for the vulnerable. But in my view that should not be the position of those of us on the left.”

Read it all.

The Labour MP Sir Stephen Timms @stephenctimms has urged members of his party to give “careful thought” to the issue of assisted dying, arguing against that idea that it might be a party-political matterhttps://t.co/nXXt4xalNi

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) January 25, 2024

From there:

24 January 2024

Dear Brothers and Sisters of the Anglican Diocese of South Carolina,

Grace and peace to you through God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Most of you will not have been at the most recent Mere Anglicanism Conference held in Charleston this past weekend, January 18-20. You might well have heard of it, however, and the controversy resulting from the presentation by Calvin Robinson. If you have, it is likely you have heard that the Revd Robinson was “cancelled” due to his position on Women in Holy Orders. I write to correct that notion, and to tell you that he was removed from the final panel because his talk was deemed to have veered substantively from the topic he was asked to address. Instead, he took advantage of the opportunity and opined on what he considers the exceeding evil of women in Holy Orders. Most importantly, he did so in a way which was inexcusably provocative, and completely lacking in charity and pastoral consideration of the people in attendance—especially the many women clergy both of our diocese and others who attended.

It might be said that more could have been done in the moment to address the situation, but I want to commend the Revd Jeff Miller, Rector of St Philip’s Church, and host of the conference, for the deft way he tried to diffuse the situation, and the controversial, but bold step he took in removing the Revd Robinson from the remainder of the conference. Any failure to address the situation in a more direct, up-front manner, is mine. And for that failure, I apologize. Especially to the women present who were deeply insulted by his remarks.

The Anglican Church in North America, and the Anglican Diocese of South Carolina, and I, as bishop, are deeply committed to the idea that both those who favor women’s ordination, and those who oppose it, do so in fidelity to scripture and are both welcomed and valued in our common life. We refer to this recognition of both positions throughout the ACNA with the unwieldy moniker, “dual integrities.” While that is a less than helpful designation, it points to the deep reality that both views ought to be held with integrity, are welcome, respected, and will be defended on either side.

I, as your bishop, believe that the ordination of women comports with the teaching of scripture, most importantly, and is not ruled out by the tradition of the church. I welcome and encourage women in all levels of ministry. At the same time, given my commitment to “dual integrities,” I will support any who disagree with me. There will never come a time when I require anyone to act contrary to their conscience and commitments.

I do require, as a matter of godliness among us, that we always treat those with whom we disagree with love and charity and kindness. The kind of demeaning talk that marked the Revd Robinson’s presentation will not be countenanced.

In my admittedly short experience as a member of the ACNA’s College of Bishops, I have seen that our willingness to commit to each other in the spirit of “dual integrities,” has brought us into deeper fellowship and love, not less. It is easy to love those with whom you agree. The great reward comes from pressing into relationships of love with those with whom you disagree.

It is my prayer that, throughout my episcopacy, this will mark the life of our diocese, as well.

Now, to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or imagine, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen. (Ephesians 3.20-21)

+Chip Edgar, Bishop
The Anglican Diocese of South Carolina

We welcome our new Bishop, the Rt Revd Chip Edgar, who was consecrated March 12, 2022. Let's pray regularly for our new bishop, his wife and family and labor alongside him to produce fruit in the vineyard to which we're called. View the service: https://t.co/4dRKj3inei pic.twitter.com/ShByUuXRIk

— Anglican Diocese of SC (@anglican_sc) March 13, 2022

Americans’ ratings of nearly all 23 professions measured in Gallup’s 2023 Honesty and Ethics poll are lower than they have been in recent years. Only one profession — labor union leaders — has not declined since 2019, yet a relatively low 25% rate their honesty and ethics as “very high” or “high.”

Nurses remain the most trusted profession, with 78% of U.S. adults currently believing nurses have high honesty and ethical standards. However, that is down seven percentage points from 2019 and 11 points from its peak in 2020.

At the other end of the spectrum, members of Congress, senators, car salespeople and advertising practitioners are viewed as the least ethical, with ratings in the single digits that have worsened or remained flat.

Read it all.

Ethics Ratings of Nearly All Professions Down in U.S.: Nurses remain the most trusted profession.
(Megan Brenan & Jeffrey M. Jones, Gallup)
More, via Opinion Today:https://t.co/wHYJF1nkIV pic.twitter.com/ruCnvYuBTR

— Opinion Today (@OpinionToday) January 22, 2024

A great topic–“Speaking the Truth in Love:The Church and the Challenge of the New Morality”

You may find the list of speakers there and the conference schedule here.

Run, don’t walk, to register for the 2024 Mere Anglicanism Conference! We have an incredible lineup of speakers: D.A. Carson, John Dickson, @RebeccMcLaugh, @amyorrewing, Vaughan Roberts, @calvinrobinson, and Carl Trueman, and more! Register and learn more https://t.co/HMhInevD1D!

— Constantine (@SinnerSaved45) July 26, 2023

Advanced artificial intelligence models can be trained to deceive humans and other AI, a new study has found.

Researchers at AI startup Anthropic tested whether chatbots with human-level proficiency, such as its Claude system or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, could learn to lie in order to trick people.

They found that not only could they lie, but once the deceptive behaviour was learnt it was impossible to reverse using current AI safety measures.

Read it all.

AI can easily be trained to lie – and it can’t be fixed, study says
https://t.co/r5rx8DNJUA

— Brendan Tierney (@brendantierney) January 15, 2024

I also came to see that liberalism’s superficial optimism concerning human nature caused it to overlook the fact that reason is darkened by sin. The more I thought about human nature the more I saw how our tragic inclination for sin causes us to use our minds to rationalize our actions. Liberalism failed to see that reason by itself is little more than an instrument to justify man’s defensive ways of thinking. Reason, devoid of the purifying power of faith, can never free itself from distortions and rationalizations.

In spite of the fact that I had to reject some aspects of liberalism, I never came to an all-out acceptance of neo-orthodoxy. While I saw neo-orthodoxy as a helpful corrective for a liberalism that had become all too sentimental, I never felt that it provided an adequate answer to the basic questions. If liberalism was too optimistic concerning human nature, neo-orthodoxy was too pessimistic. Not only on the question of man but also on other vital issues, neo-orthodoxy went too far in its revolt. In its attempt to preserve the transcendence of God, which had been neglected by liberalism’s overstress of his immanence, neo-orthodoxy went to the extreme of stressing a God who was hidden, unknown and “wholly other.” In its revolt against liberalism’s overemphasis on the power of reason, neo-orthodoxy fell into a mood of antirationalism and semifundamentalism, stressing a narrow, uncritical biblicism. This approach, I felt, was inadequate both for the church and for personal life.

So although liberalism left me unsatisfied on the question of the nature of man, I found no refuge in neo-orthodoxy. I am now convinced that the truth about man is found neither in liberalism nor in neo-orthodoxy. Each represents a partial truth. A large segment of Protestant liberalism defined man only in terms of his essential nature, his capacity for good. Neo-orthodoxy tended to define man only in terms of his existential nature, his capacity for evil. An adequate understanding of man is found neither in the thesis of liberalism nor in the antithesis of neo-orthodoxy, but in a synthesis which reconciles the truths of both.

Read it all.

“Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.” #MLK #MLKDay2024 #MLKDay #MLK95 #ShiftTheCulture pic.twitter.com/F6UhkDNqcI

— Be A King (@BerniceKing) January 15, 2024

After all, it’s not every day a large and wealthy entourage from Persia arrives unannounced, refers to Messianic prophecies, points to an astrological sign, and asks directions so that they might worship the new king of a people who had been without a monarch for more than five centuries. It was an extraordinary event, and the whole city of Jerusalem knew about it. And it seems that not one soul from Jerusalem went with them.

This is astonishing. So why didn’t the local religious leaders send a delegation along with the Magi? There are, of course, various hypotheses. While it is possible that they simply found the claims of the Magi to be too fantastic to merit serious consideration, many observers believe their reluctance is far from innocent. The interpretation that appears most often in sermons and commentaries is that, despite their impressive knowledge of Scriptures, they lacked the faith exhibited by the Persian wise men. While there may be truth in that view, it is a rather shallow explanation. Another bit of conventional wisdom is that the religious leaders were self-assured in their knowledge and did not want to give credence to the claims of foreign visitors whose Babylonian traditions were out of step with the authorities in Jerusalem. While this is certainly a more satisfactory explanation, I think it only captures part of the story.

Another reason the religious leaders chose not to send a delegation to Bethlehem was because doing so would be risky. They probably feared retaliation from Herod, a ruthless leader who was paranoid about losing power. He was infamous for executing his wife, several sons and other relatives, and Jewish leaders whom he perceived as a threat. Sending a delegation to Bethlehem would have suggested they were open to the claims of a rival king and made them vulnerable to charges of disloyalty and treason.

But both the political context and the text itself seem to indicate that fear of death was not the only reason for their reluctance. I believe that the religious and political context suggests that the religious leaders made a more calculated decision to protect their own ambitions and political power.

Read it all.

The Politics of Epiphany https://t.co/kIg6Nn0LV3

— Public Discourse (@PublicDiscourse) December 26, 2023

Faith leaders in London and the south-east have joined forces with the Bishop of London, the Rt Revd Sarah Mullally, in calling on the Government to address the leave-to-remain status situation for asylum-seekers, and the increasing risk of homelessness this winter…. They want practice to match policy, better communication, and for the timeframe to be extended.

Forty-five of them signed the letter, sent last week to Michael Tomlinson MP and Baroness Scott of Bybrook, ministers respectively in the Home Office and Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. Signatories included the Bishops of Chelmsford, Southwark, and Rochester, and their area and suffragan bishops.

Welcoming the Home Office’s efforts to tackle its backlog on asylum claims, the faith leaders say that they are “concerned at the number [of refugees] who, on receiving their leave to remain, are becoming street homeless”. They report growing demand in London’s churches, mosques, gurdwaras, synagogues, and temples, for support with accommodation from those with new refugee status.

Read it all.

Faith leaders in London and the south-east have joined forces with @bishopSarahM in calling on the Government to address the leave-to-remain status situation for asylum-seekers, and the increasing risk of homelessness this winterhttps://t.co/MW6noWWnJo

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) December 22, 2023

It is unsurprising that euthanasia consistently breaks its boundaries, always presented as an expansion of choice as the route to kindness. This is rooted in liberalism’s fundamental presuppositions, for as George Grant wrote, “it is the very signature of modern man to deny reality to any conception of good that imposes limits on human freedom … man’s essence is his freedom. Nothing must stand in the way of our absolute freedom to create the world as we want it. There must be no conceptions of good that put limitations on human action.” If there is no ultimate value towards which our lives point, then “the vaunted freedom of the individual to choose becomes either the necessity of finding one’s role in the public engineering or the necessity of retreating into the privacy of pleasure”. We are reduced to utilitarian measures of the good, achieved through harm reduction and happiness maximisation, materialistically defined.

The result of the liberal conception of the human person is expressive individualism, where “persons are conceived merely as atomized individual wills whose highest flourishing consists in interrogating the interior depths of the self in order to express and freely follow the original truths discovered therein toward one’s self-invented destiny”. This conception of the human person privileges cognition, will, rationality and autonomy in defining full personhood. Our nature as embodied souls is largely ignored: if one cannot employ one’s body to achieve the desires of one’s autonomous, rational, willed cognition, then one cannot achieve full personhood.

As a result, the constraints of our existential finitude made so explicit by disability are seen as immoral barriers to maximal autonomy attained through rational will. The unchosen bonds of interdependence, obligation, reciprocity and mutual loyalty that comprise the texture and meaning of life are denigrated. Liberalism discards the weak just as the Greco-Roman world once did, now done for reasons of supposed benevolence. From Locke onwards, liberalism has always seen some more capable of, and suited to, forming political society than others. Mill took this furthest in his proposal of colonisation and slavery for those less capable of freedom.

It is not such a stretch from liberalism’s definition of the individual’s capacity for personhood to advocating the killing of disabled infants deemed incapable of fulfilling this. As Leon Kass has written, it is no surprise that those Germans who coined the phrase “life unworthy of life” were two liberals: a jurist and an academic. Better to curb the depersonalised source of the suffering with all haste. James Burnham viewed liberalism as the ideological legitimator and enabler of Western suicide. I’m not sure he meant for the title of his book to be taken so literally, across so many countries.

Read it all from 2022.

As assisted suicide is in the news again, re-upping my piece for @TheCriticMag from last year, in which I argue that assisted suicide is not only wrong in itself, but that it’s the logical endpoint of the liberal view of the human person https://t.co/ZMK8sy5Pyh

— Henry George (@intothefuture45) December 22, 2023

Assisted suicide is banned in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, with a maximum prison sentence of 14 years. While there is no specific offence of assisted suicide in Scotland, euthanasia is illegal and can be prosecuted as murder or culpable homicide.
Rantzen says she’s joined assisted dying clinic

Mr Stride, one of 27 Conservative MPs who voted for the 2015 bill, said he thought some MPs could be wondering “whether this should be something we look at again”.

“The government has not decided to bring forward legislation,” he told the Today programme on Wednesday, “but if Parliament in some form or another decided that it wanted to have a fresh look at this, given it was some years ago that we last did so, that’s not something that I would be resistant to.”

Read it all.

Glad this article calls this for what it is: assisted suicide. I have argued against this in all my episcopal roles and will continue to do so. Investment in palliative care is essential. It will so often be the vulnerable who would suffer most in this. https://t.co/g94iLf0yQZ

— Bishop of Newcastle (@BishopNewcastle) December 20, 2023

….if the sexed nature of the body is irrelevant to the most intimate of human personal interactions, then who I am is detached from my body in a most fundamental way. I become something that inhabits my body and uses it as an instrument, not something that I am. In sum, one cannot desecrate the body and retain a stable notion of personhood any more than Nietzsche thinks one can kill God and keep the earth hitched to the sun.

If sex is no longer sacred, then practices relating to death have followed a similar path. Once it was a sacred mystery; now we mobilize social and technological forces to deny it. Violence and death, once too sacred to be depicted onstage in Greek tragedy, have become the trivial or pornographic fare of movies and video games. The Roman Colosseum made death a matter of entertainment; today, movies and video games bring pornographic violence into the living rooms, indeed the palms, of everyone with a television, a game console, or a smartphone.

Real death is a purely medical affair, with the dying placed in hospitals and hospices. The battle against the body is significant here too, for what is the final authority that the body possesses? Not to dictate our sex as male or female, but to dictate that we are mortal. In light of this, euthanasia looks like one last (and arguably futile) attempt to seize control of who we are.

The attempt to domesticate mortality continues after death. Churches are no longer typically built with graveyards, with the result that worship is today not experienced in the vicinity of dead loved ones. Funerals are becoming celebrations of life. Every year, cremations rise in popularity in America. There may well be practical reasons for this—cost, lack of space—but it still serves to incinerate any lasting, visible reminder from among the living of the dead as the dead. True, some have urns with the ashes of loved ones. But the jar on the mantel at home is different from—dare one say less sacred than?—a burial ground next to a place of worship. It is hard to maintain quiet reverence when the television is blaring and the kettle is boiling.

Read it all.

Carl Trueman on the Desecration of Man. As usual, he's spot on. https://t.co/AxXHGY8XYS

— Mackenzie Boudreaux (@PaperandPipe) December 13, 2023

“The bishops have exported this division down to every single local parish”

Two ordained women – Rev Catherine Bond and her partner Rev Jane Pearse – became one of the first same-sex couples to be blessed at a Church of England service, at St John the Baptist Church in Felixstowe yesterday. The couple has reportedly acknowledged that there is still “a lot pain” over the existence of their relationship.

The move to bless same-sex relationships has caused widespread division within the denomination, throughout the seven year process of deliberation and discernment known as ‘Living in Love and Faith’. Conservatives, who believe marriage must be heterosexual, and liberals pressing for change have yet to reach agreement or even a happy compromise.

Dunnett says it remains a highly divisive situation: “You’re going to have fractious debate at parochial church council meetings. You’re going to have vicars having to explain to people why they’re not doing this…

“This is going to be a recipe for distrust. It’s going to bring fracture to relationships that have up to now been good in local parishes.

“Already we’re hearing from clergy person after clergy person and from PCC members in dioceses all over the country that they are fearing what is now going to happen.”

Read it all.

There’s a lot to take in. Noticing a huge silence on the part of various bishops on social media in reaction to the papal pronouncement, Catholic blogger Amy Welborn said it for all the laity out there:

Whassup?

Judging by their silence on Twitter/X feeds, I’m guessing the papal pronouncement came as a surprise to the bishops, too. Were I one of these men in red hats, I’d be furious. They’re made to look like fools. The laity are wondering: Is this a change in doctrine or not?

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops put out a statement saying that no, it actually was not, because same-sex unions were not considered marriage but that “anyone can ask for a blessing when they are seeking God’s assistance, mercy and grace.” What does this mean? Is this something like bringing up a pet for a blessing during an annual St. Francis Day service?

Most others saw it as a major shift in doctrine, including the Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit and LGBTQ+ advocate who is editor-at-large for America magazine and someone whose ministry has been openly praised by Pope Francis.

Read it all.

Reaction to the note from LGBTQ Catholics and advocates touted the declaration as a major step forward. Commentary from some theologians, meanwhile, cautioned that it’s misleading to frame the declaration as a kind of monumental shift.https://t.co/CEtthGF4pa

— Crux (@Crux) December 19, 2023

On 5 December, a U.S. company called Orchid Health announced that it would begin to offer fertility clinics and their hopeful customers the unprecedented option to sequence the whole genomes of embryos conceived by in vitro fertilization (IVF). “Find the embryo at lowest risk for a disease that runs in your family,” touts the company’s website. The cost: $2500 per embryo.

Although Orchid and at least two other companies have already been conducting more limited genetic screening of IVF embryos, the new test offers something more: Orchid will look not just for single-gene mutations that cause disorders such as cystic fibrosis, but also more extensively for medleys of common and rare gene variants known to predispose people to neurodevelopmental disorders, severe obesity, and certain psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia.

That new offering drew swift backlash from genomics researchers who claim the company inappropriately uses their data to generate some of its risk estimates. The Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC), an international group of more than 800 researchers working to decode the genetic and molecular underpinnings of mental health conditions, says Orchid’s new test relies on data it produced over the past decade, and that the company has violated restrictions against the data’s use for embryo screening.

Read it all.

Genetics group slams company for using its data to screen embryos’ genomes: Orchid Health’s new in vitro fertilization embryo test aims to predict future health and mental issues | Science | AAAS https://t.co/RukcF29qiJ

— Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics (@bermaninstitute) December 18, 2023

“I’m really saddened by this,” he said. “There’s lots of clergy, evangelical clergy, middle of the road clergy and Catholic Church clergy, who are really disappointed that the House of bishops have taken this step against a lot of advice and knowing that it’s going to cause massive damage to the Church of England. So I’m disappointed that we, as a Church are putting forward prayers and we are doing it on such a narrow margin in terms of votes for and against.

“There are lots of clergy and churches who want to know how they’re going to be looked after if they dissent, if they continue to hold to the doctrine of the Church of England. None of that has been explained that this point.

“Some things in the pastoral guidance show that bishops are almost washing their hands of clergy and the doctrine. It feels like we’re almost being gaslit.”

[The] Rev [Mr] Ould said that just before the House of Bishops meeting, a broad alliance of Anglo Catholics and evangelicals had written to the bishops telling them not to go ahead with the guidance.

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CofE bishops are ‘washing their hands of doctrine’ over same sex blessings says vicar – Premier Christian News | Headlines, Breaking News, Comment & Analysis https://t.co/UKYjUjgEV6

— GospelLover (@hateisfutile) December 14, 2023

The House of Bishops’ decision to commend the prayers of blessing for same-sex couples was made despite a last-minute plea from leaders in the HTB network. Inclusive groups are urging churches to use the prayers this Sunday.

A group calling itself “the Alliance”, which comprises the current and former vicars of Holy Trinity, Brompton (HTB), the Revd Archie Coates and the Revd Nicky Gumbel, along with 23 other figures in the C of E, wrote to the Bishops on Monday, the day before the meeting at which agreement was reached to commend the prayers…

The letter says: “It is not too late to delay the commending of the Prayers of Love and Faith until the complete package of the Prayers, the full Pastoral Guidance and the Pastoral Reassurance are all presented to Synod.”

The Bishops are also urged to provide “formal legal structural provision” for those who object to the introduction of the prayers. Such a settlement “will enable those who feel compelled to pursue changes to doctrine and practice to be able to minister freely without their actions causing growing schism in the Church of England”, the group writes.

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The House of Bishops’ decision to commend the prayers of blessing for same-sex couples was made despite a last-minute plea from leaders in the HTB network. Inclusive groups are urging churches to use the prayers this Sunday. https://t.co/MMwrokW6cW

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) December 14, 2023

Journalists should not spend much of their time writing about journalism. The world is more interesting than the inky habits of the people who report on it. But this week we are making an exception, because the discovery and dissemination of information matters a lot to politics. Don’t take our word for it: “A popular government,” wrote James Madison in 1822, “without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or, perhaps both.” Were Thomas Jefferson offered a choice between a government without newspapers and newspapers without a government, he said that he would choose the press (though that is probably going a bit far).

As the turmoil at America’s elite universities over antisemitism shows, creating a political culture in which people can argue constructively, disagree and compromise is not something that happens spontaneously. In media, business models, technology and culture can work together to create those conditions. They can also pull in the opposite direction. Our analysis of over 600,000 pieces of written and television journalism shows that the language of the mainstream American media has drifted away from the political centre, towards the Democratic Party’s preferred terminology and topics. That could lower the media’s credibility among conservatives.

As the country braces for next year’s election, it is worth thinking about the internal forces that deepened this rift. You can take comfort from the fact that the industry has been buffeted time and again during its long history, yet somehow survived. The worry is that today’s lurch may prove worse than any before.

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The leftward leanings of America’s mainstream media undermine their ability to put the record straight. Can you have a healthy democracy without a common set of facts? https://t.co/saHG3ZVRJc pic.twitter.com/KeQN8ScUbn

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) December 14, 2023

Christian groups have welcomed an international agreement, the first of its kind, in Dubai, on a transition away from fossil fuels. The speed and scale of this transition remains in question, however. Developing countries represented at the COP28 climate summit say that there is a lack of funding to help them to decarbonise their economies.

Although this was the 28th COP, the words “fossil fuels” had never previously been included in a final-outcome agreement. Patrick Galey, a senior fossil-fuels investigator at Global Witness, wrote on social media: “Imagine a global process to tackle malaria where it took 30 years for the word ‘mosquitoes’ to appear in decision texts, then that being hailed as a win. That’s how low the bar has been set for climate talks and fossil fuels.”

Talks at the two-week summit ran through the night and ended on Wednesday morning, nearly 24 hours after the proposed closing time.

The final agreement calls on countries to make a commitment to “transitioning away from fossil fuels” and to accelerating action in this “critical decade” to achieve net zero by 2050. It is hoped that this will send a political signal to investors, markets, and the world at large that countries are committed to decarbonising the global economy.

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“It is clear that the era of fossil fuels is coming to a close. We may not have driven the nail into the coffin here at COP28, but the end is coming for dirty energy." https://t.co/HTHzgkgIVJ

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) December 13, 2023

Blessings for same-sex couples can take place within existing church services from this Sunday, after the House of Bishops formally commended the Prayers of Love and Faith at a meeting on Tuesday.

A statement on Tuesday afternoon revealed that the Bishops had voted 24-11, with three recorded abstentions, in favour of commending the collection of prayers, which were first published in draft form in January….

Two marathon debates in the General Synod, in February and November, ended with votes approving the Bishops’ plan to commend the blessings, despite threats of legal action if they were to go ahead….

The blessings have only being sanctioned for use within regular services, and not as a stand-alone service. In the Synod in November, an amendment calling on the Bishops to consider a trial period for stand-alone services was carried, albeit narrowly….

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Blessings for same-sex couples can take place within existing church services from this Sunday, after the House of Bishops formally commended the Prayers of Love and Faith at a meeting on Tuesday. https://t.co/4MuuNMnPpc

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) December 12, 2023

A “complex matrix of reasons” led to the disbanding of the Independent Safeguarding Board (ISB), says a report published on Monday.

Its author, Sarah Wilkinson, a barrister, identifies the Archbishops’ Council as responsible for “structural” issues with the way in which the ISB was set up and administered, which led to a situation in which the positions of the board members and Archbishops’ Council “were not clearly defined”.

Ms Wilkinson suggests that the termination of the contracts of the ISB members was made “almost inevitable” owing to their “breakdown in relationships” after Meg Munn was appointed as acting chair in March….

The two other board members — Jasvinder Sanghera and Steve Reeves — expressed concern at not being consulted on Ms Munn’s appointment, and survivors and survivor-advocates suggested that her position as the independent chair of the National Safeguarding Panel, another body scrutinising C of E safeguarding practices, amounted to a conflict of interest.

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A "complex matrix of reasons” led to the disbanding of the Independent Safeguarding Board (ISB), says a report published on Monday.https://t.co/1owXjj9XY5

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) December 11, 2023

There is precious little assistance from the government for families who need a home health aide unless they are poor. The people working in these jobs are often woefully underpaid and unprepared to help a frail, elderly person with dementia to bathe and use the bathroom, or to defuse an angry outburst.

Usually, it is family that steps into the breach — grown children who cobble together a fragile chain of visitors to help an ailing father; a middle-aged daughter who returns to her childhood bedroom; a son-in-law working from home who keeps a watchful eye on a confused parent; a wife who can barely manage herself looking after a faltering husband.

Mr. [Frank] Lee finally found two aides on his own, with no help from an agency. Using the proceeds from the sale of his stake in a group of restaurants, including the popular Charleston bistro Slightly North of Broad, he pays them the going rate of about $30 an hour. Between his wife’s care and medical expenses, he estimates that he’s spending between $80,000 and $100,000 a year.

“Who the hell can afford this?” he asked. “There’s no relief for families unless they have great wealth or see their wealth sucked away.” He worries that he will run out of money and be forced to sell their home of more than three decades. “Funds aren’t unlimited,” he said.

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Facing a severe shortage of aides and high costs, people trying to keep aging loved ones at home often cobble together a patchwork of family and friends to help. https://t.co/o7DgtCZFzp

— NYT Science (@NYTScience) December 4, 2023

The problem is that, as with the former Prime Minister’s claim, nobody really believes this is the case. How many people really believe that:

• what will be commended in the PLF Suite of Resource—public prayers for God’s blessing on two people of the same sex many of whom will be in a sexual relationship and/or a civil same-sex marriage—has always been lawful in the Church of England and could have been commended by the bishops and used by clergy at any point in the past? 
• the use of such prayers does not represent a major change from the historic and current situation? 
• while the doctrine of marriage remains unchanged, the proposed use of the PLF is neither contrary to doctrine nor indicative of a departure from in doctrine in any essential matter? 
• all these claims have been shown by the House of Bishops to be theologically and legally coherent and convincing?

Charlie Bell, a supporter of getting PLF done but also a severe critic of the latest proposals, recently wrote “what the bishops have done may be legal, but it is not honest”. This echoes the language of Canon C1 and the oath of canonical obedience. The way in which the bishops are proceeding—the “nothing has changed” argument and the refusal to publish the written legal advice they have received—is very difficult to view as honest and to trust. Given the law has not formally been changed, for many the introduction of PLF means that the doctrine to which the law refers has changed in practice. If, as it is being claimed, doctrine has not changed, then what is being proposed seems to many to be not only “not honest” but also, as shown by past legal advice, probably “not legal”. 

In short, unless we sincerely believe and are convinced that “nothing has changed”, then we have to say that it appears the bishops are acting in their commendation, and thereby encouraging clergy to act in their services, in ways which are unlawful. In addition, those liturgical actions are now—because of the bishops’ decisions, which do not alter the legality of what they commend and so in one sense could be described as simply symbolic or “virtue signalling”—going to attract much more attention when they take place then they have done in the past. This means clergy who accept at face value and act on the basis of the bishops’ commendation are probably more likely to face legal challenge than they were in the past.

In the light of this, it even more unacceptable that the bishops are now so reticent to set out clearly for parish clergy, and those who advise them such as archdeacons, both

1. the changing written legal advice which they have received throughout this process, particularly for their 9^th October meeting, and
2. a clear explanation as to how what they are now proposing in PLF is, and indeed always has been, legal and how this judgment relates to the content of past legal advice which they have published that would suggest otherwise.

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It has repeatedly been stated that the CofE's doctrine of marriage has not changed. Can the bishops commend the Prayers of Love and Faith with any credibility without sharing the legal and theological basis on which they are doing so? @theologyethics1 https://t.co/3c7RlIvjb9

— Dr Ian Paul (@Psephizo) November 28, 2023