The former suffragan Bishop of Maryland, Heather Cook, has pled guilty to manslaughter and accepted criminal responsibility for the death of a Baltimore cyclist whom she struck and killed while she was driving while intoxicated on 27 Dec 2014. Appearing in a Baltimore City Circuit Court on 8 Sept 2015, one day ahead of her scheduled trial, Cook (58) pled guilty to vehicular manslaughter, driving under the influence of alcohol, leaving the scene of a fatal accident and texting while driving. Prosecutors have asked the former bishop, who was deposed from the ministry of the Episcopal Church on 1 May 2015, be sentenced to 20 years imprisonment, with ten years of her sentence suspended, followed by five years probation. – See more at: http://www.anglicanink.com/article/cook-pleads-guilty-vehicular-manslaughter#sthash.S2obYoFU.dpuf

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…on Labor Day Americans should also be celebrating the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. The act’s most important and immediate effect was to help end racial segregation and race-based discrimination.

But the Civil Rights Act also reflected what Americans had learned through ugly episodes of hostility and discrimination against Jews, Catholics, Mormons, and others. Title VII of the Act prohibits religion-based discrimination in the workplace and requires employers to make reasonable accommodations for employees’ religious exercise unless doing so would cause “undue hardship.”

In a decision this summer involving clothier Abercrombie & Fitch and a young Muslim woman, the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed Title VII’s strong protections for people of all faiths. The company denied employment to Samantha Elauf, a young Muslim American woman, because her religious headscarf violated the company’s “look” policy.

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I suppose it would be wholly wrong, and simplistic, to suggest that these potential problems could be obviated by doing away with sperm banks….

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

…I can understand the argument for assisted dying, especially when I see people with dementia. I can (or I think I can) cope with physical frailty but it is the thought of losing one’s mind that troubles me most. Perhaps I, too, would want the independence to end my life at a time and circumstances of my choosing. But is dementia or another intractable condition even part of this assisted dying bill, which talks of capacity and death within fixed timeframes?

The proposed bill does not offer sufficient safeguarding for patients and doctors. Mental capacity can change depending on mood, physical distress or social hardship. There is always the risk that doctors will get it wrong. This risk of causing harm far outweighs any potential benefits.

Patients must have the trust and assurance that we are on their side. More thought needs to go into amending the bill further and looking at the practicalities of how assisted dying could be implemented, as there is no scope for this in routine medical practice. Assisted dying should not be the cheap alternative to high-quality palliative care.

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An endless night before, Felicia Sanders had left her blood-soaked shoes with the dead in the fellowship hall of her beloved lifelong church, Emanuel AME.

Barefoot as the sun rose, she trudged up the steps to her home, the one where 26-year-old Tywanza Sanders’ bedroom waited silently, his recent college acceptance letter tacked onto a bulletin board beside his poetry. It was after 6 a.m., and she hadn’t slept. She hadn’t eaten, not since going to Emanuel AME’s elevator committee meeting the evening before, then its quarterly conference and then its weekly Wednesday Bible study. There, 12 people met in God’s midst. Nine of them died, 77 bullets in their midst.
Felicia had answered questions all night from myriad authorities determined to find the killer. Now her phone rang. Her doorbell rang. Reporters, friends, family, strangers, an endless blare through the jangle of her muddled thoughts. Finally, in a delirious rage, she called an old friend, attorney Andy Savage.

“Andy, it’s too much!” she cried into the phone.

Read it all from the local paper.

It is an irony that troubles health care providers and policymakers nationwide: Even as public awareness of mental illness increases, a shortage of psychiatrists worsens.

In vast swaths of America, patients face lengthy drives to reach the nearest psychiatrist, if they can even find one willing to see them. Some states are promoting wider use of long-distance telepsychiatry to fill the gaps in care. In Texas, which faces a severe shortage, lawmakers recently voted to pay the student loans of psychiatrists willing to work in underserved areas. A bill in Congress would forgive student loans for child psychiatrists.

Even with such efforts, problems are likely to persist. A recent survey by the Association of American Medical Colleges found that 59 percent of psychiatrists are 55 or older, the fourth oldest of 41 medical specialties, signaling that many may soon be retiring or reducing their workload.

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….it seems to me that Davis has a much stronger claim under state law for a much more limited exemption. Davis’s objection, it appears (see pp. 40, 133, and 139 of her stay application and attachments), is not to issuing same-sex marriage licenses as such. Rather, she objects to issuing such licenses with her name on them, because she believes (rightly or wrongly) that having her name on them is an endorsement of same-sex marriage. Indeed, she says that she would be content with

Modifying the prescribed Kentucky marriage license form to remove the multiple references to Davis’ name, and thus to remove the personal nature of the authorization that Davis must provide on the current form.

Now this would be a cheap accommodation that, it seems to me, a state could quite easily provide. It’s true that state law requires the County Clerk’s name on the marriage license and the marriage certificate. But the point of RFRAs, such as the Kentucky RFRA, is precisely to provide religious objectors with exemptions even from such generally applicable laws, so long as the exemptions don’t necessarily and materially undermine a compelling government interest.

And allowing all marriage licenses and certificates ”” for opposite-sex marriages or same-sex ones ”” to include a deputy clerk’s name, or just the notation “Rowan County Clerk,” wouldn’t jeopardize any compelling government interest. To be sure, it would have to be clear that this modification is legally authorized, and doesn’t make the license and certificate invalid. But a court that grants Davis’s RFRA exemption request could easily issue an order that makes this clear.

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Under the circumstances, Kim Davis poses little threat to the rule of law. Her actions have done nothing to prevent gay couples from getting marriage licenses throughout Kentucky. The couples that present themselves for her signature can easily go to the next county, as I’m sure heterosexual couples in Rowan County have done over the last two months. She’s not making grand public statements about a supposed right to dissent. She’s done nothing in the way of organizing resistance to Obergefell. No counter-revolution.

So why the furor? Because her refusal poses a symbolic threat to “marriage equality” and its claim to realize the high ideals of justice. One word of dissent, one act of conscience, disturbs the serene confidence of progressives that they have a monopoly on all that is right and good.

Neither you nor I nor Kim Davis have a “right” to follow our consciences. That’s silly. Our consciences do not wait upon the niceties of rights. I would not protest if higher authorities decided to remove Davis from her position. The law has a proper claim on public life, even if it does not have a final authority over our consciences.

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Take the time to watch it all.

In the year that the U.S. economy was supposed to take off, an odd thing has happened: Americans are finding new jobs, but they aren’t finding employers willing to dole out meaningful pay increases.

It’s the tension at the center of an economy that is only growing more perplexing as it enters a perilous autumn.

Fresh data released Friday ”” showing unemployment at a seven-year low and a cooling pace of jobs growth ”” provided conflicting signals about the nation’s economic momentum as the Federal Reserve considers raising interest rates for the first time in nearly a decade. The U.S. added 173,000 jobs, slightly below expectations, while the unemployment rate fell to 5.1 percent. Never before has the nation’s unemployment rate plunged so low ”” a point when companies should be competing aggressively for workers ”” while wages have stayed so flat.

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My third concern is that we need to reflect on what sort of society we might become if we were to permit assisted suicide. At present, we can show love, care and compassion to those who at all ages and stages of life are contemplating suicide. We can try to intervene, to support them to embrace life once more. We can do all in our power to surround those who are terminally ill with the best possible palliative care, including physical, emotional and spiritual support. We can redouble our efforts to alleviate suffering. We can show that we love even when people have given up on caring for themselves. We can support our doctors and nurses as they act consistently in the best interests of their patients, affirming life and caring for the vulnerable.

We risk all this for what? Becoming a society where each life is no longer seen as worth protecting, worth honouring, worth fighting for? The current law and the guidelines for practice work; compassion is shown, the vulnerable are protected. In spite of individual celebrity opinions and the “findings” of snap opinion polls (that cannot hope to do justice to the intricacies of the issue) the current law is not “broken”. There is no need to fix it.

Read it all from the Observer.

The heartbreaking picture of three-year-old Alan Kurdi lying lifeless on a Turkish beach has unleashed an outpouring of grief and anger, perhaps marking a tipping point in the refugee crisis that has been unfolding in Syria for five years. Calls that Western governments do something have become deafening and can no longer be ignored.

But it has also allowed emotion to overcome reason, and for assumptions to trump facts. Canada and its government are not responsible for this little boy’s death, even his mourning aunt absolved Canada of blame. Misinformation spread by social media unfairly vilified Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Immigration Minister Chris Alexander. Neither has anything to apologize for.

However, Canada’s immigration system, designed to ensure those coming to settle have the qualifications to succeed, is not well suited to act quickly in a crisis. There is too much red tape and too many bottlenecks, some of which are the fault of transit countries and the United Nations.

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In late August, Shannon Neuman and her husband Chris went to the municipal court in Calgary, Alberta, to get a divorce. They had already filled out the forms and taken the requisite seminars. They navigated the 24-story Courts Centre and dropped their papers off.

Then, on their way out, Chris and Shannon ”” no longer the Neumans ”” paused in front of a courthouse sign. They snapped a selfie, both smiling.

“Here’s Chris Neuman and I yesterday after filing for divorce!” Shannon wrote in a Facebook post that was shared 11,000 times within its first hours online. (Wrote Chris, in the comments: “I couldn’t have hand-picked a better ex-wife if I tried.”)

Er ”¦ what is going on here?

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…the hardest questions for the Christian conscience come after she had lost her appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. At this point, she has few options. Judge Bunning had his own options, and he opted to send Kim Davis to jail. That, at the very least, is an act of judicial overreach that is more of a political statement than a judicial act.

What are government officials now to do? This story centers on a County Clerk in Kentucky, but the questions will eventually extend to any office holder, anyone wearing the uniform of the United States military, and virtually any government employee. The same pressures will come on anyone teaching on a secular college campus and anyone working for a Fortune 500 corporation.

But the hardest question in this case has to do with the fact that Kim Davis holds a constitutional office that now requires her, according to the federal courts, to do what she believes she cannot do in good conscience. Anyone who sees this case in simplistic terms simply doesn’t understand the issues. Christians of good conscience may answer these questions in different ways. In a fallen world, some questions seem to grow only more vexing.

Read it all (emphasis mine).

And what else has Davis done? This returns us to my earlier question. She has also said she can accept compromises that give same-sex couples their marriage licenses, including in her county, through the hands of other people or with licenses that do not require her signature.

Here is a another detail that I wish I was seeing in print: Under current Kentucky law, does the county clerk’s signature or name have to be on every marriage license, even if it is physically handed to citizens by someone else? This would explain why Davis is refusing to allow her staff to distribute the licenses in their current form. She has said she has no problem with someone else signing them or issuing marriage licenses that do not contain a signature, if the law can be tweaked to allow that.

Are these important facts in this story, the facts concerning her willingness to compromise and allow same-sex marriages to commence?

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Hammering home the momentous difficulties that would await us as parents was clearly a tactical move by the doctor to push us toward an abortion.

That abortion is not the exception, but rather the expectation in cases of Down syndrome, is not limited to medical professionals. Though precise numbers are unavailable, at least two-thirds and as many as 90 percent of fetuses found to have Down syndrome in utero are aborted. Public opinion polls show that Americans are significantly less critical of abortion in the case of mental or physical impairment. Even the Dalai Lama says it is understandable.

So it raised eyebrows when we ”” a couple of pro-choice liberals ”” informed our doctors that we had chosen not to terminate the pregnancy. There was pushback: Did we not understand the decision?

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

Watch it all–a super powerful story about love and adoption; KSH

“The moral foundation of political economy,” to use Lord Acton’s phrase, rests on the connection of liberty with right, of right with duty, of duty with leisure and delight, and of all with transcendence.

Our most unsettling economic problems are actually not economic but moral””moral ones that cannot be simply passed on from generation to generation. They need to be chosen and internalized by each person in each generation at the risk of deflecting material goods from their proper purposes.

Work likewise is not exclusively for its own sake. Rather work, while being an expression of human dignity and concrete accomplishment, aims at a product, aims at the material wellbeing in which something more than work can happen. The basis of culture, as Josef Pieper wrote in a famous thesis, is not only work but also leisure that lies beyond work. We work in order to have leisure, not the other way around.

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Britain will accept thousands more Syrian asylum seekers in response to the migration crisis engulfing Europe, David Cameron will announce in the coming days.

In a marked shift in tone, the Government is preparing plans to resettle the refugees fleeing Isil jihadists and conflict in the region in an attempt to fulfil its “moral obligation”.

Officials are working on a “detailed package” to give asylum to Syrians under the “vulnerable persons relocation scheme”, which has so far seen 216 people allowed to come to the UK.

It will be seen as a change of direction by Mr Cameron, who on Wednesday insisted that Britain would not accept “more and more” migrants.

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“As Christians we believe we are called to break down barriers, to welcome the stranger and love them as ourselves (Leviticus 19:34), and to seek the peace and justice of our God, in our world, today.

“With winter fast approaching and with the tragic civil war in Syria spiralling further out of control, we must all be aware that the situation could yet worsen significantly.

“I am encouraged by the positive role that churches, charities and international agencies are already playing, across Europe and in Syria and the surrounding areas, to meet basic humanitarian needs. These efforts may feel trivial in the face of the challenge, but if we all play our part this is a crisis that we can resolve.

“We need a holistic response to this crisis that meets immediate humanitarian need while tackling itsunderlying drivers.

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In a first-of-its-kind study, LifeWay Research surveyed 1,500 pastors of evangelical and historically black churches and found an estimated 13 percent of senior pastors in 2005 had left the pastorate 10 years later for reasons other than death or retirement.

“Pastors are not leaving the ministry in droves,” said vice president Scott McConnell.

Still, pastors say the role can be tough:

84 percent say they’re on call 24 hours a day.
80 percent expect conflict in their church.
54 percent find the role of pastor frequently overwhelming.
53 percent are often concerned about their family’s financial security.
48 percent often feel the demands of ministry are more than they can handle.
21 percent say their church has unrealistic expectations of them.

“This is a brutal job,” McConnell said. “The problem isn’t that pastors are quitting””the problem is that pastors have a challenging work environment….

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Germany and France pressed the rest of Europe to end squabbling over its exploding migration crisis that is sowing new political divisions across the Continent.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande called for a burden-sharing system to distribute across the European Union the swelling numbers of people arriving from violent regions in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia.

Their call for action came as hundreds of migrants faced off with Hungarian police and after a photograph of a Syrian boy lying dead on the beach in Turkey, drowned trying to reach a Greek island, appeared on the front pages of newspapers across Europe. The image sparked outrage at what critics say is the European Union’s timid response to the crisis.

“It’s a tragedy,” Mr. Hollande said of the boy’s death, “but it’s also an appeal to the European conscience.”

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Wangaratta’s bishop has become the country’s first senior Anglican cleric publicly to recognise that the legalisation of same-sex marriage in Australia has become inevitable.

Bishop John Parkes ”“ a former barrister ”“ has told the Chronicle that he believes the country has “grown up” and that the federal government will be bound within a relatively short time to change the Marriage Act to enable people of the same gender to marry.

He admits that the challenge of such a move for religious faiths will be complex ”“ but does not believe that gay marriage will become “a betrayal of the Gospel or the end of the world”.

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We deplore the situation of insecurity that prevails in Burundi. We call on those in leadership to put the needs of the poor and vulnerable ahead of their own interests. We call on the UN, the African Union and the East African Community to renew all possible efforts to support peace.

We call on Christians of all denominations to pray fervently for Burundi, and we call on the leaders in Burundi earnestly to seek peace and pursue it and especially to call the various political leaders to resume immediately serious and inclusive dialogue.

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Dear Muddled:

Don’t be so hard on yourself. As the editors of the traditions gathered together under the name “Jeremiah” wrote: “The heart is perverse above all things, and unsearchable, who can know it?” Pascal, though only a Frenchman, expressed a similar sentiment when he said, “The heart has its reasons that reason knows not.” What these authors, separated by centuries, agree upon is this: you cannot control whom you love.

The important thing is that we find a way for you to feel welcome in the Church in your clandestine extramarital relationship with Magdalena. Is it right to call a committed, though unorthodox, loving relationship adultery? I think not. So enjoy the blessings of love (and love!) and do not let small-hearted naysayers keep you from communion!

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According a faculty biography, he’s the father of eight children, is rector of theology and chair of philosophy and theology at Reformation Bible College. He’s also a teaching fellow for Ligonier Ministries, an outreach ministry. It was founded by Robert Charles Sproul, his father, who is also chancellor of Reformation College. Sproul Jr.’s college biography also describes him as delighting in teaching “the fullness and the glory of the gospel truth that Jesus changes everything.”

Or rather, he was a professor. He was a fellow. He alerted both institutions and, in accordance with church discipline, is now suspended from both roles.

Unlike other Christians, who maintain all of us are born into sin, his sin ”” or rather prospective thought about maybe sinning ”” was outed. And yet, R.C. Sproul Jr., is still teaching a Christian lesson.

This is what he posted on his blog today. It’s titled, “Judgment and Grace.”

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As a reader, I expected that Putnam would exhort me to tutor, attend a diverse church, babysit for a single mom, move to a poorer neighborhood””to take action. After all, his fond memories of Port Clinton emphasize its warm social cohesion. Perhaps Putnam assumed the exhortation to personal action was obvious, and omitted it. If so, he missed an opportunity to turn theoretical discussions of inequality into a non-political social movement toward renewed community.

Putnam’s proposals for government transfers, better-paid teachers, and free sports teams may represent helpful stepping stones to children who are socially secure and were raised in a stable, disciplined home, as his poor classmates were. But the children of Our Kids demonstrate painfully that outside influences are too little, too late for those from broken homes.

In 1959, eight out of eight poor parents in Our Kids had been present throughout their children’s lives.* In 2015, that was true of two out of twelve. Putnam does not have a plan that will help the kids whose parents have fled.

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Overall, the picture is grim indeed. Out of 5.5 million female accounts, roughly zero percent had ever shown any kind of activity at all, after the day they were created.

The men’s accounts tell a story of lively engagement with the site, with over 20 million men hopefully looking at their inboxes, and over 10 million of them initiating chats. The women’s accounts show so little activity that they might as well not be there….

Either way, we’re left with data that suggests Ashley Madison is a site where tens of millions of men write mail, chat, and spend money for women who aren’t there.

Read it all (used from the pulpit in yesterday’s sermon by yours truly and yes, emphasis mine).

A new report suggesting that marriage is “alive and well” among the rich, but not the poor, is evidence that the “liberal elite” are hypocrites, a researcher said this week.

“It’s very striking that the liberal elite will happily tell everyone that it does not matter if you marry or not, yet nearly 90 per cent, even today, get married if they have children,” Harry Benson, research director at the Marriage Foundation, said on Tuesday.

“They talk a good liberal story, but act in very conservative ways for themselves. . . These modern-day Pharisees tell us how to live our lives, but live their own lives in a completely different way.”

The report from the Marriage Foundation, The Marriage Gap, looks at mothers with children under the age of five. In 2012, 87 per cent of mothers with an annual household income of above £45,000 were married.

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Stone was cut by the attacker behind his neck, and his thumb was nearly sliced off as the man was wrestled to the ground by the Americans. Sadler said: “The gunman pulls out a box cutter and slices Spencer a few times.” He added that the attacker “never said a word.”

To Americans who remember Sept. 11, 2001, this kind of response ”” even down to the “let’s go” ”” echoes the story of Todd Beamer and the passengers of Flight 93. It’s the right response, of course, to terrorists who threaten innocents.

As Brad Todd wrote days after 9/11, it was the response of ordinary Americans on this flight that meant a repeat of the attacks was much less likely: “Just 109 minutes after a new form of terrorism ”” the most deadly yet invented ”” came into use, it was rendered, if not obsolete, at least decidedly less effective. … United Flight 93 did not hit a building. It did not kill anyone on the ground. … Why? Because it had informed Americans on board who’d had 109 minutes to come up with a counteraction. And the next time a hijacker full of hate pulls the same stunt with a single knife, he’ll get the same treatment and meet the same result as those on United Flight 93. Dead, yes. Murderous, yes. But successful? No.”

Read it all.